Ron Paul: Worst Candidate for Any Public Office, Anywhere in the World, in All of History

Fortunately for all things good and holy, the Ron Paul movement has become all but irrelevant lately. But the support base for Paul was such a strange alliance of totally ignorant hippies and right-wing nuts, that I feel it still bears commenting on. Maybe this way we can prevent such a travesty from ever happening again.

I have taken what follows directly from Paul's website, and I have tried not to quote anything out of context.

“The people know much better how to spend their money than the government."

Even traditional microeconomics recognizes many instances in which government action is more efficient that private sector activity - so called "public goods." Because these goods cannot be denied to anyone if they are provided to anyone, they are subject to free-rider problems and therefore must be funded coercively out of taxes. So returns on public sector investment can be higher than returns on private sector investment in many cases. All this cheap rhetoric about how inefficient government is is really tired. Open up a microeconomics book.

But beyond public goods, redistribution of wealth is a moral imperative. Of course people "know better" how to spend their own money for their own benefit - they'd spend it on themselves rather that give it someone who needs it more. Because they would not willingly do this, the government must make them do it.

Finally, the "people" have more control over, and common cause with, the government, through the democratic process than they do over the massive concentrations of private wealth ammased by select individuals and business entities. The Walton family is not "the people."

Working Americans like lower taxes. So do I. Lower taxes benefit all of us, creating jobs and allowing us to make more decisions for ourselves about our lives.

Of course everyone likes lower taxes on them. What an insight! But, according to polls, more people believe that the rich not paying their share is a bigger problem than them paying too much. Lower taxes benefit the people who have their taxes lowered at the expense of those who receive public services that get cut. And in some cases public sector investment is actually way more efficient.

Whether a tax cut reduces a single mother’s payroll taxes by $40 a month or allows a business owner to save thousands in capital gains taxes and hire more employees, that tax cut is a good thing. Lower taxes allow more spending, saving, and investing which helps the economy — that means all of us...

To suggest that these twp scenarios are the same is an insult to our intelligence. Capital gains are taxed at lower rates than single mothers' labor income, which is a joke. Lower taxes are good if and only if the programs that get cut weren't of more social value than the additional private sector activity that flows from a tax cut. This is not an obvious proposition, and requires a case-by-case analysis of the economic and moral pros and cons.

And of course, the supply-side theories that lower taxes lead unequivocally to greater economic growth are demonstrably false.

It is an outrage that waiters, waitresses, and other service-sector employees have to pay taxes on the tips they earn. The IRS makes an estimate of how much service-sector workers will make in tips, and taxes them on it even if the taxpayer did not actually earn as much as the IRS' estimate!

Tips provide a substantial portion of the income of many service-sector employees, many of whom are young people just trying to make a few extra dollars to get through school, or single parents often balancing two jobs while trying to make enough to raise a family. This tax amounts to nothing more than the federal government punishing these employees for working hard and doing their jobs well."

This really may be the stupidest thing I've ever heard anyone say. Tips are obviously compensation for services. Compensation for services is income. Income is subject to income tax. What is the problem? Why should people who earn more of their pay in the form of wages be taxed more than people who earn their compensation through tips? You want to help "working people," increase the sort of public services that make social mobility possible (education, health care, etc.) and make their effective tax rate lower than the tax rate of freakin' billionaires.

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"In addition, the Federal Reserve, our central bank, fosters runaway debt by increasing the money supply — making each dollar in your pocket worth less. The Fed is a private bank run by unelected officials who are not required to be open or accountable to 'we the people.'”

This is superficially an okay point in the narrow sense that the Fed Chairman and Governors are unelected and are therefore arguably not subject to sufficient public accountability. But Paul is disingenuous. What does he suggest? A "hard money" system, like a gold standard. Right, because central bankers are not responsive to the public, we should use the totally arbitrary price of a precious metal to determine our money supply and interest rates. Gold prices are really responsive to popular demands.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with even a moderate amount of inflation. It has no negative effect on economic growth until it gets to be over 50%/yr. We're clocking at about 3.5% last time I checked. It's cool, we'll be okay.

...

"NAFTA’s superhighway is just one part of a plan to erase the borders between the U.S. and Mexico, called the North American Union. This spawn of powerful special interests, would create a single nation out of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, with a new unelected bureaucracy and money system. Forget about controlling immigration under this scheme.

And a free America, with limited, constitutional government, would be gone forever.

Let’s not forget the UN. It wants to impose a direct tax on us. I successfully fought this move in Congress last year, but if we are going to stop ongoing attempts of this world government body to tax us, we will need leadership from the White House."

Besides my plan to create a North American Union, there is no serious plan to unite Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. And pretty much all other first-world countries enjoy civil liberties and non-authoritarian government.

And this guy is seriously playing the "U.N. Card." Yeah, the U.N. is way too powerful. They almost have enough money to hire janitors for the U.N. building. How dare they insist they we pay our arrear dues!!?

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"The federal government will not suddenly become efficient managers if universal health care is instituted. Government health care only means long waiting periods, lack of choice, poor quality, and frustration. Many Canadians, fed up with socialized medicine, come to the U.S. in order to obtain care. Socialized medicine will not magically work here."

A single payer system does not involve government "management." It involves government reimbursement for services provided by either a private or public health care provider. The government has shown itself to be quite efficient at this, as overhead constitutes 1% of the SSA's budget and 3% of Medicare's budget (compared to 30% for private insurers). And what makes "bureaucrats" so efficient just because you take down the sign that says "The Government" on the building and put out a sign that says, "Freakbone Insurance Co."? You still work in an office crunching numbers and actuarial tables and you still evaluate the same kinds of claims. Big enterprises always have some amount of bureaucracy and inefficiency, but this is not a private vs. public sector thing.

And please, our system is so much worse than Canada's. You know what the problem with Canada's health system is? They don't fund it enough, so its too much like our system. But they have far better access and far better outcomes than we have, at a fraction of the overall cost.

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"My commitment to ensuring home schooling remains a practical alternative for American families is unmatched by any Presidential candidate.

Returning control of education to parents is the centerpiece of my education agenda. As President I will advance tax credits through the Family Education Freedom Act, which reduces taxes to make it easier for parents to home school by allowing them to devote more of their own funds to their children’s education.

I am committed to guaranteeing parity for home school diplomas and advancing equal scholarship consideration for students entering college from a home school environment.

We must have permanency in the Department of Defense Home School Tier 1 Pilot Program, providing recruitment status parity for home school graduates. I will use my authority to prevent the Department of Education from regulating home school activities.

I will veto any legislation that creates national standards or national testing for home school parents or students."


This silliness speaks for itself. But I think its funny that a "libertarian" is going to somehow force the private sector to give equal weight to a home school diploma.

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"It is the federal government that most divides us by race, class, religion, and gender. Through its taxes, restrictive regulations, corporate subsidies, racial set-asides, and welfare programs, government plays far too large a role in determining who succeeds and who fails. Government "benevolence" crowds out genuine goodwill by institutionalizing group thinking, thus making each group suspicious that others are receiving more of the government loot. This leads to resentment and hostility among us.

Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than as individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism.

The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence - not skin color, gender, or ethnicity."

Okay. Once again, this gibberish is so nonsensical that it doesn't really need a retort. But I will fashion one anyway.

It sounds like Paul is saying that, by using the federal government, a little bit, and only intermittently, over the last 40 years to help poor people and minorities out, it has hurt them. That's truly Orwellian in its ass-backwards reasoning. There have surely been some bad policies over the years that operated to the detriment of minorities, but the solution to this is to replace bad policies with good policies, not to repudiate government altogether. And without the federal government we'd still be in the Jim Crow South, so there's that.

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"The key to sound environmental policy is respect for private property rights. The strict enforcement of property rights corrects environmental wrongs while increasing the cost of polluting. "

I get it. Wait till someone has done the damage (rather than prevent it to begin with through environmental laws), and then let someone sue them in court. So you will need to be able to hire counsel competent to take on big shot corporate lawyers in order to vindicate your rights, and we will leave the whole thing to the murky concept of "nuisance" in tort law. Eminently sensible.

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"The United States invaded Iraq under false pretenses without a constitutionally-required declaration of war. Our Founders understood that how we go to war is as important as when we go to war, which is why they vested the power to declare war in the Legislative Branch. The resolution passed in Congress authorizing the president to use force in Iraq said nothing about the U.S. Constitution, but it mentioned the United Nations a dozen times. The United States should never go to war to enforce UN resolutions!"

No one in their right mind thinks the Iraq War was a good idea anymore. But it was a bad idea because it was a bad idea, not because it the Constitution doesn't say, "Article XXI: Congress Shall Have the Right to Invade Iraq at All Times and for No Reason." This thread of Constitutional fundamentalism runs deep throughout all of Paul's positions, and it's just about the strangest form of anachronism worship I can think of. The Constitutional Framers were not even close to all-knowing, and they could not have possibly foreseen the needs of government 200+ years later. Let's use our own judgment about what we need and not try to divine what Thomas Jefferson would have had us do after he was done screwing slaves.

And I like the U.N. dig. Good call