| SamuelRSmith said: I'll try to answer everything except the gold standard question (simply because I don't fully understand the arguments for a hard currency, myself) - although I will point one thing out, Ron Paul is in favour of competing currencies. Basically, Ron Paul will allow taxes to be paid in any currency, at the moment, the only reason that the dollar is the official currency, is because it is illegal to use other currencies, and all taxes must be paid in dollars. Ron Paul's idea is that if there is some kind of competition, it will force institutions like the Federal Reserve (which, under Paul, would be far more open) to act in a way that keeps the dollar valuable. His belief is that, ultimately, the Fed would not be able to compete with a hard currency, and the hard currency would eventually replace it. If the hard currency starts losing its value, some other currency would rise up. As for the corporation thing - you have to remember that most of the corporate power comes from the fact that the Government are so involved in the markets. Under Paul, corporations will get no benefits, no subsidies, no tax breaks. They will have to compete with smaller businesses on a fair playing field. Not only that, but because the Government would have less power, there would be less to corrupt over. That post I made on Facebook the other day, with pizza being declared a vegetable, through corporate interest... that wouldn't happen under Paul, because the Federal Government wouldn't be in the business of deciding what goes on school children's dinner plates. 2008 was not a result of poor/lack of regulations, it was a result of too much Government. The sub-prime crisis began because the Government mandated that banks should make riskier loans in order to achieve the "American dream" of owning a home, this was made worse by the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates too low. The crisis spead to the UK because of the FSA, a government institution set up by Gordon Brown in the early 2000s, which basically, through a series of regulations, enforced the notion of "too big to fail" which dramatically changed the British banking sector, and encouraged them to buy into the sub-prime mortgage scandal. |
I agree that subsidies, benefits, and tax breaks by and large need to be removed.
However, I think you're underestimating the effect the repeal of regulations like the Glass-Steagall Act had on the financial crisis.
The merging of depository and investment banking gave banks a financial incentive to pool sub-prime loans into securities, which they then proceeded to advertise as AAA investments and even bet against these very same investments.
It wasn't just a matter of people defaulting on loans they couldn't afford. Banks were using these mortgages to make additional profits in other ways, which encouraged them to increase lending in addition to any persuasion by the federal government. They built a house of cards on top of an unsustainable bubble - a bubble that was being further inflated by that same house of cards. It was only a matter of time before it all collapsed.
The Glass-Steagall Act was put into place in our struggle to get out of the Great Depression, and only a decade after its repeal things went to shit. A correlation doesn't show causation, but there's plenty evidence for causation to be found.
I had read a great article on the 2008 financial collapse awhile back, but I can't seem to find it. However, this does a decent job of explaining in further detail what I mentioned above:
I think that right now we have too much bad regulation and not enough good regulation. Ron Paul, I believe, thinks we have too much regulation in general.
Edit:
I also think we need stricter limits on how corporations can interact with government officials (campaign finance reform, forbidding politicians from working for corporations that have been affected by legislation they've worked on, etc.), something I assume Ron Paul would be against.
