"Resolved: Ron Paul, as US President, would be disastrous for America."

[packbat]

Being a liberal Republican, it is meet* for me to state my stance on Ron Paul.

I believe that Ron Paul would be a terrible President for the reasons cited here. Most prominently among these are:

• The gold standard would lead to economic turmoil (not to mention devastate industries which use gold),
  
• The abolition of the income tax would cripple the federal government,
  
• A law to prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on an issue is un-American, even when it is not explicitly intended to bolster prejudice,
  
• Racism - be it against black men in DC or immigrants throughout America - is wrong, (edit: I cannot defend this claim; I withdraw it.) and
  
• Undermining modern medicine would destroy millions of lives in the most brutal fashion.

Citations for Ron Paul's support of each of these are in the link.

* "Meet" meaning suitable, proper, appropriate. It's standard.

Comments

[roaminrob.livejournal.com]

I like your formatting better than the one I use. I'm going to steal it a little. :-)

Gold Standard:
> I nevertheless remain far from convinced that it is even feasible...
I don't think it's feasible in the short term, but I do think that a plan could be created that would do it. My understanding is that there are some intermediate money systems that would put us on a kind of "partial" gold standard.

> ...for one thing, the amount of gold in circulation is worth approximately $1 trillion U.S. right now...

Mostly because the U.S. dollar has devalued sharply in the last several years. Deflation would fix that number in our favor.

Income Tax:
> I posted a couple links in a comment upthread...

Yeah, I was trying to avoid revisiting anonymous dude's arguments. I don't recall anything there that I specifically disagreed with, but, like you, I dislike dealing with people that won't put their name on what they say.

>Like it or not, we can't cut one trillion U.S. dollars from the budget any time soon.

Immediately, no, but it could be done. I have mixed feelings on this one, admittedly. As I mentioned earlier, I'm furious at the mishandling of funds and the continued upward spiral in taxes. I would like to believe that we could simply dramatically cut the income tax, and continue funding for projects where it made sense to do so. I think the libertarians are badly misguided when they think that free marketism will solve any social problem. That said, I also think that any amount of income tax leaves the door open to continued abuse, and eliminating it altogether more effectively shuts that door.

So, frankly, I don't have a good solution here. What I do know is that I'm sick of contributing 40% of my wages to a series of governments that spends way too much of that money -- my money -- on projects which I am vehemently opposed to. I have played around with the idea of voluntary taxes, and I think we have the technology now to make that feasible, but I don't know of anybody that's done that so I can't be sure that it would work. Essentially, wage earners would have the option of saying, "I want 25% of my taxes to go to Federal Public Health and Welfare, 30% to go to Federal Research, 15% for State and Local...", etc.

>In addition, the whole "starve the beast" plan seems actively wrongheaded.

Why? We're supposed to remove politicians from office when they act against the public interest or commit crimes. Why not say, "You used my tax money to wage an illegal war, so I'm denying you any further funding"?

[peri-renna.livejournal.com]

I think I'll have to put off replying to these - I've spent too much time on my laptop today already. Be sure to ping me if I don't respond for a while. ;)