Ron Paul and Libertarian ideas have been tried failed

Wow, go take a poly sci class. You clearly don't understand libertarians. If you know anything, you'd know there are two kinds of libertarians. They have no set policies.

 

you are a "lawyer"?

as usual, your post makes little sense. and where did i advocate no stop lights, meat inspectors or restaurant inspectors?

 

who is advocating for not having a publicly funded police force or a publicly funded independent judiciary?

and for the record, if i catch someone breaking into my house i will shoot first then call the cops.

and how independent is our judiciary now? time and time again they are there to protect large corporations over the interests of the people.

 

the "regulatory" system is what allowed all that malfeasance to occur. imo, you fail to see that the problems are systematic. i realize that you have good intentions when you call for more regulations, but the reality is that the people who are supposed to be regulated are the ones who write the laws and control our elected officials and their intentions are not as pure as yours. the regulations are there to protect large corporations over the average american.

like i said, the problems are systematic and no amount of "regulation" is going to solve them. as i said in the occupy wall street thread, we would go a long way towards fixing the problems in this country if we imposed term limits, banned lobbyists, banned corporate contributions and rejected the notion that corporations are people and can be too big to fail and need to be bailed out when they fail.

the problem is beyond regulations - its the whole damn system - the relationship b/t government and the corporate world...crony capitalism/fascism. a system that both republicans and democrats fully endorse. until that changes we will continue down the path we are on.

 

There are problems within the system, but I inherently reject the idea that it means the whole system should be scrapped. You have to work within the system to change it, or the result will be chaos.

And out of your list? There is no way I could support term limits ( this past Congress has shown that the idea of a bunch of novice Congressmen running things is a VERY BAD IDEA), I would be cautious about limiting lobbyists and flat out opposed to banning them, and very cold towards banning corporate personhood ( people seem to think that it would prevent Exxon or McDonald's from having a voice, but would some how keep the NRA or ACLU in. It wouldn't.)

 

Friend, it's not that you lack all the ideas, it's that you lack any of the ideas. You told me that having a federal securities regulator should more or less be left to the states, because of "Madoff" - why don't you explain to me how having 50 state securities regulators (again, tabling the fact that we already kind of do in a certain sense) is going to eliminate the problem of a "Madoff", without creating a whole treasure trove of other problems?

Maybe this is the problem with your making a generalization by taking one failure amid many more successes (we have a fairly vibrant method of capital investment in this country, in case you hadn't), deeming it an overall problem with the federal government, and proposing a solution which is utterly illogical as you haven't defined it as relevant to the problem you identified.

Basically you are misdiagnosing the problem e.g. a sneeze as a sign of lung cancer, and then proposing that the response is bloodletting and leeches.

 

One more comment on libertarianism and I will try to stop posting so much about this ideology, which analogous to the GOP capture of Evangelical Christianity so often fools even thinking members of the 99% to support the economic policies of the 1%, but more specifically the .01% who so heavily subsidize the ideology.

I consider myself sort of a libertarian socialist. Why not have as much liberty and freedom as realistically possible. This includes freedome from the whims of large corporations and authorians religions and ideology-- and also freedom from unregulated markets which history shows in the end mainly benefit the wealthy few. It includes freedom from overly authoritarian government.

But, I am interested in facts and justice and the countries with the best quality of life have fairly strong governments redistributing the fruits of regualted markets with mechanisms for large input into government from ordinary folks and not just the wealthy. I am certainly aware that what passes for libertarianism or Ron Paulism has it adherents who believe if it could be practiced pure enough all the past problems with unregulated markets would disappear and we would have teh best ever society. Again it reminds me of the few remaning communists of the Stalin variety who theorize about what would happen if the communism was just pure enough.

BTW i would be interested in knowing what other posters can add about the intense attraction of present libertarianism for young folks deep in the 99%? I am somewhat at a loss.

 

spoken like someone who is happy w/ the status quo.

you dont like "novice" congressmen? is that b/c they are "novice" or is it their politics you dont like? personally, i dont like "career" politicians - imo, they are anathema to what american politics is supposed to be about.

as far as lobbyists, if you are good w/ the direction this country is going i wouldnt want to ban them either. but if you are like me and have a problem w/ corporate influence in the political process and the fact that corporations write their own laws and regulations than you should want to limit the influence of lobbyists.

 

you support barack obama and the crony capitalist/fascist system which has brought us to where we are. you have no credibility.

ive said it before and ill say it again - republicans and democrats have alot more in common w/ each other than libertarians do. out of control spending, expanding government, foreign interventionism, wars, civil liberties violations, corporate cronyism, ect.

 

andrew jackson faints.

 

As usual a libertarian always claims to be so misunderstood. They are always so misunderstood. No one outside the cult, whether moderate, liberal or conservative has a clue about libertariansm. Fine you have a few libertarian positions. So do I. I am against criminalizing recreational drugs. That does not make me a libertarian. Over and over libertarians always decry any real world result that is consistent with policies folks self identified as libertarians vote for.

We just saw 30 years of increased deregulation be tried and failed big time as the OP said. Yes I exaggerated on the stop signs, though in college I actually debated a college libertarian who was struggling with the concept a bit. Sure let's say libertarians are in favor of restaurant inspectors, because it sound so inane to virtually anyone, but let's constantly never miss a chance to deride government, claim all government workers including meat inspectors are overpaid as they have pensions. Claim that private meat inspectors voluntarily hired by meat processors would be so much better etc. If you are Ron Paul shrink funding for government inspectors whether of securities, or work place safety or meat. It is not you don't support saftey or for fraud, it is just they are government employees. Deride the pensions of "gubmint" meat inspectors as pensions are generally are anathema to libertarians because they seldom exist with mere individual bargaining power for most workers unless they have gasp! unions which libertarians are generally against as undermng the free market in labor which would lead to nirvana.

I know you will dispute this as you would be happy if Howard Roark freely granted his workers a union, but only if he wants to out of the goodness of his job creating heart and certainly without government regulations of any sort that prohibit him from campaigning against them in any form or firing anyone who wants to form a union he doesn't want to bestow.

 

Howard Roark didn't have workers, he was an independent architect, a sub-contractor. Hank Reardon, Dagny Taggert, Midas Mulligan, Dan Conway, Ken Danagger, Lawrence Hammond, Dwight Sanders, Andrew Stockton, or Ellis Wyatt would be good choices to replace him in your diatribe.

 

Ok, I know it may not directly apply to politics, but this libertarian sounding idea is starting to sound like 'This time is different'. We can get rid of regulation because now we are smarter, now we are wiser, we know better than yesteryear. No we don't, we as human beings are, on average, idiots, and often behave as such.

The idea the market will somehow solve all the problems is just....wrong. I mean come on, would you get on a government approved safety standard plane for $100, or get on a non-approved plane for $10. It's very easy to think 'Oh, if the product is shoddy, then the market will stop buying it and it will disappear', but it doesn't. People are myopic, tend to underestimate risks, and, to reiterate, idiots.

 

Congratulations you have successfully defended libertarianism Btw Howard Roark was an architect without a secretary,receptionist or draftsman? Somehow I remember him as a bit more big time.

 

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I love the body language of the PBS journalist.

 

I don't believe he had a secretary or receptionist, I am almost certain he didn't have a draftsman. I haven't read the Fountainhead in about six years, but I don't recall any employees being mentioned. None of those individual employees, had they existed, would have formed a union anyway (hard, and pointless, to have a one person union). He was mostly small time. He designed two houses, a gas station, a department store, I think he got an office building but lost it, and he designed a housing project but was more of a ghost architect and the credit went to Keating. Gail Wynand was big time, but Roark was not. Gail Wynand would have been another good one for you.

I just figured if you wanted to take shots at libertarianism by going after an Ayn Rand character for not running a union shop, you might have wanted to go after one that had a number of employees.

 

If he had no employees and was a big time architect, it would be strange and sort of unreal. I actually used Roark as a classic symbol of libertarian rugged individualism . I supposed I could have used the Koch Brothers with their thousands of employees.. I did not mean Roark literally-- if that is possible about a character in a novel.

 

im not claiming to be misunderstood - im claiming that you dont know what you are talking about. and ill ask again, where did i advocate no stop lights, meat inspectors or restaurant inspectors?

which policies would those be?

and who has been leading our country in the last 30 years? republicans and democrats...not libertarians. on that point, i would counter the thread title by saying republican and democrat ideas have been tried and are failing.

and that includes obama, who is every bit the corporatist that his predecessor was.

so you admit you were exaggerating and then you make this statement, which is nothing more than one long, nonsensical exaggeration...

where have i advocated for any of the above? where have i mentioned "pensions"?

who is howard roark?