No. We've had this debate for the last fucking month. The debate's over. You don't get to call a fucking do-over because you're late to the party.
Read through the 90+ pages of this thread, and you'll realize that we've addressed your points in detail and illustrated why they're completely wrong. Seriously, we need to sticky at the top of this forum a "Why We Think That Ron Paul Is Batshit Fucking Crazy" FAQ.
I don't really think that there's much of an understanding of how the fed increases the money supply here. They don't just print money and then spend it on nice things.
Well, this view of Paul's is heavily influenced by the formative period of his political life - the 1970s, before the Fed really cracked down on inflation and the economy was really fucked up due to the costs of Vietnam. At that point this view of sound money policies appeared to have more merit.
True, we might have to actually use judgment instead of running through our official "Should We Launch Troops?" questionnaire. How is this different than any other issue? We always need to weigh a fuckton of pros and cons before deciding upon the proper answer.
And you expect people to do that with any level of accuracy weighing both long and short term goals? You sure have a lot of trust in government there.
Yes, I think the military should only be used in ways that benefit the American people. I just recognize that such ways are more varied than "country X is directly blowing us up." Regardless, do you apply the same standards to all government programs? I mean, I'm not directly benefited by Medicare. I'm not directly benefited by the federal highways running through the midwest. I'm not directly benefited by the existence of the National Guard. Of course, all of those things probably indirectly benefit me by keeping the grand mechanism of the nation running smoothly. Just as the increasingly global nature of our economy and our alliances makes it on our best interests to keep the grand mechanism of the world running smoothly.
Is your only goal then to have things run smoothly? You know that's the same argument some fascists used to use in times past to advocate their platforms. They said that the trains would always run on time and all of that hubub. Now I'm not calling you a fascist just saying that the lone idea of allowing things to function smoothly isn't a good basis for sound policy since it can be used to advocate any number of things that may or may not have any actual benefits or downsides to the people on a whole.
Right now we all pay taxes, why do we pay taxes? Because we in effect, collectively signed a social contract called the constitution, that lists the terms we as a people are willing to accept being governed under. Income tax was added as an ammendment to help fund that organization. I suppose I should've been more specific when I mean direct benefit. Even if people aren't in direct danger of being blown up, it's still in their best interest to fund a military to prevent that. Highways, in my opinion are a huge benefit to the country (though I personally feel we need a constitutional ammendment added to authorize those sorts of things I do very much believe we do need them.) You may never go down an interstate in Florida but the money you pay isn't just to that interstate in Florida it also funds interstates all over that do in the end benefit the American people greatly both in direct and indirect ways.
Is there an overal long and short term direct and indirect benefit to the vast majority of taxpayers? Obviously nothing will have direct or even indirect benefits for 100% of the populace, but if something has a large enough percentage of benefits without significant downsides, then obviously it's a good idea. That said, I find a lot of reasons we get involved in certain conflicts aren't for what I'd consider obviously good ideas, and as I posted before, if you look at our track record we haven't been doing so hot internationally when we get seriously involved for things for idealogical reasons versus practical reasons.
In practical terms, I think internationally America needs to do only what is best in the long term for America. Whether and how the world functions is only relevent in relation to our nation. Does this mean I'm advocating total isolationism? Of course not, but it does mean I believe our government doesn't have any sort of mandate, obligation, nor should do anything for anyone other than the American people who fund it. Sure it'd be nice if we could save everyone, I'd love that, but it's just not practical and we unfortunately need to face that reality.
Not to say there aren't frivolous endeavors in our nation's past or present, but I think your short list of acceptable military functions is... well, short.
Well, there might possibly be other uses but as of yet national defense is the only use I've seen with compellingly large short and long term benefits to the vast majority of our nation.
It works both ways. While not getting involved may save a few lives and dollars in the short term, what about the long term?
See, this is why we go back to that whole "using wise judgment" thing.
I totally agree with you on that, what it seems we disagree most with, is that government will use such wise judgement. That's why I don't like broad mandates, people aren't always smart, they aren't always doing it for the people, and government certainly has a track record of hair-brained schemes that show that. So why should we trust these people with more power if they've shown they're not the best at using it?
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Easier said than done. it's hard to do that when most people only see two clowns saying the same thing with only slight differences, one red, one blue, and everyone with a different idea gets excluded.
By making them value their jobs? Bernanke and Greenspan haven't done that horribly. Granted the rates were too low for too long creating a new bubble to cushion the burst of the .com's but I'd hardly say we're in that horrific of a fiscal situation at the moment. Bad, certainly, but what sort of 'sane' fiscal policy are we lacking?
Maybe I'm just being suckered by the numbers, but seeing debts in the trillions, hearing about how much we're spending on wars (not just Iraq, but anything called the war on * as well), and seeing a falling dollar value plus our trade deficit, it seems like things aren't doing too well for America financially.
Would you rather trust the Fed with regualting our currency or a bunch of greedy assholes on Wall St. fucking with e commidities markets ot make a quick buck.
"hard' currency means fuckall. look at how much the value of gold fluctuates on a daily basis and you'll see it's value is hardly rock solid.
That's why I just asked some questions to figure out the hows and whys. Like I said, I'm not an expert on economics, which is why I wanted to ask people who are more informed on the issue why.
That said, personally in its current state I'd prefer to trust neither.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
No. We've had this debate for the last fucking month. The debate's over. You don't get to call a fucking do-over because you're late to the party.
Perhaps other people are still interested in having the conversation. Don't worry. No one will compel you to join.
There's a difference between a newcomer reading up and joining into the thread after reviewing what's come before and just hopping in and tossing up points we killed two weeks ago as if they're the gospel truth. If he wants to debate, he could show some fucking courtesy and read up on what we've said. Maybe he'll find that we've argued his points into the fucking ground.
This is how the Rondroids "win" their arguments - when you think you've beaten the arguments down, you get another one who posits the same fucking thing and the cycle starts over until they wear you down. The only answer to that is to tell them that we've already discussed those points, and that the response is in the log. Once they realize they need new material they don't have, they'll go bye-bye.
Is your only goal then to have things run smoothly? You know that's the same argument some fascists used to use in times past to advocate their platforms. They said that the trains would always run on time and all of that hubub. Now I'm not calling you a fascist just saying that the lone idea of allowing things to function smoothly isn't a good basis for sound policy since it can be used to advocate any number of things that may or may not have any actual benefits or downsides to the people on a whole.
The fascists didn't run things smoothly. That was just an untrue claim.
Well, there might possibly be other uses but as of yet national defense is the only use I've seen with compellingly large short and long term benefits to the vast majority of our nation.
Aiding in relief efforts goes a long way towards making people hate the US less.
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratorMod Emeritus
Easier said than done. it's hard to do that when most people only see two clowns saying the same thing with only slight differences, one red, one blue, and everyone with a different idea gets excluded.
How a person capable of understanding English and with enough cognitive ability to tie their shoes can regard the Democratic and Republican positions as "the same thing" completely baffles me.
Easier said than done. it's hard to do that when most people only see two clowns saying the same thing with only slight differences, one red, one blue, and everyone with a different idea gets excluded.
...they don't say the same things, and we don't elect the chairman of the federal reserve. What the fuck.
By making them value their jobs? Bernanke and Greenspan haven't done that horribly. Granted the rates were too low for too long creating a new bubble to cushion the burst of the .com's but I'd hardly say we're in that horrific of a fiscal situation at the moment. Bad, certainly, but what sort of 'sane' fiscal policy are we lacking?
Maybe I'm just being suckered by the numbers, but seeing debts in the trillions, hearing about how much we're spending on wars (not just Iraq, but anything called the war on * as well), and seeing a falling dollar value plus our trade deficit, it seems like things aren't doing too well for America financially.
The dollar is falling due to fears over subprime mortgages and the current economic conditios prevent the Fed from upping interest rates to tighten the currencies value (as determined by the invisible hand of the free market) at present. Also, our debt is lower as a % of GDP than at any other time in history. It certainly should be shrunk even further, but just because something sounds big to you individually doesn't mean it's actually all that big. Do you have any idea how much money zips around on Wall Street in one afternoon? The volume is staggering.
Would you rather trust the Fed with regualting our currency or a bunch of greedy assholes on Wall St. fucking with e commidities markets ot make a quick buck.
"hard' currency means fuckall. look at how much the value of gold fluctuates on a daily basis and you'll see it's value is hardly rock solid.
That's why I just asked some questions to figure out the hows and whys. Like I said, I'm not an expert on economics, which is why I wanted to ask people who are more informed on the issue why.
That said, personally in its current state I'd prefer to trust neither.
Well, I'd rather not have to change a goat for 2 chickens and hogshead of apples when I make purchases. Good thing I'm in the majority on this.
Easier said than done. it's hard to do that when most people only see two clowns saying the same thing with only slight differences, one red, one blue, and everyone with a different idea gets excluded.
How a person capable of understanding English and with enough cognitive ability to tie their shoes can regard the Democratic and Republican positions as "the same thing" completely baffles me.
Because it's an easy out, Will. Otherwise, you're left in the situation where you have to ponder WHY people don't follow those "different ideas", and that scares the shit out of them. Much easier to just say "we'd be big if it wasn't for The Man, man."
The fascists didn't run things smoothly. That was just an untrue claim.
That wasn't the point, the point was they claimed they could if they had power and that by doing X or Y that they'd make everything run smoothly. I was making a point that smoothing out the operation of society is a bad argument to make for why we should or shouldn't support a policy, since it can be so easily used and abused to justify any number of potentially good or bad things. In fact if anything that reinforces the point because fascists didn't even get things to "Run smoother" by enacting their policies, but it sure did sound like a nice campaign pledge though, didn't it?
Aiding in relief efforts goes a long way towards making people hate the US less.
For a while, that might actually be necessary, but only because of the fact we made the world hate us by our current actions. Like I said earlier, short-sighted foreign policy leads to the need for more intervention to fix mistakes we already made and worse yet it could possibly in certain cases (not yours) have more blowback. It's sort of like a vicious cycle. Eventually we need to draw a clear line in the sand.
How a person capable of understanding English and with enough cognitive ability to tie their shoes can regard the Democratic and Republican positions as "the same thing" completely baffles me.
Let's see, under Bush Sr. we got involved in wars, and lost civil liberties, under Clinton we got into police actions and lost civil liberties, under Bush Jr. we got into wars and lost civil liberties.
Sure the specifics may be different but the practical outcome has been virtually the same. Let me state it more concisely in one of my more preferred personal statements: "The only real difference between Democrats and Republicans is which rights they want to take away first." They differe on specifics and scopes but present day the big two parties are both for big spending, for removing liberties and rights, and for intervention in foreign policy by a very large margin. To me that sure seems like almost the same thing.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratorMod Emeritus
The fascists didn't run things smoothly. That was just an untrue claim.
That wasn't the point, the point was they claimed they could if they had power and that by doing X or Y that they'd make everything run smoothly. I was making a point that smoothing out the operation of society is a bad argument to make for why we should or shouldn't support a policy, since it can be so easily used and abused to justify any number of potentially good or bad things. In fact if anything that reinforces the point because fascists didn't even get things to "Run smoother" by enacting their policies, but it sure did sound like a nice campaign pledge though, didn't it?
You glossed over the 'save millions of human lives by preventing genocides' bit, though. That'd look snazzy on a bumper sticker, right ege?
Because it's an easy out, Will. Otherwise, you're left in the situation where you have to ponder WHY people don't follow those "different ideas", and that scares the shit out of them. Much easier to just say "we'd be big if it wasn't for The Man, man."
Then please do inform me good sir. Why is limited government a bad idea? Why is less bureaucracy a bad idea? I'm not talking about batshit insane ideas like immediately removing the department of energy, homeland security, the IRS, ETC. I'm saying why is it a bad idea to limit what laws congress can pass, limit what the president can do, why is limiting IP law back to more sane terms/conditions, and maybe, just maybe, try and cut spending and get people to be more self sufficient and independent in a slow and controlled manner? I never really seem to see either of the major parties espousing those ideas, or at least ever actually practicing them seriously in office.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
You glossed over the 'save millions of human lives by preventing genocides' bit, though. That'd look snazzy on a bumper sticker, right ege?
We can say any war saved so many lives, we can use that to justify anything. The real question is whether or not we should be saving those lives. Like I was saying before on practicality, it'd be great if we really could just save everyone, but the practicality of doing things like that can be so messy that it bares asking if it's really worth it. I was trying to include issues I personally felt are more directly relevant to Americans at large versus feel-good issues that are just there to emotionally sway people into saying the equivilent of "Yeah, he'd make a great president because he saved a hundred babies from a burning building!"
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Because it's an easy out, Will. Otherwise, you're left in the situation where you have to ponder WHY people don't follow those "different ideas", and that scares the shit out of them. Much easier to just say "we'd be big if it wasn't for The Man, man."
Then please do inform me good sir. Why is limited government a bad idea? Why is more bureaucracy a bad idea? I'm not talking about batshit insane ideas like immediately removing the department of energy, homeland security, the IRS, ETC. I'm saying why is it a bad idea to limit what laws congress can pass, limit what the president can do, why is limiting IP law back to more sane terms/conditions, and maybe, just maybe, try and cut spending and get people to be more self sufficient and independent in a slow and controlled manner? I never really seem to see either of the major parties espousing those ideas, or at least ever actually practicing them seriously in office.
Let's see, under Bush Sr. we got involved in wars, and lost civil liberties, under Clinton we got into police actions and lost civil liberties, under Bush Jr. we got into wars and lost civil liberties.
Sure the specifics may be different but the practical outcome has been virtually the same. Let me state it more concisely in one of my more preferred personal statements: "The only real difference between Democrats and Republicans is which rights they want to take away first." They differe on specifics and scopes but present day the big two parties are both for big spending, for removing liberties and rights, and for intervention in foreign policy by a very large margin. To me that sure seems like almost the same thing.
You just condensed 20 years into three sentences. What the hells?
How a person capable of understanding English and with enough cognitive ability to tie their shoes can regard the Democratic and Republican positions as "the same thing" completely baffles me.
Let's see, under Bush Sr. we got involved in wars, and lost civil liberties, under Clinton we got into police actions and lost civil liberties, under Bush Jr. we got into wars and lost civil liberties.
Sure the specifics may be different but the practical outcome has been virtually the same. Let me state it more concisely in one of my more preferred personal statements: "The only real difference between Democrats and Republicans is which rights they want to take away first." They differe on specifics and scopes but present day the big two parties are both for big spending, for removing liberties and rights, and for intervention in foreign policy by a very large margin. To me that sure seems like almost the same thing.
And then you get upset when we call your worldview simplistic. Yes, you can distill things into a snarky comment. And yeah, you'll get some people to bite. But for those of us who understand that indeed, the devil's in the details, all you're doing is confirming that you're an intellectual lightweight.
How a person capable of understanding English and with enough cognitive ability to tie their shoes can regard the Democratic and Republican positions as "the same thing" completely baffles me.
Let's see, under Bush Sr. we got involved in wars, and lost civil liberties, under Clinton we got into police actions and lost civil liberties, under Bush Jr. we got into wars and lost civil liberties.
Sure the specifics may be different but the practical outcome has been virtually the same. Let me state it more concisely in one of my more preferred personal statements: "The only real difference between Democrats and Republicans is which rights they want to take away first." They differe on specifics and scopes but present day the big two parties are both for big spending, for removing liberties and rights, and for intervention in foreign policy by a very large margin. To me that sure seems like almost the same thing.
And then you get upset when we call your worldview simplistic. Yes, you can distill things into a snarky comment. And yeah, you'll get some people to bite. But for those of us who understand that indeed, the devil's in the details, all you're doing is confirming that you're an intellectual lightweight.
I prefer Mies' take on it with God being in the details.
You glossed over the 'save millions of human lives by preventing genocides' bit, though. That'd look snazzy on a bumper sticker, right ege?
We can say any war saved so many lives, we can use that to justify anything. The real question is whether or not we should be saving those lives. Like I was saying before on practicality, it'd be great if we really could just save everyone, but the practicality of doing things like that can be so messy that it bears asking if it's really worth it. I was trying to include issues I personally felt are more directly relevant to Americans at large versus feel-good issues that are just there to emotionally sway people into saying the equivilent of "Yeah, he'd make a great president because he saved a hundred babies from a burning building!"
I think we're at a fundamental ideological crossroads when we have to debate whether any human life is 'actually' worth saving.
and that map doesn't show economic/soft power either
The coolest map I saw about the Empire was on HMS Belfast, on the Thames, London - it had a bunch of shipping lanes with the commodities that were carried. I can just imagine the crew and captain sitting around deciding where to visit next based upon who made the coolest stuff.
and that map doesn't show economic/soft power either
The coolest map I saw about the Empire was on HMS Belfast, on the Thames, London - it had a bunch of shipping lanes with the commodities that were carried. I can just imagine the crew and captain sitting around deciding where to visit next based upon who made the coolest stuff.
If they decided it based on that, the commodities would include nothings but hookers and beer.
This is just Hamilton vs. Jefferson all over again: free market vs. centralization of power.
To Shinto: centralization was precisely why the Brits were able to finance their Empire under the gold standard (that and opium, which may have been the most important thing). The Bank of England was pretty much the same thing as the Fed and this allowed the Brits to conquer the world while still being “tied†to the gold standard.
The American innovation (or, in your eyes, folly) was to take monetary power from the government and put it in the hands of the people. This did indeed lead to bank runs when unsavory businessmen abused fractional reserve lending, but it also kept the government in check and out of our personal lives and wallet.
To those who cited modern wars as an example that warfare is possible under the gold standard – well, technically you’re wrong as all modern wars (including the Revolution) necessitated a temporary abandonment of the gold standard.
And, of course, we as Americans disproportionately enjoy the benefits of the non-gold standard because Bretton-Woods established the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. Once the politicians pissed that away with Vietnam, the dollar still retained its power due to OPEC continuing to price oil in dollars. This, along with a desire to sell useless plastic shit for rednecks at competitive prices at Wal-Mart, gives other countries a vested interest in retaining dollar hegemony, thus giving it artificial value. See Japan for a counter-example – they’ve had 0% interest for TWELVE years and STILL face devaluation.
The problem now, of course, is that our constant expenditures are depreciating the dollar so badly that other countries are getting ready to drop it as the reserve currency. We are then fucked because we don’t export anything and thus have very little way to make money. The economy will implode.
And also, inflation IS hurting us badly. The Fed/Gov (I lump them together because they are more or less synonymous at this point) have a vested interest in deflating the dollar; they are HUGE debtors. Inflation always benefits a debtor, because by definition they have more liabilities than assets so devaluation of what you owe helps you. This also helps the US Corporations that make income abroad (most all of our big corporations make about 60% of their revenue abroad now), because when they convert their profits into a cheaper US Dollar to report results they have a currency translation gain as well. That's a big part of why the stock market continues to do pretty well while the domestic economy is not so good.
This really hurts Joe-six pack (me) because costs are increasing, the dollar is worth less, and I’m making the same amount of money.
Ron wants to change this system by instituting a dual currency of non-debt/bond based government bills while slowly fazing out Federal Reserve bills. Also, by slashing spending and getting out of Iraq, we free up a shit load of money. In this manner, we can pay off the national debt. Only after that’s done would any serious discussion of returning to commodity backed currency begin.
You glossed over the 'save millions of human lives by preventing genocides' bit, though. That'd look snazzy on a bumper sticker, right ege?
We can say any war saved so many lives, we can use that to justify anything. The real question is whether or not we should be saving those lives. Like I was saying before on practicality, it'd be great if we really could just save everyone, but the practicality of doing things like that can be so messy that it bares asking if it's really worth it. I was trying to include issues I personally felt are more directly relevant to Americans at large versus feel-good issues that are just there to emotionally sway people into saying the equivilent of "Yeah, he'd make a great president because he saved a hundred babies from a burning building!"
We can't save everyone, but it's a good idea to try and save some people whether there is a direct and immediate benefit to us or not. Those suffering from genocide in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Sudan come to mind. I find it rather shameful that we're only at 1:3 there, but I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
Doing a quick google on collective action problem and checking the first result that states what it is. You're basically saying they're bad ideas because everyone believes they're bad ideas? Doesn't that sound...well...stupid? Believing in something doesn't make anything more true or untrue.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Because it's an easy out, Will. Otherwise, you're left in the situation where you have to ponder WHY people don't follow those "different ideas", and that scares the shit out of them. Much easier to just say "we'd be big if it wasn't for The Man, man."
Then please do inform me good sir. Why is limited government a bad idea? Why is more bureaucracy a bad idea? I'm not talking about batshit insane ideas like immediately removing the department of energy, homeland security, the IRS, ETC. I'm saying why is it a bad idea to limit what laws congress can pass, limit what the president can do, why is limiting IP law back to more sane terms/conditions, and maybe, just maybe, try and cut spending and get people to be more self sufficient and independent in a slow and controlled manner? I never really seem to see either of the major parties espousing those ideas, or at least ever actually practicing them seriously in office.
Easier said than done. it's hard to do that when most people only see two clowns saying the same thing with only slight differences, one red, one blue, and everyone with a different idea gets excluded.
...they don't say the same things, and we don't elect the chairman of the federal reserve. What the fuck.
I was referring to the general question of "how do we keep the government from fucking things up" question, not speaking specifically to the role of federal reserve chairman.
ElJeffe on
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This is just Hamilton vs. Jefferson all over again: free market vs. centralization of power.
Jefferson was against centralization of power.
The American innovation (or, in your eyes, folly) was to take monetary power from the government and put it in the hands of the people. This did indeed lead to bank runs when unsavory businessmen abused fractional reserve lending, but it also kept the government in check and out of our personal lives and wallet.
Hello, First Bank of the United States? Second Bank of the United States? The gilded age was also fanfuckingtastic for the common people.
To those who cited modern wars as an example that warfare is possible under the gold standard – well, technically you’re wrong as all modern wars (including the Revolution) necessitated a temporary abandonment of the gold standard.
Bullshit. Spanish-American War and the wars that Britain, Germany, etc. fought in Europe. I could probably name some more.
Also, by slashing spending and getting out of Iraq, we free up a shit load of money.
He would be slashing revenues, probably losing the government money.
This really hurts Joe-six pack (me) because costs are increasing, the dollar is worth less, and I’m making the same amount of money.
Joe-six pack has a nice amount of credit card debt and wouldn't want that to suddenly become a crushing amount of debt.
True, we might have to actually use judgment instead of running through our official "Should We Launch Troops?" questionnaire. How is this different than any other issue? We always need to weigh a fuckton of pros and cons before deciding upon the proper answer.
And you expect people to do that with any level of accuracy weighing both long and short term goals? You sure have a lot of trust in government there.
That argument can basically be used to bludgeon away any argument for having government at all. At some point, you're going to need to stop running your nation via checklist and start having people make decisions. Whether your government operates on 2 billion dollars a year or 2 trillion, there are countless important decisions that impact millions of people. Are you suggesting that the government ran smooth as silk in the 1920s, when government was smaller? No, it was a clusterfuck back then just as much as it's a clusterfuck now. The government of any non-trivially size nation is, to some extent, going to be a roiling vat of stupid.
But here's the thing - society itself is a roiling vat of stupid. People, in large numbers, are fucking idiots. They fuck shit up. All the time. When you strip away more government, that doesn't make things necessarily run more smoothly. It just means the stupid has less official oversight. It's possible to under-govern just as it's possible to over-govern, and the more complex modern society gets, the more difficult that whole governance thing is.
Personally, I'm a big fan of limited government. I think the government should be as small as it can reasonably be, and I think crap like "When someone's a-hurtin', the gubmint's gotta move" is retarded, feel-good swill. I also get a hard-on for federalism, and the notion that local governments are more efficient than non-local governments on many, many fronts. But, assuming you're swallowing the Ron line in toto, you're pushing for at least a 50% reduction in the size of the government. All that's going to do is release a lot of the stupid into the wild, rather than keeping it caged up in Washington where we can monitor it.
Is your only goal then to have things run smoothly? You know that's the same argument some fascists used to use in times past to advocate their platforms. They said that the trains would always run on time and all of that hubub. Now I'm not calling you a fascist just saying that the lone idea of allowing things to function smoothly isn't a good basis for sound policy since it can be used to advocate any number of things that may or may not have any actual benefits or downsides to the people on a whole.
I'm not even going to respond to this on account of it being brain-wrenchingly dumb.
ElJeffe on
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You just condensed 20 years into three sentences. What the hells?
Would you prefer a twenty page college essay with bibliography? I'm attempting to be brief and summarize things because I'm trying to avoid a nasty habit I have of making very long winded posts on forums nobody wants to read.
And then you get upset when we call your worldview simplistic. Yes, you can distill things into a snarky comment. And yeah, you'll get some people to bite. But for those of us who understand that indeed, the devil's in the details, all you're doing is confirming that you're an intellectual lightweight.
I prefer to focus on what actually gets done with some weight towards what they say they want to do. So far I've seen change moving slowly but surely in one direction. Sure the debates and campaign pledges and all of that try to polarize the candidates as being far left or right or having different positions, but again, we have to look at practical issues and not just what people say. The devil may be in the details, but you have to ask yourself, why choose between say, a secular nanny state, or a theocratic nanny state if you could choose a non-nanny state? That's what I'm getting at. It seems to me the non-nanny state is in everyone's best interests but nobody likes the idea. Now we're basically back to where I started at.
I think we're at a fundamental ideological crossroads when we have to debate whether any human life is 'actually' worth saving.
By default, it is.
It's a different issue when government is involved though. i suppose my babies in a burning building was a bad analogy since it's really more like sending someone else in to save babies from burning buildings. It's one thing to assume personal responsibility, and liability and do something yourself. It's an entirely other animal when you force others to do it and make America pay for it. You might say this is commoditizing lives but sometimes that has to be done, like with Triage, do what you can how you can within reason.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Doing a quick google on collective action problem and checking the first result that states what it is. You're basically saying they're bad ideas because everyone believes they're bad ideas? Doesn't that sound...well...stupid? Believing in something doesn't make anything more true or untrue.
You should have read the next link down.
COLLECTIVE ACTION PROBLEM = A situation in which everyone (in a given group) has a choice between two alternatives and where, if everyone involved chooses the alternative act that is Individualistically Rational (IR), the outcome will be worse for everyone involved, in their own estimation, than it would be if they were all to choose the other alternative
It's a different issue when government is involved though. i suppose my babies in a burning building was a bad analogy since it's really more like sending someone else in to save babies from burning buildings. It's one thing to assume personal responsibility, and liability and do something yourself. It's an entirely other animal when you force others to do it and make America pay for it. You might say this is commoditizing lives but sometimes that has to be done, like with Triage, do what you can how you can within reason.
No one is forced to do it.
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ElJeffeNot actually a mod.Roaming the streets, waving his gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
It's a different issue when government is involved though. i suppose my babies in a burning building was a bad analogy since it's really more like sending someone else in to save babies from burning buildings. It's one thing to assume personal responsibility, and liability and do something yourself. It's an entirely other animal when you force others to do it and make America pay for it. You might say this is commoditizing lives but sometimes that has to be done, like with Triage, do what you can how you can within reason.
No one is forced to do it.
You just say that because the government wiped your memory of all the brainwashing.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
It's a different issue when government is involved though. i suppose my babies in a burning building was a bad analogy since it's really more like sending someone else in to save babies from burning buildings. It's one thing to assume personal responsibility, and liability and do something yourself. It's an entirely other animal when you force others to do it and make America pay for it. You might say this is commoditizing lives but sometimes that has to be done, like with Triage, do what you can how you can within reason.
No one is forced to do it.
You just say that because the government wiped your memory of all the brainwashing.
You remember that quote you said about Ayn Rand books turning people into dicks for a bit?
I think they should just add on The Jungle to it. Sort of balance it all out. I think it'd work.
My bad. Hamilton:Jefferson :: Centralization:Free market
Hello, First Bank of the United States? Second Bank of the United States? The gilded age was also fanfuckingtastic for the common people.
Both banks were allowed to lapse. And I know the gilded age was shit; that's why the people ceded control to the government. However, instead of the pendulum swinging from free market, to gov, and back to free market, the two just allied in the name of expansion and profits, and we're getting fucked b/c of it.
Bullshit. Spanish-American War and the wars that Britain, Germany, etc. fought in Europe. I could probably name some more.
Fair. Rev, Civil War, and WWI - the big ones - we went off it.
He would be slashing revenues, probably losing the government money.
What are you talking about? How is cutting spending cutting revenue? Plus, maybe if we got lucky, he'd legalize weed and tax it. That's a bigger fantasy than RP even getting elected...
Joe-six pack has a nice amount of credit card debt and wouldn't want that to suddenly become a crushing amount of debt.
Yeah, he has to turn to the credit card because of inflation and how fucked up the monetary/fiscal system is now. And when the dollar crashes, we're all facing crushing debt.
That argument can basically be used to bludgeon away any argument for having government at all. At some point, you're going to need to stop running your nation via checklist and start having people make decisions. Whether your government operates on 2 billion dollars a year or 2 trillion, there are countless important decisions that impact millions of people. Are you suggesting that the government ran smooth as silk in the 1920s, when government was smaller? No, it was a clusterfuck back then just as much as it's a clusterfuck now. The government of any non-trivially size nation is, to some extent, going to be a roiling vat of stupid.
No, I don't think we should go back to the 1920s, but I don't think we should abandon the good ideas we had back then just because that was the era they came out of, or because there were some flaws. Like I said earlier about road building. It's flat out unconstitutional if you read the constitution strictly. That said I think the benefits are great enough we do need to do it, just also authorize it the right way. I think expanding powers of government, when it happens, needs to be done in a very slow, controlled, and thoughtful manner. Do we need changes, improvements and expansions? yes, but we also need a lot of reductions as well. The key problem with government isn't just stupidity but also corruption, the best way to deal with both is to spread, limit and check power as much as possible. We need a way to pass expansions of power yes, and that's why we can ammend the constitution. The idea by design I'd think, was to ensure that if we expand the federal government's power there has to be such a pressing need, and demand for it, like say to build roads and bridges, that the states and the federal government can come into a majority agreement that it should be done. This helps as a filter to keep more bad ideas out.
Does it limit responsiveness? Yes, but that's a question of a tradeoff we have to make. Freedom isn't always going to be pretty. We have to ask ourselves as a society what's more important. If responsiveness is really THAT important on a whole, then why can't we pass an ammendment to make the process faster?
But here's the thing - society itself is a roiling vat of stupid. People, in large numbers, are fucking idiots. They fuck shit up. All the time. When you strip away more government, that doesn't make things necessarily run more smoothly. It just means the stupid has less official oversight. It's possible to under-govern just as it's possible to over-govern, and the more complex modern society gets, the more difficult that whole governance thing is.
Agreed, but isn't it more concise and responsive to let people sort out more of their own problems themselves? Obviously government does need to step in, but we shouldn't just keep giving up our right to handle our own situations ourselves to government. Sure people may solve some of their own problems in stupid ways, but if we can have government trying mostly to keep stupid solutions people make to their problems, from harming others, then why is letting people be stupid and fuck themselves over such a bad idea?
Personally, I'm a big fan of limited government. I think the government should be as small as it can reasonably be, and I think crap like "When someone's a-hurtin', the gubmint's gotta move" is retarded, feel-good swill. I also get a hard-on for federalism, and the notion that local governments are more efficient than non-local governments on many, many fronts. But, assuming you're swallowing the Ron line in toto, you're pushing for at least a 50% reduction in the size of the government. All that's going to do is release a lot of the stupid into the wild, rather than keeping it caged up in Washington where we can monitor it.
I think Ron's got a lot of good ideas about what are problems facing us and what we're doing wrong in government. I disagree with him on a lot of his solutions. Cutting out departments left and right on a whim in short order is definitely insane and harmful, but the core idea of government being too powerful and needing to, over time, be seriously scaled back, is a very good idea I agree very much with. We need to return to ideas like personal responsibility and liability and keep the government out of our lives. We can't do that all in one night and we shouldn't, but it does need to be done, eventually.
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
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No. We've had this debate for the last fucking month. The debate's over. You don't get to call a fucking do-over because you're late to the party.
Read through the 90+ pages of this thread, and you'll realize that we've addressed your points in detail and illustrated why they're completely wrong. Seriously, we need to sticky at the top of this forum a "Why We Think That Ron Paul Is Batshit Fucking Crazy" FAQ.
Well, this view of Paul's is heavily influenced by the formative period of his political life - the 1970s, before the Fed really cracked down on inflation and the economy was really fucked up due to the costs of Vietnam. At that point this view of sound money policies appeared to have more merit.
Today he's a fossil.
Perhaps other people are still interested in having the conversation. Don't worry. No one will compel you to join.
And you expect people to do that with any level of accuracy weighing both long and short term goals? You sure have a lot of trust in government there.
Is your only goal then to have things run smoothly? You know that's the same argument some fascists used to use in times past to advocate their platforms. They said that the trains would always run on time and all of that hubub. Now I'm not calling you a fascist just saying that the lone idea of allowing things to function smoothly isn't a good basis for sound policy since it can be used to advocate any number of things that may or may not have any actual benefits or downsides to the people on a whole.
Right now we all pay taxes, why do we pay taxes? Because we in effect, collectively signed a social contract called the constitution, that lists the terms we as a people are willing to accept being governed under. Income tax was added as an ammendment to help fund that organization. I suppose I should've been more specific when I mean direct benefit. Even if people aren't in direct danger of being blown up, it's still in their best interest to fund a military to prevent that. Highways, in my opinion are a huge benefit to the country (though I personally feel we need a constitutional ammendment added to authorize those sorts of things I do very much believe we do need them.) You may never go down an interstate in Florida but the money you pay isn't just to that interstate in Florida it also funds interstates all over that do in the end benefit the American people greatly both in direct and indirect ways.
Is there an overal long and short term direct and indirect benefit to the vast majority of taxpayers? Obviously nothing will have direct or even indirect benefits for 100% of the populace, but if something has a large enough percentage of benefits without significant downsides, then obviously it's a good idea. That said, I find a lot of reasons we get involved in certain conflicts aren't for what I'd consider obviously good ideas, and as I posted before, if you look at our track record we haven't been doing so hot internationally when we get seriously involved for things for idealogical reasons versus practical reasons.
In practical terms, I think internationally America needs to do only what is best in the long term for America. Whether and how the world functions is only relevent in relation to our nation. Does this mean I'm advocating total isolationism? Of course not, but it does mean I believe our government doesn't have any sort of mandate, obligation, nor should do anything for anyone other than the American people who fund it. Sure it'd be nice if we could save everyone, I'd love that, but it's just not practical and we unfortunately need to face that reality.
Well, there might possibly be other uses but as of yet national defense is the only use I've seen with compellingly large short and long term benefits to the vast majority of our nation.
I totally agree with you on that, what it seems we disagree most with, is that government will use such wise judgement. That's why I don't like broad mandates, people aren't always smart, they aren't always doing it for the people, and government certainly has a track record of hair-brained schemes that show that. So why should we trust these people with more power if they've shown they're not the best at using it?
Easier said than done. it's hard to do that when most people only see two clowns saying the same thing with only slight differences, one red, one blue, and everyone with a different idea gets excluded.
Maybe I'm just being suckered by the numbers, but seeing debts in the trillions, hearing about how much we're spending on wars (not just Iraq, but anything called the war on * as well), and seeing a falling dollar value plus our trade deficit, it seems like things aren't doing too well for America financially.
That's why I just asked some questions to figure out the hows and whys. Like I said, I'm not an expert on economics, which is why I wanted to ask people who are more informed on the issue why.
That said, personally in its current state I'd prefer to trust neither.
There's a difference between a newcomer reading up and joining into the thread after reviewing what's come before and just hopping in and tossing up points we killed two weeks ago as if they're the gospel truth. If he wants to debate, he could show some fucking courtesy and read up on what we've said. Maybe he'll find that we've argued his points into the fucking ground.
This is how the Rondroids "win" their arguments - when you think you've beaten the arguments down, you get another one who posits the same fucking thing and the cycle starts over until they wear you down. The only answer to that is to tell them that we've already discussed those points, and that the response is in the log. Once they realize they need new material they don't have, they'll go bye-bye.
Aiding in relief efforts goes a long way towards making people hate the US less.
How a person capable of understanding English and with enough cognitive ability to tie their shoes can regard the Democratic and Republican positions as "the same thing" completely baffles me.
...they don't say the same things, and we don't elect the chairman of the federal reserve. What the fuck.
The dollar is falling due to fears over subprime mortgages and the current economic conditios prevent the Fed from upping interest rates to tighten the currencies value (as determined by the invisible hand of the free market) at present. Also, our debt is lower as a % of GDP than at any other time in history. It certainly should be shrunk even further, but just because something sounds big to you individually doesn't mean it's actually all that big. Do you have any idea how much money zips around on Wall Street in one afternoon? The volume is staggering.
Well, I'd rather not have to change a goat for 2 chickens and hogshead of apples when I make purchases. Good thing I'm in the majority on this.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/102943/Republicans-Report-Much-Better-Mental-Health-Than-Others.aspx
Because it's an easy out, Will. Otherwise, you're left in the situation where you have to ponder WHY people don't follow those "different ideas", and that scares the shit out of them. Much easier to just say "we'd be big if it wasn't for The Man, man."
That wasn't the point, the point was they claimed they could if they had power and that by doing X or Y that they'd make everything run smoothly. I was making a point that smoothing out the operation of society is a bad argument to make for why we should or shouldn't support a policy, since it can be so easily used and abused to justify any number of potentially good or bad things. In fact if anything that reinforces the point because fascists didn't even get things to "Run smoother" by enacting their policies, but it sure did sound like a nice campaign pledge though, didn't it?
For a while, that might actually be necessary, but only because of the fact we made the world hate us by our current actions. Like I said earlier, short-sighted foreign policy leads to the need for more intervention to fix mistakes we already made and worse yet it could possibly in certain cases (not yours) have more blowback. It's sort of like a vicious cycle. Eventually we need to draw a clear line in the sand.
Let's see, under Bush Sr. we got involved in wars, and lost civil liberties, under Clinton we got into police actions and lost civil liberties, under Bush Jr. we got into wars and lost civil liberties.
Sure the specifics may be different but the practical outcome has been virtually the same. Let me state it more concisely in one of my more preferred personal statements: "The only real difference between Democrats and Republicans is which rights they want to take away first." They differe on specifics and scopes but present day the big two parties are both for big spending, for removing liberties and rights, and for intervention in foreign policy by a very large margin. To me that sure seems like almost the same thing.
Self-reported mental health doesn't mean dick.
You glossed over the 'save millions of human lives by preventing genocides' bit, though. That'd look snazzy on a bumper sticker, right ege?
Ignorance is blissfulness.
:P
Then please do inform me good sir. Why is limited government a bad idea? Why is less bureaucracy a bad idea? I'm not talking about batshit insane ideas like immediately removing the department of energy, homeland security, the IRS, ETC. I'm saying why is it a bad idea to limit what laws congress can pass, limit what the president can do, why is limiting IP law back to more sane terms/conditions, and maybe, just maybe, try and cut spending and get people to be more self sufficient and independent in a slow and controlled manner? I never really seem to see either of the major parties espousing those ideas, or at least ever actually practicing them seriously in office.
We can say any war saved so many lives, we can use that to justify anything. The real question is whether or not we should be saving those lives. Like I was saying before on practicality, it'd be great if we really could just save everyone, but the practicality of doing things like that can be so messy that it bares asking if it's really worth it. I was trying to include issues I personally felt are more directly relevant to Americans at large versus feel-good issues that are just there to emotionally sway people into saying the equivilent of "Yeah, he'd make a great president because he saved a hundred babies from a burning building!"
Short answer: collective action problem.
Long answer: Click here
I fucking knew it. The Democrats are actually crazy.
You just condensed 20 years into three sentences. What the hells?
And then you get upset when we call your worldview simplistic. Yes, you can distill things into a snarky comment. And yeah, you'll get some people to bite. But for those of us who understand that indeed, the devil's in the details, all you're doing is confirming that you're an intellectual lightweight.
I prefer Mies' take on it with God being in the details.
I think we're at a fundamental ideological crossroads when we have to debate whether any human life is 'actually' worth saving.
By default, it is.
The coolest map I saw about the Empire was on HMS Belfast, on the Thames, London - it had a bunch of shipping lanes with the commodities that were carried. I can just imagine the crew and captain sitting around deciding where to visit next based upon who made the coolest stuff.
If they decided it based on that, the commodities would include nothings but hookers and beer.
This is just Hamilton vs. Jefferson all over again: free market vs. centralization of power.
To Shinto: centralization was precisely why the Brits were able to finance their Empire under the gold standard (that and opium, which may have been the most important thing). The Bank of England was pretty much the same thing as the Fed and this allowed the Brits to conquer the world while still being “tied†to the gold standard.
The American innovation (or, in your eyes, folly) was to take monetary power from the government and put it in the hands of the people. This did indeed lead to bank runs when unsavory businessmen abused fractional reserve lending, but it also kept the government in check and out of our personal lives and wallet.
To those who cited modern wars as an example that warfare is possible under the gold standard – well, technically you’re wrong as all modern wars (including the Revolution) necessitated a temporary abandonment of the gold standard.
And, of course, we as Americans disproportionately enjoy the benefits of the non-gold standard because Bretton-Woods established the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. Once the politicians pissed that away with Vietnam, the dollar still retained its power due to OPEC continuing to price oil in dollars. This, along with a desire to sell useless plastic shit for rednecks at competitive prices at Wal-Mart, gives other countries a vested interest in retaining dollar hegemony, thus giving it artificial value. See Japan for a counter-example – they’ve had 0% interest for TWELVE years and STILL face devaluation.
The problem now, of course, is that our constant expenditures are depreciating the dollar so badly that other countries are getting ready to drop it as the reserve currency. We are then fucked because we don’t export anything and thus have very little way to make money. The economy will implode.
And also, inflation IS hurting us badly. The Fed/Gov (I lump them together because they are more or less synonymous at this point) have a vested interest in deflating the dollar; they are HUGE debtors. Inflation always benefits a debtor, because by definition they have more liabilities than assets so devaluation of what you owe helps you. This also helps the US Corporations that make income abroad (most all of our big corporations make about 60% of their revenue abroad now), because when they convert their profits into a cheaper US Dollar to report results they have a currency translation gain as well. That's a big part of why the stock market continues to do pretty well while the domestic economy is not so good.
This really hurts Joe-six pack (me) because costs are increasing, the dollar is worth less, and I’m making the same amount of money.
Ron wants to change this system by instituting a dual currency of non-debt/bond based government bills while slowly fazing out Federal Reserve bills. Also, by slashing spending and getting out of Iraq, we free up a shit load of money. In this manner, we can pay off the national debt. Only after that’s done would any serious discussion of returning to commodity backed currency begin.
Sounds good to me – and not crazy at all.
We can't save everyone, but it's a good idea to try and save some people whether there is a direct and immediate benefit to us or not. Those suffering from genocide in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Sudan come to mind. I find it rather shameful that we're only at 1:3 there, but I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
Doing a quick google on collective action problem and checking the first result that states what it is. You're basically saying they're bad ideas because everyone believes they're bad ideas? Doesn't that sound...well...stupid? Believing in something doesn't make anything more true or untrue.
Fixed.
I was referring to the general question of "how do we keep the government from fucking things up" question, not speaking specifically to the role of federal reserve chairman.
Hello, First Bank of the United States? Second Bank of the United States? The gilded age was also fanfuckingtastic for the common people.
Bullshit. Spanish-American War and the wars that Britain, Germany, etc. fought in Europe. I could probably name some more.
He would be slashing revenues, probably losing the government money.
Joe-six pack has a nice amount of credit card debt and wouldn't want that to suddenly become a crushing amount of debt.
Nah... they're just emo.
That argument can basically be used to bludgeon away any argument for having government at all. At some point, you're going to need to stop running your nation via checklist and start having people make decisions. Whether your government operates on 2 billion dollars a year or 2 trillion, there are countless important decisions that impact millions of people. Are you suggesting that the government ran smooth as silk in the 1920s, when government was smaller? No, it was a clusterfuck back then just as much as it's a clusterfuck now. The government of any non-trivially size nation is, to some extent, going to be a roiling vat of stupid.
But here's the thing - society itself is a roiling vat of stupid. People, in large numbers, are fucking idiots. They fuck shit up. All the time. When you strip away more government, that doesn't make things necessarily run more smoothly. It just means the stupid has less official oversight. It's possible to under-govern just as it's possible to over-govern, and the more complex modern society gets, the more difficult that whole governance thing is.
Personally, I'm a big fan of limited government. I think the government should be as small as it can reasonably be, and I think crap like "When someone's a-hurtin', the gubmint's gotta move" is retarded, feel-good swill. I also get a hard-on for federalism, and the notion that local governments are more efficient than non-local governments on many, many fronts. But, assuming you're swallowing the Ron line in toto, you're pushing for at least a 50% reduction in the size of the government. All that's going to do is release a lot of the stupid into the wild, rather than keeping it caged up in Washington where we can monitor it.
I'm not even going to respond to this on account of it being brain-wrenchingly dumb.
Would you prefer a twenty page college essay with bibliography? I'm attempting to be brief and summarize things because I'm trying to avoid a nasty habit I have of making very long winded posts on forums nobody wants to read.
I prefer to focus on what actually gets done with some weight towards what they say they want to do. So far I've seen change moving slowly but surely in one direction. Sure the debates and campaign pledges and all of that try to polarize the candidates as being far left or right or having different positions, but again, we have to look at practical issues and not just what people say. The devil may be in the details, but you have to ask yourself, why choose between say, a secular nanny state, or a theocratic nanny state if you could choose a non-nanny state? That's what I'm getting at. It seems to me the non-nanny state is in everyone's best interests but nobody likes the idea. Now we're basically back to where I started at.
It's a different issue when government is involved though. i suppose my babies in a burning building was a bad analogy since it's really more like sending someone else in to save babies from burning buildings. It's one thing to assume personal responsibility, and liability and do something yourself. It's an entirely other animal when you force others to do it and make America pay for it. You might say this is commoditizing lives but sometimes that has to be done, like with Triage, do what you can how you can within reason.
You should have read the next link down.
You just say that because the government wiped your memory of all the brainwashing.
I think they should just add on The Jungle to it. Sort of balance it all out. I think it'd work.
Both banks were allowed to lapse. And I know the gilded age was shit; that's why the people ceded control to the government. However, instead of the pendulum swinging from free market, to gov, and back to free market, the two just allied in the name of expansion and profits, and we're getting fucked b/c of it.
Fair. Rev, Civil War, and WWI - the big ones - we went off it.
What are you talking about? How is cutting spending cutting revenue? Plus, maybe if we got lucky, he'd legalize weed and tax it. That's a bigger fantasy than RP even getting elected...
Yeah, he has to turn to the credit card because of inflation and how fucked up the monetary/fiscal system is now. And when the dollar crashes, we're all facing crushing debt.
No, I don't think we should go back to the 1920s, but I don't think we should abandon the good ideas we had back then just because that was the era they came out of, or because there were some flaws. Like I said earlier about road building. It's flat out unconstitutional if you read the constitution strictly. That said I think the benefits are great enough we do need to do it, just also authorize it the right way. I think expanding powers of government, when it happens, needs to be done in a very slow, controlled, and thoughtful manner. Do we need changes, improvements and expansions? yes, but we also need a lot of reductions as well. The key problem with government isn't just stupidity but also corruption, the best way to deal with both is to spread, limit and check power as much as possible. We need a way to pass expansions of power yes, and that's why we can ammend the constitution. The idea by design I'd think, was to ensure that if we expand the federal government's power there has to be such a pressing need, and demand for it, like say to build roads and bridges, that the states and the federal government can come into a majority agreement that it should be done. This helps as a filter to keep more bad ideas out.
Does it limit responsiveness? Yes, but that's a question of a tradeoff we have to make. Freedom isn't always going to be pretty. We have to ask ourselves as a society what's more important. If responsiveness is really THAT important on a whole, then why can't we pass an ammendment to make the process faster?
Agreed, but isn't it more concise and responsive to let people sort out more of their own problems themselves? Obviously government does need to step in, but we shouldn't just keep giving up our right to handle our own situations ourselves to government. Sure people may solve some of their own problems in stupid ways, but if we can have government trying mostly to keep stupid solutions people make to their problems, from harming others, then why is letting people be stupid and fuck themselves over such a bad idea?
I think Ron's got a lot of good ideas about what are problems facing us and what we're doing wrong in government. I disagree with him on a lot of his solutions. Cutting out departments left and right on a whim in short order is definitely insane and harmful, but the core idea of government being too powerful and needing to, over time, be seriously scaled back, is a very good idea I agree very much with. We need to return to ideas like personal responsibility and liability and keep the government out of our lives. We can't do that all in one night and we shouldn't, but it does need to be done, eventually.