Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

+1 Well said SamAdams.

That is the crux of my point with Paul, he will stop trying to legislate everything just to seem like he is doing something to help the people. I wish politician could run on a platform of "I will not do anything to disrupt your lives, you can be free to do whatever you want"

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

Clue what is your problem with the von Mises institute?

Why don't you just come out and say that you are a progressive and everything RP stands for is against what you want. You want more state control for everyone because you think the people you elect into office (whoever that may be) can make all the right decisions on HOW people should act.

I, on the other hand, support the idea that citizens should be allowed to act and do whatever they want so long as it does not harm another human. In some cases animals etc. But if they want to do harm to their self then so be it.

FYI, what does that Raised/Spending chart have anything to do with RP? If you click on Texas District 33 Ron Pauls name does not come up. RP represents Texas 14th district.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

I just contributed!

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

Truly think about the last paragraph you wrote. I am sure when the United States was founded they thought the same..............

So in other words we should go along with the status quo because that is the direction everything is going? We are moving toward a more progressive marxist/socialist/facist state so we might as well get it over with and jump to that point in the political spectrum.

You do realize that nations start out idealist and end in collapse? Then they cease to remain important in the world.

Rome started as a Republic and ended as a Dictatorship that led into anarchy based off of the same argument you just espoused above.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

oddlots I am pointing out scientific facts. Unfortunately most people do not live in reality.

Blondness is not an important trait to me but I would assume that being blonde is important to a lot of people thus you wouldn't see girls of every ethnicity color their hair blonde or for that matter black/brunette/red.

We are conditioned as humans to think that whenever someone starts speaking about race they are automatically a racist unless of course you are black. As I have had a black professor espouse to me and the other students in his sociology class that blacks cannot be racist because to be racist you have to be part of the dominate socioeconomic group in a society.

Because you see if it is not overt racism then it must be institutional racism and if it is not institutional racism it must be subconscious racism that whites don't even know they displaying.

[c1ue]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

I know RP has large contributions and a large amount of subsidies he has brought back to his constituents.

From a certain perspective, isn't this exactly pay for play?

I'm not saying RP is corrupt - merely pointing out that there are large denominated reasons why RP isn't against campaign contributions.

But it is insider trading that influences the actual laws being passed, not the drop in the bucket of campaign contributions.

Can you demonstrate this in some way? Or perhaps you are referring to corporations insider trading as opposed to Congressional insider trading?

Please clarify.

Clue what is your problem with the von Mises institute?

My problem with the von Mises Institute?

1) they say they're all about the free market, yet when push comes to shove the 'free marketers' are all about going for the free money:

http://exiledonline.com/monster-koch...ek-to-america/

This link gives more detail on the twining links between Koch and Rothbard (von Mises institute founder).

2) The most important detail, however, is that the von Mises Institute is all about Austrian economics - which is not free market economics.

From the link above:

Austrian economics is in itself a value free science, but Austrian economists, like Rothbard, fully committed to a free society, rely on Austrian monetary theory to demand a return to the gold standard and abolition of the Federal Reserve System. The Chicago School strongly disagrees. The greatest representative of Chicago economics, Milton Friedman, thought that the monetary authority should follow a fixed rule of moderate expansion and held a diametrically opposed theory of the causes of the Great Depression of 1929 to Rothbard's.

So what exactly does Ron Paul believe?

If he's converted from Austrian to free market - then he should disavow his links with the von Mises Institute.

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

Clue, I still don't see it. How is the Chicago school about free markets? Although I like Friedman the Chicago school is the one that has gotten us into these monetary problems in the first place. Usually when individuals left of center start railing agaisnt free markets and cite Austrian economics what they really mean to say is the Chicago school.

I do not see anything in your outline above about Austrian economics that leads me to believe that it is not about free market economics. Abolition of the Fed is the correct choice when referring to free markets. The Fed is a quasi public-private institution that controls the supply of world currency and that was never supposed to exist in the first place WITHOUT a charter. It says so in the constitution thus the reason why the first bank of the United States was voted out after it's 20 year charter and why the second bank of the US was voted out after it's 20 year charter ended.

After the end of the second bank of the US we had the most prosperous time in US history, commonly referred to as the free banking era. Sure there was economic collapse and economic gains but that is the way that free markets are supposed to work. The problem today is that people think economies never should go through severe recessions and the good times should roll on forever.

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.

[oddlots]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

We are conditioned as humans to think that whenever someone starts speaking about race they are automatically a racist unless of course you are black.

Well POZ, thanks for the insight into my motives and reasoning. Let me return the favour by highlighting some of the points made by Stephen Jay Gould regarding the dominant motives of those studying race, at least in so far as these get expressed in public (as opposed to academic) discourse. As you might guess, the precedents are not good:

Twenty years ago, Gould, a Harvard University scientist, published ''The Mismeasure of Man,'' which challenged the historical ranking of people by so-called levels of intelligence. Gould led the reader on a near-comical documentary of the ways the scientists of yesteryear tried to measure skulls, brains, heredity, and even the tattooing on criminals with the primary goal of declaring that western and northern Europeans had higher IQs than Eastern and Southern Europeans and people of color had much lower IQs. One famous example quoted by Gould was Louis Agassiz, the Harvard zoologist of the mid-1800s, who wrote that black people are part of a ''degraded and degenerate race.''

In 1996 Gould published a revised edition of ''The Mismeasure of Man,'' because men were still mismeasuring men and women. In 1994, right-wing political activist Charles Murray and the late Harvard psychology professor Richard Herrnstein hit the best-seller lists with ''The Bell Curve,'' which claimed that black people have lower and more fixed IQs than white people.

Gould exposed ''The Bell Curve'' as devoid of serious facts or new arguments. Gould said the book was ''a manifesto of conservative ideology, and its sorry and biased treatment of data records the primary purpose - advocacy above all. The text evokes the dreary and scary drumbeat of claims associated with conservative think tanks - reduction or elimination of welfare, ending of affirmative action in schools and workplaces, cessation of Head Start and other forms of preschool education, cutting of programs for slowest learners, and application of funds to the gifted.''

Gould said the book presented an ''apocalyptic vision of a society with a growing underclass permanently mired in the inevitable sloth of their low IQs. They will take over our city centers, keep having illegitimate babies (for many are too stupid to practice birth control), commit more crimes and ultimately require a kind of custodial state, more to keep them in check (and out of our high IQ neighborhoods).''

The ''custodial state'' of Murray and Herrnstein is already here: By the 1990s states had begun to spend more on prisons than on higher education. Though white Americans smoke, snort, and inject illegal drugs in proportion to their share of the population, the jails were disproportionately filled in the 1980s and '90s with young black men who were easy for police to snatch up off street corners. While this confirmed to many conservatives the existence of black numskulls, no one asked whether the police needed higher IQs to look over the white picket fences of white suburbia.

Contrary to the smug self-assurance of too many white Americans that the United States has evolved into a permanent enlightenment, Gould reminded us that three times in the 20th century alone, the United States suffered a punctuated loss of political equilibrium. Gould noted three major surges of ranking people by intelligence - in the anti-immigrant, antiblack lynching years after World War I, in the rush by conservatives in the 1970s to declare the social programs of the 1960s a failure (which spurred him to write the original ''Mismeasure of Man''), and ''The Bell Curve.''

Gould wrote that it was no accident that ''The Bell Curve'' was published precisely when Newt Gingrich rose to power in Congress, ''with a new age of social meanness unprecedented in my lifetime.'' The meanness is still here, as social programs to the most needy are the first item on the chopping block in the current fiscal crisis in the states.

Gould wrote: ''What argument against social change could be more chillingly effective than the claim that established orders, with some groups on top and others at the bottom, exist as an accurate reflection of the innate and unchangeable intellectual capacities of people so ranked? Why struggle and spend to raise the unboostable IQ of races or social classes at the bottom of the economic ladder; better simply to accept nature's unfortunate dictates and save a passel of federal funds; (we can then more easily sustain tax breaks for the wealthy!)?''

From: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0529-01.htm

My point remains as I said earlier:

In other words, it seems far more likely to me that perceived differences in racial traits are going to be explained by competition between visibly distinct groups of people in the hurly-burly of history rather than any apparent set of inborn traits. Thinking otherwise seems tantamount to arriving at a murder scene at a country home full of venomous family rivals and assuming that the most fruitful course of the enquiry would be to search the surrounding moors for the ideal sniper position.

Or put another way, people selling apparently scientific notions of racial difference might well be offering hand grenades quite innocently as paper-weights.

But it doesn't seem likely

[lektrode]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

Quick glance of this thread revealed a few misconceptions about Paul:

thanks Sam - perhaps one of the most salient, concise pro-paul pieces i've seen to date (mr c1ue's comments notwithstanding.. or is that withstanding his comments?.. i dunno, didnt get the best marks in english... no matter - but c1ue always helps to keep the facts and perspective on the table around here, a big plus when things heat up, is all i'm trying to say)

anyway...

here's a 'juxtaposition' (big word, kindy funny meaning too) on the other 2 primary/major contenders and this might help in the separation of wheat/chafe, as it were, in helping us think thru who might be the best choice in a difficult field of 'pubs (and the only thing NOT difficult, is grasp of the concept of change, as in ABO, or anybody _but_ the current occupant)

its also why NH keeps em _all_ on their toes...

first up, a front page editorial from the onion loader... uh... sorry - i mean the NH Union Leader (which is a funny name for a paper that doesnt usually have much good to say about unions, but i think it was the 'other/older' union that was in question when they named the paper.. nears i know, but that aint sayin much...)

anyway... these items can give some perspective on all three (even if they dont talk about RP - but talk about 'scrappy' = aint nuthin like that ole NH feistiness when it comes to politicians ;)

but you might want to check this one out first, as for some of us the more significant item is merely the fact The NEWS was the UL's editorial, in the first place ???:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics...s-mitt-romney/ quite a good re-cap in itself, on whats happnin in the contest

http://www.unionleader.com/article/2...ON01/712069991Page One Editorial: Romney opposes Newt’s good idea

By JOSEPH W. McQUAID
Publisher
Published Dec 6, 2011 at 3:00 am (Updated Dec 5, 2011)


Newt Gingrich has a very sensible suggestion for helping poverty-stricken, inner-city youngsters, which is why it is no surprise that liberal politicians and media have treated it with scorn.

What is disappointing is that former Gov. Romney has joined their chorus.

Gingrich’s idea is to provide an opportunity that many inner-city kids don’t have: To earn some money and learn about the value of good, honest work.

That is what a lot of kids in better economic situations, including here in New Hampshire, are able to do. Whether it’s a parent’s pocket money for shoveling snow or doing other chores or an after-school job, children learn lessons that will stick with them.

Gingrich says some kids from jobless families could earn and learn by making it possible for them to take over some after-school jobs cleaning up the classrooms.

From the howls, you would have thought Gingrich was forcing David Copperfield back to the bootblack or Manchester kids to die in the mills.

In fact, this is just the kind of commonsense idea that attracts people to Gingrich.

So it is disappointing but not wholly surprising that Gov. Romney, who has brought few fresh ideas to the presidential race, told the New York Times this weekend that he disagrees with the idea. It would mean “repealing portions of the child labor law.’’

Well, yes, it would, But we doubt Romney has looked at what decades of federal regulation have done to those laws of long ago.

and this one:

http://www.unionleader.com/article/2...ON01/712119958

Joseph W. McQuaid: Romney's desperate hours

By JOSEPH W. McQUAID
New Hampshire Union Leader Publisher
Published Dec 11, 2011 at 3:00 am (Updated Dec 10, 2011)

Mitt Romney has thought himself so close, for so long, to finally grabbing a presidential nomination that he is now desperate as his “front-runner” status slips away. Desperate men do desperate things.

Enter John Sununu, former White House chief of staff to George H.W. Bush. As revealed last week, Sununu has been nursing a 20-year-old grudge against Newt Gingrich.

Why? Gingrich refused to go along with Sununu and others who engineered Bush's infamous breaking of his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge. Breaking that pledge caused Bush to lose the White House to Bill Clinton.

It may be understandable for Sununu to want to “get Gingrich” over this. But it is nearly incredible that Romney would allow himself to be talked into supporting it. What a way to remind voters, already highly skeptical of his reliability, that Mitt Romney is aligned with the Bush-Sununu gang that broke the pledge and raised our taxes.

Again, desperate men do desperate things. Romney's excuse that he doesn't “write the scripts” in which Sununu and his other surrogates are now viciously and personally smearing Gingrich is laughable. He clearly approves. New Hampshire voters had better brace themselves for what Romney may do next.

ok - now, for another good contrast, we have george will in the washpost
on wed13dec:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...hsO_story.html

who has signed off the past few with disclosing his wife is working for perry? ;)

Newt Gingrich commits a capital crime

By George F. Will,

Newt Gingrich — the friend of his detractors, to whom he offers serial vindications — provided on Monday redundant evidence for the proposition that he is the least conservative candidate seeking the Republican presidential nomination: He faulted Mitt Romney for committing acts of capitalism.

Gingrich did so when goaded by Romney regarding his, Gingrich’s, self-described service as a “historian” for Freddie Mac, which paid him more handsomely than anyone paid Herodotus. Romney was asked by an interviewer about the $1.6 million Gingrich earned, or at any rate received, from Freddie Mac, the misbegotten government-backed mortgage giant. In the service of Washington’s bipartisan certitude that too few people owned houses, Freddie Mac helped produce the housing bubble and subsequent crash. It did so even though it paid Gingrich $30,000 an hour. That is about what he received if, as he says, he worked for Freddie Mac about an hour a month, telling it that what it was doing was “insane.”

Anyway, Romney’s interviewer mischievously asked him if he thought Gingrich should “give that money back” to Freddie Mac. Romney said, “I sure do.”

Soon thereafter, Gingrich, when asked about Romney’s cheeky judgment, replied: “I would just say that if Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain Capital, that I would be glad to listen to him.”

This departure from his pledge that his campaign “will be relentlessly positive” represents the virtue of recycling applied to politics. Gingrich is reusing the attack honed by Ted Kennedy in 1994, when Romney suffered a 17-point loss in attempting to take Kennedy’s Senate seat.

The Kennedy-Gingrich doctrine is this: What the economist Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “creative destruction” is not really creative. Rather, it is lamentable and, when facilitated by capitalists, reprehensible. For Kennedy, this made sense: Reactionary liberalism holds that whatever is, from Social Security to farm subsidies to the Chrysler Corp., should forever be. But Gingrich is supposedly our infallible guide to the sunny uplands of a dynamic future.

Gingrich has three verbal tics which, taken together — and they usually come in clumps — signal his depth and seriousness. Deploying his three F words, he announces his unique candor by prefacing this or that pronouncement with the word “frankly.” What he frankly says is that “fundamental” change is necessary for America. He knows this because he sees over the horizon, into a “future” requiring “transformational” (Gingrich’s self-description) leadership.

Romney, while at Bain, performed the essential social function of connecting investment resources with opportunities. Firms such as Bain are indispensable for wealth creation, which often involves taking over badly run companies, shedding dead weight and thereby liberating remaining elements that add value. The process, like surgery, can be lifesaving. And like surgery, society would rather benefit from it than watch it.

Romney surely anticipated that such an attack would come — but from Democrats, in the general election, not from a volatile Republican. He now understands Rep. Paul Ryan’s response when Gingrich attacked his entitlement reform as “right-wing social engineering.” Said Ryan: “With allies like that, who needs the left?”

Intra-party competitions are supposed to reveal candidates’ potential susceptibilities to attacks. Two unfair attacks against Romney concern his polish and his past. Four years ago, Mike Huckabee, targeting Romney without mentioning him, slyly said, “I want to be a president who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off.” And there is a photograph of Romney that will eventually be seen far and wide (and can be seen at http://wapo.st/romneybain). It shows a young Romney and six Bain colleagues feeling their oats, with paper currency protruding from their dark suits. The young men are overflowing with what John Maynard Keynes called “animal spirits.”

We should welcome such spirits and should hope for political leadership that will hasten the day when American conditions are again receptive to them. Until then, economic dynamism will not return. We should not expect Gingrich to understand this until he understands that his work for Freddie Mac was not, as he laughably insists, in “the private sector.”

He probably believes that. He seems to believe there is always some higher synthesis, inaccessible to lesser intellects, that makes all his contradictions disappear. One awaits the synthesizing of his multicity tour in 2009 with Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, and Al Sharpton promoting “a common education reform” of primary and secondary schools.

(Disclosure: This columnist’s wife, Mari Will, is an adviser to another Republican presidential candidate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry.)

oh yes boyz and grrlz, this is gonna be a VERY interesting election season...

the eventual winner might be wise to at least talk to RP about joining em, if he doesnt make the cut? (since they couldnt end up any worse than mccain picking klondike barbie, eh?)

[charliebrown]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

I think a lot of that prosperity was due to a wide open country abundant in resources and cheap labor. Now the "pie" is surrounded by hungry diners all gorging themselves. When the piece count dwindles to less pieces than diners, I don't care what kind of monetary system will be grafted on top of it, it is going to get ugly.

I do have a question though, why has the U.S. become fabulously wealthy, while central and south america never really left 2nd gear?

[c1ue]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

How is the Chicago school about free markets?

It seems you really need to brush up on your economics.

The Chicago school is the one which is the inheritor of laissez faire capitalism - which is to say that standards and regulations impede the ability of the free market to reduce prices.

Goldman Sachs and the TBTF using their money to buy influence is free market.

Monopolies are free market.

The gigantic real estate control fraud is free market.

I do have a question though, why has the U.S. become fabulously wealthy, while central and south america never really left 2nd gear?

I'd think it is fairly obvious: the US has in the past invested in education, infrastructure, and thus productivity increases.

Central and South America have not.

Central and South America also had the bonus disadvantage of having been looted by the Spanish and Portuguese for well over a century, and even longer depending on what you term the 'non-native' ruling elites of those nations.

[marvenger]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

how well does it work? We have more than enough technology to feed the world sustainably but there's 1 billion malnourished and 99% of scientists say we're changing the climate.

[lektrode]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

how well does it work?...

if 'they' are trying to make us krazy/insane enough to believe that the current course and speed coupled to the status quo on minor items such as economic/monetary policy (and we'll just ignore the fiscal stuff) energy and trade..
along with medical service?

makes any kind of sense whatsoever?

then i would say that its working purrrfectly.

(for somebody, not that 'they' would be The Rest of US, buts i'm fairly certain thats not the plan..)

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

I don't think I need to brush up on my economics. I know the differences between the schools quite well.

Obviously the ultimate goal of any company is to have 100% market share which is thus a monopoly. This is what Ayn Rand was saying. Competition between companies eventually creates one company that may dominate the industry but what you conveniently leave out of your statements above is that another company will come on and take market share from the monopolistic company IF the government does not restrict barriers to entry. I think we can all agree that the problem becomes when the business gets in bed with the government and because of that relationship the entry for any other company in that business is stopped by government.

And sorry but GS and TBTF banks using their money to buy influence is not free market but crony capitalism.

The gigantic real estate control fraud is not free markets, considering that the players in the market took what was given to them by government policies

I think you have a cynical view of individuals. Sure lots of individuals are corrupt but do you really think the people in government are also not as corrupt? I assume from your writings that you think these benevolent individuals in the government are also not as corrupt as any business owner.

Who are these angels that you think should decide which company gets what and how much.

[oddlots]

Re: Conan Parodies Ron Paul Ad

The gigantic real estate control fraud is not free markets, considering that the players in the market took what was given to them by government policies

I suggest you review Ritholtz's treatment of this claim here.