Why does every RP thread degenerate into this kind of ignorant mockery? I haven't seen a hint of tinfoil in here. One of my friends from HS is Jewish and she's an avid RP supporter. In fact, Paul was one of the few people in the 80s who supported Israel's decision to strike a nuclear reactor in Iraq. He just doesn't think that foreign lobby groups should be able to influence our foreign policy and undermine our own sovereignty. Nor does he think we should enter into treaties and international alliances that would override our own laws. What the hell is so crazy about that?
Oh, I totally grant that many people get in over their heads and that the whole bigger-is-better culture gets a lot of people into trouble, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about reasonable luxuries like a good education, affordable health care, savings for retirement, and quality food and energy costs for summer and winter. And having just gone through college and seen tuition hikes every year at percentages far exceeding the rate of inflation, I am convinced that this is a far broader issue than you are giving credit for. My statement that we now "need" two jobs to maintain the standard of living we once enjoyed is exactly that. I'm not buying this substitution crap that Keynesians do where they eliminate all luxuries from life, going from steak to hamburger to dog food, lower the average family size, and then pretend that people were just greedy before and we didn't real *need* anything better than cheap hamburger, 1 kid, some credit cards with no savings, and more blankets in the winter.
So you admit that fiat currencies fail even when competing with one another, because it's success is dependent on behavior which can become complacent or corrupt even when it's winning? Great, let's go back to a gold standard then and let everyone else inflate. That IS how we initially became the reserve currency of the world, isn't it?
I do believe that banks are the only industry allowed to loan out a ghost product that doesn't exist and earn interest on it. But I wasn't even advocating getting rid of it, I was trying to point out that there is a responsibility as a depositor, and if you deposit with a bank that pulls this shit, tough luck. The bank is going to get crushed, too, and maybe that will cause other banks to follow more prudent standards (bankruptcy tends to do that). Problem is, when it happens and it hurts people, they're not going to feel that way about it, they'll want their money back. Then they'll accept a law that promises to bail them out in 1913 and get far worse in return. It's human nature to be idealist and believe in utopia rather than accepting a system with maximal costs and minimal benefits. It's just like when people call for gun bans after gun deaths. They don't realize they're already living in the best system and try to ban guns to achieve no crime. Then it INCREASES crime because they were blind to the deterrent that existed with guns which prevented many crimes from even happening, and that doesn't show up in statistics. So they effectively vote for something worse for them out of idealism.
The business cycle experiences these severe shifts and I think it's naive to think that the Fed has no part in them. Greenspan was encouraging this behavior until he finally saw the bubble himself. I don't believe that he knew all along, only the result of the political pressures of avoiding recessions, which are NECESSARY parts of a self-correcting economy, but no politician or person wants the negative feedback of such an event. People were calling for Volcker's head when he did it because they couldn't see that he was really correcting someone else's fuck up. This is the human behavior aspect of economics that is so powerful and can't be discounted even though Keynesians try to treat it entirely mathematically. If you think lowering interest rates and creating "exuberant" demand in another sector to avoid a savings retrenchment in the economy is a good enablement for the Fed to have, then it's going to happen. This stuff is so complex with the delays and illusory bubble growth and the encouragement. We are only now beginning to see that 90s inflation move out of those bubbles and into commodities because Greenspan managed to keep it diverted into two bubbles which are now popped. I can't imagine how you would expect an economically ignorant populace to see this stuff before it happens. The enablement has to be destroyed.
Says many a person in China and Cuba. Look, the reason this country lasted as long as it did and was as prosperous as it was was largely because of our fairly thorough constitution at its inception. Those views of those intellectuals largely got it right. It was an atypical scenario in who they were and how they won. The constitution they wrote limited what government could do right away and allowed us the defense your speak of with guns and political dissent. I see a purpose in supreme law, maybe you don't, but you don't seem too concerned at the moment to know that they ignore many parts of it, gold among them. And if you're okay with them ignoring rather than amending, then what precedent does that set in your mind for other things? So you're obviously only conditionally concerned with violations of supreme law. And when I bring up somebody like Paul who is apparently "radical" in his strict adherence to it, you don't want to follow your own advice and vote for them. Whatever, dude. I agree in the end, we are masters of our own destiny and every country deserves the government it deserves, good and hard. And you're getting it.
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