Ron Paul's candidacy

Pythagorean

Finally got it downloaded. It's a lot of material, but so far the only mention of Ron Paul is that they would vote for him. Can't find anything like what the article reports.

Jasongreat

If, "an informed citizenry exists", then "The private sector creates bubbles just to extract some money from people (see housing crisis)." would never happen. Even with a informed public as long as government provides free money or practicly free money(low interest) housing bubbles will continue to exist, would you pay more than a house is worth if it isnt going to have compounding interest on the overcost, how about if there is 5% compounding interest? How about 10% interest? I think I would be less apt to overpay the higher the interest rate goes, the opposite would be true the lower they go. The other side of the coin is the local governments, the ones who value your property for tax purposes, it is in thier interest to say your property is worth more than it is, since it gives higher tax revenue for the city, county, parish or whatever. If a true market controled the price, bubbles would be less apt to happen, as long as government controls the market, bubbles will continue to happen.

Dotini

An "alliance" between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney is reported by the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...oiQ_story.html

RENO, NEV. — The remaining candidates in the winnowed Republican presidential field are attacking one another with abandon, each day bringing fresh headlines of accusations and outrage.

But Mitt Romney and Ron Paul haven’t laid a hand on each other.

They never do.

Despite deep differences on a range of issues, Romney and Paul became friends in 2008, the last time both ran for president. So did their wives, Ann Romney and Carol Paul. The former Massachusetts governor compliments the Texas congressman during debates, praising Paul’s religious faith during the last one, in Jacksonville, Fla. Immediately afterward, as is often the case, the Pauls and the Romneys gravitated toward one another to say hello.

The Romney-Paul alliance is more than a curious connection. It is a strategic partnership: for Paul, an opportunity to gain a seat at the table if his long-shot bid for the presidency fails; for Romney, a chance to gain support from one of the most vibrant subgroups within the Republican Party.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

lpetrich

The original Constitution nowhere mentioned "slave" or "slavery". In fact, it tries to dodge that issue in a few places, like where states get to include in their population for representation purposes "three fifths of all other Persons."
Where?
Everybody else would call it a nation -- it's more than (say) the European Union.

Pure hairsplitting. Reminds me of the lengthy argument I once had on another board about someone who insisted that the UK is not a "crowned republic" or a "monarchical republic".
News to me and to just about every jurist in the business.

Angry Citizen

This is rather laughable, to be blunt. Ron Paul selling out his principles to ally himself with the Republican whose record is the least conservative, most "big government" of all.

ThomasT

I wouldn't know how to ascertain whether this is true or not. Imho, the main reason to not vote for Paul is because he's a libertarian who believes that the less government intervention and regulation the better. We know that this is an orientation leads to big problems. Even Alan Greenspan admitted that his libertarian economic approach was wrong. It seems that Paul hasn't learned some important lessons that our history might teach us.

MarcoD

I have the feeling that lots of people in the US romanticize the glory days of how the west was won (I don't blame them.) They always seem to want to return to the 'primordial soup' of society. It wouldn't surprise me if libertarians and the extreme right-wing US share that belief.

Doesn't say a lot about Ron Paul, though.

Jasongreat

Which is exactly the point I was making, I have no doubt that you are intelligent and 'well' educated. Yet you hold the exact politically correct understanding of american history I was refering to.

I hope that neither you nor anyone else gives anyting I say the benefit of the doubt. But I think if you study the same sources I have you will come to the same conclusion.


I came to my beliefs reading Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Madison, John Taylor of caroline, the federalist and anti-federlist papers among others, and for the souths view I read the rise and fall of the confederate states, by the president of the confederacy Jefferson Davis.

Another politically correct 'fact'. The south had been victims of the norths aggression for years before fort sumter. Your fact also fails to take into account that while the south had people in washington trying to negotiate a peaceful solution, the north were sending reinforcements and supplies to fort sumpter. If I was in a city, and across the bay a fort was being filled with men, weapons and supplies, I would consider that aggression, especially since those in the forts had been free to go into town to re-supply.

It has long been the custom that to the victors goes the spoils, in this case the victor re-wrote history to justify its unjust, unneeded, anti-constitutional war. That is the history taught in school today and is why I labeled it the way I did.

Jasongreat

So your argument is that since slavery is not explicitly mentioned in the constitution that it does not qualify as protected property?

1) At the time the constitution was adopted, slaves were held as legal property.
2) In that same constitution it meantions no ex-post-facto laws can be passed. Therefore one cannot pass a law depriving one of their legal property. You can make a law effecting all future property, but cannot make a law effecting presently held property.
3) In the fourth ammendment it says that all persons are to be secure in their effects, effects are property, unless through due-process. Going to war is not due proccess.

I am well aware that today it is easy to distinguish between human beings and property, but at the time in question, human beings were legally binding property, unfortunately.


As fun as this has been, and even with states rights being part of pauls platform, civil war history however is a bit off topic and as such I will not reply to any more post on this subject, feel free to respond though, you all will have the last word, if you so choose.

ParticleGrl

But apparently you've never read any of the succession documents! Reading this "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." The vice-president of the confederacy seemed to believe that THE founding principal of the Confederacy was slavery. The various states that succeeded cited slavery as the principal reason they succeeded. Everyone writing before the war seems to believe that slavery was the proximal cause.

If slavery was a non-issue, why did Davis devote a large portion of his book to the history of slavery, the hypocrisy of northerners toward slavery, etc, etc...

CAC1001

Reagan was most certainly not a stooge by any means. I'd rank him as one of our greatest presidents, when viewing his economic policy and his foreign policy.

CAC1001

This is completely untrue. Hoover was a reknowned disaster-management expert and very much intervened when the economy started collapsing. He raised taxes to try and balance the budget, he enacted price and wage controls, he signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, and began various public works programs. Hoover did not believe in laissez-faire capitalism. If Hoover's response had actually been laissez-faire, then the economy might not have spiraled into the depresison the way that it did. One of the prime reasons why the economy did what it did was because of terrible monetary policy at the Federal Reserve, but no one really understood this at the time. We also had a much more limited understanding of macroeconomics at the time.

Government had nothing to do with the population gaining prosperity, that was due to the market economy. Government can play a role in facilitating the market through infrastructure or funding research, but government itself is not what caused people to rise up from being destitute. And while government does have some roles to play, it also has a huge record of very negative effects from doing things as well.

A big government is not required for adequate regulation. An economy needs, overall, light and efficient regulation. Regulation is one of the means by which corporations "rape the middle class," if you will, as they use regulation to establish cartels, to drive smaller competitors out of the market, to force people to buy more expensive light bulbs as we've seen recently under the guise of being "green," and so forth. Regulation is a tricky subject because with too little of it, businesses will abuse people. And with too much of it, businesses will abuse people. That is why Republicans are for limited government. Not anti-government, but limited government.

Single-payer healthcare is not the ideal form of universal healthcare because it is socialist and as such, is fraught with the problems of rationing. The British system has this problem, the Canadian system has been experiencing it, other European countries have partially privatized their healthcare systems because of the rationing problems.

They also are very small and very uniform and don't have much in the way of defense spending. Take Norway, Denmark, or Sweden and crank up the population by 30X, add in a whole slew of additional cultures, ethnicities, races, religions, languages, etc...and you'll find they don't function nearly as smoothly. And Norway, BTW, gets 25% of its GDP from oil exports. It is one of the world's largest oil exporters.

BTW, why is egalitarianism always viewed as some noble end to be sought after? It's fine for a society to strive to have a safety net, but otherwise, freedom and opportunity should be the goal, not "egalitarianism" where we all come out equal in the end.

You might want to look at just what FDR did during the New Deal, as much of it was utterly disastrous statist economic policy that lengthened out the depression. Government is mostly incapable of stimulating an economy in the short-term. Long-term, it can facilitate economic growth, which the New Deal did, but this would be years later.

World War II spending did not get us out of the Great Depression. What ended the Depression was a few things:

1) The rest of the industrialized world had been bombed to ruins and was re-building. The U.S., meanwhile, had not only not been bombed, but not made up a massive chunk of the world's total industrial capability.

2) Some countries followed the path of socialism, which was disastrous, such as the UK.

3) The New Deal's infrastructure programs - the New Deal had some bad aspects, but it did contribute to the post-war economic recovery in terms of the infrastructure. The infrastructure programs did not stimulate the economy during the Depression itself, but after the war, they allowed for whole areas of the country, which had previously been rural backwaters, to develop into booming, thriving economies, because of roads, electricity, airports, bridges, etc...

4) The defense budget. The U.S.'s defense budget served as a major form of industrial policy after the war by providing funds for research into various industries. Things ranging from the C programming language, C++, and Unix, to the laser and transistor were all developed at Bell Labs, with funding from DARPA. The Internet and GPS both stem from military spending. The AEGIS air defense computer and the Apollo spacecraft computer contributed to the development of computer architecture. All of these technologies led to the creation of booming industries and lots of economic growth in the economy.

5) The Interstate Highway System - another infrastructure project, one which was also tied to national defense, so we'd have the ability to move the army from one side of the ocuntry to another easily if need be. The IHS has had a huge economic impact on the nation since being constructed.

6) During the Great Depression, the birthrate declined. By the time the end of World War II rolled around, the men who had been born during the Depression years, many of whom were just entering the job market, found jobs ready and waiting for them.

FDR did not have the nation tread water, he basically anchored the country underwater, until finally after the war, the various things he'd done that were constraining the economy, were lifted. Also, why would nationalization have saved the economy during the Depression (it actually was quasi-nationalized due to FDR's policies, which hampered economic growth)?

lpetrich

What's "political correctness"? Some sort of big conspiracy?
Including what George Washington did about the Whiskey Rebellion?
I don't see why the South is supposed to be so worth weeping for. One can argue with such stretched definitions of "aggression" that the southern states had aggressed against the northern ones in their efforts to protect slavery.
No, it's that you've been reading too much into the Constitution.
An ex post facto law is one that's retroactive. Thus, the Federal Government had the right to outlaw slavery, but not to make it retroactive for people who've already freed their slaves. Jasongreat, that is a VERY questionable legal theory, and I don't think that you'll find many jurists supporting it.
I disagree.

CAC1001

The history is wrong. Again, Hoover was no friend of laissez-faire and definitely not one to sit on the sidelines, being reknowned for disaster management as he was.

Are you aware that FDR's policies allowed violation of the anti-trust laws?

California's problem is excessive spending, not a lack of tax revenue.

Sweden, Norway, and Denmark have among the highest VAT taxes in the EU, which is sort of like a national sales tax, except it's a hidden tax that taxes every stage of the production and distribution of goods and services. It primarily hits the poor and middle-income because of how it raises the cost of living. It hits the rich too whenever they buy things, but the rich guy doesn't care if his grocery bill costs more or if his fuel bill costs more.

We tried two nationalized central banks and both had to be shut down due to corruption. The current Federal Reserve is the third attempt at getting it right and is a hybrid institution as we can't have a privatized central bank either. If you nationalized all banks, you would have capital getting allocated via politics as opposed to economic needs.

Much of Keynesian economics has been shown to be very over-simplified and just flat-out wrong.

Not really. That's a common stereotype, but it isn't true. One look at the media in Europe and one will see that the Europeans have a rather limited worldview given how their media leans almost entirely socially-democratic. It isn't like in the U.S., where you have firey polemic on both ends of the spectrum. This is because the Europeans don't trust the free-market to handle the issue of media, and thus entrust it to the government, in the idea that the government running the media will ensure it is fair, balanced, objective, etc...but which often results in it being unfair, unbalanced, and completely subjective. Media that is run by the private-sector, they regulate very stringently.

That this happens shouldn't be surprising, because people with a political agenda are rarely objective, and even the ones that lean a certain way but try to be objective, will still tend to end up producing content that leans in their direction. To a social democrat, what seems a centrist position would to many other people on the right clearly be center-left, and what seems a center-left position would be seen as flat-out left. So such people will tend not to produce objective news. The same thing will occur with the right-wing as well. With the American media system however, we have all manner of news, everything from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the Washington times and the New York Post. We have National Review and The Weekly Standard and The Nation and Mother Jones. We have Fox News which leans right and CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, etc...which lean left, and talk radio, which is mostly dominated by right-leaning programs, but also there are left-leaning ones.

You don't find this in Europe where the government either runs the media or regulates it highly. The Scandinavian nations are in particular bad in this sense. What it leads to is a populace that is very limited in its worldview on things if it relies on its nation's media.

Jasongreat

Sorry, I thought I could seperate myself from this discussion and allow those with less then honorable policies to argue against my points. However the replies have been ridiculous.

The whiskey rebellion is one of the black spots on Washingtons record, imo. And is the reason that washington doesnt fall into my list of best presidents, however he does fall into my list of great presidents.

A ex post facto law is one that is retroactive, and is why these type of laws are not allowed in the US. Those who owned a leaded car didnt have their cars confiscated, they were allowed to own the same car but to put unleaded fuel and additives into their tank.

Jasongreat

An expost facto law is retroactive, and why it is dissallowed under the constitution.

ThomasT

He was an ignorant tool of the status quo, imho. One of the very worst US presidents in history. His economic policy benefited a small minority at the expense of the vast majority of the populace, and some of his documented foreign policy dealings were awash with corruption. He was a not well studied one-dimensional anticommunist and a laisez faire capitalist. A rich, not too smart, McCarthyite. But also a good looking guy, and a, sort of, movie star. By the most important measures Reagan was, imho, a lightweight. But he had the necessary personal habits to be a presentable president.