Exactly. They are all a bunch of goons.
Glenn Beck was the biggest phony after calling Ron Paul supporters domestic terrorists...now all of a sudden he thinks he's on to something by telling everyone what is really going on.
The Republican party is a joke and needs to be replaced by real conservatives.
palin 2012.
Ron Paul was not a better way. He was totally soft on protecting this country. The problem with the Republican Party is that the real conservatives have been sidelined and silenced. John McCain is not a real conservative - neither is Lindsay Graham, Olympia Snow, Arlen Spector or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those are the people we need to get rid of!
We need to go back and study the ideals and beliefs of Ronald Reagan - and start rebuilding from there.
Ron Paul is a crazy moonbat.
These are crazy times sugar coated by smoke and mirrors.
Emotions are running high on both sides; but it seems the dems are rushing to get things done before the euphoria rubs off and people really start to look at what is happening.
It will be very interesting to see where we are in 6 months; and then next year at this time. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of disillusioned and disappointed people. And I mean both Democrats and Republicans.
no they aren't. there is an overwhelming sense of relief.
I have never liked every aspect of any candidate...ever.
But Ron Paul was/is the best case scenario I have had in my voting lifetime.
Only problem is, he attracts tinfoil hats and consipiracy theorists. Not exactly the crowd I want to meander with. Dr. Paul though has all the right ideas about domestic policy and the absolute abolition of the Fed.
I would elect any man to office with these two platforms:
1. Ban, disregard, disintegrate, demolish, dance on the grave of the Federal Reserve
2. Dont start or get involved in unnecessary wars
Boom. There goes my vote.
i feel the same exact way, one night i looked up some of his vids b.c some kid in class told me and 2 hrs and numerous vids later i realized there were politicians in this world with a sense of righteousness
+1
i'm sure RP is a great guy, but isolationism died after WW2.
-Mars
he's not an isolationist. he thinks our military bases in asia and europe are an unnecessary waste of tax dollars, and that over-expanding ourselves is a bad idea. if you look at his voting record, he voted to go into afghanistan. plus, he always cites reagan we he speaks about foreign affairs.
I have no issue with a lot of Paul's policy ideas. I think decentralization in a lot of ways is a good thing.
That being said his economic policy and some other odds and ends was a recipe for disaster.
I really don't care who did what. It seems that both are responsible for the deregulation of the banking industry over the last decade or so.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to repeal the regulations concerning speculation by banks needs to be exposed. That was the biggest travesty of modern times. It was put into place by FDR 80 years ago because speculation was a leading contributor to the great depression. Lo and behold history repeats itself.
Well Paul supports true free markets. Unfortunately, what you end up with are vertical demand lines and monopolies. Again look to the 19th century and Teddy Roosevelt to show that.
Then you have completely asinine ideas like the removal of the FDA. That is just stupid. The Jungle anyone?
Most of all I hate absolutist politics. There is not one single true and right way. And decentralizing at every level possible is not a good idea from the blanket sense.
Also I think people need a little history lesson. Paul in no way shape or form is representative of the GOP or a conservative ideology. The GOP was founded by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was responsible for the estruction of federalism via the Civil War and Paul is an hetical to that.
From an ideology standpoint. He essentially wants a complete dismantling of the government structure as we know it today. That does nothing to CONSERVE.
Listen.
He is anti-NWO.
That's all you need to know.
De-regulation LOL when Dodd Frank and others have had their hand in the cookie jar while traveling to this pile up. Give me a break. I'm sure bigger government and beefier SEC (who couldn't even stop Madoff) will really save us all.
Your public servants are about to take trillions in dollars for a stimulus package.....TRILLIONS...and they cannot even tell you how many jobs it will create or how well it will help the economy.
What a joke.
First of all what you are talking about is fraud which is an entirely different subject. Speculation by banks is a completely different story. There is emperical evidence, some of it very recent that backs me on that.
As for your fraud babble:
When you try to enforce law in the neighborhood, one of the things that you do is you patrol said neighborhood with police officer that will be on the look out for crime so they can prevent it. This is in their job description in addition to the reactive response when someone calls in.
When it comes to the SEC. They look into things when a 3rd party brings it to their attention about 99% of the time. Meaning that there are no beat cops in the financial world. Of course they couldn't prevent Madoff from doing anything
Its actually laughable that you would think that the answer to that is to remove the SEC. Quite frankly that is stupid. It is akin to a group of thieves going into a neighborhood and stealing people blind and concluding that the answer is to dismantle the police department.
As for the stimulus package I have no idea what figures they are bandying about. I do know that during his campaign he gave figures constantly about how many jobs he projected to create. That really is neither here nor there.
Expecting exact figures is again stupid as any projection is going to be next to worthless as it is going to be in the works over years. What should be your concern is what industries are going to be benefiting from the package and whether or not money spent in those industries will benefit long term.
Again you look to history. The last time something akin to this was done was FDR's New Deal. It was quite a mixed bag. First example I can think of would be the Tennessee Valley Authority. I am sure you have heard of it as it still has economic benefits to this day from the land development to various dams that were built. That is an example of a type of program that works. Generally speaking infrastructure either creates business ie a road where there wasnt one before or it reduces the cost of doing business.
The converse of that would be the Public Works Administration. Now granted they built schools and things of that nature which is good but on the other hand they did it artistically. Jefferson HS in SA was built by the PWA and its beautiful. I do think that there is some merit in pure aesthetics when building a culture. OTOH you look to see what the SAT scores are coming out of that HS and at least I think to myself that money could have been better spent.
At the end of the day a severely depressed market just doesnt fix itself. You can look at more than a decade of the Great Depression to show that. Now typically the response is that the New Deal didn't get us out of the depression which is true it was WW2.
But what about WW2 got us out? It certainly wasn't blowing up. Destroying someones home doesn't help the economy. No it was all the forced industries and war bonds and roads, shipyards and factories that were built. All WW2 showed was that the new deal wasn't enough. That it required a much more substantial investment.
Essentially Ron Paul = Herbert Hoover in this economic climate. The laissez faire let the markets correct themselves didn't work then and those who don't pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it.
Tell me about it. Unfortunately the media would never let him get much traction. It was up to the internet savvy and the few libertarians to get votes and we came up short. It really is sad because I'm truly afraid of where this country will be in 10+ years with our current monetary system.
We're not going back to the gold standard so just give it up already.
But here's a long Ron Paul rant about how great the gold standard is, just to get you excited.
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense-perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire -- that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.
In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society.
Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving.
The existence of such a commodity is a precondition of a division of labor economy. If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible.
What medium of exchange will be acceptable to all participants in an economy is not determined arbitrarily. First, the medium of exchange should be durable. In a primitive society of meager wealth, wheat might be sufficiently durable to serve as a medium, since all exchanges would occur only during and immediately after the harvest, leaving no value-surplus to store. But where store-of-value considerations are important, as they are in richer, more civilized societies, the medium of exchange must be a durable commodity, usually a metal. A metal is generally chosen because it is geneous and divisible: every unit is the same as every other and it can be blended or formed in any quan y. Precious jewels, for example, are neither geneous nor divisible. More important, the commodity chosen as a medium must be a luxury. Human desires for luxuries are unlimited and, therefore, luxury goods are always in demand and will always be acceptable. Wheat is a luxury in underfed civilizations, but not in a prosperous society. Cigarettes ordinarily would not serve as money, but they did in post-World War II Europe where they were considered a luxury. The term "luxury good" implies scarcity and high unit value. Having a high unit value, such a good is easily portable; for instance, an ounce of gold is worth a half-ton of pig iron.
In the early stages of a developing money economy, several media of exchange might be used, since a wide variety of commodities would fulfill the foregoing conditions. However, one of the commodities will gradually displace all others, by being more widely acceptable. Preferences on what to hold as a store of value, will shift to the most widely acceptable commodity, which, in turn, will make it still more acceptable. The shift is progressive until that commodity becomes the sole medium of exchange. The use of a single medium is highly advantageous for the same reasons that a money economy is superior to a barter economy: it makes exchanges possible on an incalculably wider scale.
Whether the single medium is gold, silver, seas s, cattle, or tobacco is optional, depending on the context and development of a given economy. In fact, all have been employed, at various times, as media of exchange. Even in the present century, two major commodities, gold and silver, have been used as international media of exchange, with gold becoming the predominant one. Gold, having both artistic and functional uses and being relatively scarce, has significant advantages over all other media of exchange. Since the beginning of World War I, it has been virtually the sole international standard of exchange. If all goods and services were to be paid for in gold, large payments would be difficult to execute and this would tend to limit the extent of a society's divisions of labor and specialization. Thus a logical extension of the creation of a medium of exchange is the development of a banking system and credit instruments (bank notes and deposits) which act as a subs ute for, but are convertible into, gold.
A free banking system based on gold is able to extend credit and thus to create bank notes (currency) and deposits, according to the production requirements of the economy. Individual owners of gold are induced, by payments of interest, to deposit their gold in a bank (against which they can draw checks). But since it is rarely the case that all depositors want to withdraw all their gold at the same time, the banker need keep only a fraction of his total deposits in gold as reserves. This enables the banker to loan out more than the amount of his gold deposits (which means that he holds claims to gold rather than gold as security of his deposits). But the amount of loans which he can afford to make is not arbitrary: he has to gauge it in relation to his reserves and to the status of his investments.
When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for further expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth.
When gold is accepted as the medium of exchange by most or all nations, an unhampered free international gold standard serves to foster a world-wide division of labor and the broadest international trade. Even though the units of exchange (the dollar, the pound, the franc, etc.) differ from country to country, when all are defined in terms of gold the economies of the different countries act as one -- so long as there are no restraints on trade or on the movement of capital. Credit, interest rates, and prices tend to follow similar patterns in all countries. For example, if banks in one country extend credit too liberally, interest rates in that country will tend to fall, inducing depositors to shift their gold to higher-interest paying banks in other countries. This will immediately cause a shortage of bank reserves in the "easy money" country, inducing tighter credit standards and a return to compe ively higher interest rates again.
A fully free banking system and fully consistent gold standard have not as yet been achieved. But prior to World War I, the banking system in the United States (and in most of the world) was based on gold and even though governments intervened occasionally, banking was more free than controlled. Periodically, as a result of overly rapid credit expansion, banks became loaned up to the limit of their gold reserves, interest rates rose sharply, new credit was cut off, and the economy went into a sharp, but short-lived recession. (Compared with the depressions of 1920 and 1932, the pre-World War I business declines were mild indeed.) It was limited gold reserves that stopped the unbalanced expansions of business activity, before they could develop into the post-World Was I type of disaster. The readjustment periods were short and the economies quickly reestablished a sound basis to resume expansion.
But the process of cure was misdiagnosed as the disease: if shortage of bank reserves was causing a business decline-argued economic interventionists -- why not find a way of supplying increased reserves to the banks so they never need be short! If banks can continue to loan money indefinitely -- it was claimed -- there need never be any slumps in business. And so the Federal Reserve System was organized in 1913. It consisted of twelve regional Federal Reserve banks nominally owned by private bankers, but in fact government sponsored, controlled, and supported. Credit extended by these banks is in practice (though not legally) backed by the taxing power of the federal government. Technically, we remained on the gold standard; individuals were still free to own gold, and gold continued to be used as bank reserves. But now, in addition to gold, credit extended by the Federal Reserve banks ("paper reserves") could serve as legal tender to pay depositors.
When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. More disastrous, however, was the Federal Reserve's attempt to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain's gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates.
The "Fed" succeeded; it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market -- triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed. Great Britain fared even worse, and rather than absorb the full consequences of her previous folly, she abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930's.
With a logic reminiscent of a generation earlier, statists argued that the gold standard was largely to blame for the credit debacle which led to the Great Depression. If the gold standard had not existed, they argued, Britain's abandonment of gold payments in 1931 would not have caused the failure of banks all over the world. (The irony was that since 1913, we had been, not on a gold standard, but on what may be termed "a mixed gold standard"; yet it is gold that took the blame.) But the opposition to the gold standard in any form -- from a growing number of welfare-state advocates -- was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.
Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy's tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government's promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited. The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which -- through a complex series of steps -- the banks accept in place of tangible assets and treat as if they were an actual deposit, i.e., as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. The holder of a government bond or of a bank deposit created by paper reserves believes that he has a valid claim on a real asset. But the fact is that there are now more claims outstanding than real assets. The law of supply and demand is not to be conned. As the supply of money (of claims) increases relative to the supply of tangible assets in the economy, prices must eventually rise. Thus the earnings saved by the productive members of the society lose value in terms of goods. When the economy's books are finally balanced, one finds that this loss in value represents the goods purchased by the government for welfare or other purposes with the money proceeds of the government bonds financed by bank credit expansion.
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.
Oh wait that was Alan Greenspan in 1967
Last edited by SnakeBoy; 01-24-2009 at 07:29 AM.
I agree with you. In the case of Ron Paul, my fear was he would stop the current wars with bad timing. Right or wrong for the reason of starting two wars, we need to finish what we started.
Just ignore history again.
What was one of the main reasons that Hoover was unable to help the economic climate? Because he refused to get off the gold standard.
Hmmm..... I've come to consider that kind of talk as the illogical conclusion of Ayn Rand style objectivism, and I usually just dismiss/or disregard the position.
I almost never disagree with your take on issues, and I've come to consider you one of the best posters on this forum, so I'm interested-- what's your logic for wanting to abolish the Fed?
My thinking is that the federal reserve (although, Greenspan more or less created this global economic meltdown in so many ways) is a necessary check against a 1929 level economic meltdown, do you disagree with that?
There is no "finishing" an occupation other than leaving. The definition of war is a conflict between two states/parties.
Its really simple. The fed is an ins ution created by Alex Hamilton who is the original anti-federalist. It is the foundation of a centralized government and as such is anathema to libertarians. Who cares about what it actually does.
I finally read the wall of text and there is one big disagreement I have. That is that the brits depressed the IR not because it was unpalatable politically. It was but they did it because to let them be raised would in essence lower raise the price of credit and it would be available to less people.We're not going back to the gold standard so just give it up already.
But here's a long Ron Paul rant about how great the gold standard is, just to get you excited.
Oh wait that was Alan Greenspan in 1967
In that situation, you are creating even less capital in the economy which is already depressed.
When it comes to the gold standard you are completely beholden to the market and I for one agree with the idea that being able to arbitrarily set certain monetary factor is a good thing especially in the current economic climate.
"ideals and beliefs of Ronald Reagan"
list them, please
St Ronnie ran up huge federal deficits, a fundamental conservative principal, of course.
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