The Ron Paul Thread

[DjEep]

Bolshevist!

[upnorthman]

I am still getting emails and there are some strong words here as always, thoughts?

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,



Ron Paul

[Quadratrückseite]

This is the man who should be on the ballot, not McCain. That's what I think.

[3072]

This is the man who should be on the ballot, not McCain. That's what I think.

Given the choices of the running candidates that we have to choose from.. at the end of the day, he maybe the the best one out of the bunch!

[BellePlaine]

Although I've heard of Ron Paul during the elections, I didn't (and still don't) know a dang thing about him other then some of his supporters seemed to be very, say "energic" with their support for him. Last night I stumbled upon some YouTube videos of his responses during the 08 debates and it sparked my interest. Now I found this thread and am going to read through it (wow, 28 pages!) to find out what my IAC friends think about him. I'm sure that I'll have questions and thoughts along the way.

[Velokid1]

1 year ago if you googled RP, you got nothing but his website and then a bazillion people talking about him being a quack.

Now if you google him, you get pages and pages of really great discussion of him, the bulk of it supportive.

I no longer feel a US with RP as president would be what we need, but I would like to see him in the VP spot or to otherwise have the ear of the President.

I have long recognized though that there are tons of people who consider themselves conservative or independent whose views line up with RP's and they have no idea. They go on and on about shit, sounding just like Ron Paul, and yet when you ask if they support him, "Oh no way, god no... he's a quack!"

Now that we've all bounced violently between an inept GOP and a castrated Dem Party, I think Ron Paul is going to be a very big force in the next few years.

[BellePlaine]

I like Ron Paul because he values liberty which to me is a very common sense philosophy. I’m almost finished reading his latest book titled, End The Fed where he makes the argument that the Federal Reserve is too blame for our economic bubbles which will always burst. For instance, when the Fed fixes low interest rates, not only is it discouraging to savers, but it creates an illusion that risky loans are not as risky as they might seem. The Fed does this by creating credit out of thin air which is basically printing money and devaluing the system. Of course, the big crisis will hit when our dollar loses enough value that other countries have bought enough of our assets that they don’t want anymore and want repayment.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the book that I found interesting…

As the years rolled on, it became more apparent to me that the leadership for a return to sound money would never come from the U.S. Congress. Of course, Congress could abolish the Fed tomorrow if it wanted to. The representatives’ ignorance of economics, as well as the benefits they enjoy from irresponsible spending, prevent this. Our leaders will only respond when the people of this country rise up and demand honesty in money.

Of course, not every supporter of the Fed is somehow a participant in a conspiracy to control the world. Everyone who wants to control the world, however, whether for the benefits of gaining wealth or power, must have control of the monetary system. It’s been that way throughout history. The greater the degree of freedom the people enjoy, the sounder has been the money. Tyranny always goes hand in hand with government’s wrecking of the money system.

The problem is not only a lust for power; ironically, benevolence and humanitarianism drive many to seek power over others. They believe for humanitarian reasons that the strong and wise have an obligation to subject the weak and ignorant to the whims of government control. As the gain more influence and power, they believe that brute force must be used to impose their “goodwill” on the stubborn few. The purpose of freedom vanishes from their minds.

The French Jacobins in the eighteenth century were so convinced that their cause was right that even using the guillotine to enforce their will on others for their alleged own good was legitimate. Some who promoted the Iraq War were motivated in the same manner. They rationalized a humanitarian excuse for the war even as more than 4,000 Americans died and tens of thousands were wounded. The one million Iraqis who died, and hundreds of thousands who were injured, and the millions of refugees were all justified because of the “goodness” the instigators of the war brought to the world.

[steve74baywin]

I like Ron Paul because he values liberty which to me is a very common sense philosophy. I’m almost finished reading his latest book titled, End The Fed where he makes the argument that the Federal Reserve is too blame for our economic bubbles which will always burst. For instance, when the Fed fixes low interest rates, not only is it discouraging to savers, but it creates an illusion that risky loans are not as risky as they might seem. The Fed does this by creating credit out of thin air which is basically printing money and devaluing the system. Of course, the big crisis will hit when our dollar loses enough value that other countries have bought enough of our assets that they don’t want anymore and want repayment.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the book that I found interesting…

As the years rolled on, it became more apparent to me that the leadership for a return to sound money would never come from the U.S. Congress. Of course, Congress could abolish the Fed tomorrow if it wanted to. The representatives’ ignorance of economics, as well as the benefits they enjoy from irresponsible spending, prevent this. Our leaders will only respond when the people of this country rise up and demand honesty in money.

Of course, not every supporter of the Fed is somehow a participant in a conspiracy to control the world. Everyone who wants to control the world, however, whether for the benefits of gaining wealth or power, must have control of the monetary system. It’s been that way throughout history. The greater the degree of freedom the people enjoy, the sounder has been the money. Tyranny always goes hand in hand with government’s wrecking of the money system.

The problem is not only a lust for power; ironically, benevolence and humanitarianism drive many to seek power over others. They believe for humanitarian reasons that the strong and wise have an obligation to subject the weak and ignorant to the whims of government control. As the gain more influence and power, they believe that brute force must be used to impose their “goodwill” on the stubborn few. The purpose of freedom vanishes from their minds.

The French Jacobins in the eighteenth century were so convinced that their cause was right that even using the guillotine to enforce their will on others for their alleged own good was legitimate. Some who promoted the Iraq War were motivated in the same manner. They rationalized a humanitarian excuse for the war even as more than 4,000 Americans died and tens of thousands were wounded. The one million Iraqis who died, and hundreds of thousands who were injured, and the millions of refugees were all justified because of the “goodness” the instigators of the war brought to the world.

Ah, truth, intelligence, oh how I crave more of this.

[BellePlaine]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO93P6uz9t8

Super funny video from Jon Stewart. Kinda depressing, actually.

[chitwnvw]

Kind of depressing? Good lord, we're doomed.

[steve74baywin]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO93P6uz9t8

Super funny video from Jon Stewart. Kinda depressing, actually.

Nice, I noticed that yesterday myself.
I noticed it in 2008. Chee, I wonder why the main stream super rich owned news outlets would do that to just one man and with his message? Could it be that all the other ones are CFR and International Banking Cartel approved and he is not?

Yeah, time to move on, I think I will head over to the Good Visions thread.

[Amskeptic]

That is bizarre and frightening to see this utter disconnect from reality AND the perfectly parroted lingo from all of those talking heads that Jon Stewart compiled. It is repellent.
Colin

[ruckman101]

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-a ... e-top-tier

This version skips the home-grown shaky cam bidniz. It is pretty damn indicting.


neal

[Velokid1]

At least it makes sense that the media would do what they do to RP. The more frightening thing is that Americans let it slide. There's no good reason for that.

[Sylvester]

There goes that Ron Paul again talking about unsustainable wars. Heh