Viper1 said:
I'll cover your points one by one to better clarify things.
1. Civil Rights - His point against the Civil Rights Act is modern in thought. If you were to establish a white only business today, you'd be out of business in a week. It would a disasterous venture. While the business is given the right to choose whom they cater to, the consumer has the right to ensure his establishment fails. I, nor Dr. Paul, are sugesting it a good idea to create discretionary businesses but we also understand that if you did, you'd only be setting yourself up for failure and allowing a business to fail is a concpet America has a hard time grasping lately.
2. End of federal education (not state education) - And federal education has improved American education how? Every eyear we keep getting worse and worse. None of it is even standardized across the states or school districts. Also the fact that government backed school loans are one of the largest reasons college tuition has skyrocketed in price. A university may charge anything it wants to knowing it will get paid regardless of whether the student pays his loans or not. So they have no incentive to work on free amrket priciples. Education itself has become far cheaper per student than ever thanks to larger class sizes and technology. But instead of lowerd tuition, it rises.... Get rid of federal education and the government backed student loans go away forcing universities and colleges to reduce their credit hour rates.
3. Leaving NATO and UN - The US government has started taking orders from UN and many UN policies are now laws that supercede our very own laws. They drag us into wars we have no business being in, use us as a global police force, violate soveriegnty of other nations and their laws. Fact is they do far more harm to the world than good and we're losing our soverignty to them.
4. Gold standard - He doesn't want a complete return of the gold standard but the option to allow competing currencies such as gold. Right now, gold is illegal as a currency despite it being listed in the Constituion as the only currency (plus silver). More to the point is that it would keep the value of the dollar honest instead of continually losing value as it does under the Federal Reserve.
5. State rights - State rights are actually the intention behind the United States of America and the Consitution. The concept of 'voting with your feet' means if you do not like the laws of your state, move. You have 50 to choose from. 1 of them should have the perfect set of laws for you. Largely, they'd all have the same basic set of laws with only a few variations. Nevada and New Jersey allow gambling, for instance. Any reason why this concept should not be accepted more broadly?
6. Income tax - The US survived just fine for over 100 years with no income tax. We didn't ahve one until the early 1900's. If you reduce our federal budget to 1995 levels, we can completely get rid of income tax. All other federal revenue streams would cover the budget.
7. Non-interventionism - The country was established on this priciple and we held to it for more than 100 years with no one wanting to kill us. As soon as we started interfereing in other countries business, we made enemies. Had we stayed out of the Middle East, 9/11 would never have happened. Do you think radical Islamic extremeists have it our for Canadians or the Swiss? Nope. Because they leave people alone. They don't go overthrowing elected presidents, establishing oppressive dictators, occupying nations, building 900 military bases around the world, bomb hundreds of thousands of innocent civillians and then expect people to smile, ask for more and say thank you, America.
8. Free market education - We had it before and it worked just fine. I also think you are mixing concepts on this one. He still wants public education just governed from the local and state level, not federal. But free market education is also known as private schooling. Right now it's expensive because a public option exists. There is no market for a private school at that level whena free school already exists. If ALL schools were private based, the market would cover all levels simply because demand for it would exist. But again, you're mixing his policy on this one.
So as you can see, these ideas aren't crazy. In fact, they are largely, if not compeltely, based on the Constitution itself which my friend is most certainly not a crazy document.
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1) I still don't see the disadvantage of the Civil Rights Act. And that's only true today because of enforced equality.
2) Granted, America's education system is absolute garbage. The solution to that, however, is not to abolish federal education entirely - it's to reform it. The right-wing states will undoubtedly want to spend less money on education, so the quality of education will decrease further. It should be something that stays level across the country (and ideally, across the world) - that's one of the very few left-wing views I hold.
3) NATO and the UN have never forced America into anything. The Gulf War, the Afghan invasion and the Iraq war were all America's doing. Indeed, it used the UN and NATO to get support for them. If not for NATO, you would have invaded Iraq alone. And there is nothing either organisation can do to force you into doing something. You will never be sanctioned or attacked, and probably not even condemned. Besides which, NATO and the UN are both defensive organisations which, in general, oppose war, so this reasoning makes no sense.
4) Do you really want to be carrying around lumps of gold and melting them down when you want to pay for something? It's not the idea here that's the problem as much as the sentiment. It shows he is willing to pander to the Constitution, which, yes, was a revolutionary (literally) document 200 years ago, but is still 200 years old. Times, society and knowledge all change in 200 years.
5) I see what you mean, and that's generally quite a good idea. But some states will become havens of intolerance, and that's never a good thing.
6) Obama can't balance the budget with income tax, and any Republican would have difficulty with it. It brings in $937 million a year, which is larger than any single item of spending on the budget. To balance that budget would require spending cuts, from today, of $2.311 trillion. That's pretty much impossible. I would love to abolish income tax as leader. I would also love to give everyone a free car, reduce crime to zero and colonise the moon. None of these things are possible in the short term.
7) What happened when you tried non-interventionism? You led the entire world into a massive war. And you had to get involved, because Japan attacked you. If you had taken some time to actually defend your interests, none of that would have happened. Would you deny that the world is a safer place now than in the 1930s, including for America?
8) Private school is a brilliant idea, and I'm glad it exists. There are, however, people who cannot afford private school. Perhaps very cheap schools would start for them, but they would have no funding. Therefore, their teachers would be paid less. Therefore, even half-decent teachers would not want to teach there. Therefore, they would suck. That's a massive plutocracy - the quality of your education is dependent upon your wealth to such an extent that it is nearly impossible to succeed if you are not rich.
So I stand by my statement that Ron Paul is insane.
(Former) Lead Moderator
