So you* didn’t* tell everyone to get their news from breakthematrix.com, rense.com, reason.com, and Lew Rockwell?
Probably because it is. The idea that the CIA is so desperate to fund itself that it has resorted to breaking into Fort Knox and stealing gold bars is absurd.
jrodefeld, it comes down to this: governments and private companies absolutely do unethical things at times. Corporations have sold unsafe or dangerous products and suppressed information to make money (he said to the libertarian), and governments have covered things up and deliberately harmed citizens in situations like Tuskegee. But this is not a reason to oppose vaccination programs. It’s a reason to have a government with minimal secrecy for one thing, and it’s a reason to support strong and credible regulatory agencies (and you’ve taken very mixed views on that second part). What you’re arguing is closer to ‘water fluoridation is a Communist plot.’ You’re not helping yourself by treating this as a realistic possibility.
Did you expect jrod to see any hyperbole in that?
Have you ever seen Ron Paul drink a glass of water?
But, don’t they have to put WATER in all the other stuff you drink?
To be honest, I have no illusion of being able to fight your ignorance on this subject. I posted the Wiki links for the benefit of other participants in the thread, who might vaguely remember the topic from history class, but not recall the details. If one notices the details, it becomes obvious to everyone (except, perhaps, you) that nullification never had any standing, with the Founders or anyone else. It was a trial baloon floated by Jefferson and Madison in the context of a specific political fight, over the Alien & Sedition Act, and went nowhere. It was asserted seriously exactly once, by Calhoun and South Carolina, and again went nowhere. For you to treat it as a viable concept we’ve somehow overlooked is either very bad history or extreme bias.
And, really, this is the sort of thing I had in mind when I compared you to Young Earth Creationists. You sift history, economics and constitutional theory for the nuggets which fit your world view and discard the rest. You like nullification because it reigns in federal government. Never mind that it was never accepted by anybody and isn’t in the Constitution. It fits your script and so is meaningful. For the rest of us, it’s an interesting footnote and nothing more.
As for my personal views, no nullification can’t be right. Article VI (the supremacy clause) means nothing if it is. For better or worse, we’re stuck with the the Supreme Court as arbiter. Nothing else fits the system of checks and balances. BTW, I support medical marijuana, yet recognize the California law is invalid. It’s one of the prices I pay for living in a democracy.
It’s not in the vodka.
Well, that just demonstrates your ignorance. Don’t you see the end result of Keynesianism? Bankruptcy and/or hyperinflation. Thats what happens. They want to patch up the problem with more paper money injected into the economy rather than dealing with the fundamental problems.
The philosophy doesn’t allow for the possibility of ending inflation, paying down the debt or reducing government spending. The result of Keynes’ theories is the creation of MORE inflation, higher debt and more government spending. It can’t be any other way.
But can’t you look ahead and see that EVEN IF the Obama team is able to keep the system together for a while longer, that the end will come one way or another?
Why can you not see this?
You actually make good points. I respect the founders more as philosophers than as presidents. They articulated the concepts of liberty and limited government very well. Frequently they violated their own principles in action. Some were better than others.
And nobody is disputing that slavery is anti libertarian. I don’t see the founders as the be all end all of libertarian thought. Far from it. They are the starting point. They provided the blueprint for our system of government through our Constitution and Bill of Rights. I believe in liberty as a Progressive ideology. As time progessed we abolished slavery, moving towards more freedom. Then we allowed women to vote, more freedom. Then, we passed Civil Rights, more freedom. Now we will allow gays to serve openly and even get married, more freedom. So, freedom is a progressive ideology. Frequently, we have gone in the opposite direction towards more authoritarianism and more violence, thus compromising human liberty. I oppose this course of action.
So, I don’t worship the founders or consider them the ideal libertarian role models. We should expand upon the philosophy they gave us and keep and maintain their goals of liberty and independence and rejection of tyranny in all forms.
We should be progressing towards more freedom of choice for schools, more freedom of choice in health care, less war, less aggression, more tolerance, and less government.
This can, and should evolve over time. But in many ways we have been devolving as a nation for a couple decades now.
Now do YOU understand the point I am making? Studies are important to judging the validity of certain medical procedures, but it is not the ONLY criteria. My point is that there are many experimental procedures that are ground breaking, yet they haven’t been subjected to very many formal studies, frequently due to the hoops that have to be jumped through to get the funding and get accepted through the primary channels.
This does not mean they aren’t valid or there isn’t scientific evidence to support them.
What I am saying is that with direct experience a person can verify the success of a treatment like prolotherapy. Not scientifically, but experientially.
The point is that you seem determined to reject out of hand anything that is not “approved” through certain channels like the FDA. These organizations have biases and agendas. There are studies that have been done on prolotherapy that have been rejected by these organizations without a justified reason.
You are closing your mind off to the possibilities of cutting edge medical treatments that are out there.
I am ending the discussion on vaccines. Not because I don’t feel I can make my points, but because I want to refocus the debate on matters of importance.
So, I will not answer any more questions about vaccines. Lets talk about economics, the wars overseas, and how the Democrats are going to get wiped out in November.
These were a few websites that I listed off the top of my head. There are many more that one should read to broaden your perspective. Rense.com does alternative news. Breakthematrix is a standard libertarian posting site. Reason.com is a big time libertarian website and Lew Rockwell’s site is full of great articles from Austrian economists, libertarian thinkers and historians.
There are many more websites I suggested people read, including mises.org.
There are too many to count. I cannot vouch for everything contained in these websites. I personally don’t agree with a lot of it. But reading these websites, and many others, has allowed me to be more informed and ahead of current issues far better than the mainstream sources I used to read.
What is your big complaint about a suggestion of websites to broaden your perspective?
As to the Fort Knox gold issue, you are not opposed to a full audit to determine IF the gold is there, are you?
We should find out once and for all. What is your opinion on that?
Well, its a reason to make sure that government is involved in medical care to the least possible degree. Any private corporation that harms somebody obviously should be held accountable. But I want to know that I only trust my own doctor to recommend treatments. If he recommends a vaccine, I will take it. But I don’t want pressure from the government or the WHO to make me take a vaccine and scare everyone on the news about H1N1 that killed far less people than the regular flu.
This only arouses peoples suspicions. Most people trust their doctor. Nobody I know trusts the government. I don’t want a centrally managed government controlled medical system. I am vehemently and morally opposed to such a system.
I know all this. But you are wrong that there weren’t any founders that believed in Nullification. That is patently false. I want to point you to an article written for Campaign for Liberty by Robert Hawes.
Here it is: Campaign for Liberty - Reclaim the Republic. Restore the Constitution.
…
Continued in the next post
Continued from last post
I am sure you haven’t given the idea of Nullification much thought. But what are your impressions of the information contained in the above article? I would be very interested to hear you answer.
What the fuck is this in relation to? If I recall correctly you were defending inflation. I have answered this question already, you just apparently missed it.
This is the dumbest question I have ever heard. No, I don’t want to take away anyones house. And I am certainly not in favor of “giving them to the rich”. You really have no idea what you are talking about.
There is no contradiction, inflation is a monetary phenomenon. I am saying that when there is inflation the RESULT is prices go up.
Yes, but if we had sound money and NO inflation the poor would have very little debt. Yes right now your house payment may be beneficial in paying off certain kinds of debt (which you wouldn’t have with sound money) but what about groceries and goods and services you need to buy? Those are going up and people are hurting as a result. What about people on fixed incomes? You don’t think they are hurt by inflation?
This is such an academic question that is incredibly obvious to anyone with even a cursory understanding of Austrian economics. But, for your benefit, why don’t you read these two articles on the true harms of inflation:
http://mises.org/efandi/ch18.asp
Did you get that? When will this information sink in to your head?
No, not true at all. First of all, as I have explained before, the minimum wage does not rise at the rate of inflation. Again, read the links above. It is not worth going over for the thousandth time the harm caused by inflation. The information is written down here. Reread it if you need to.
Not true. Did you actually read the article? The article ends on a note indicating that we SHOULDN’T believe government statistics and shows how the government is fudging the figures constantly. It ends like this:
You suffer from a major reading comprehension problem if you cannot get that this article is stating that government figures are not to be trusted and that the CPI constantly UNDERESTIMATES the true rate of inflation.
Read it again. And read other articles on mises.org. Read them until you completely understand inflation.
The problem is that the people who will lose their homes (not everyone, certainly) are going to lose their homes in the long run no matter what. They couldn’t afford the home they are in in the first place. You should be blaming Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, as well as predatory lending practices and Alan Greenspan who inflated the housing bubble for why people are losing their houses. Ron Paul argued that we shouldn’t have built up a housing bubble in the first place.
We cannot simply patch this thing together and expect that no one will feel pain. It will be hard on everyone. But it is time to bite the bullet and do the right thing for the future of America. That means we must liquidate the toxic assets and cut spending across the board. Government cannot save us this time. If they try to they will risk hyperinflation.
I don’t WANT to see an economic situation where people will lose their homes, but that is where we are. Blame Greenspan, blame Bernanke, blame Congress, but don’t blame me or Ron Paul, who would have avoided this whole mess if we would have listened to him.
This is a very poor argument you are putting forth. Didn’t it occur to you that in a system with sound money and no inflation, people wouldn’t owe huge amounts of debt? In such a system savings would be encouraged and debt would be discouraged, the opposite of today. The transition to such a system would be painful, but the long term gain is worth it.
I’m sure if you thought about what you are saying here and read a bit more from Mises and the Austrians (the TRUE experts on inflation and the harm it causes) you would see how foolish what you are saying really is.
This is hilariously naive! Poverty has been eliminated in at least one Capitalist society has it? No it fucking hasn’t. How many incredibly poor people are involved in making the computer you’re typing this idiocy on? Exported poverty is still poverty in the system, or do they not count because they aren’t American?
And arguing that Capitalism doesn’t require poor people just highlights your complete lack of understanding about basic economics and inflation. Being poor is relative, afterall.
I’ll try to explain it to you. Anything that requires labour to produce (so everything basically) has a labour cost. Whether you can afford to buy something largely depends on the disparity between what you earn and the what the people making it earn (all through the chain, including resource mining, company administration etc). If you are poor, bottom 20% of earnings for instance, then everybody else is richer than you and so everything is much less affordable. That’s what being poor IS.
Here you say ‘BUT, even poor people these days have TV’s? what about that?’ and I say stop being such a US centric idiot. How many poor people in China helped make that TV? I bet they can’t afford TVs.
Capitalism REQUIRES a high wealth disparity or there would be nobody to clean the toilets. This inevitably leads to having poor people, and though this can be offset somewhat by improved productivity through mechanisation there will always be poor people.
Yet you just hand wave it away as if free-market economics is some sort of magic fucking wand. Put the ideology aside and think about what you say instead of just parrotting Libertarian nonsense.
So you are arguing that any and all prior government growth was precipitated upon an altruistic desire to “fix” society, therefore it was justified? No politician, banker or corporation had any ulterior motives? How naive can you get?
The Federal Reserve CAUSED the Great Depression, as explained elsewhere. The fact that people were doing badly in the 30s was BECAUSE of government intervention.
This is really astounding though: It was to save lives that the Constitution was ignored.
Oh, really? If you studied the history of the period you would discover that Roosevelt’s policies made the Depression worse and prevented a true recovery for more than a decade so I am not convinced that his motivations were completely pure in nature.
Even if this was true, after the crisis period was over and people WERE’NT starving anymore, it would mean that power should be abolished on Constitutional grounds, right?
Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser and others lived and worked during the late 19th century. They, especially Menger, constituted the First Wave of the Austrian School. They formulated the theories and laid the groundwork for the greatest economic school ever devised. They were acutely aware of the triumphs and problems of the time period.
Böhm-Bawerk, another earlier Austrian, wrote extensive critiques of Marx in the 1880s and 1890s.
I have read books from each.
There certainly WERE problems during the time period, but they did not arise from the things you have been told.
I suggest you read some of the works authored by these men.
Why not improve upon that? Maybe we could try enjoying a high standard of living without financing it with crushing levels of debt. This “prosperity” you see could be wiped out overnight with a currency crisis.
And, like I’ve said before, the prosperity we DO enjoy is DESPITE the governments involvement in the marketplace, not BECAUSE of it.
The debt issues is critical though, both at the national level and the individual level.
The poverty figures have stayed the same over the past forty years.
The quality of eduction has gone down, health care quality has gone down, we are fighting losing war after losing war, including a failing war on drugs and our entitlement system is bankrupt. We have had stagflation in the 70s, corporatism in the 80s, NAFTA and the repeal of Glass Steagal in the 90s and the economic problems we face today.
If that qualifies as success to you, I don’t want to know what failure looks like.
Violence is inherently anti libertarian. I don’t condone it. The issue for me is not to defend the Industrial Revolution, but to defend free markets and the notion that on the whole the Industrial Revolution was beneficial to all people, and this is proved by the statistics.
There were quite a few things that were imperfect about conditions in the 19th century, but too much Free Enterprise was not one of them. Having very little inflation was not one of them. Not having a central bank and not engaging in continual wars of aggression was not the source of our problems.
So, the justification for such things is reduced to patent absurdity.
I guess I should respond to the rest too.
I think treatments that actively harm patients should be banned. Such as prescribing dangerous and ineffective drugs or banging people on the head with a rock to relieve their migranes. But that is probably not ‘free’ enough for you, because you would still need the FDA to do that.
That is a fair argument. As I said, I’m not ideologically attached to the minimum wage and I could be persuaded that it does more harm than good.
I cannot believe how many people have explained this to you and you still don’t understand. The value of one dollar is completely irrelevant, talking about ‘the value of money going up’ is meaningless.
This iat least makes sense, as long as you remember many regulations are there for very good reasons. Places like China compete by having less regulations but then they also have many more industral accidents, deaths and generally worse worker welfare. Be careful what you wish for.
Who do you think the government is exploiting? I’ll help you out here: taxation is not exploitation.
What if the majority don’t care? What the boycotts cost less to the bottom line than changing the company’s exploitative policies? Boycotts simply don’t work as a means of addressing these sorts of issues.
It wouldn’t be a sudden jump, but it would certainly be a trend in certain industries. You only have to look at the way things are done in manufacturing in the third/developing world to see that.
I never claimed that. But do you really think that something like that wouldn’t be a danger? Given peoples and America’s history of mass xenophobic hysteria. Hint: See McCarthyism.
That may be your opinion, but you’re completely wrong.
Oh please. Like whom? History is full of a lot more people who have been exploited to death by rich land-owners, factory owners and employers acting without regulation.
Maybe, perhaps they also make money by providing the loans and investment necessary to encourage business creation and expansion?
Is there inheritance tax in your Libertarian Utopia? What is to stop all of the wealth accumulating in a small collection of hereditory family fortunes? That is what has happened every time government regulation has been absent in the past, after all.
You think all of this without any proof but your usual hand-waving and reliance on your fantasy concept of human nature. You have offered nothing that remotely persuades me that any of this would be true.
This is a bunch of bullshit and you know better. I have addressed these unfounded smears elsewhere but one by one:
the belief that black people are inferior: Absolutely false. Never in my life have I done anything of the sort.
that violence against Mexicans is good: Nope. Another baseless smear. I don’t advocate violence against anyone.
that Jews are involved in all kinds of conspiracies: This is a vast oversimplification. Some bankers, who happen to be Jewish, are involved in some secret plans. You take this information and call me an antisemite.
that the Holocaust was a hoax: I NEVER said this ever. I don’t believe this and any link that may have included such a thought I repudiate completely.
that Hitler and the Nazis were good people: You just pulled this one straight out of your ass. I have criticized FDR in a few ways which you confuse with supporting Hitler. An embarrassing smear that no one really believes.
that the NAFTA Superhighway, the Amero, and the North American Union are all read (you mean real?): Yes on another thread I gave information to the effect that I believe there are people who are or were working to eventually dissolve US sovereignty to form a larger nation in a few ways, primarily by replacing the currency. There is a big difference between there being plans bated around out there and it being an imminent threat. From my research it is a possibility and we should resist such an effort. This hardly makes me crazy to be concerned about sovereignty.
that vaccinations are bad for people; that homeopathy, herbal cures, and other quack therapies are good for people; Not quite. A VAST oversimplification. What I said was vaccines should be mandatory and there should be no limit to the alternative doctors people can see if they so choose. No federal limits or control of alternative medicine.
This is not quite the way you said it because you are a pathological liar.
that FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance: Yes, I believe that. I have read MUCH information to that effect and have watched several documantaries that indicate such. It would not be that shocking to be proven true. Even Judge Andrew Napolitano shares evidence that suggests that FDR knowingly maneuvered the Japanese into attack Pearl Harbor to justify entry into the war. And there are other mainstream historians that believe this.
You haven’t given this ANY thought whatsoever. You just brushed it off without a second thought. If you looked you would see the evidence is overwhelming.
that President Obama practices mind control: Another one you just pulled from your ass. Do you like making up stories about other people? Do you wish to have any credibility at all?
that the Jews are responsible for starting World War II; More bullshit. I never said any such thing, nor did any link I posted.
that the Freemasons are responsible for starting World War II; Wrong again. Sigh.
that the Democrats were responsible for starting World War II; that Satan Worshipers were responsible for starting World War II; I see you are trying to be funny but I know my history far better than you do so you will be eating these words when you discover the truth.
that Ron Paul would make a good President Another attempt at humor. Of COURSE I think Ron Paul would make a good president. Why wouldn’t he?
that David Duke would make a good President; I never said that. You still think somehow you can search the furthest recesses of each and every website I link to and say that I believe the same thing. Of course this is dishonest, but you don’t care do you? You get off on this kind of mud slinging. I’d rather focus on substantial debate but you are having none of that. You resort to name calling.
that racists such as Thomas Woods, Lew Rockwell, and David Rense are the only reliable sources of information: Its Jeff Rense, by the way. And NONE of these men are racists in any way. You have provided NO information that proves they are racist. You have nothing.
that basic things such as the CPI and medical information are part of some far-reaching government conspiracy: Yeah because it is completely far out to think that the government fudges its figures and is not to be trusted in certain areas :rolleyes: Please try spending a little more time on planet earth.
that women and homosexuals are conspiring to neuter men by dumping chemicals in the drinking water; More complete bullshit. I don’t even know where you got this one from.
that global warming is a hoax; that global warming is not a hoax but that the government is using it to take away our freedoms I passionately believe in global warming. I also believe the government will use this issue to pursue other ends, including a sacrifice of our liberties. Nothing crazy about this belief. I just have other ways of proposing we protect the environment.
So, a good 90% of the things you accuse me of are completely made up bullshit. The other 10% you simply misunderstand what I am saying.
None of this matters to my larger points. I want to challenge this notion that you have a long history of fighting for smaller government. I want to see some evidence of such. Humor me and list the top ten areas that you would role back government power and authority.
But before that, if you had any decency, you would apologize for calling me a racist and anti mexican (completely baseless assertions) and for misunderstanding what I am saying 90% of the time. We can disagree but gentlemen don’t resort to immature slandering and casting aspersions without merit.