Why Ron Paul blows.

...

Holy shit I helped change someone's mind.

Well color me pink and call me kooky.

Though let's not swell me up, It's not like I really 'changed your mind' I probably just gave you a little bit of info that after you looked at it, your position shifted a little bit from, "Ron Paul, meh." to "Ron Paul, nah."

more like "Ron Paul, sure, why not" to "Ron Paul, eehhhhh???" But I don't get to vote so I'm not gonna join the discussion.

actually, you perfectly set up my point.

The cost of variable Z should rise, I understand this. But the cost of variable X should decrease, but it isn't. If healthcare was a free-market system with competition, there would be motivation to lower the cost of X. It's because of the governments involvement in healthcare that there is no motivation to lower the cost of X



Not really sure what this video proves. it sounded like he supports school vouchers, which I highly agree with, as my family home-schools.

he called her a socialist because she made an argument similar to what you said in a different thread (I think it was in the "2 parties" thread). I don't want to revive that argument, as were already discussing too many issues at once


I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. In that video, Ron Paul never said he wanted to get rid of it, He can't get rid of it because it's not a federal service. The only federal involvement within the schools is through the dep. of edu. which he wants to get rid of.



The idea that people evolved from a fish is not the foundation of being able to heal people.

It's "embarrassing" for evolution that it's been rejected despite it being taught to everyone.



fine, your next statement really hits the center of my accusation anyways.



This is not at all accurate; You are giving the government the right to choose what medicine I'm allowed to use. I don't agree with the governments selection, and I already justified why I disagree. I want the freedom to take care of myself and the ones I care about, yet the government won't even let me do that.



I trust and believe in God; I don't trust and believe in the government. They break their promises, they lie, they deceive us, etc.



They should be deported. Otherwise, we're just motivating more illegal immigrants to come here



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigrants_in_the_United_States#Economic_Costs_of_Undocumented_Immigrants

"illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes"

And mind you, that's just in 2002. Can you imagine what the costs are now, some 10 years later?

Our system was meant for Americans, by Americans specifically. This dates back to the revolution where the Founders didn't want Britain to slip it's agents inside the country and call them "Americans".

It's actually quite disgusting that there are millions of Americans like Biglundi(Mostly Liberals and clueless neo-cons) who reject the Founding Fathers's thesis, simply because they live in their beloved delusionary world of today.

And on what arrogance can they reject the thesis of our Founders? What have they done so brilliantly that our Fathers didn't? As we discussed above, the Liberal didn't solve the issue of racial inequality, but rather he actually made us all inequal by denying our individual worth so we could be forced together into a borg hive.

He's done nothing for the Middle Class and for the peasants, if only to give them a crutch that doesn't help them walk it just helps them stand up. Through the Liberal's beloved big government, he has solved not a single social issue and has created more poverty and joblessness in it's place.

The greatest delusion in America today, is the Liberal's so called accomplishments with which there are in fact none. But this isn't surprising, why? Because the Founders rejected Liberalism/Democracy/Communism et.al forms of leftism.

What I find disgusting is little Randroits like you trying to recast history as something that it was not. You're blaming all the ails of the country on liberals and the left, when it was the rich that have robbed the coffer, submerged the welfare state, so instead elected officials, business (and the rich) got to manage its apparatus.

On one hand the oligarch preach about the free market above all, ferociously fighting any and all attempts that would regulate them... on the other, they're busy sucking the welfare teat of the state. Billions of dollars go to subsidies each year. By privatizing commodities like water the oligarchs get to reap their profit even on stuff that should be free for all as they are providing no real service... in fact they've been proven to be worse managers than the so called "bloated state", having to be bailed out time and again as they've grown "too big to fail".

If you--

• have never heard of (or don't think much of) Rothbard, Rockwell, Rand, and von Mises

• accept that the FDIC is a pretty good idea

• want a leaner, more efficient government, but don't dream of getting rid of it

...then what I wrote isn't really addressed to you. You're probably more of a small-government conservative; and if you voted against Bush, we can probably get along just fine.

However what Lelouch24, LustfulAngel and Ron Paul and his libertarian friends are promoting are something else entirely. They want to dismantle the state and turn back the clock to the times when capitalism was totally unrestricted.

All around the world this was accompanied by massive exploitation of the workforce, hazardous work environments, little to no consumer protection - read Upton Sinclair's jungle to see what went on in the Meat industry for instance - and massive fraud and corruption in finance that eventually lead to the Great Crash and Great Depression.

Once Reagen and his cronies dismantled and co-opted the last bastions of Roosevelt's legacy the same thing happened. We have a new state religion: The FREE MARKET, that KNOWS BEST, DOES BEST and CAN DO NO WRONG.

Sadly reality differs. The market didn't police itself. The free market paradigm just DIDN'T WORK! It's based of axioms that not only don't exist in real world, but acting on these assumptions have been harmful rather than beneficial. Yet the priests of the market keep preaching and people swallow their lie hook, line & sinker. For all the mathematical trappings, economics is NOT a HARD SCIENCE. It has models and the models work because... well, we assume they do! Even when the models don't work, they're still used.

When will we finally wake up and realize we have been Econned?

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." - John Mayard Keynes

Their failings are numerous. Quote from "Econned" written by Yves Smith:

• Overconfidence. Economists have undue faith in their theories and analyses.

• Drunk under the street light syndrome. This is based on the oft-told joke of the drunk who looks for his keys under the street light, where he can see better, rather than where he lost them. Economists restrict their inquiry to where the established, familiar methodologies function well, neglecting areas and information that are troublesome.

• Biases. The desire of economists to turn economics into a hard science has required that certain assumptions be made. But the outcomes depend on the hypotheses. To put it differently, the risk that the assumptions determined the results isn’t treated as seriously as it should be. One reason this is a danger is that economics doesn’t simply rest on the axioms one often hears mentioned, like “perfect competition,” but also deeper assumptions that undergrid some approaches, yet are seldom subject to scrutiny. The result is that the professional ambitions of the discipline in fact produce significant biases and blind spots, the most serious being uncertainty and instability.

• Inappropriately large political role. Economists have come to hold a position that is dangerous in a democracy. Their use of science-like procedures gives them authority that is often unwarranted. Even though they like to cast themselves as benign umpires, they wield far more influence. Moreover, as individuals, they usually have a clear position on the right/left spectrum that is reflected in their recommendations. Power without accountability is a dangerous position for any group to hold in a democracy.

"Already, in 1956, R. G. Lipsey and Kelvin Lancaster published “The General Theory of the Second Best,” also known as the Lipsey-Lancaster theorem. Recall that the situations that economists stipulate in theoretical models are idealized, usually highly so. Consumers are rational and have access to perfect information. There are no transaction costs. Goods of a particular type are identical. Capital moves freely across borders. Using these assumptions, or similar ones, the model is then shown to produce a global optimum. This highly abstract result is then used to argue for making the world correspond as closely to the model as possible, by lowering transaction costs (such as taxes and regulatory costs) and reducing barriers to movements of goods and capital.
But these changes will not produce the fantasy world of the model. Doing business always involves costs, such as negotiating, invoicing, and shipping. Capital never moves without restriction. Buyers and sellers are never all knowing, and products are differentiated. Despite the pretense of science, it is a logical error to assume that steps that realize any of the idealized assumptions individually move the system closer to an optimum state. The Lipsey-Lancaster theorem examines this thinking and proves it to be false.
The article shows, first in narrative form, then with the required formulas, that if all the conditions for the ideal state cannot be met, trying to meet anything less than all of them will not necessarily produce an optimum. Partial fulfillment of equilibrium conditions may be positively harmful, forcing the economy to a less desirable state than it was in before. Thus simple-minded attempts to make the world resemble hypothetical optimizing models could well make matters worse.
In general, outcomes at least as good as any “second-best” reality can result from a wide variety of different policy choices. So, while abusing rarified economic models to grope toward a unique hypothetical ideal can be harmful, many different messy policy choices can lead to improvements over any current, imperfect state. There is no one, true road to economic perfection. Trudging naively along the apparent path set forth by textbook utopians may lead followers badly astray, despite the compelling simplicity of the stories they tell."

Ho, ho,ho. Where to start? Roosevelt, he who violated the terms of office, brought us into WW2 and frankly was the first of the cronyists who would get into the White House?

He who brought us the New Deal, and thereby started the economic bubble that would inflate and deflate for the next several decades into the 2008 crisis? President Johnson brought us the War on Poverty and Social Security and Medicaid. And then the Clintons topped it off with NAFTA. Let's deregulate the trade industry and let's rip off American Consumers in the name of cheaper products! Brilliant Idea!

But why restrict the Liberal failures to America? Ancient Greece notably lost her influence as she became a Democracy. Nearly every Democratic country is a second and third world country and 'America' has now joined the list.

Now, let's try to bring you even more into reality: What you call a Free Market and what transpired under Bush is not a free market. Bush's government was blatantly pro-corporate(remember all of the OIL partners inside his White House). Trickle-down Economics is blatantly pro-corporate and blatantly anti-Middle Class.

One would argue Trickle-Down Economics is actually more to the Left than a Liberal would care to admit. Liberalism has always been supported by corporates since the Big State has always been the ally of Big Corporations.

What a Free Market is, is this: The people have the rights to be hired by the employer of their choice and the people have the rights to exercise their consumer rights. A Free Market would not be dictated by the Stock Broker or by the Economist and his model.

We DO NOT live in a Free Market, your Liberal President isn't even engaging in Free Market policies if Liberalism is so pro-free market. Your President has brought off bankrupt corporations, strengthened the Federal Reserve and then he cries "I can't punish them".

Neither Liberals, nor Neo-Cons have ever been free market. That's the one thing Liberals and Neo-cons have in common: They are Anti-American Parties, against this country and it's people and they con the people every year with a pro-corporate policy tying the people into it, like tying a ribbon on a gift. The ribbon was never originally a part of the gift.

You, the people, Flauser were never a part of a Neo-con or a Liberal's idea of a State, which is wholly self-serving.

Ron Paul doesn't deny evolution. He simply denies human evolution because there's not enough scientific evidence to back it up. Our theory of human evolution is like saying the earth is flat because we could provide a few experiments "proving" that. It doesn't make the theory true, but it makes it a theory.

Not that I personally don't believe in evolution, but I can understand his view. FOX-P2 is the gene which makes us human. But where did it come from?

He's talking specifically human evolution.

I don't believe there's anything wrong with being skeptical, or how it's relevant to what he wishes to do.

Pay attention, ladies and gentleman! You see here prime Randroid speciman!
He demonstrates why civilized people call hard-line libertarianism the Marxism of the right:

Communism <-------------------------------> Libertarianism
Property is theft <------------------------> Property is sacred
Totalitarianism <-------------------------> Any government is bad
Capitalists are baby-eating villains <----> Capitalists are noble Nietzchean heroes
Workers should rule <---------------------> Worker activism is evil
The poor are oppressed <------------------> The poor are pampered good-for-nothings

This comparision was made by Mark Rosenfelder. I've changed the formatting to fit the forum.

"If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society." - Robert Locke on the Amercian Conservative

It's just as radical as the hard-line radicalism of the left, Marxist Communism was. Just like Communism, its methodology isn't much different either: oppose the obvious evils of the world with a fairy tale. The communist of 1910 couldn't point to a single real-world instance of his utopia; neither can the present-day libertarian. Yet they're unshakable in their conviction that it can and must happen.

Libertarians love abstract, fact-free arguments-- often, justifications for why property is an absolute right. LustulAngle just made a handful of broad and generalized claims about FDR, the New Deal and wealth-fare measures in general. Unlike me, he didn't cite *any* sources.

Truth to tell, I didn't back up all my claims either, but I don't want to turn this into a pissing contest as to who can quote more obscure IRS trivia entirely taken out of contest. By comparison though, I did name some of the sources I referred to.

I could write more, entire pages, essays and so on, but it has already been done.
Instead let me end this with a quote from FDR:

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

And you still HAD the nerve to try to connect a Libertarian philosophy to a Communist Philosophy, even more hilarious still is the arrogant proclamation that the more 'sources' we cite(IE: The more scholars we worship), the more legitimate our argument is.

A scholar's statement is no different from mine or yours, the only reason we take the scholar's statement seriously as evidence or testimony is that the scholar is a "Third Party" leaning to neither one of us.
However, there are millions of scholars who have provided countless such testimonys on both sides.

Do you realize then, how fruitless a debate of Scholars is? We can fill this whole forum with scholars and their articles and books if you'd like. In reality however, if we judged our own opinions based off of another person let's just kill individuality all together.

And I have to say that Mark too, is far from an intellectual. The Libertarian/Founding Fathers thesis is not that the Workers union is evil, but that rather all forces are equal in the end. That's a free market and economy.

I'm not even a Libertarian, I don't believe in Universal Freedom as I outlined in my Political Thesis post, people like yourself are precisely the reason I'm not! How can I entrust this country to a bunch of apathetic peasants?

Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. To MANY Americans a third choice is inconceivable let alone standing for themselves and their rights.

Let me rebute the tyrannical, traitorous Democrat FDR and Liberalism all together, here's a quote from me personally.

"The test of our progress is neither whether we add more abundance to those who are abundant or to provide to those who have not, the test of our progress will be when our society as a whole flourishes."-me

There's no doubts about the fact that human have evolved. From a taxonomical point of view I'm a bony fish. Feels good doesn't it. And there's obviously more then one gene that makes us different. I had to google the gene you mentioned, speech gene apparently, and the only odd thing about that one is that it mutated twice in 6 million years (extremely fast from a relative point of view) which... isn't that odd since it seems both mutations caused an immense selection process that quickly caused it to spread to entire population.

If someone does not believe in evolution they are either
1: Uninformed
2: Retarded
3: A person who refuses to accept information that goes against their current world view
The details of how evolution works is of course debated but not the concept.

If you want to defend Ron Pauls stand it's better to say that he's just saying that to win votes of religious people.

Don't be silly.

Don't ever act like things in Science is 100%. One, it goes against the very ideology of what is Science and not pseudoscience. Two, nothing is ever possible to be proven 100%.

Could you argue that Evolution has a lot of evidence supporting it and backing it? Sure you could. And it is true that the majority of Scientist accept the theory as a fact. Though a portion of the acceptance does come not because of necessarily the support is has, but that a good deal of science has to assume it to be the case or it would just not work necessarily.

Negating your field of work of certain things, or rather having to completely redefine their field motivates people to accept certain things more easily.

But this is true for even the 'Laws' of science which are just near universally accepted theories in truth. Heck, there are certain aspects of gravity that Scientists are just unable to grasp.

There is even the argument that Science cannot ever reach the 100% because it has to work under the assumption that the Scientific Method is able to prove.

Yes, the assumption, there is no verifiable way to prove the Scientific Method as it would either require itself which would create bias that would negate any findings or it would require a new method to prove it which would then in turn come onto the same instance of being unable to be verifiable.

So your assumption that people have to be one of the three choices is insulting, biased, and ignorant.

Nice going sir.

Nothing can go faster than the speed of light cuz' scientific laws said so, amrite?

None of the 'laws' ever said that actually. The Theory of Relativity was never designated as a law.

Well I guess I'm corrected. Thanks!

Ok, you don't understand how economics work. See, X? The cost of bandages? SHOULDN'T go down, because it's a base material that all people involved in the medical business use. IT's used in first aid stations, school nursing offices, hospitals, the works. Anywhere there needs to be healing done, bandages are there, because it's basic. So no, bandages shouldn't 'drop in price' because we still use them just as much as before, we just ALSO use Z. So, by your own admission, Z SHOULD go up, and X SHOULD remain the same, meaning costs in general SHOULD go up, rendering your entire objection moot.



He called public education socialist, and he's a conservative that's against socialism. It doesn't take Scooby Doo to solve this mystery.



And that involvement is the foundation of modern public education systems. Dissolving the department of education means dissolving public education as we know it. He wants a MASSIVE overhaul to the way in which these places are run, to the point where they're just about privatized.



Did you not read my link about nothing in biology making sense except in the light of evolution? By a christian?

The people who should be embarassed are those who don't accept evolution, yet claim to be a medical doctor. Your mischaracterization of what evolution is set aside, I have no tolerance for science denialism. While Obama makes speeches congratulating science, darwin, and the medical advancements that can and are attributed to the theory, Paul goes, "Nope, I don't buy it." like an ignorant backwoods hick. The rest of the world accepts evolution on a massive scale, but here, people don't. That's not embarassing for evolution, that's embarassing for the people. Because it means despite it being tuaght in science, and the fact that it is science, the public still won't accept it. That's called being a bunch of close minded idiots.



"I don't agree with the government's selection" right, you don't agree as to the safe drugs, you want the unsafe drugs. I won't let you hurt yourself with unsafe drugs. That's my position. Sorry if you don't like that, I find that to be the ethical choice, not letting you pick drugs that won't work, or will do harm to you.

Just like I don't support the right of 'christian scientists' to pray for their cancer stricken family members to get better in lieu of medical treatmenet, I'm not letting you pick inefficient and harmful methods of healing to heal your family members and yourself. I care too much about people to let that happen.



So you trust and believe that which you don't see, you just don't trust and believe what you don't see when the government's involved. Nice to see you being logically consistent /sarcasm.



They should be naturalized, so that they're no longer a burden on society, but able to support themselves in the light of being an actual citizen. Don't we WANT people coming here?



So they do pay their taxes. Billions of dollars of them in fact.

Now...what's the problem?:

Neither of you understand economics.

First off. If the usage of something is increased, then more of them will be produced and the actual cost of producing them is reduced due to economies of scale. So sorry Lundi, but the cost of bandages will go down.

Second off. As something stays in production, more efficient ways to produce said item will be developed and the cost of producing them will go down with the newer, more efficient method and again, the cost will go down.

Third off, the cost of research into the new method is not a fixed cost or variable cost for the production of the new method. The cost depreciates over the time of production until it is non-existent. So that is another reason why the cost decreases as time goes on.

The market for the initial exposure will also be relatively small. When a product is first introduced into a market, typically only the savvy will have exposure to it. This means that the mark-up will have to be higher because it will lack economies of scale and will have the initial high cost of the research as a cost backing it as well.

Another aspect is what type of market it is. After the initial exposure into the market and acceptance of a new method, it is typically a seller's market as they will have more power. As time goes on, more producers pop up and the power ends up shifting over to the buyers until it becomes a buyer's market. The higher the supply, the lower the mark-up.

The reason this does not occur in the medical field is because there is a price floor in place which is set above the equilibrium price.

Okay, so who derepped me? One knows they get derepped but they don't get to know who did the derepping.

You make yourself look immature and silly if you worry about rep.

Ron Paul's a dick, and I've got to agree with your points there (which I rarely did).
Though I have to agree with Ron on your 7th's point.

Kay, I agree that I went a bit over the top with the 3 alternatives thingy. And yes things can't be proven to 100%, and yes in theory you could disprove evolution. But gravity is a perfect example for my side of the argument. If I were to deny that gravity exist, would you think that people would be open and accepting about that? No, they would think that there's something wrong with me... And chances are that there actually would be something wrong with me.