Hitler Finds Out Ron Paul Is Four Points Ahead of Him in the Polls
Libertarian Ron Paul is running four points behind President Obama.
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
The Pauls don’t believe in social safety net… monopolies. Putting all your eggs in one basket… the same basket with all the guns and the bombs and the desire to use them… doesn’t strike them as the wisest of ideas. Depicting their views on the matter more accurately, it is their contention that voluntarily-financed private and local relief organizations are more immediate, more responsive, and that one can actually see their money working and oversee how it is used, rather than sustaining far-away bureaucracies, bankers, war-making, and the like. Indeed, tied up in their views on monetary policy, they believe that the return on what is fed in to federal and state relief programs is devalued by a deliberately inflationary policy that punishes the poor and rewards the wealthy and connected. If you don’t like them or disagree with that depiction, fine. But that’s their beliefs accurately stated.
That “safety net” metaphor is one of the silliest people have ever come up to defend their ideas. In the real world, safety nets are generally used by people who are taking unusual risk (for entertainment or more noble purposes) that ordinary people wouldn’t want to take, with or without a net. So are you all in favor of state-run faux-charity willing to concede that social “safety nets” encourage economically risky behavior?
As for Thomas comment’s, “they” hate even more seeing their tax money go to bombing faraway countries into oblivion, something the liberals (as per the DNC) have no problem with, now that “their” president is in office.
Bucephalus….yes, I am willing to concede that social safety nets do encourage some risky behaviors, just as the ‘too big to fail’ mentality of social safety nets for corporations and wall street have contributed to risky behavior…..I’m sure you know…moral hazard and all.
However, I’m not convinced about the direct nature of the risk-aversion you’re referring to here -just like claiming that capital punishment provides deterrence to violent crime…maybe a few rare cases, but how can you prove it?
If you’re referring to economically risky behavior…like…say…spending what little money you have in your old age on a pressure cooker and selling your fried chicken recipe store-by-store (resulting in a yummy consequence of KFC), I think I’m willing to accept the risk of some slackers for that. In the dream world of my imagination, where education expenses are federally reimbursed in exchange for several years of productive work…public or private….and where everyone is entitled to single-payer tax funded health insurance…people would feel the freedom to start businesses rather than hang on to jobs that don’t maximize their entrepreneurial spirit just to keep their benefits and 401K plans. Most of them would fail….most business start-ups do…but some of them would succeed. Without the security, though, people hunker down and try to weather the economic storms…most people live mediocre lives doing this.
As a longtime Ron Paul supporter (since before he became famous), I can say that I don’t have too much of a problem seeing my tax money going to the poor. The problem is that the vast majority of my tax dollars go not to the poor, but to the very wealthy – those who have the connections and influence to have the tax code and other laws written to their benefit (GE, Exxon-Mobil, Goldman Sachs, etc.). Most of my tax dollars go to fatcat bankers, defense contractors, and overpaid government workers who are all living large while I’m wondering where my next mortgage payment is going to come from.
As for a libertarian society being ‘dog eat dog’, I really can’t imagine it being any worse than the society we live in today, where Wall Street bonuses are paid by taxpayer funded ‘bailouts’ and Wall Street crooks are getting away with trillions of dollars of fraud at taxpayer expense with a wink from the umpteen bajillion federal regulators. But you True Believers in big government bureaucratic socialism keep fiddling if that’s what makes you happy. Why worry about the trillions of dollars being funneled to the banksters and the military-industrial complex when Ron Paul – horror of horrors! – would someday eventually like to reform the entitlement system which the left generally acknowledges is broken anyway.
Ok, here we go…first of all Ron Paul is a Republican. Always was, always will be, as he kept on saying last time around when people were begging him to run for the Libertarian Party or as an independent.
What sets him apart from all the others though is that they hate his guts. Strictly speaking he’s none of the above, he’s a constitutionalist. If it ain’t in the Constitution, faggetaboutit. The Constitution allows for two government departments. War and the Post Office. That’s it, everything else is unconstitutional.
You want a war? Get Congress to vote on it and get the Senate to approve. No Presidential fiats, no signing statements, no Czars running the country…which is why other Republicans (and Democrats for that matter) can’t stand him. No big business telling them what to do and therefore no money from them.
Horrors you say! No welfare. That’s right, no FEDERAL welfare, either for individuals or CORPORATIONS. No bail-outs, no subsidies, no income tax either (and while there is an amendment for income tax there is no amendment for the IRS, another unconstitutional agency)
Which is not to say that there won’t be any welfare (or whatever the name/flavor of the week is today) because you see there is another amendment to the Constitution. It’s the tenth one.
The Tenth Amendment states the Constitution’s principle of federalism by providing that powers not granted to the federal government nor prohibited to the states by the Constitution are reserved, respectively, to the states or the people.
Get it? It’s none of the federal government’s business, it’s in the pervue of the individual state whether they want income taxes, welfare, socialized medicine, public schooling, whatever.
Ron Paul is simply following those guidelines. Read the Federalist Papers, and then read the Anti-Federalist Papers. All of the things the anti-federalists warned about (and that the pro-federalists poo-pooed) has come to pass. You can do a LOT worse than having Paul as President, and have been since Washington and that SOB Hamilton decided to send in federal troops to put down the Whisky Rebellion.
First thing, kill all the lawyers. No, actually Paul wants to pull back all the troops that have no business being anywhere else other than on US soil. End the illegal wars. Go back to gold standard. End of financial crisis.
This is a bad thing?
The Murdoch and other similar types MSM has done a wonderful hack job on Ron Paul, no doubt about it. Wave the red flag of getting rid of federal handouts and he’s vilified. He hates the little people! yeah right…
I agree with Grouchy, the US government has a constitutional mandate to protect the interests of its citizens, which the supreme court ruled in the 1930s includes economic and health security. This doesn’t mean the feds have to provide it, they simply have to ensure it. Time and time again ‘the market’ has failed to produce adequate results for the entirety of the citizens…in fact, ‘the market’ left to its own devices doesn’t even eliminate slavery. . .that took what Ron Paul would consider unconstitutional acts to accomplish. Every day people in the United States live without economic and health security is a day that the federal government has violated its own founding charter.
Aggie, can I infer from your former post that you consider corporate welfare defensible too? You know darn well I don’t.
Grouchy, is food a basic human right too? What about love? What about joy?
Basic rights? Obama was talking about giving free internet to everybody, but We’ll still have to pay for food, water, electricity, and other necessities, yeah life makes sense.
bucephalus, no you may not infer that. Corporations aren’t people…even though they have now been legally defined as such and are treated as such by the government. THEY ARE NOT PEOPLE. The US government has a constitutional mandate (hehehe…I said..man date) to ensure the ability for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of all its citizens. Does that mean giving people free food? No, but it means setting policies that provide for safe, affordable food and subsidize those who are unable to pay.
Formal education is another must, because it is required to live a fulfilling life in a modern, technologically sophisticated world. So is electricity, and phone access, and now, yes..even internet. Again, this doesn’t mean these things need to be free…nothing is free….it means the government should set policies (i.e. regulations…laws….rules) that allow for fair access and reasonable rates.
Ted, focusing on nationalization is focusing on a process, not an outcome. Yes, the ends do not justify the means, nor do the means justify the ends…both are important. I don’t think that in this time we need the federal government taking over anything, as it appears the federal government is currently incapable of setting and maintaining reasonable policies.
Quite right, but I use nationalization as a wedge, to make a broader issue about the way capitalism allocates wealth. At present the Bank of New York Mellon holds deposits in excess of the US national debt. If the US were to seize that company alone, there would be no need for austerity or talk of gutting Social Security. That point exposes the, um, bankruptcy of the system and the benighted way it allocates resources.
In 2008, Doris Lessing, the previous year’s Nobel laureate in literature, opined that Obama would never become president, becuase the US «deep state» (my term, not Lessing’s) would have him assassinated before he assumed office. Lessing, like many others, was deceived by what Mr Obama seemed to promise during his campaign ; we now know – and it was evident from the time he picked his first Cabinet – that he had no intention of discontinuing the (undeclared) wars started under his predecessor ; instead he has widened them, to, we must presume, the great pleasure of the deep state . But in the unlikely event that this deep state were to be confronted with a Ron Paul who would really put an end to the US’s many unconstitutional wars of aggression abroad, then assassination – disguised, perhaps, as a heart attack (remember what happened to Stanley Motss ?) – would, to my mind, be inevitable….
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the Pauls don’t believe in any social safety nets. Dog eat dog, here we come.
The Pauls don’t believe in social safety net… monopolies. Putting all your eggs in one basket… the same basket with all the guns and the bombs and the desire to use them… doesn’t strike them as the wisest of ideas. Depicting their views on the matter more accurately, it is their contention that voluntarily-financed private and local relief organizations are more immediate, more responsive, and that one can actually see their money working and oversee how it is used, rather than sustaining far-away bureaucracies, bankers, war-making, and the like. Indeed, tied up in their views on monetary policy, they believe that the return on what is fed in to federal and state relief programs is devalued by a deliberately inflationary policy that punishes the poor and rewards the wealthy and connected. If you don’t like them or disagree with that depiction, fine. But that’s their beliefs accurately stated.
hope you like living wit’ your grandma.
Wit’ty.
Also, they don’t like to see their tax money go to the poors.
That “safety net” metaphor is one of the silliest people have ever come up to defend their ideas. In the real world, safety nets are generally used by people who are taking unusual risk (for entertainment or more noble purposes) that ordinary people wouldn’t want to take, with or without a net. So are you all in favor of state-run faux-charity willing to concede that social “safety nets” encourage economically risky behavior?
As for Thomas comment’s, “they” hate even more seeing their tax money go to bombing faraway countries into oblivion, something the liberals (as per the DNC) have no problem with, now that “their” president is in office.
Bucephalus….yes, I am willing to concede that social safety nets do encourage some risky behaviors, just as the ‘too big to fail’ mentality of social safety nets for corporations and wall street have contributed to risky behavior…..I’m sure you know…moral hazard and all.
However, I’m not convinced about the direct nature of the risk-aversion you’re referring to here -just like claiming that capital punishment provides deterrence to violent crime…maybe a few rare cases, but how can you prove it?
If you’re referring to economically risky behavior…like…say…spending what little money you have in your old age on a pressure cooker and selling your fried chicken recipe store-by-store (resulting in a yummy consequence of KFC), I think I’m willing to accept the risk of some slackers for that. In the dream world of my imagination, where education expenses are federally reimbursed in exchange for several years of productive work…public or private….and where everyone is entitled to single-payer tax funded health insurance…people would feel the freedom to start businesses rather than hang on to jobs that don’t maximize their entrepreneurial spirit just to keep their benefits and 401K plans. Most of them would fail….most business start-ups do…but some of them would succeed. Without the security, though, people hunker down and try to weather the economic storms…most people live mediocre lives doing this.
As a longtime Ron Paul supporter (since before he became famous), I can say that I don’t have too much of a problem seeing my tax money going to the poor. The problem is that the vast majority of my tax dollars go not to the poor, but to the very wealthy – those who have the connections and influence to have the tax code and other laws written to their benefit (GE, Exxon-Mobil, Goldman Sachs, etc.). Most of my tax dollars go to fatcat bankers, defense contractors, and overpaid government workers who are all living large while I’m wondering where my next mortgage payment is going to come from.
As for a libertarian society being ‘dog eat dog’, I really can’t imagine it being any worse than the society we live in today, where Wall Street bonuses are paid by taxpayer funded ‘bailouts’ and Wall Street crooks are getting away with trillions of dollars of fraud at taxpayer expense with a wink from the umpteen bajillion federal regulators. But you True Believers in big government bureaucratic socialism keep fiddling if that’s what makes you happy. Why worry about the trillions of dollars being funneled to the banksters and the military-industrial complex when Ron Paul – horror of horrors! – would someday eventually like to reform the entitlement system which the left generally acknowledges is broken anyway.
Ok, here we go…first of all Ron Paul is a Republican. Always was, always will be, as he kept on saying last time around when people were begging him to run for the Libertarian Party or as an independent.
What sets him apart from all the others though is that they hate his guts. Strictly speaking he’s none of the above, he’s a constitutionalist. If it ain’t in the Constitution, faggetaboutit. The Constitution allows for two government departments. War and the Post Office. That’s it, everything else is unconstitutional.
You want a war? Get Congress to vote on it and get the Senate to approve. No Presidential fiats, no signing statements, no Czars running the country…which is why other Republicans (and Democrats for that matter) can’t stand him. No big business telling them what to do and therefore no money from them.
Horrors you say! No welfare. That’s right, no FEDERAL welfare, either for individuals or CORPORATIONS. No bail-outs, no subsidies, no income tax either (and while there is an amendment for income tax there is no amendment for the IRS, another unconstitutional agency)
Which is not to say that there won’t be any welfare (or whatever the name/flavor of the week is today) because you see there is another amendment to the Constitution. It’s the tenth one.
The Tenth Amendment states the Constitution’s principle of federalism by providing that powers not granted to the federal government nor prohibited to the states by the Constitution are reserved, respectively, to the states or the people.
Get it? It’s none of the federal government’s business, it’s in the pervue of the individual state whether they want income taxes, welfare, socialized medicine, public schooling, whatever.
Ron Paul is simply following those guidelines. Read the Federalist Papers, and then read the Anti-Federalist Papers. All of the things the anti-federalists warned about (and that the pro-federalists poo-pooed) has come to pass. You can do a LOT worse than having Paul as President, and have been since Washington and that SOB Hamilton decided to send in federal troops to put down the Whisky Rebellion.
First thing, kill all the lawyers. No, actually Paul wants to pull back all the troops that have no business being anywhere else other than on US soil. End the illegal wars. Go back to gold standard. End of financial crisis.
This is a bad thing?
The Murdoch and other similar types MSM has done a wonderful hack job on Ron Paul, no doubt about it. Wave the red flag of getting rid of federal handouts and he’s vilified. He hates the little people! yeah right…
Qui bono?
You’re right. We shouldn’t refer to health care, education, shelter and other necessities required for a dignified life as a “safety net.”
We should call them human rights.
I agree with Grouchy, the US government has a constitutional mandate to protect the interests of its citizens, which the supreme court ruled in the 1930s includes economic and health security. This doesn’t mean the feds have to provide it, they simply have to ensure it. Time and time again ‘the market’ has failed to produce adequate results for the entirety of the citizens…in fact, ‘the market’ left to its own devices doesn’t even eliminate slavery. . .that took what Ron Paul would consider unconstitutional acts to accomplish. Every day people in the United States live without economic and health security is a day that the federal government has violated its own founding charter.
Aggie, can I infer from your former post that you consider corporate welfare defensible too? You know darn well I don’t.
Grouchy, is food a basic human right too? What about love? What about joy?
Food, definitely.
Basic rights? Obama was talking about giving free internet to everybody, but We’ll still have to pay for food, water, electricity, and other necessities, yeah life makes sense.
bucephalus, no you may not infer that. Corporations aren’t people…even though they have now been legally defined as such and are treated as such by the government. THEY ARE NOT PEOPLE. The US government has a constitutional mandate (hehehe…I said..man date) to ensure the ability for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of all its citizens. Does that mean giving people free food? No, but it means setting policies that provide for safe, affordable food and subsidize those who are unable to pay.
Formal education is another must, because it is required to live a fulfilling life in a modern, technologically sophisticated world. So is electricity, and phone access, and now, yes..even internet. Again, this doesn’t mean these things need to be free…nothing is free….it means the government should set policies (i.e. regulations…laws….rules) that allow for fair access and reasonable rates.
Ted, focusing on nationalization is focusing on a process, not an outcome. Yes, the ends do not justify the means, nor do the means justify the ends…both are important. I don’t think that in this time we need the federal government taking over anything, as it appears the federal government is currently incapable of setting and maintaining reasonable policies.
Quite right, but I use nationalization as a wedge, to make a broader issue about the way capitalism allocates wealth. At present the Bank of New York Mellon holds deposits in excess of the US national debt. If the US were to seize that company alone, there would be no need for austerity or talk of gutting Social Security. That point exposes the, um, bankruptcy of the system and the benighted way it allocates resources.
Soilent Green is people though….you may infer that.
In 2008, Doris Lessing, the previous year’s Nobel laureate in literature, opined that Obama would never become president, becuase the US «deep state» (my term, not Lessing’s) would have him assassinated before he assumed office. Lessing, like many others, was deceived by what Mr Obama seemed to promise during his campaign ; we now know – and it was evident from the time he picked his first Cabinet – that he had no intention of discontinuing the (undeclared) wars started under his predecessor ; instead he has widened them, to, we must presume, the great pleasure of the deep state . But in the unlikely event that this deep state were to be confronted with a Ron Paul who would really put an end to the US’s many unconstitutional wars of aggression abroad, then assassination – disguised, perhaps, as a heart attack (remember what happened to Stanley Motss ?) – would, to my mind, be inevitable….
Henri
Aggie,
Here’s a story for you to ponder on the fairy tale of big government and strong regulation helping out the little guy (especially the little guy, or rather gal, trying to lift herself up from the doldrums of unemployment):
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-08-05/news/chi-local-ice-cream-makers-could-be-shut-down-by-state-20110805_1_kris-swanberg-nice-cream-strawberry-syrup
I’m sure forcing her to buy that 40k pasteurizer is also going to be a boost for the economy… Of whoever manufactures it!