Is Ron Paul still considered "fringe?"

at least he has GOOD IDEAS! most our politicians do not.
Also I think a lot of his so called "crazy" side was exaggerated by the media which they tend to do

 

ron paul on prosecuting those who committed torture and then current (as of may 2009) state of economy. at the 2:20 mark they play some interesting and prophetic comments paul made in 2003 relating to the recent housing meltdown.

6:00-
"we havent had free market economics. now they are blaming capitalism for all these problems and not enough regulation. we have crony capitalism, inflationism, corporatism, big government. we have not had true free market capitalism."

7:20
ill summarize - "if i was going to cut debt i would start overseas. when conservatives want to make cuts they will cut 5% of out childrens health care and although im opposed to government being involved in health care, but thats not where i would cut. i would cut overseas spending. bring our troops home."

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he debates the lesser baldwin on legalizing mar1juana in this clip and pwns him.

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I think Fringe is a good description of Ron Paul.

 

http://www.cnbc.com/id/36267220/
End Insanity Of The War on Drugs—Start With Decriminalizing mar1juana at The Federal Level
Ron Paul
Published: Tuesday, 20 Apr 2010 | 12:00 AM ET

In light of the recent drug-related violence in Mexico, it is appropriate to reflect on how our current prohibition laws affect crime, law enforcement and the economy.

Many will have the knee-jerk reaction of wanting to see more of a crackdown on illegal drugs. But I have to ask: Haven't we been cracking down on drugs for several decades only to see the black market flourish and the violence escalate? Could there be a more effective approach?

The illegality of drugs is, in fact, the Number One factor that keeps profits up for dealers and cartels, and ensures that organized crime dominates the market.

Cocaine, for example, has about a 17,000-percent markup and sells for more than gold in some areas. This is nothing new or unique to drugs, but a predictable outcome of prohibition.

During alcohol prohibition, Al Capone and others involved in organized crime made fortunes taking advantage of the dangerous and lucrative underground market the laws had created. Every time law enforcement makes another bust, profits rise for the remaining suppliers. These types of economic forces are insurmountable for law enforcement, but make for very good business for dealers and cartels.

For the rest of us, however, it is a disaster. The war on drugs keeps our prisons full to bursting at great expense to taxpayers, but also at great danger to the public at large when the real criminals, the murderers, the rapists, the child molesters, are let out to make room for non-violent drug offenders.

We imprison more of our population per capita than Russia or China ever have, and yet criminals like Philip Garrido (Jaycee Lee Dugard's kidnapper) are out there able to rape and kidnap again and again. (It is interesting that in his case, a little mar1juana caught the attention of law enforcement more than repeated reports from neighbors of children in his backyard).

The War on Drugs skews the priorities of law enforcement to the detriment of the public.

Repeal of alcohol prohibition certainly did organized crime no favors. So too today, if we wanted to pull the rug out from under violent drug cartels, create legitimate job opportunities in place of the black market, realign the priorities of law enforcement, and make room in prison for the people that ought to be there, we need to end the insanity of the War on Drugs.

Decriminalizing mar1juana at the federal level would be a start.

 

And why is that so terrible?

 

well. It does not give an incentive for people to save money and is basically an indirect tax on the citizens.

 

Yeah, but a stagnant economy with no prospect for growth/pay rises offer no incentives for workers to improve and innovate.

I like Ron Paul but I agree with a slow inflation being the best system for us in this age. I believe an annual 2-4% growth across the board is more healthy than flat 0%. Even if money is to be tied to gold, ppl will speculate on any other commodities and cause trouble anyways!

 

Your argument is fallacious. You're misrepresenting Paul's point of view on economic policy. I'm a PhD student in economics, so I have a pretty broad point of view in terms of scholarly thought on economics. From the Austrian point of view, which Paul subscribes to, the various panics you've pointed out stem from state controls over particular markets, and state controls in the banking industry. As an example, the Panic of 1873 was largely influenced by Congressional manipulation of the banking industry; in 1873, Congress passed legislation which established gold as legal money, a gold standard. Had Ron Paul been a member of Congress in 1873, he wouldn't have voted for that piece of legislation. From the Austrian view of economics, which Ron Paul prescribes to, a legal gold standard would effectively be a limitation on non-violent mutual voluntary exchange, a principle central to Austrian economic theory. One who prescribes to the Austrian theory of economics would likely view legislation like the Coinage Act of 1873 (to continue my earlier example) as unduly employing the coercive force of government to limit the market on what objects can legally be considered money (in this case, Gold).

 

Since this thread was brought up for some strange reason, I'll put in my 2 cents and say I agree with your father.

 

I think you'd have to go issue by issue.

Less fringe:

Stop the war on drugs.
Stop the war on homosexuality.

More fringe:

Go back to the gold standard (as with most economic issues, you'll have some PhD students talking about historical examples that may or may not support a position, but an overwhelming number of economists would not support abolishing the fed or returning to the gold standard).

Bring our troops home (US presence in Europe and East Asia are lynchpins to maintaining regional security and preventing nuclear proliferation. You have some particularly slanted think tanks like Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute that disagree, but they are by far in the minority).

 

That stuff isnt even the most fringe. He gets nuttier when he talks about what specifically he'll abolish from government. The Department of Education tends to be a convenient topic but he's also gone on record as stating that he'd support getting rid of the Federal Aviation Administration (I guess private companies can oversee airport security or help to navigate planes in airport towers) and he supports eliminating things like the national science foundation and the National institutes of health, the CDC, etc.. (all of which have tremendous scientific value)

So yes he's a fringe candidate.

 

Reagan suggested many of the same things. Not that he wasn't a nut in some people's opinion. But being President and advocating them probably makes them 'mainstream' instead of fringe.

 

True but Ron Paul takes that view to a much larger extreme. No mainstream candidate advocates defunding the smithsonian or the national archives. He's even said he'd eliminate agencies ranging from the HHS to the Department of Energy. No one else suggests that we should remove all environmental and financial regulations, etc.. Also, Reagan generally focused his attention on agencies and federal programs that were considered relatively irrelevant in the grand scheme of things (hence his obsession with killing off things like the National Endowment for the Arts)

I give Paul tons of credit for being intellectually consistent but that doesnt change the fact that pure libertarianism isn't mainstream. Sure it has some positions that a lot of people can get behind but as a whole I dont see how you can't conclude that Paul isnt a fringe candidate.

 

Given his obsession with returning to "following the yellow brick road", I would have trouble seeing Paul doing anything but advocating the gold standard. It is like a personal fetish.

Given that Friedrich Hayek wasn't born yet, it would have been pretty difficult for this to happen. I appreciate that according to the Austrian School, that all the problems in the history of man stem from too much regulation.

Personally, that seems like a pretty clear rigid failure of that school's economic philosophy to me. But that doesn't stop people from following it off a cliff like lemurs.

A parallel would be the Fox News obsession with blaming poor people for the current economic problems. I mean, from the rigid views of that extreme ideological political philosophy, it is inherently impossible to blame Goldman Sachs guys who made fraudulent bonds from MBS's for problems as they are essentially your 'gods' for lack of a better term. In that case you have to create a system that blames others. And you can create a logical system that blames anybody you want. That doesn't make it true.

Economics has a pretty long history of people who, when forced to choose between theory, and a disconnected reality, stick squarely behind the theory.

 

Can someone tell me the reasoning behind the "crazy" label? He seems very uncrazy to me... Maybe I just happen to be crazy as well?

 

Here's one to chew on for libertarians...the FDIC with its moral hazard policy on insuring customer deposits deserves the most credit for preventing panics. From what I read, politicians and the banks didn't want it because of its philosophical implications. It passed by populist demand.

The Lehman collapse and the subsequent panic in the repo markets exposed a structural deficiency that the Fed or any other government institution can not prevent.... unless they're jumping headfirst into the business of insuring hundreds of millions of dollars for every transaction made.

 

The scope of what Paul advocates at once may be larger, but Reagan literally asked for legislation to abolish the Dept of Energy and the Department of Education.

 

Again, Paul isn't something everybody agrees with, but alot of his views are very sound. I remember watching the Republican debates back in 07-08, it's not even funny how he outclassed the likes of his peers (Thompson, Guiliani, Romney, McCain, and Huckabee). I guess you could liken Gravel and Kucinich being sort of his equal for the democratic side (but they weren't nearly as effective as culturally relevant as he has set in his platform). They were pretty much winning most of the debates.

It's also funny people kept focusing on Obama and change, when in reality, in the debates or even through his voting records, he is never really supported anything or created something that was vastly different from other democrats. Yet, people had the sense (not help by certain outlets in Mainstream media) that he was some kind of radical, even though he was anywhere as radical political as even Mike Gravel or Kucinich.

Back to Paul's views, The War on Drugs is overly, expensive and proven to be ineffective and unnecessary, same can also be said for the War on Poverty to an extent and possibly the War on Terror.

On most social things, he is going to lean in some towards libertarianism principles, since he believes Federal government should not being doing very little inter-meddling and even argues some laws used to legislate social behaviors is somewhat unconstitutional in the way that some are prosecuted or charged in a felony class.


His views on preemptive war and non-interventionism are pretty sound in not only context, but reality. Essentially, if we weren't involved in the Middle East (only for business and resources) without military advancement and nation-building. We probably would be in a better situation with our economy and have less extremist from that part of world coming to America attacking us or attacking our soldiers. Neutral countries (like Sweden) are much lesser targets of terrorist organization (Islamic), because they are neutral. It's kind silly people still believe they (mainly Al Qaeda) are attacking us because of our freedoms, when in reality there are Euro countries just as free and untouched by certain fringes of international islamic terrorism.

I think in 2010, it is kind of silly to believe people fight wars for the good mankind or even the good of nation or freedom, when it is clear as day that is all about the resources and political muscle over others. If there was a price for freedom, it would've been sold along time ago.

His focus on the decrease of overall federal spending (on everything, defense; social programs; foreign aid; federal institution; federal reserve; and etc) is very interesting, and is a possible solution. But, alot of people are probably scared of the effects, which I think would be unclear as well.

 

On the Bloated Intelligence Bureaucracy - Essay By Ron Paul for July 26, 2010

I have often spoken about the excessive size of government, and most recently how waste and inefficiency needs to be eliminated from our military budget. Our foreign policy is not only bankrupting us, but actively creating and antagonizing enemies of the United States, and compromising our national security. Spending more and adding more programs and initiatives does not improve things for us; it makes them much much worse. This applies to more than just the military budget.

Recently the Washington Post ran an extensive report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the bloated intelligence community. They found that an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. Just what are all these people up to? By my calculation this is about 11,000 intelligence workers per al Qaeda member in Afghanistan. This also begs the question - if close to 1 million people are authorized to know top secrets, how closely guarded are these secrets?

They also found that since the September 11 attacks, some 17 million square feet of building space has been built or is being built to accommodate the 250 percent expansion of intelligence organizations. Intelligence work is now done by some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private contracting companies in about 10,000 locations in the United States.

The former Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, has asserted that US intelligence now has the authority to target American citizens for assassination without charge or trial. How many of these resources are being devoted to spying on American citizens for nefarious reasons at home rather than targeting foreign enemies abroad?

It has been pointed out how much information we had about the impending attacks on 9/11, but because of layers upon layers of bureaucratic inefficiencies, our intelligence community was unable to act meaningfully on that information. Obviously we needed drastic change. But it was pretty clear that we did not need more bureaucracy, more confusion, more expenditures and more government.

It is even claimed by some leaders that the intelligence community has grown this way by design; that it is advantageous to have more than one set of eyes looking at the same information. With this logic, is there any number of intelligence employees at which we achieve diminishing returns? Can there ever be too many cooks in the kitchen, in their view?

Are there any problems at all that the government wouldn’t attempt to solve by throwing more money at them? Even now, the government is trying to solve our economic problems related to too much government spending and debt, with more government spending and debt.

The problem with our intelligence community before 9/11 was not an inability to collect information. Therefore, the post-September 11 build-up of the surveillance state does nothing to enhance safety. Instead what Americans have gotten in return for the billions of tax dollars spent on security is a surveillance state that reads our e-mails, wiretaps us without warrants, and strip searches grandmothers at airports. This is yet another instance in which Americans would be safer, richer and freer if our government would simply look to the Constitution and respect the boundaries it has set.

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