In the U.S., they come in three large groups: gun-totin’, drug-smokin’, and tax-dodgin’. Rand and Ron Paul are mostly in the third category.
Back when I first heard about libertarianism and decided I was one in the 90s, if you asked me to picture a libertarian I’d have pictured a green haired facial pierced lesbian. I’m not sure when it became a refuge for neo-cons.
Typical is “That government is best which governs least”. But RP doesn’t believe that at all- he just wants the Feds to mettle less, allowing the states to meddle all they want. He thinks the feds should have no right to interfer with a state that wants to ban abortion.
A real libertarian would be against gun control, for abortion rights (altho quite possibly against abortion on personal ethical grounds, would allow each woman to make her own choice) for less taxes, less government, for freedom of speech, religion, etc.
and polluted rivers. they LOVE polluted rivers.
I have no idea if this site is any good, but some side-by-side comparison is possible:
http://www.ontheissues.org/gary_johnson.htm
I checked GJ, since he actually ran as a Lib. There seems to be a lot of overlap. I’ll look for other flavors.
I have found one teeny-tiny exception to that: He sponsored a national right-to-work bill, which would force it upon even those states that have explicitly rejected it.
So, he’s all for states’ rights when states are establishing religion or putting gay people in jail, but if they don’t bust the unions fast enough, in come the feds.
To be fair, they don’t. They just have a mistaken belief that corporations would not pollute, if there were no regulations against pollution. In the ideal, this would be true. Corporate boards of directors are made up of people who drink water, and they have families they love.
The trouble is the hellish and inescapable “tragedy of the commons” and other iron laws of moral irresponsibility. If company A does not pollute, but company B pollutes, company B obtains a competitive edge over company A, and succeeds in the free market. Company A is forced out of business, or else must change its practices in order to pollute also.
The BoD of company A doesn’t like pollution. But unregulated competition will compel them to engage in it.
To be clear, I am a libertarian, not allied with anyone who’s last name is “Paul”. I’m more of a Milton Friedman type myself.
That said, what you’ve written here is simply untrue.
(1) We’ve not had 70 years of McCarthyism, obviously. McCarthy and his “ism” have both been dead for quite a while.
(2) The claim that there are hardly any unions or work regulations left is flatly false. There are countless unions in the USA, though fewer than there used to be. There are also countless labor regulations, and probably more than at any previous time in history.
(3) The United States does have mandated maternal leave, according to the Family and Medical Leave Act. In fact the 12-week guarantee for new mothers is longer than what’s guaranteed in many other countries. The USA’s law does not guarantee paid leave, though a great many companies offer it.
(4) You seem to equate workers “rights” with more intrusive labor law, but why? For instance, if there were a country with no required maternity leave, then a woman would have the right to decide how much importance she attaches to maternity leave. A woman who wanted maternity leave could negotiate with her employer to get it, while a woman who didn’t want to have children could tell her employer that she’s willing to trade in her maternity leave in exchange for higher pay, more vacation time, or whatever else pleases her most. Thus the absence of maternity leave would actually be an increase in rights for workers.
(5) You say that with more labor law, the government would redistribute wealth less. France and Italy have very strict labor laws. They also have unemployment rates that have been in double digits for years. With all those unemployed people hanging around, it’s no surprise that they have to have generous welfare states as well.
(6) In any case, there’s clearly no law in the USA that can be blamed on Ron Paul or any other libertarian, since they’ve never held power.
This may be true, but it doesn’t quite cover all the bases. Lots of minority blocs have been effective in getting legislation passed, as part of a bargaining process. The Pauls, Congressman and Senator, have been influential in legislation, even if they haven’t been members of a majority party.
It’s a bit more subtle than that, and I feel that if we’re going to mock their opinions, we should at least mock opinions they actually hold.
They think that lawsuits are the be-all and end-all of enforcing these kinds of laws. If company A pollutes, and you get harmed by it, sue company A and they’ll either stop polluting or go bankrupt, at which point they stop polluting.
There are numerous problems with this:
[ul]
[li]You will likely have a Hell of a time proving it was any one company’s fault: If three companies are all polluting, how do you prove any specific damage came from any specific company? You can only sue one at a time, after all, and any one company could always forge a defense by blaming the other two. And maybe it wasn’t any one of them, but all three of them collectively pushed you into the bad outcome.[/li][li]You will likely have a Hell of a time proving a solid causal chain to a standard a court would accept: “Oh, so people who lived in that region only had an increased risk of cancer? There was no absolute cause? Why are you wasting this court’s time?” Look at what tobacco companies did back when the idea that smoking causes lung cancer was being bandied about; if you convince the court to take a narrow enough view of causation, it can be very difficult for anyone to win a case against you.[/li][li]It presumes that a corporation can’t budget for lawsuits, and simply pay them off and keep on keeping on: Couple this with the notion that we need tort reform once any lawsuit involves punitive damages, especially if those damages total more than a tenth of a percent of a company’s daily profits. In order for this to work, lawsuits have to sting, and it’s difficult to convince courts to make them sting, apparently.[/li][li]It’s retroactive, not proactive, and can only work once the damage is done: This is the big one. It’s unconscionable that we as a society should be unable to prevent people from being harmed by the bad acts of another.[/li][/ul]
It wasn’t Congress. It was the Federal Communications Commission, a body of unelected bureaucrats.
Congress has done its utmost trying not to take sides on the net neutrality issue, on account of its being very popular among internet users but very unpopular among large campaign contributors.
This was largely not a partisan issue, with both Democrats and Republicans—save a few exceptions—avoiding taking a public stance.
Strange thing, though. As soon as the FCC acted, all of a sudden a whole bunch of Republicans became anti-net neutrality. Go figure.
I recall a poster here who was arguing against restricting the use of antibiotics. Someone who gets infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria can just sue the farmer who caused it! I believe that same thread had someone arguing that since restrictions on antibiotic use hadn’t prevented all forms of antibiotic resistance, that’s proof that the restrictions don’t do anything and we should just remove them all.
I’ll see if I can dig it up.
I don’t know if they were “Ron Paul style libertarians.”
That would seem to be a very pro-military stance to me.
I disagree with most of what Ron/Rand Paul says (same person, different branch of the same idiot tree) but not sending soldiers everywhere to go die seems to be the most pro-military thing you can do.
Pay them in the defense of our nation, ever ready to defend it. Sending troops into Iraq because reasons was not defending our nation.
One of the biggest issues I have with libertarianism is the myopic view that we live in boxes, that the things we do have no effect on other people. Very little of what we do fits into that category. Businesses, for example, need to be part of society, not castles of individualism, because they rely on society to “create” their wealth. Achieving the right balance in this area is difficult, but it is not obvious that a libertarian approach would improve upon what we have now (which is of course itself deeply flawed).
From what I can tell, the libertarian ethos leads to millions of little boxes of freedom, a sort of “cube-city” nation. That does not seem like a better way to live. Ironic that an eye doctor like Randy Paul can himself be so myopic.
What cock-eyed definition of “neo-con” includes Ron Paul?
Ron Paul HATES neo-cons, and vice-versa.
By DEFINITION, neo-cons want to project US military power around the world. Ron Paul is an isolationist. He blames the US for most Muslim terrorism.
If you didn’t know that, don’t use words like “neoconservative.” Don’t use big words in general, if you don’t know what they mean.
One exception does not disprove the general observation. The Libertarian movement has become a haven for many neo-cons. Showing that one member isn’t fails to rebut that.
It’s as if someone noted that the NRA opposes gun-control legislation, and you focused in on one of the very few members who doesn’t. “Jack Smith favors gun control laws, and he’s an NRA member, so you’re wrong, and you can’t use big words either.” Hm.
Opposition to military adventurism is really a trivial component of the libertarian ethos. Their goofy, poorly-thought-out freedom-sapping economic ideas are the major definition of the ideology, isolationism is less significant. If libertarian policies were brought into play, they would want to begin with economic policies, which would lead to military adventurism as corporate power would become stronger and demand that their international interests be protected.
I was being sarcastic
Don’t know if this is well known , but in 2008 Paul fans had a funny way of getting him votes at state GOP conventions. They would run for office and get to make a speech. However their speech was only about Ron Paul, not about the office they were running for. They would all make long speeches so that eventually a lot of people left. That meant at the end many of the people remaining were the Paul supporters and he got a lot more votes then he would have.
So, the peace candidate is actually the militarist candidate.
Right.
Do you ever think before you hit submit?