I’m getting really tired of all the rabid Paul supporters who don’t even know what he stands for.
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul wants to:
- Dissolve the FDA and let drug corporations take care of labeling, regulation, and distribution of their own addictive drugs.
- Eliminate the IRS the day he assumes office, and eradicate all federal income tax and income tax returns. The thousands of dollars in Child Tax Credits annually given to single parents will be lost the first year. All corporations will instantly stop reporting and tracking their income and payroll to the Federal Government.
- Allow prayer in schools. He actually co-sponsored AN AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION called “The Prayer in Schools Amendment”
- Forcing the United States to return to the Gold Standard of currency, a complete joke in today’s global economy.
- Eliminate all federal social services, and make Social Security voluntary.
- Crush Net Neutrality. Ron Paul voted against the Net Neutrality bill, which is consistent with his belief that huge corporations should operate with no restrictions whatsoever.
- Overturn Roe vs. Wade, the court decision that made abortion legal.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
This sounds like the conservatives case for Ron Paul. If he is for all these things I am definatly gonna vote for him.
lol FDA. I was watching TV the other day and there was a butcher butchering a cow and there was a FDA bureaucrat standing behind him, inspecting. What a waste of money. Let people choose what they want to put in their bodies, not some politician or some bureaucrat. We have lost this freedom through the FDA.
Oops. HIt enter too soon.
You’re not telling people why he stands where he does though.
And returning to a commodity based dollar isn’t nonsense. A fiat based currency has never worked in any economy. Ever.
RON PAUL 2008!
LOL, Paul is a nut job with no chance of winning (not even if every digg user voted).
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
That’s because it is a bad thing.
hah, prayer in school and no abortion
libertarian my ass
I was talking about medication, not beef. Are you complaining that we lost the “freedom” to unknowingly purchase dangerous medicine we’ve been falsely told is safe?
Two clarifications:
We went ’till 1913 without the income tax, and the unconstitutional IRS. (I know ‘unconstitutional’ is slowly becoming a hackneyed buzzword as of late, thanks to RP supporters, but never the less.)
Ron Paul wouldn’t force us to go back to the gold standard. But he’d make having gold a viable option incase our fiat currency is inflated into oblivion.
So we just want to go back to the point where we have to worry about what is in our meat? Bring on The Jungle. And medications? Well we can all die because of inaccurate medicines and get cancer because they haven’t been studied enough. America’s Screwed.
Robert and probabilityZero are exactly right; we need the FDA. The only freedom it limits is the freedom of corporations to screw ordinary people over.
I fully support Ron Paul, and I really think he has the best chance out of all of the Republican runners of winning.
I really only need to know that he is in favor of getting rid of the I.R.S., everything else is just icing on the cake. I have never heard a more honest, intelligent, rational politician in my life, and I think everyone is starting to realize that what they are experiencing, although it’s shocking, is the truth. And apparently to some, it hurts.
Zack: because of course taxes have never done anything good for us…
also, way to prove probabilityzero’s (this blog’s author) point by saying you only care about one of paul’s positions.
This guy sounds scary. The day any one of those things becomes a reality is the day I move to Canada.
Where do I send the box of tissue?
Texas
I didn’t know Ron Paul stood for all those things…..screw Mitt , Ron Paul has my vote !
“The thing that bugs me is that people think the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is protecting them — it isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as night and day.”
Dr. Herbert L. Ley, former Commissioner of the FDA
You obviously forgot one of the primary lessons of capitalism, that it has to be a free market for it to work. The FDA eliminates the possibility of a free market. It also makes it EASIER for corporations to get their genetically altered unsafe chemical shit into your bodies because they can spend millions of dollars on faulty research. Donald Rumsfeld took control of GD Searle to get aspartame through the FDA process. In April 1981, Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr. is made the new FDA commissioner by Ronald Reagan. On July 18, 1981 aspartame was approved for use dry foods by Hayes, Jr. overruling the Public Board of Inquiry and ignoring the law, Section 409(c)(3) of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 348), which says that a food additive should not be approved if tests are inconclusive.
It’s just another government bureaucracy that stifles growth and invention by creating impassable legal barriers and inane regulations. Check out this article to understand how this ridiculousness affects our farmers:
http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp03.htm
Corporate farms THRIVE under federal regulation. You’ve got your facts mixed up. And regarding the IRS and the income tax… they are an unconstitutional joke that would be laughed at by our Founding Fathers, who specifically denied an unappropriated tax in the original Constitution. (taxation without representation? anyone?) The 16th Amendment and the Federal Reserve Act were sponsored by Senator Aldrich, who admitted meeting with international globalists to construct the bills. Where do you think your federal tax dollars go? Distributed evenly amongst the people for the common good? Hah.
FDA does seem to just get in the way a lot, and it seems to act more in political interests than it does for public health.
In Europe and many other countries around the world they irradiate their foods like meat and milk. This acts like pasturization and allows for the food to keep much longer. In Mexico, for example, milk is a shelf item and it does not have to be refigerated and it keeps for months, but the Dairy Industry lobbied the FDA to ban the process of irradiating food, so their product would rot more quickly thus artifically reducing the milk supply.
Irradiation would completely kill salmonella and other bacteria found in meat which make people sick and even kills some people, but because big agriculture owns the FDA they have been successful in banning this new technology which would make our food supply cheaper, safer and more abundant.
The pro-lifers were also succesful in procrastinating the release of the morning after pill, for political reasons, not health reasons. I’m pro-life myself, but I do not have any ethical issues with the morning after pill, but the zealots in the pro-life movement do. Who knows how many surgical abortions were caused by this delay?
Big Pharma is able to lobby the FDA to keep competive drugs out of the US market, when they think that those drugs might hurt their bottom line. They are also able to pressure the FDA to “approve” drugs that have not been fully tested and have proven to be dangerous for people. Take Phen/fen, or those arthritis drugs that caused all those heart attacks a few years ago.
Alcohol, nicotine products, red dye #3, aspartame, high fructose corn syrup are approved, yet if I have a cigarette’s worth of marijuana in my possession i am stripped of my freedom and liberty? please take a moment to check out http://www.canorml.org/healthfacts/vaporizerstudy2.html anyway besides the more intelligent comment from JohhnyB, the FDA will review dexanabinol for corporate patents and approve countless unhealthy products (although they do put a warning label on some of the more obvious ones)while the DEA keeps marijuana illegal because it isn’t profitable. (You didn’t mention Dr. Paul’s opinion on “the war on drugs” or the DEA but you probably wouldn’t like them either. Is it not ridiculous for the government to tell you what you can and can’t do punishable by your freedoms themselves?)
You must relize at well that the FDA DOES NOT promote corporations to make safe food. It promotes them to pass FDA regulations. If you pass regulations you are immune from being sued no matter how shitty and unsafe your food is. How many life saving drugs are you being kept from because of the FDA? Drugs are blocked because they are competition to big pharma not because they are unsafe. See the marijuana example above.
Remember that before the FDA if you died because your food was diseased, and someone sold it to you knowing it was diseased, they were liable for criminal charges, possibly murder. Now its just pass inspection and do whatever the fuck you want because your immune!
Also denying expiremental cancer drugs to people on their death beds is EVIL. I can come up with 100 examples where people where denied expirimental drugs by the FDA that ended up getting approved after the person died. Seriously if someone is gonna die and their only chance is an expirimental drug let them take it.
The FDA easily kills more and sickens more than it ever saves. And its a huge waste of money to top it off.
Typical. There’s a bit of corruption in a government agency, and rather than try to fix it conservatives say we get rid of it completely. Well, if you think things are bad now, with the FDA sometimes letting corporations get away with releasing dangerous products, imagine how it will be when there’s no regulation at all.
The magical free market fairies aren’t going to fix things. If unsafe products are released into the marketplace people will buy them, and a hell of a lot more unsafe products will be released if we remove the FDA.
Also, I love how you all mention money and taxes as a prime factor in why you hate the FDA. There are things more important than the size of your bank account.
Okay, that’s one example. What about all the drugs that are not allowed on the market because they’re dangerous? Would you rather all those drugs be on the shelf right next to asprin and tylenol, with no way to tell how safe or unsafe they are?
“Zack: because of course taxes have never done anything good for us…”
Well, certainly not the income tax. It’s been used to pay off the interest from the money we borrow (print out of thin air.) and nothing else.
The issue at the heart of all of these issues is voluntarism vs. force. Liberty results in individual responsibility (if you can’t count on the government robbing your neighbor and doing your thinking for you, you must become productive and thoughtful).
Ron Paul’s positions all promote liberty.
Where do the fools get the idea that greedy capitalists will cheat the public, but greedy bureacrats can’t be bribed by the greedy capitalists? In the end you must defend yourself. Turning that job over to whores living off the extortion-racket called taxation is suicidal, not selfish.
Thanks for reminding me of some of the things that Ron Paul is against. I just sent in another $100.00 donation to his campaign. Donate! Donate! Donate! We can do it!
Here is a great quote about Ron Paul that I pick up from lewrockwell.com:
“He’s on the wrong side of the biblical threescore-and-ten, his demeanor is as mild as buttermilk, and his physique is wraith-like, but Ron Paul is a steel-spined ass-kicker with dangling anatomy made of solid brass. He is a man in full.”
Yeah!! That’s the kind of president that I have been waiting for all of sixty years of life.
P.S.: I’m not a nitpicker. but if you are going to post a negative comment about Ron Paul, you should at least check your grammar, as it does not portray you as being particularly bright.
[I’m getting really tired of all the rabid Paul supporters who don’t know even know what he stands for.]
Dude! You only had to write one sentence. Did Ron Paul mention eliminating the federal Dept. of Education? Go Ron Paul!
The same people that are running big Pharma are also part of the FDA…the fox watching the henhouse…
Foods that are raw are best, no irriadiation needed, -but to shelve something and make sure you make every cent you can why not irradiate, pasteurize, etc. to make it last longer. The living organisms in food are not all bad, in fact many are called enzymes and help you digest your food. The reason so many people have so many “medical conditions” is because we have raped our food of its value in the interest of $$. Why do you think they have you so scared about salmonella? Its bullcrap. I used to eat 2 week old spaghetti with meat sauce out of the refrigerator, no one said anything, and I did not get sick. The FDA wants you to think they are protecting you…they are not. They are making you buy their (Pharma runs the FDA)drugs, etc.
Don’t believe me, look up AMYGDALIN, B-17, LAETRILLE!
The “cure” for cancer (a vitamin deficiency, not a disease) lies in the above, read up on it. Looks at who is promoting it and who is debunking it. The FDA has banned the sale of this cure in conjunction with any mention of what it does, absolutely kills cancer cells DEAD, and only the cancer cells! Why would they do this? Because the cancer industry is a 200 billion a year business, and business is GOOD (for them).
Ron Paul is right, we do not need the gov’t to protect us, just protect our borders.
Americans are adult-children of government dependant parents. Americans beg to be taken care of because they have lost the spirit of our founding fathers.
They have been raised in a latch-key video game single or no-parent environment, and simply are not capable of taking care of themselves.
Ron Paul is one of the last who survived through the tough times and made a place in this world based on a fundamental belief in the individual being responsible for themselves.
I am sorry but this country is made up of mostly broken-spirit dysfunctional non-voting self-absorbed feel good people who care only about 200 cable channels and microwave popcorn.
They live in virtual America, they watch an HDTV world, and don’t ever have to leave their homes except to buy sleeping pills, weight-loss consumables, and insulen.
Imagine these adult-children as they move into congress and you will see the last semblance of freedom disolve into government approved toilet paper.
Its nice we are going to increase the budget for Chinese toy testing, we sure don’t want to spend any of that money on infrastructure or alternative energy.
If you need more money, print it. I can’t wait to get my money printing machine from the government, it will allow me to only print 1 million a week, but most of the stores shelves will only have lead-free Barbie accesories.
That’s an empty statement if I’ve ever heard one. Reminds me of Bush and all his “freedom” speeches. Try some original thinking next time.
So, removing the FDA and having big Pharma police itself will fix this problem how?
You live on the edge, man.
Figures you’d say something like this. Gullible dumbass.
We don’t need the gov’t to protect us? So why isn’t Ron Paul advocating disbanding the military?
I don’t mean to nitpick, but I actually had to write more than one sentence. If you read my post you’ll see there are many sentences, but you obviously stopped reading after the first because you disagreed with me. Common mistake among Paul supporters.
Once again, empty sentence. He’s just a politician. We should be concerned with what positions he holds.
Also, please read this before commenting:
I can see the IP address of everyone who comments. Please don’t comment more than once under different names; it isn’t fooling anyone.
I’m not saying everyone is doing this, but it has happened. If it continues I might start deleting comments.
I don’t care about what you posted… most of it has nothing to do with why I’m voting for Ron Paul (or would if I was old enough). I’m voting for him because he stands for freedom and the constitution. He is the president our founding fathers would want. If he thinks we should get rid of the FDA or whatever then we should.
PS: I seriously doubt he’s against net neutrality and abortion. You should check for typos more closely next time before you post.
“Figures you’d say something like this. Gullible dumbass.”
Your the dumbass, I’m afraid. Cancer can be easily cured, but the pharma industry doesn’t want you to know. Do a bit of research next time.
“We don’t need the gov’t to protect us? So why isn’t Ron Paul advocating disbanding the military?”
Because if he did, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting elected. It’s the same reason he’s never gone public with his support for the 9/11 Truth movement, which he obviously believes. It coincides perfectly with his other positions as well as his passion for liberty and freedom from opression.
He’s pro-life and opposes net neutrality. Surprised?
Oh great. Not this again. I’m not even going to bother arguing with you guys any more. Just go away.
Oh man, this page is hilarious.
“Zero! I got cancer! Quick! Throw me a bottle of Vitamin water and Flintstone chewables!”
> Ron Paul’s positions all promote liberty.
rp’s positions promote _personal_ liberty by demanding personal responsibility.
liberals seem to really embrace the “elitist” epithet that conservatives claim for them. in a lot of cases i can understand the ironic enjoyment to be called an elitist by someone you genuinely consider stupider than you.
however, when i consider liberalism’s connection to an elitist attitude i always come back to the idea that the liberal ideology fundamentally considers the average individual too stupid to manage their own lives with the community around them. if that is going to far for you, then it is that one particular organization haphazardly chosen will ultimately be a better guiding light for everyone in many highly personal aspects of daily life than the individual’s own ability to choose for themselves.
even an organization that fails in almost every task it is given. where it succeeds it does so at great expense. the further reaching the effort, the more costly and less worthwhile the effort. the ideas… the words… they are all fantastic. both in size and strength of heart. but the government does not have the incentive that the individual has to look after the individual’s life. it also does not have the breadth of scope to deal with each individual’s life considering more than about 50 people. it is a futile effort.
for myself, i would much prefer to invest myself in my community than some society that acquired me by the fact of my birth. not that i dont appreciate all the accouterments that have come with the territory, just that i don’t consider my work the entitlement of those who happen to live on this portion of the continent any more than i don’t consider their work an entitlement of mine.
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The panicked attitude you express towards the removal of many of these government programs is quite typical. Big government is a warm and all-enveloping safety-blanket, and many of us, at first blush, are loathe to give it up. As a reformed neo-con myself, I can attest to this firsthand.
But while you and so many others who get dizzy at the thought of the loss of your bureaucratic protectors in Washington tend to dismiss us supports of Dr. Paul as moonbats (or, in your case, dumbasses), we truly don’t have a death-wish. A closer examination of some of your underlying assumptions might help to clarify why so many of us are so enthusiastic about what seem to you to be insane policy positions.
First (as it’s gotten the most play here), the FDA. Your basic assumption is that, in its absence, pharmaceutical corporations (and food producers, &c.) will be left to “take care of labeling, regulation, and distribution of their own addictive drugs”, and so, by their basic criminal nature, will kill thousands or millions of defenseless Americans, sacrifices to their god, Mammon. Thankfully, this is not the case. Rather than beings driven by inconceivable evil operating in a vacuum, corporations are groups driven by the profit motive operating in the marketplace. This gives rise to two protections, far more powerful than the authority of any gov’t regulator. Firstly, consumers are unlikely to buy the products of a company that will kill them. A company’s own selfish self-interest (invisible hand, anyone?) drives it to seek a reputation for safe and reliable products. Releasing deadly or harmful products is a bad business decision. And, in today’s highly-connected and web-savvy society, it simply isn’t possible to hide slip-ups and sweep things under the rug. There is huge pressure to self-regulate and constantly improve quality – drug companies that don’t will simply fall by the wayside, flattened by consumer choice. And, exponentially reinforcing this is the second protection, the threat of civil and criminal litigation in the event of negligence. As prior posters have pointed out, by adhering to FDA mandated regulations, drug companies can render themselves proof against any consequences in the event that a drug proves unsafe. Remove this bureaucratic shield, and instantly you put our often excessively litigious culture to work for you! Criminal negligence, wrongful death, pain & suffering, there are hundreds of permutations of class-action lawsuit that can be leveled at companies, and, as Big Tobacco shows, intentionally deceiving the public as to a product’s safety can warrant BILLIONS of dollars in punitive damages. This double-whammy of customer loss and crushing legal challenges is a far more powerful incentive for companies to “play it safe†and self-regulate than any lobbyist-vulnerable regulatory agency.
In addition to this, your concerns rest on the depressing premise that if the Federal Government doesn’t regulate and monitor these companies, no one will. This country has 50 states and 300 million citizens – there’s a lot more to us than the old big F bigger G! As a federalist (someone who believes that powers not explicitly given to the Federal government devolve to the states), Dr. Paul would have no problem with states regulating food and drugs as they see fit. If libertarian New Hampshire trusts the unbridled market, great (I’d move there)! If regulation-happy Massachusetts and California want their own stringent agencies, good for them. The American people can enjoy the benefits and drawbacks of the system adopted by any of the several states – that’s choice, freedom! And let’s not forget private regulatory agencies. Have you ever read Consumer Reports, or looked for the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval? Likely not, but in a free and vibrant market, you’d just as likely be a more informed consumer. You would read reports and compare the options, and, with more personal responsibility (the all-important corollary to personal freedom), you’d probably make better choices overall than you do now, snug in the Federal blanket as you are.
Now, on to the IRS. Yay, no taxes and all that, but Ron Paul understands economics (and basic arithmetic!). He knows the President is not a dictator – he can’t dissolve agencies willy-nilly without Congressional approval. Dr. Paul’s important point, however, is that, if this nation ceases foreign adventurism and loses the “Federal Government is the only way†mentality cited above, we wouldn’t NEED the IRS. It’s true, and this prospect obviously is attractive to a lot of Americans. A Constitutionally-sized Federal Government could easily survive, as it did before 1913, on revenue (note: not protective!) tariffs, excise taxes, and other apportioned direct taxes. Kind of a neat thought, eh? Paul couldn’t get us there in 4 or 8 years, but he wants to move in that direction.
Prayer in schools: yes, he does want to give you the freedom to choose whether or not to allow prayer in your schools. You seem to have the impression Dr. Paul’s “Prayer in Schools Amendment†would force public schools to allow voluntary prayer. However, this is exactly the kind of top-down interference in education that Dr. Paul wants to eliminate (this is also why he wants to eliminate the unnecessary Federal Department of Education). Dr. Paul’s amendment would return the decision regarding the allowance of, again, VOLUNTARY prayer in public schools to the local schoolboards, where it belongs. With our current system, the gov’t could just as easily mandate that prayer must be allowed in all schools. Wouldn’t you be more comfortable keeping a this local issue, one that reflects the views of you and your neighbors? Again, Dr. Paul offers us choice, offers us freedom. A variegated system of schools for us to choose from, and giving us choice at a local level, really isn’t scary, really isn’t bad.
Next, a return to the gold standard. Look, a debate over the merits of the Austrian School of Economics, to which Dr. Paul adheres and of which he is an acknowledged expert, is a whole essay unto itself. The main point relevant to this discussion is, with an asset-backed currency, the government can’t just print more of it and inflate the currency to finance massive deficient spending, and thereby tax us in a far more subtle way than through a direct tax. If you like the idea of balanced budgets, I’d give this some more thought.
Next, you worry he will “Eliminate all federal social services, and make Social Security voluntary.†Okay, this is actually 2 separate issues, so let’s start with his cruel plan to axe all social welfare programs, thrusting the widows and orphans into the street a la a Snidely Whiplash landlord. Not quite. Long term, Dr. Paul’s ideas of limited government cause him to desire and support the reduction and elimination of what he sees as un-Constitutional federal programs. However, short-term, he would settle for us being able to afford them, and not have a de facto elimination of all social services when our bankrupted future government hits credit default. As he himself says, we don’t want to throw these dependent people out on the street. With the money saved by ending our interventionist foreign policy, we’ll be able to look after these people well into the future, all the while teaching a new generation how to stand on its own feet, the lessons of freedom and responsibility, so we can ease them off Federal aid and help end the trans-generational poverty this dependency saddles many of these modern serfs of the government with. In the meantime, state and private charities would grow to help ensure an adequate safety net for all Americans. Remember, Americans are a generous people- historically, we haven’t helped each other just because the government made us. Read a history of Herbert Hoover’s public life, it has a lot of good examples of this.
As to making social security voluntary, is that a bug-a-boo? I’m a bit worried when you cite his desire to give people more choices and freedom as a big reason for not supporting a candidate. If you think you can do a better job managing your retirement than a Treasury department technocrat, shouldn’t you have the option to opt out of the system? This whole idea of government telling us “Do what’s good for you – or else!†is a real head-scratcher for me. And again, the literally TRILLIONS a Paul Administration would save by hanging up a “closed†sign on the American Empire would support the system’s shortfalls while Americans are allowed out of the sinking ship. Come to think of it, a mandatory system where you have to pay rent to support other people every month smells a lot like feudal landlordism, doesn’t it?
Your penultimate concern, net neutrality, is just unnecessary government intervention into what is currently a free and prosperous domain. Leave well enough alone. And hey, thanks to the market, if you don’t like what your ISP is doing, vote with your feet and subscribe to another one. As long as the government assures free entry, which a Paul Administration would be deeply committed to, if there aren’t any providers you think are giving you a fair shake, you can start your own and capture a big market share. Just remember – where regulations go, taxation follows (ask yourself: why won’t the FG make the internet tax ban permanent? So that it can expire, of course!).
And finally, Roe v. Wade. This is again a huge issue worthy of a deep discussion, not one paragraph in an already overlong response to a blog post. First though, in the interest of full disclosure, I am pro-life. My point is here, that Dr. Paul can’t overturn a Supreme Court decision. He can, and will, appoint only the strictest of constructionists to the Supreme Court, as you would expect from a constitutionalist. If they overturn Roe v Wade, they do. But even if they did, Paul wouldn’t call for a national abortion ban. Again, he believes in federalism, and that tough issues are best resolved at more local levels. This again will result in a more variegated and vibrant nation, one with different policies for different states, with a more dynamic, engaged, and freedom-centered public discourse.
This post is quite lengthy, so my conclusion will be brief. Dr. Paul believes freedom is popular. Indeed, it often is. But I understand that freedom is also scary, sometimes even terrifying at first blush. I’m asking you to think on these issues, think about your own capacity for choice, and think about the ideals this nation was founded on. Maybe having the liberty of our forefathers won’t be so bad.
Please understand, I’m not trying to dismiss your political philosophy (my post wasn’t aimed at real libertarians, but rather at people who support Ron Paul because it’ “cool”), and your lengthy comment was certainly well thought out… That said, there’s a lot in it I don’t agree with.
This is so ridiculous I don’t know where to start. Are we just going to use trial and error to see which drugs kill us? If something slowly poisons the population for 20 years, do we organize a boycott? We can do that now. You can buy only drugs you research and know are completely safe for you. The only thing that will change without the FDA is that decision will be orders or magnitude harder and your taxes will go down slightly. Doesn’t seem like a fair trade to me.
Hooray! My state will still have regulation! Except, none of this is going to happen anyway; this is purely a hypothetical discussion. Even if somehow Paul managed to get elected (Infinite Improbability Drive engaged), there’s no way he could get most of his ideas into action. Again, my post was to inform people what Ron Paul actually stands for and believes (other than being a Republican who doesn’t support the war), not what would theoretically happen were he elected.
Nothing is stopping students from praying in school now. All his amendment would do is make the school set aside time specifically for praying.
No, it sounds like a system where you have to spend your money to help others, and we all know how much libertarians hate that. Seriously though, if you don’t like social security shouldn’t you try to fix it, rather than just killing the whole thing (which is what making it optional would do)? It isn’t some evil conspiracy to take your money; it has pure intentions, and does help millions of people. As for the “trillions” you could spend to “support the system’s shortfalls while Americans are allowed out of the sinking ship,” wouldn’t the government giving out money to help people go against everything else you’ve said?
Oh hey, I didn’t think of that! Oh wait.. I did… Good thing I have access to two high speed ISPs where I live. Most people only have access to one. The whole problem behind letting the free market handle the Internet is that the Clinton administration already gave millions to the big teleco companys in the 90s to help expand technology or whatever. They used that money to crush smaller competition and innovation, so now we’re left with inferior and overpriced technology run by corporations with a collective monopoly. The free market fairies aren’t coming to our rescue here.
That’s not to say I think you are a “dumbass.” Quite the opposite. Libertarianism is a great idea, I just don’t think it’s practical.
Really, I’m just disappointed there haven’t been more 9/11 conspiracy morons here, considering they usually flock to posts about Ron Paul.
Um, getting rid of the FDA will drop the prices of drugs across the board as it will destroy the FDA’s monopoly on drugs. That’s a good thing topic creator. How can you not see this. Great examples are India and China and I don’t see people dropping dead in the street because of it.
Electing someone like Ron Paul will make pharmaceuticals drop in price as he will destroy the FDA’s monopoly. Good examples are China and India where you can buy any pharmaceutical you please at rock bottom prices. This link has a bunh of erection drugs because they are the most popular, but you get the idea. Every drug on the market today would drop in price if we got rid of the FDA.
http://www.indiapharmacyonline.com/news.php
What are you talking about Paul supporters don’t know what he stands for? You just named a ton of reasons why they love him. And to agree with some previous posters, you say all of this like it’s a bad thing. Ron Paul is one of the only people in politics worth a damn. Paul supporters know more about their candidate than any other supporters of any other candidates because it is all grassroots based.
And to the idiot that made the remark that you’re not libertarian if you believe prayer should be allowed in schools and abortion should be legal. You sound like a capital L libertarian and not lower case l libertarian and there is a difference. Us lower case l libertarians are more libertarian! Why wouldn’t kids be allowed to pray in public schools? They should be allowed to do whatever they want. Freedom of religion my friend. And regarding abortion, this just depends on whether or not you believe the person inside is indeed a person. And if they are, and you believe they are, how can you deny them their liberties?
Oh, and for anyone who’s sick of all this shit, Ron Paul 2012.