You aren’t doing your side many favors when you whine about Obama’s “czars”. Do you realize that the term is a media creation and not part of anyone’s official title? No, didn’t think so. Seeking justices with empathy is not unconstitutional. Neither is the belief that the Constitution is a living document.
You’re mistaken in that people disagree with you out of ignorance about libertarianism. We disagree because we know enough about libertarianism to reject it. I don’t have to read a book about homeopathy to know it is junk science. Neither do I have to read what you suggest in order to reject the cult of libertarianism.
I think that in Feudal times, workers generally made things for their lord, who took it and doled it back to them as he felt proper. Perhaps a minimum of items would be left to the workers to trade in town, but this was a minority of all things produced. The lord might have then taken the items and traded them about, but often more often on the basis of connections and title than out of market needs and reciprocity.
Either that or you were simply a subsistence farmer, at which point trade is basically for the sake of getting some variety, not because anyone else has more than you.
A cash-based economy existed principally among traders, who were looked down upon as the scum of the Earth.
Just FYI, by the way, it is not customary to append a byline to a new thread. Merely writing “The Media Treatment of Rand Paul - Knee Jerk Reactionism” would have been sufficient, though “Mental Midgets” IS a great user name for the OP.
You did not lose me with what could honestly be construed as a condescending attitude on your part, full of assumptions on what others may or may not have read, or on what others do or do not understand about, “the virtues of a society based on liberty” Not knowing you, I give you* the benefit of the doubt *here. It is only fair, but fairness also dictates that I mention to you, what struck me about your attitude and your basic assumptions, as being condescending.
If I am to believe the media feels threatened, which I do not, I would have to buy into several paranoid and unrealistic fantasies about what constitutes ‘the media.’ I do not.
You obviously put a lot of time, thought, and effort into his. And for that you deserve some credit and respect.
Why are you picking that particular time period? Trade has flourished for thousands of years under a number of different political systems. Nomadic tribes in the middle-east traded with each other, as did Roman and Greek merchants. Even coinage has been around for thousands of years. Hell, Jesus tossed money traders out of the temple.
Well if you ignore those people who were engaged in transactions in which supply and demand set prices, then I guess there were no examples of the invisible hand. Aside from that Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?
How dare those media meanies actually let Doctor Rand Paul speak. And then repeat what he says. It’s not fair!
The OP often presents material from the Senior Doctor Paul. But there’s never a link. (I’m not counting the insufferable YouTube stuff.) When I asked about those paragraphs of bolded text, he said he’d paraphrased the Senior Doctor’s words. Is there a good online source for his actual stuff?
Well, his Congressional District is not far from me; I’ve been aware of his antics for years. I doubt our OP is earning him any new friends.
I have always been amused by the paranoid fantasies of many who claim Libertarianism as their creed. There are many Libertarians who are not paranoid and who are well meaning in their beliefs, and who are very serious about their principles—all without paranoia … But there were also many eugenicists who were well meaning in their beliefs, and who were very serious about their principles—all without paranoia.
I have snipped the rest because it is highly tendentious, factually wrong, or occasionally so misguided that it is not even wrong.
Hayek wrote a very good book. In 1949. The state of the world and of the economic discipline has changed enormously since then. Perhaps you’d like to read about it.
This is what confuses me about Libertarians: they pretend to be intellectually superior while making claims that are nothing more than juvenile fantasies of how the world should work without a basic reality check. That whole rant sounds like someone with a raging case of blind hero worship and not anything like a reasoned or realistic assessment.
Pot meet kettle…
Rand Paul wishes he were on par with Sarah Palin in intellect. Even good ol’ goin’ rogue Palin wouldn’t say the kinds of aggressively stupid things Rand on Ron Paul regularly come up with.
For what it’s worth, I also agree with substantially nothing Bryan Caplan does. But I still think he is quite on point in his essay I linked, if entirely too charitable.
Holy Cow. And I thought Atlas Shrugged was long boring and irrelevant.
I’ve got a degree in law and economics and I’m gonna guess that there are a lot of folks on this board that can talk circles around me on those two topics without any formal training in those areas.
I like Libertarians better than Republicans. They are internally consistent and their philosophy works really well as long as everyone else thinks like them.
They also really believe in what they are saying. Republicans on the other hand adopt libertarian catch phrases when libertarian philosophies support their positiona dn abandon them when they don’t.
Rand Paul is light years smarter than Palin and a lot more intellectually honest. it doesn’t make Libertarianism any less crazy (or any more racist). If Rand Paul (and Ron Paul for that matter) gets pilloried it should be because they are batsh!t crazy.
Here’s one problem with Rand Pauls response in the interview. The South would have been perfectly happy to continue to practice segregation even if it wasn’t required by law, these businesses did fine for a century without any black (or integrationist) customers, I reckon they would have continued to do so. Segregation would exist today in large swatches of the South if the federal government hadn’t stepped in and told private parties to knock it off.
If Woolworths was segregated, Libertarians might not have eaten at their lunch counter but there are a whole group of people that wouldn’t have eaten anywhere else.
That doesn’t seem to be the direction home prices took when neighborhoods became integrated. In some places white people had money and black people didn’t and you didn’t really care about losing the black customer as much as you were about lsoing the racist white customer.
I’m not so sure it would depress prices.
Also, back then there were real estate laws that allowed you to prevent your neighbor from selling to blacks.
In other cases developers would include the restriction on the deeds in a new development so that white people (who could frequently pay more) would move in. These were private contracts and gosh darn it if people would only respect the right to contract, then these racist neighborhoods in the south would have withered on their own because Libertarians would not have bought those houses.
Well because human beings are behaving incorrectly, if they read Mises and Hayek, then they would all evolve into homo-economicus and we would all be John Galt.
Its not even nice in theory when you can’t identify HOW you would balance the budget. I spend a lot more time than most staring at the budget trying to figure out if we will be able to close the gap before inflation kicks in but until I start seeing people who promote death panels (cutting medicare benefits) and raising taxes I don’t see how we are ever going to balance the budget over the long term (any idea how much it would cost to fully fund the present value of our medicare liabilities, this bailout is frikking peanuts).
It was Washington, the greatest leader who ever lived because he could have been king and chose not to.
Its hard for Ron (or rand) because they have crazy in the genes.