>> ^Fjnbk:
We have to remember that Ron Paul is and has always been a Republican, so he will have few good things to say about Obama. I wouldn't trust everything he says when he's talking about the Democrats.


Actually, he ran as the Libertarian Party candidate in the 80s. You're making a huge mistake in associating him with the neo-conservative leadership currently in control of the Republican party.

>> NetRunner:
I disagree with the entire term "welfare state" when used about the United States government. Look at any other English speaking nation in the world


All of which have serious problems of their own that are continuing to get worse as immigrants come not just for opportunity, but to be subsidized by others, placing enormous stress on the middle class everyone wants to see expand rather than contract. And these are countries who DON'T have a military empire to maintain, no less, which Obama has no plans of ending. Health is too complex of an issue to leave to anyone but the earners themselves. The minute you socialize health care, you're going to get incredibly high wait times and fraud, not to mention the inefficiency of government. Because if your fellow taxpayers are paying, why not go to the ER for a cough? Why not keep smoking and eating poorly? No financial incentive not to. Quite a bit different from roads and firehouses isn't it? No, I think the problem is too many government handouts and bills to remove competition in the market. Think about it, why is there no price list for basic workups in your doctor's office? Health care costs are going up for the same reason as everything else in this country: inflation and special privilege subsidies eroding competition. Everything comes back to monetary policy.

Anyway, I always hold that Democrats are just Libertarians who don't know it yet. You just need to do more research on this stuff. Social Security was a stupid ponzi scheme from the very beginning, doomed to ultimate collapse despite appearing to work for the earliest recipients.

http://www.letxa.com/articles/15

http://www.socialsecurity.org/reformandyou/faqs.html

http://youtube.com/watch?v=OS2fI2p9iVs

>> ^NetRunner:
While Ron Paul has a leg to stand on by calling out Obama on change, since RP represents more change than Obama, calling Obama "status quo" and "no substance" just makes it sound like Ron Paul got a letter from the RNC saying "repeat our talking points about Obama or else".
Obama has talked specifics about what change means. Just because you haven't listened, haven't liked it, or wanted more change, doesn't make Obama status quo.


Well, not quite. He's right that Obama speaks very little about economic policy and seems pretty deadset on the welfare state, which our own comptroller general thinks is coming to a slow and cancerous end. Obama's supporters seem more hopeful than anything, and that, I think, has always been our problem. We try to guess who is going to be a good president based on how charismatic they are on the campaign trail instead of looking at voting records, if there are lobbyists surrounding them, and challenging ourselves to do hard research on libertarian positions like Paul's that often get mocked by people who don't. But I did my research and I agree with Paul on just about everything, and I am convinced from his voting record that he is one of the most trustworthy politicians in existence today. We need a drastic reduction in government spending and a government that obeys its own supreme law. Either competing currencies need to be legalized or the Federal Reserve needs abolished, because the issue of inflation enablement needs addressed. If the enablement is there, it will get abused. And it did. It's that simple. And if you don't want a gold standard restrainment, fine, amend the constitution. But don't ignore it.

I actually thought that Kucinich was a stronger candidate than Obama, but he didn't have that motivational slickness in his speaking that Obama had. Kucinich really laid the wood when they asked him why he was the only Democratic contender to vote against the Patriot Act: "Because I read it," he said. So here you have a guy who voted against the war and the patriot act, and he gains no traction against Clinton who voted for both but claimed she was fooled. It's just really telling of how dumbed down we've become as a nation if something like that doesn't matter to people. This is why I don't think much hope is left. For those of us who know the future repercussions and how to best judge integrity, we are in the minority and the herd won't wake up until pain is knocking on their door. Sad, but true.

By the way, anyone reading this thread would do well to watch the entire speech on youtube. He goes into great detail on the run-up to the war and all he did to stop it. Quite elucidating.

>> ^coolhund:
Sad thing is, theres people that will actually vote republican after seeing it because they are ignorant idiots and dont understand sarcasm.


No, the sad thing is that uneducated historically ignorant people like yourself are so mired in this two-party duopoly with petty antagonism with one another, that they fail to see how socialist policies on both sides are leading this country straight into bankruptcy.

Let's look at how stupid and hypocritical this is:

1. Video implies that Democrats respect the constitution. Oh, really? Is that why Obama voted for the patriot act and gun bans, both violations of the Bill of Rights. Or how about joint support for easily inflatable fiat currency, in violation of Article 1, Section 10 which mandates gold backing. How about going to war without congressional declaration in Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo and others? All illegal under the same Article and section and all started by the Democrats.

2. Video says abortion is about respecting a woman's right to her own body. I'm not even religious and it seems rather obvious to me that abortion is murder of inconvenience. Didn't want the kid? Why did you have unprotected sex? Furthermore, why is a being one minute apart, from womb to exiting, the difference between having no rights and having rights. That makes no sense. Life has to be defined at conception.

3. Video implies that allowing drugs to be chosen immediately is a bad thing because they haven't been tested. Dude, that's against freedom. If you're dying of cancer, and you want to try an experimental drug, who the fuck cares if it's unsafe? YOU'RE GOING TO DIE. Government has no right to restrict you that opportunity to research and get advice from your doctor about it. And what about all the people who die during the delays that the FDA imposes on new drugs. How can those deaths ever show up in statistics?

4. Video implies that we should continue to block domestic drilling to prevent potential harm to some wildlife. This isn't a cartoon, drilling doesn't leave an area in shambles. Have fun trying to fly planes with solar panels and meeting our power needs without emission-free nuclear, recyclable nuclear, which you've blocked for thirty years with fear-mongering campaigns about shitty soviet reactors from the 70s. Have fun watching Bush starting insane wars in the middle east and begging Saudi princes to increase production because we have to import 70% of our oil from abroad because of these insane energy policies. Say hello to peak oil and $300 a barrel oil in the coming years. You can't lower the price by debasing your currency to pay for 60 trillion in unfunded ponzi scheme welfare promises started by FDR, blocking oil, and blocking nuclear.

>> ^Abel_Prisc:
Every time a video, an article, or a blog post comes out about the Americans having ridiculous gas prices, it's spammed by people from Europe saying how we have no reason to complain.
What kind of logic is that? We're all getting screwed.
I'll stop complaining when these companies stop breaking profit records.


This is something of a myth perpetuated by brainless politicians looking to posture and blame the market to make it look like they're doing something, appealing to your distress and total ignorance about how the market works, the incredible impact of government economic policy, etc. The truth is that nominal corporate profits have been going up alongside the price of just about everything else due to dollar debasement. The GOVERNMENT actually takes in more profit from the sale of gas than the companies who harvest and refine it do. Remember, it's not how many dollars you have, it's what those dollars are worth relative to the goods you buy with them. The Fed has inflated the dollar to lose 40% of its value in the last eight years, by definition causing the price of everything, including oil, to go up in nominal terms relative to it, because it now takes 40% more of them to buy what you could eight years ago.

But that isn't the only reason for oil's surge domestically. Now let me point out that the bulk of our oil doesn't even COME from domestic oil companies. It comes from foreigners. Domestic oil is only 30% of our consumption, we import 70%. So explain how an even larger tax applied to 30% of current producers is going to do anything. That will cause prices to go UP.

Nobody "sets" a price for oil. It's a giant worldwide bidding contest for a finite resource, and those demanding who can pay the most get it, just like every other commodity. As our currency loses value relative to manufacturing-based, creditor nations with actual savings rates like India and China, we are having to bid higher to keep pace with the consumption to which we've grown accustomed.

Research peak oil, note how our politicians continue to block domestic drilling which would raise production and lower the price, research how France is 79% nuclear while the environmentalist movement (ironically) has blocked the building of a new plant for thirty years, stifling any legitimate hope of becoming less dependent on imported oil and making idiots like Bush think that they can get more oil with psychotic wars and begging Saudi princes. We have waited until our face is smashed in before dodging the punch.

As you continue to live and research how both liberals and neo-cons are pandering and posturing and lying and being stupid and cooking up any scheme necessary to convince you that they need to inflate and tax and provide welfare and health care and education with your money, etc, the more you will understand the libertarian position and how important supreme law is. If we had followed supreme law and never abandoned the gold standard or handed off congressional powers to the banks, this would NEVER have been possible. Identify the enablement, see the inevitable consequence, AND LEARN.

>> ^Trancecoach:

Anyway, this girl is preaching to the choir. There doesn't seem to be any corporate executive, any industrial CEO, privy to such a speech (or prepared to receive the message), who is also in a position to do the things that she calls on him or her to do. Nevertheless, the power is in the hands of the individual, the consumer, to abstain from participation, from voting with their currency, and stop encouraging malpractice with their purchases.


Why are you blaming the marketplace for poverty, are you freaking nuts? Look at any country like Burma or North Korea or Somalia, and I gaurantee you find that the problem lies in the system of government and whether the bulk of capital is individually controlled or "communally" (governmentally) controlled. You HAVE to have large amounts of economic freedom in order to have a prosperous country: people keeping what they earn, being allowed to enter mutually agreeable transactions with each other, enter labor contracts with each other. Government's job isn't to take that money, it's to make sure no one is infringing on each other's rights, providing recourse through a system of courts, and some legitimate national defense spending. Usually a constitution outlines these functions, to be followed and amended, but never ignored and subverted (as ours has). As people get wealthier in this scenario, it has the effect of increasing voluntary relinquishment of capital (charity). That's moral because it's their money, their choice, nothing is forced. But this whole guilt trip about people being obligated to give up the "luxury" of having more children or certain things they want for their kids because SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE has less than them is just lunacy. Why do they have less? It isn't because some capitalist pig wants to come in and offer them a job that pays more than anything else in their protectionist country. It's because they were born in a place with no resources, to irresponsible parents who were financially incapable to have them, and who do nothing but cower under their protectionist dictatorial governments. It's sad, but nobody on this earth should be paying through the nose to subsidize these people. The money just gets stolen, or it prevents a badly needed auto-determined revolt by preventing true consequence of such government.

Government has incredible powers that the private sector doesn't. They have the power to force payment (tax), create new paper money which debases the value of existing money (inflate), redirect that money to industries which bribe those in government (subsidy), ban a product from being sold in the marketplace (search: stevia, miraculin), and legislate special privilege legislation upon being bribed or lobbied (NAFTA, HMO Act, etc, etc.). So as you can see, the root cause is not industry, it's the idealist socialist enablements with whom these companies can collude to beat competition or avoid bankruptcy in a way OTHER than catering to demand and following prudent policies in so doing. Because it isn't in a greedy company's best interest to go bankrupt by taking huge investment risks, delivering products that you don't want or deceive you. They'll get sued into oblivion for the latter. Therefore, despite having the sole intention of making money, doing so requires offering you something you think will make you happier (and yes, this is your job to figure out, lol.). Adam Smith's "invisible hand" if you will.

Government, on the other hand, could make horse buggies from tax dollars that noboy buys and include it as production in GDP.

McCain's a flip-flopping neo-con schmuck, but Obama and Clinton are barely any better. They all want to take your money one way or another, either taxation or inflation. They all get lobbied to pass special privilege legislation. Fuck, NAFTA was a Clinton bill. And SS and Medicare were doomed to fail from the very beginning, it is a complete con. If you were allowed to keep that 12% per paycheck tax, you'd be able to invest it YOURSELF for YOUR OWN RETIREMENT. Holy shit, what a novel idea: a system that can't fail with generational bubbles, can't be raided by government, can't result in fraudulent claims, doesn't need higher taxes to FUND the paychecks of useless jobs needed to run the damn thing, can't be stolen by manipulating CPI calculations to understate inflation (another Clinton-era miracle), can't be moved further to your death by raising the retirement age... I mean, honestly, get off the big government bandwagon.

And ideally, there should be no federal income tax for ANYONE. Enough with this rich vs poor antagonism, it's a total diversion. Who the hell do you think pays your salary, created the job you're in? A rich person. And guess what, most of them compete with one another for your skilled labor, which is why your wage doesn't drop to 10 cents an hour overnight. And not all them gained unfairly. It's morally retarded, there's no way to determine who gained fairly or unfairly, so just tax em all above a certain bracket? They are responsible for creating pretty much all of our jobs. You tax the shit out of them, more small businesses go plunk, more jobs get cut, and the biggest move it offshore and say "fuck it, where's the incentive?" and avoid it completely. That's exactly what happened when the capital gains tax was raised last time, total revenue went DOWN because you socialist idealists don't understand how easy it is for rich people to avoid tax, so only the poor people end up paying.

>> ^complacentnation:
I still don't understand why so many people hyped Ron Paul when Dennis Kucinich was way better. Especially in terms of free market. A 'freer' market in this country would mean corporations taking shit to the next level. The government should get out of our lives but should better regulate corporate conglomerates. Not having some sort of regulation on business is practically the same thing as economic imperialism!


Probably because they did research and you didn't. What Kucinich, like any regulationist, doesn't understand is that the problems are not rooted in capitalism, but government enabled collusive activity between politicians and business. This can only happen with greater government control of the market. Maybe not with upstanding people like Kucinich, but some politician at some point who is more corruptible. So long as the regulatory power is there, it's going to happen. The idea of regulation itself depends on the person regulating being supremely unselfish and morally upstanding, and that's simply not going to be the case 90% of the time. It also asserts that government officials are prescient intellectuals who can choose the best technologies better than a market outcome. Therefore it is idealistic to expect it to work despite well-intentioned meaning and origin. In the end, all it does is raise prices and stifle innovation. Take ethanol subsidies for example. The government took money from you, and gave it to big corn conglomerates under the pretense that it knew what the best tech was better than a market outcome (that's essentially what a subsidy is). The people are poorer and less able to afford or invest in better technologies, corn-related food and livestock goes up in cost negating fuel savings, pollution stays the same since it takes as much energy to create ethanol as you get from it. Total government fuck-up.

A lot of socialist democrats today in favor of ever bigger government, they falsely blame market greed for the original depression, the cost of oil, CEO wages. I hear it all the time. It is insane to believe the housing bubble, for example, was rooted in spontaneous evolution of man becoming more greedy in the year 2000. That is nonsense. What really happened was centralized control of interest rates, under the same idealist principles which you espouse, in the form of the Federal Reserve, lead to a human being (Greenspan) politically pressured to avoid a necessary correction/recession after the last Fed-created bubble bust in 2000. Rates were forced down to 1% for an entire year, well below where the market would have had them at the time. That created a demand for housing and kept everyone spending, but do you see how that demand was artificial? All the people on Wall Street, they didn't evolve. They've always been greedy, that's what they're there for, to invest in the best sectors and benefit at the same time that their investment is ultimately benefiting us in the form of better products and services that we, the consumer, demand. If a recession was allowed to happen, though, and rates were reflective of the truth, they wouldn't have been incentivized into all that speculative and unsustainable madness. Greenspan actually vocally encouraged that "growth" for years and naturally people gravitate towards optimism and wanting to think something that great will last forever. Naturally, that attracts these ponzi schemes and shady lenders into placed they were not so commonly found before. So the socialist plank of a central bank and central economic planning enables it, and yet capitalism is blamed. Meanwhile, people are talking about giving the arsonist even more firefighting duties. Huh? You can see why we libertarian people are beside ourselves.

Greed drives innovation so long as competition is preserved and government grants no special privileges. If you accept that competition and the fear of competition leads to prices getting bid down in an effort to win the consumer of that product or service, then the last thing you want is government getting involved to erode it with managed trade like NAFTA, health care bills like the HMO act, no-bid contracts, taxpayer subsidies, etc, etc. Government is itself a monopoly, comprised largely of lawyers and very manipulative individuals who engage in some of the most outstanding and convincing propaganda you'll ever see, all the while colluding with their businessmen campaign financiers to return the favor and cause all the problems you hate so much but are utterly unwilling to blame on government enablement itself.

You know, I hate to point out the political implication of this for all the big government libs and neo-cons who support the FDA and centralized control in the market in general. Read the article. The FDA is comprised of humans. The intention is for those humans to test and ban unsafe products based on ongoing and unbiased research because it is assumed that it would be worse if you were allowed to choose. The humans do their job 70% of the time, all the while delaying good drugs for approval resulting in untold numbers of deaths, but also saving a number of people as well. Now we see, as was the case for Stevia, established artificial sweetener companies with chemical patents bribing these humans and funding phony research to product and assure them exclusivity in the market. The system, based on a faulty idealistic presumption not accounting for human behavior, acted out of personal benefit rather than the benefit of you and me, the direct opposite of what's expected of it. Socialism fails folks, because it offloads all of your own responsibilities to a centralized and corruptible force.

Motivation itself is not enough. Motivation doesn't address the cost/benefit of what you end up choosing to do. Someone could end up becoming motivated towards becoming one of these self-help instructors, for example, and end up causing more harm than good despite thinking that they are doing good. Tony in Scarface was highly motivated to do something bad and he fucked up everything around him. Being motivated only magnifies the effects of what you're doing. It doesn't change what you're doing. The only thing that, on the average, leads to better results, is knowledge and reasoning skill. But where do people go for that? There are countless places to look, countless people you could turn to. Who is right and who is wrong? Somehow, you have to go and figure it out. School won't be enough, and most of us don't have parents with foresight enough to talk about credit cards and home buying and ethics and how things fundamentally work. We don't normally have parents who recognize and remember all the mistakes they made in the past so that you can avoid doing the same.

Choggy is actually sort of right on this one. The Democrat vs Republican duopoly distracts people. The collectivist mentality usually means defending whatever your party does when the other side blames and visa versa. Judging by actions and not words (Bush campaigned on no policing of the world), it's clear that both parties believe in military interventionism of some kind. McCain's a warmongering nut who thinks Iran getting nukes is the end of the world when the soviets had 40,000. We knew that. But look at all the people in love with the Democrat candidates. Neither Clinton or Obama want to close up our bases all over the world. They, like McCain, also believe Iran getting nukes shouldn't be allowed and would probably strike militarily. I support going after Bin Laden in Pakistan because he attacked us, but look at what we did instead. Nation building, industrial profiteering, coercing the petrodollar. We'll keep getting this nonsense instead of addressing the idea that intervention may be the root cause of 9/11s and people hating us as long as people keep ignoring the Ron Paul's of the world, suppressing third parties, etc. This will all end on economic terms soon enough, the worst way it possibly can. The soviets made the same mistake, but didn't have as free of a market to sustain it for as long as we have.

I don't think there's any question the media was blacking out Paul. I don't think there was a single interview through all of 2007 where he wasn't told that his chances were "slim" and he was a "longshot" and ultimately asked "will you run on a third party ticket." I remember seeing a Fox clip covering the 6 million dollar day and the ticker at the bottom said "Money for nothing?" I kid you not. None of the other candidates got treated that way, and he raised more money and got more votes than a lot of them despite it. Imagine what it would have been if he had gotten a fair shake. I imagine the powers that be want to regulate the internet now seeing the influence it had for a truthtalker like Paul.

People are so weak minded that that's all the media really has to do. Plant the seed of doubt in their mind that he has no chance, and they will effectively believe it in a self-fulfilling prophecy along the same lines as "I don't want to waste my vote on someone who won't win." I think if there was an election between media-loved Hitler, media-loved Stalin and a blacked out libertarian candidate, Hitler or Stalin would win.

Lobbying is one of the most ignored issues among voters. The unregulated free market achieves the best possible result because competition drives costs down and quality up. No company is safe from a good competing product and the average man's lot increases indirectly through this kind of market operation. Until... the free market gets socialized as it is today.

Big businesses give politicians pack money for advertising (which people fall for) to help them beat the incumbent. And since both sides engage in it, there's no chance of it not happening. Politicians, once elected, return the favor by passing special privilege legislation: HMO Act, NAFTA managed trade, certain FDA bans (Stevia comes to mind), subsidies, no-bid contracts, special tax breaks, and yes even the Federal Reserve Act (manipulates market interest rates) etc. Happens under both Republican and Democrat administrations.

So government, itself a monopoly, via legalized bribery increasingly socializes the free market by taking money from your paycheck and giving it directly to a company rather than making that company earn it by making a better or equal but cheaper product under the pressure of competition. Under the weight of government largess, many small businesses fail or have no incentive to begin. All the while, Suzie Democrat blames the Republicans and Joe Republican blames the Democrats, despite probably getting screwed by both. Some people even blame the free market. "We need more government regulation" they say, even though they never read the bills and depend entirely on morsels they get from the corporate owned networks to know what's happening.

So how do you prevent this from happening? Basic research on your candidate and his history. Ron Paul, for example, refused lobbying. If your candidate accepts money from special interest groups, his ideals are corruptible and the free market is in danger. Period. Why would you EVER vote for someone like that? Too late. We have a major uphill battle getting rid of those above things before this country collapses under the weight of a government who you people keep thinking is your savior. Stop it. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

I agree with qm's libertarian principle, but qm is a neo-con and not a libertarian, so something tells me that when asked about legalizing ALL drugs under the same pretense, he would be quick to withdraw that statement.

While the criticism on this needless and unprovoked war is justifiable, the implied alternatives are also flawed morally by suggesting that it is possible to do good with someone else's money. What should be done with the three trillion dollars is to give it back to the people who worked for it and from whom it was taken. Individually, not collectively under socialist redistribution of wealth schemes. So that they can each spend the money that THEY worked for in order to provide for THEIR child's education, THEIR retirement, THEIR groceries, THEIR medicine, and with the money left over engage in capitalistic activity which will lead to indirect mutual benefit or voluntary charitable activity which will lead to morally sound direct benefit. We had mindset like this in the 19th century and had something called the Industrial Revolution. If you've done your research and know the story after that, then you know how socialism and Keynesian economics got their foot in the door.

@Solipsy

Once again, I have to respond to short-sighted intellect that is fixated on nominal values rather than values relative to other goods. Why don't you understand what I'm saying here? Low-paying jobs are painful not because they are "low-paying" and in your mind "trivial," but because the money you make from them is losing purchasing power and being taxed away at a rate greater than it ever has been in the history of this country. It is being devalued and taxed away by the very policies you claim are helping you. But you fail to see that government intervention and redistribution of wealth is actually making the poor poorer because they cause hyperinflation and rising costs of food and energy. Redistribution of wealth schemes benefit the rich far more than they benefit you. We've already covered how a truly free market brings far more people into prosperity than it doesn't, which increases donations to non-profit organizations, makes families richer, etc, to help the remaining people who truly need it. When you claim that it is in a company's best interest to underpay their employees, you simply don't understand how the free market works. If minimum wage didn't exist, McDonald's could not hire anyone for 2 cents a day. No one would do it. People are only willing to work jobs that generate income relative to their living expenses. The wages are then dictated by the market itself. You think janitors would just disappear in a free market system? That's a junk argument if there ever was one. If we suddenly had a society where everyone was brilliant and skilled and no one wanted to the dirty jobs, the demand for those dirty jobs would rise immensely and the wages would rise to reflect that need. And if that happened, you'd have plenty of people quitting their lower paying office jobs to go scrub toilets for more money, to hell with anyone's perceptions about the status of the work itself.

And it's bad for business to underpay. If 25% of people are unemployed in this country or making far less money than they should, businesses die because they are losing consumers to pay for their products and services. Then the people who were employed at those businesses lose THEIR jobs.

Technology advances often give us the illusion of a greater standard of living, but the standard of living has actually gone down considerably over the years as government has gotten bigger and more interventionist (a result of people believing and electing politicians who fool them into promising them more wealth with higher taxes, socialist programs, etc). Peter Schiff makes an excellent point in an old interview that his grandfather was a carpenter, raised seven kids on that income, and his wife didn't even have to work. Someone with that kind of job today cannot do that. So you may have nicer gadgets and cars than you did back then, but the cost of food, energy, education, medical care, has gone way, way up relative to average income. And it's because of the federal reserve devaluing our money and the government borrowing trillions of dollars it doesn't have to promise you better stuff and an easier life, which the vast majority is falling for hook, line, and sinker.

Once the long overdue second depression finally comes, you may finally realize that all of this stuff you espouse has led you into a situation where you are attempting to survive without a job or with wheelbarrows full of worthless fiat money. So good luck with that when it comes.