Ron Paul’s Farewell Address: The Internet Can Stop Big Government

You like the drug war? NDAA? Patriot Act? Massive debt and unfunded liabilities? Corporate welfare and bank bailouts? Constant war and policing of the globe? Secret kill lists? FBI raids of dairy farmers? Rendition and torture? Please explain to me how voting for Obama or Romney (and thus their support of those policies) is not crazy in comparison to Paul's policies. After you do that, I'll continue this conversation, but not before.

• Has no clue how the banking system works. Even the Cato Institute called him "incoherent". http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/dec/...

• To lower the cost of health care he says we need to increase competition by increasing the availability of quack medicine (specifically homeopathic medicine) over science-based medicine. http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-09-24/ron-paul-we-need-true-comp...

• Has repeatedly introduced legislation to reduce the scope of the First Amendment's establishment clause so that it would not apply to state and local government, and to remove Federal recognition of a right to privacy. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:H.R.539:

• His budget plan proposed immediate massive cuts in research in science and medicine, and didn't have anything allocated for the National Science Foundation or NASA. Also immediately eliminated programs for the poor (specifically the woman, infant, and children supplemental nutrition program and the low income home energy assistance program). (No cite, because his site appears to have taken down the page that had the budget plan).

• Voted to block the USDA from even considering the possibility that there might be climate change and trying to figure out what impact that could have on the US food supply and the mission of the USDA. http://tinyurl.com/albm229 Here is what Paul wanted to stop: http://www.ocio.usda.gov/directives/doc/DR1070-001.pdf

Sounds like a crazy guy to me.

It's impossible in many cases to identify the source of pollution. For instance, suppose I'm a farmer and acid rain is damaging my crops. The source could be polluters hundreds or thousands of miles away. Proving that any specific polluter was the source of the pollution that hit my farm is simply not feasible.

The tort approach in essence says it is OK to pollute as much as you want as long as your pollution will be dispersed enough so that no particular victim can trace the pollution on their land back to you.

Another problem with it is that cleaning up pollution can be very expensive, so that it would not be uncommon for those polluters who can actually be identified sufficiently to be sued to not have enough money to cover the damages they cause.

The tort approach simply cannot deal with the problem. As Friedrich Hayek (one of the leading libertarian economists) noted in his book "The Road to Serfdom": "Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism. But the fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created, does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function".

Yes, it's bananas crazy. Fiat money won everywhere because it outcompeted the gold standard just like mixed economies won everywhere because they outcompeted libertarianism. The story is the same for every single frontier town in the us, brazil and every other country -- more government or ghost town.

"And a lot of those aren't policies, you know. "

Those are all policy positions. Playing semantic games isn't going to change that.

""You still haven't told me what policies I wrote about above are objectionable to you""

Because the question was which Ron Paul policies are crazy. I answered that, don't move the goalposts.

"After you do that, I'll continue this conversation, but not before."

You seem to have mistaken my replies as leverage that you can take this subthread hostage for your tangent. I don't care if you continue. The fact that I don't like the Patriot Act and many other things the government does doesn't mean I'm ready to throw out the many good things it does which outweigh this by many orders of magnitude. I'm certainly not ready to chuck the mixed economy so we can go back to feudalism.

On top of being a clueless pie in the sky Randian, Ron Paul is a social issue troglodyte whose own newsletters and repeated ties to white supremacist groups should disqualify him from consideration for anything ever by any rational American.