Fuck Ron Paul

[Jeff]

A satirical by Jesus' General" of one of Paul's endorsements:

Like I said, I just got back from a conference and wasn't going to post today, but when David Duke emailed me with the news that Ron Paul had received a key White Nationalist endorsement, I had to share it with you immediately.

I like Ron Paul but I'm a little wary of trusting Stormfront Radio. I mean, after all, it has the word "radio" in it, and we all know radio is controlled by the Episcopalians.

[Jeff]

A profile from The Washington Post last year:

Republican Ron Paul missed out on the 19th century, but he admires it from afar. He speaks lovingly of the good old days before things like Social Security and Medicaid existed, before the federal government outlawed drugs like heroin.

...

Last year, Congress decided to send billions of dollars to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Guess how Ron Paul voted.

"Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?" he asks. "Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?"

...

Ron Paul may seem an unlikely advocate for the repeal of federal drug laws, but this stance stems from the same impulse that leads him to call for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration and its "health nannies." He says that decades of government programs can soften Americans' sense of personal responsibility and that the free market can do a better job of keeping people safe and healthy than the government can.

He also wants America to withdraw from the United Nations and NATO. He is against the government's "delusional, feel-good" policies of giving aid to needy countries in places like Africa; instead, private citizens and private groups should give charity if they want to. He has written that Americans "don't need to be forced to pay for foreign welfare at the barrel of a government gun."

...

Paul doesn't just question conventional wisdom. He stomps all over it. According to him, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery. He often attempts to prove his political theories by pointing to how things used to be. For instance, the federal government banning drugs like heroin doesn't work for the same reasons Prohibition didn't. The IRS doesn't need to exist for the same reasons it didn't exist before.

"We had a good run from 1776 to 1913," he says, referring to the years before the modern income tax. "We didn't have it; we did pretty well."

As for Social Security, "we didn't have it until 1935," Paul says. "I mean, do you read stories about how many people were laying in the streets and dying and didn't have medical treatment? . . . Prices were low and the country was productive and families took care of themselves and churches built hospitals and there was no starvation."

("Where to begin with this one?" asks Michael Katz, a historian of poverty at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied charity case records from the early 20th century. "The stories just break your heart, the kind of suffering that people endured. . . . Stories of families that had literally no cash and had to kind of beg to get the most minimal forms of food, who lived in tiny, little rooms that were ill-heated and ill-ventilated, who were sick all the time, who had meager clothing . . .")

[slow_dazzle]

link

Several good points in the article such as.

At the end of 2006, the UK-based journal of world economic affairs, The Economist, produced a banner issue on ‘Happiness and Economics’. Not surprisingly the magazine concluded that human happiness and market economies are closely linked. But in arguing the case the lead article unwittingly revealed the market’s Achilles heel. Orthodox economics has no means of separating the universal needs of human beings from junk commodities for the masses, or gold toilet-seats for the rich.

The market also discriminates against healthful products unless they promise more profits. The British Medical Journal reported in July 2003 that a daily low-cost pill made up of six known drugs resulted in an 80 per cent reduction of heart attacks in everyone over 55 – ‘a greater impact on the prevention of disease in the Western world than any known intervention’. Pharmaceutical corporations had little interest because the drugs involved were inexpensive and out of patent. Governments fail to produce the pills themselves because they would be pilloried by corporate PR campaigns for ‘undermining the free market’ – just as public healthcare is still demonized in the US as ‘socialist’.

As governments decline into ‘the best democracies that money can buy’ there is no public authority left to protect the common interest. Our political leaders assume market growth is essential to society’s development. So public welfare is sacrificed to ‘more global market competitiveness’ – and more life-system depredation. To name the causal links remains taboo.

The need to provide the individual worker with a bulwark against exploitation is why trade unions were set up and even then they had to struggle to be recognised. In fact, union activists are being killed today because they are trying to organise. Likewise, concessions over welfare had to be wrenched from the state. Doesn't that chime even distantly? Not even a little tinkle tinkle?

Unfortunately, people have been brainwashed into shallow mindset thinking. When they hear words such as socialist, radical, welfare and freedom, instead of thinking what these words actually mean, they just drool like Pavlov's Dog.

Perhaps a little time travel would help wise the deluded up. Drop them back into a 19th century, industrial town (as a worker...) for 6 months and see how they fare. Senor, may I have a raise?

Everything we have today has had to be fought for and defended against from the few who want us to be little better than beasts of burden. So if anyone wants to return to those good old days I'll send you a PM if I find a time travel machine. And I won't charge for it either...provided you only want a one way ticket and you promise to send some holiday snaps of those good ol' days.

[Spoonerian]

Republican Ron Paul missed out on the 19th century, but he admires it from afar. He speaks lovingly of the good old days before things like Social Security and Medicaid existed, before the federal government outlawed drugs like heroin.

What a hayseed! Doesn't RP know that the only way to stop those bad "capitalists" in the 19th century China "trade" (Russells, Harrimans, Bushes, etc.) from corrupting Jesus' General's children was to hire federal government secret soldiers and spies?

But you have to admit that it is kind of ironic (and impolite) for a 19th century thinking bigot to shed light on the fact that the good government loving 20th century Soccer Moms and Church Ladies foolishly put these bad government China trading capitalists in charge of their good war.

Obviously, RP will never comprehend the 20th and 21st century progressive view that his grandchildren really must be protected from schoolyard heroin dealers and that the way to do it is to put good people in charge of the governments soldiers. Doesn't RP realize that most of those schoolyard heroin dealers are black for crying out loud? What kind of a bigot is he!

And on things like Social Security and Medicaid RP is such a Stone Aged crank, that he actually talks about the fact that the dollars that the good government's checks are dominated in can become nearly worthless overnight! Doesn't he know that those kind of things only happened in the 19th century?!! (Well maybe with the exception of Germany in the 1930s...or the U.S. in the 1970s...or Argentina about 5 times...) And, anyway, besides those instances and maybe a few others, doesn't RP know that now in the 20th and 21st centuries the government has economists who are highly trained in the complicated science of "issuing money to the people?" What a rube he must be to not understand this! A good government would never let our money become worthless overnight. We just need to put good people in charge of government and not get sidetracked with all of this ancient history and economics.

Plus, on top of all of that. All this crazy talk about not protecting our children from heroin, the "China trade" and currency collapses sheds light on the intimate connections within these issues as RI poster Slow_Dazzle points out here:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewt ... 869#135869

I found it strange that Slow_Dazzle considered RP's bringing up these issues into the mainstream as far as RP has to be some kind of logical inconsistency. Impolite? Definately. Out of touch with 21st century? No question.

[slow_dazzle]

His line is basically it will all get better if only we can get our patterns of consumption right. It is economics as we practice them that has gotten us into this mess in the first place. Gobbling up resources and screwing up the planet do not constitute a sustainable model for humanity (or the planet). We need something entirely different but RP (and the other establishment talking heads) doesn't even get anywhere close to offering an alternative. The last thing we need is a leader who is just peddling more of the same old consumerist mentality. What a bankrupt approach to the problems we face today. If only we can find a better way to consume stuff it'll all get better. Is that his answer? A different way of buying stuff?

Admittedly, RP has a different slant on how to go about running the economy but nowhere does he address the spiritual and social malaise that is the product of industrial society. On the contrary he peddles the meme that consumption is good if only we can find better ways of doing it. It is a pretty bankrupt strategy to simply offer a different way of continuing to consume stuff. RP strikes me as typical of the soul-dead, mean spirited, shopkeeper so brilliantly portrayed by Mike Judge in Beavis & Butthead. Just the sort of person with whom you wouldn't want to get stuck on a desert island. A unidimensional, straight laced bore who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

In fact, I suspect the RP's of this world are a subtle pysop, put there to present an alternative to the system of government but not to the system of continued consumption. Exactly the sort of role Al Gore has been put forward to play in the context of global warming. Just as Gore sells the lie that GW will reduce if we all do our bit, RP is the hypnotist to beguile those who desperately want government to change but only if they can continue with the dead paradigm of consumerism. Neither of the aforementioned even begins to challenge corporatism or consumerism. Psyop operatives, both of them. OK, Gore is probably a deliberate plant. RP is a probably an unwitting and useful idiot.

To reiterate the point I made about wrecking the US economy if RP pulls all US foreign troops and bases that question still remains to be answered. And to simply reply to the effect that we'll restructure domestically will show he has an appalling lack of understanding of how money and energy supplies work. Particularly the US dollar which would plummet through the floor in days if it lost its status as de facto reserve currency. The US has a blank cheque (check) book and the rest of the world maintains its huge overdraft. But if RP can somehow tell us how a forward funded, debt based, increasing the money supply US can continue to operate without a huge military presence worldwide, let's hear it. Money is a symbol for energy; not a measure of value.

I find it dispiriting that on a board like RI, home to contrary, free thinking, spiritually minded thinkers who view the suits with suspicion, a dry, boring fart like RP is lauded as a hero. An establishment talking head in a suit, with all the charisma of a piece of road kill.

As a pre-emptive comment I don't have an alternative, nor do I have any answers. But I do know what we don't need and it isn't some grey faced old fart like RP.

Jeez, the contrary denizens of RI supporting an establishment twit like RP.

[FourthBase]

FUCK RON PAUL.

[Sweejak]

Rothbard's "Left and Right": Forty Years Later

Very interesting read!

[vigilant]

Every politician in washington understands what the "peoples" problem truly is, they just don't see it as a problem for themselves. The ones that do see it as a problem for themselves, end up with that same odd problem. That "head" landing on the floor problem. Same problem Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy had, and many others through history that dared even mention, much less tinker with the real problem....the unspeakable....(International Banking)

[Joe Hillshoist]

"Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?" he asks. "Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?"

Thats right I remember reading about this.

What a turd.

I guess that defines his position more than anything else. Why should someone be "robbed" to support their fellow citizens?

I guess that comment sums up why the US is screwed more than anything else.

[Sweejak]

Actually, I think the government response is why the US is screwed more than anything else.

Here is Paul's take:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul275.html

http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2005/tst091905.htm

[Joe Hillshoist]

Actually, I think the government response is why the US is screwed more than anything else.

Here is Paul's take:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul275.html

http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2005/tst091905.htm

Well thats completely different. I actually agree with that. Especially the bit about local communities being responsible for the reconstruction efforts. Dunno about the tax free "enterprise zones" tho. What does that entail?

But the mentality that people in Arizona should be robbed to help people on the coast is a real problem.

Admittedly being robbed to NOT HELP other people is completely fucked, and a totally different issue. But the idea that govt funds are there to help everyone in the community and we all contribute isn't that bad IMO. Sure its "socialist", but whats the point of government if it doesn't do that?

Whats the point of calling yourself a nation if you don't feel the hurt of your fellow citizens and act to help them.

I do get that impression from "libertarians" and many conservatives as well.

[11:11]

Shit, filthy rich people live on the coasts, get wiped by out by hurricanes, and rebuild with tax money, over and over. That's because these areas can't get insurance for where they are, so everyone else has to pick up the tab so they can live it up on the beach. It's not a Katrina situation.

[Sweejak]

If anything I'd like to see my taxes spent on community, but I can assure you that around here it is FEMA that is seen as a turd.

Whats the point of calling yourself a nation if you don't feel the hurt of your fellow citizens and act to help them.

I agree, and in this case it was government that actually got in the way of doing just that, except for the Coast Guard, which threw away the book and acted on it's own.

Paul has a point about people living in dangerous places and then requiring community support to bail them out, but it doesn't fly for me in this case. New Orleans is a very major port, at least until the Trans Texas Corridor and associated highways are built, and as such it would make sense to have installed protection decades ago. This is saying nothing about the cultural value of one of Americas few unique cities.

In any case it appears Paul is most strongly criticizing waste. Further, he claims his own constituents would rather see national treasure go to the people rather than FEMA.

"Free Enterprise Zones" have become a terror word for many, like "democracy" or FEMA, I don't know exactly what he means.

But that bill... What was in it, what is Maxine Waters talking about?

http://www.house.gov/list/speech/ca35_w ... error.html

[monster]

"Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?" he asks. "Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?"

Thats right I remember reading about this.

What a turd.

I guess that defines his position more than anything else. Why should someone be "robbed" to support their fellow citizens?

I guess that comment sums up why the US is screwed more than anything else.

Although Dr. Paul takes the concept too far in this case, I've often wondered the same thing when I see that people continue to build homes on the Florida coast (right up to the water!) when hurricanes hit every year. Why is it anyone's fault but theirs? It's not like hurricanes hitting Florida happen once every fifty years, they happen every year.

It's like building a house in a flood plain (which is occurring in the midwest) and then being surprised when it floods.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Paul has a point about people living in dangerous places and then requiring community support to bail them out, but it doesn't fly for me in this case. New Orleans is a very major port, at least until the Trans Texas Corridor and associated highways are built, and as such it would make sense to have installed protection decades ago. This is saying nothing about the cultural value of one of Americas few unique cities.

In any case it appears Paul is most strongly criticizing waste. Further, he claims his own constituents would rather see national treasure go to the people rather than FEMA.

Does he tho? The entire country of Australia is a potentially dangerous place, the only places not subject to severe storms and bushfires are subject to tropical cyclones, floods and bushfires...

Cept in the desert, where its just hot and dry and can't support a population.

America might be different.

After reading his response that you provided I have to agree that he just seems to be against waste and undue federal interference. That quote may not be accurate as I couldn't find it in his statement.

Had a quick look for that bill and it seems to be about funding for rebuilding the levy and associated infrastructure.

I don't know what was wrong with it, cept perhaps the way the rebuild was supposed to happen. But I think the bit I read may have only been a section of it.

Because from what Waters is talking about, and the title, well what do you know it appears to be a bill mostly aimed at funding the war on terra and in Iraq, with the hurricasne recovery bit thrown in for bastardry purposes. (IE if you vote against the war you also vote against helping new orleans.)

Maybe I should retract that "what a turd" comment.