I'm gay for Ron Paul.
I'm gay and I like really saggy balls.

I think principled conservatives and principled liberals could get along, work together and thrive. What if we joined forced to push the corporate proxies out of office?

Ron Paul's no enemy of corporations. Libertarians say "trust the free market" to a far greater extent than the neocons do.

We should've all rallied around Dennis Kucinich, he'd have held this corporate world's feet to the fire.

At least, when he wasn't gettin' it on with his super-hot wife.

His economic ideas are daft, but he has the right idea on foreign policy.

In point of fact, NetRunner, Paul has been very critical of the kinds of extra protections that corporations have been given. He's a strong supporter of individual rights, to be sure, but it is not at all clear that corporations count as individuals by his lights. Many of the special protections--especially tax refuges--would be repealed or at least subject to attrition under a Paul presidency.

Neocons do not merely "trust to the free market" but almost explicitly advance the causes of corporations which support them.

@ jwray: I bet you live on food stamps and Medicaid. Daft economic ideas? Have you taken economics 101?

Remember kids, second place is still first loser. He was the only real name of note on the republican ballot besides McCain...and let's not forget the turnout for the republican primary was pitiful since McCain's already clinched the nomination!

^ I'll confess to being under informed on Ron Paul's policies. The main things I've heard him talk about is monetary policy, ending American imperialism, and eliminating the bulk of what the U.S. government does, including regulating businesses. I'm with him on the first two, but that last one is a deal breaker for me.

A quick search of his website yielded this:
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/articles/290/regulation-free-trade-and-mexican-trucks/

A couple sentences in is this gem:

Not only that, but the anti-competitive and burdensome yoke of over-regulation of our industry at home is about to send a lot more Americans to the unemployment lines.

>> ^LostTurntable:
Remember kids, second place is still first loser.

I once got a 73 on a biology final exam. Normally I'd have been a little unhappy since the sciences were among my best classes, but since I hadn't even shown up to take the final, why complain?

Second place is pretty damn impressive for someone who isn't even in the race.

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!

Obama/Kucinich '08!

hah!

I frigging hate how CNN's "widescreen videos" are just squished so they have letterbox mattes. Well done.

Look at the 3 people who could beat this guy... then fuckin launch me off this wasteland planet.

>> ^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.

*dead

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