Constant Conservative Ron Paul...

[runningdownthatdream]

On Aug 27th in regard to Irene, Ron Paul said, "We don't need FEMA, that's what the Second Amendment is for."

WTF!? The man never was too smart, but now he's lost it. What is he suggesting? People caught in the hurricane should guard themselves with firearms? Maybe you should shoot your neighbor before his rational self-interest usurps your own. Or maybe he's suggesting you shoot those would be government rescuers. You don't need those FEMA fuckers helping out and getting the way of good old fashioned looting. Maybe shoot Irene if she wanders too close.

He also said that it's not the purpose of government to protect the people! We know he would eradicate FEMA, but now the FDA, the military, the intelligence agencies, the Federal, State and Municipal police, and fire departments are evidently being called into question. Do you really need the fucking Federal government to protect your business from being extorted by local mobs? Do you really need Federal assistance when an earthquake rips up your town and causes a nuclear meltdown in a nearby reactor? According to Ron Paul the answer is: Hell No You Don't! It's not the purpose of government to protect the people.

Government's role shouldn't be to protect 'the people'. Not sure about you but I'm comfortable with protecting myself and what belongs to me. Just get rid of the laws that prevent me from doing that! You are an enormously intelligent person (from your posts) which is why I find it startling that you - time after time - advocate so passionately in favour of 'government' acting as a parent to protect the people. I'm curious as to why you think this is necessary and love to hear your thoughts on the role of 'government'.

[Ben]

[Ben]

Government's role shouldn't be to protect 'the people'. Not sure about you but I'm comfortable with protecting myself and what belongs to me. Just get rid of the laws that prevent me from doing that! You are an enormously intelligent person (from your posts) which is why I find it startling that you - time after time - advocate so passionately in favour of 'government' acting as a parent to protect the people. I'm curious as to why you think this is necessary and love to hear your thoughts on the role of 'government'.

The "government's role shouldn't be to protect the people...." OK, what exactly is the government's role? (What about from, say, foreign attacks or potential terrorist attacks or "protection" at the airports?) Should they or the government (and we should note that in a very meaningful democratic society the people and government are one and the same and they, government officials or what should be simple ADMINISTRATORS, serve the interests of the people; and, too, this needs to be underscored: corporations are private governments -- and also they're private governments that are inordinately right wing as democracy doesn't exist in these institutions) build highways, bridges, schools, roads, sidewalks.... If, say, the Pentagon ceased to exist we wouldn't have the high-tech economy. (Remember the way STATE CAPITALISM works is pretty straightforward. The ideas, costs and risks are socialized and then the profits and management are privatized. I mean, the Internet came out of the public sector. It was in the public sector from 1965 to circa 1995. And then parasites like Bill Gates come along and make a fortune. Bill Gates did not invest his own money in the Internet and computers. The Internet and computers came out of the public sector. This ain't free market capitalism. Capitalism, again, in its purest ideological form means no government.
So this isn't free market so-called capitalism when the State plays a profound role.

[trish]

Government's role shouldn't be to protect 'the people'. Not sure about you but I'm comfortable with protecting myself and what belongs to me. Just get rid of the laws that prevent me from doing that! You are an enormously intelligent person (from your posts) which is why I find it startling that you - time after time - advocate so passionately in favour of 'government' acting as a parent to protect the people. I'm curious as to why you think this is necessary and love to hear your thoughts on the role of 'government'.

Thank you for your kind assessment of my prior posts.

You ask in effect, “Why do I think the function of government is to protect us as a parent protects a child?” The short answer is that I don’t. Indeed, we probably agree that people have the responsibility to protect themselves. But here is probably where we differ. I think that appropriate governance is governance of, by and for the people and that one of the appropriate roles of government is therefore protecting its citizens from a variety of obvious threats. When governance is rightly done, a government protecting its citizens IS its citizens protecting themselves.

So what sorts of protections can we provide for ourselves through government?

Some are obvious. We cannot adequately protect ourselves individually against foreign invasion. So we have a military.
The citizens of all modern democracies have agreed that on local and State levels police forces are necessary for making our streets and the businesses lining them are safe from robbers, thugs and gangs.
We’ve agreed that when crime syndicates cross State lines it is necessary and convenient to have a Federal law enforcement agency.
A long time ago Federal marshals in Federal territories protected sheep herders from the outlaw posies of wealthy ranchers. Few would disagree that these protections, provided by local, State and Federal government, are justifiable functions of government.

As the world grows more complex thugs and thieves grow more sophisticated and exploit people in more sophisticated ways. Slavery. Indentured servitude. Price fixing. Dumping toxic wastes in public waterways. Fraud. Theft. It is impossible for a single individual to protect herself or himself against all instances of these and other wrongs that might be perpetrated in one form or another in our modern world. But we can combat these assaults on ourselves and on our form of life by banding together against them. We do this most conveniently by carefully delineating just what sorts of practices are unwarranted or immoral and legislating against them, and by having the appropriate law enforcement agencies investigating and prosecuting violations of the laws upon which we have agreed to honor.

Perhaps you will agree that most or all of the above examples of government protection are warranted. Modern conservatives are usually pretty big on law and order issues. So what about other sorts of protections, like Social Security or Medicare?

Once again, as the world grows more sophisticated so grows our perception of the role of government. In particular Social Security is an evolved function of modern democracies. It was a historical response to a need to provide a safety net for the elderly. Before unions men who reached late middle age were often fired from their jobs. Not because they were bad at them, but because younger laborers were cheaper and less questioning. It’s very difficult for a man in his late middle age to get a new job. Moreover, wages were such that a laborer's family could barely live from week to week, let alone save for old age or buy stock. The Great Depression amplified this problem. The solution for the wealthy is to build walls around the manor. The solution for workers was labor unions and government protections. Now that most unions have been busted modern readers may find out soon enough for themselves what things were like. Unions were a way that laborers used to protect themselves against the abuses of employers. But I see nothing wrong with codifying some of the protections won by labor into local, State and Federal law. Some of these protections take the form of economic safety nets likes Social Security and Medicare. These programs are not at all paternalistic. They are simply the extension of people looking after themselves.

Finally I can imagine there might be a reader who agrees with everything I said so far but objects that our government (the good ol’ U.S.of A.) is not a government of, by and for the people. I simply disagree. Moreover, I favor graduated taxes and stiff regulations that would protect against the oligarchic rule of rich and powerful individuals, rich and powerful corporations and lobbies and which at the same time protect the health and pocketbooks of ordinary citizens against the abusive practices the greedy.

[Stavros]

It is curious that there seems to be a critical debate about the role of Government in the USA, to some extent also in the UK but with less vitriol; whereas in France and Germany this debate doesn't seem to happen on the same level or with the same tone -there they have periodic and anxious debates about what it means to be French or German; but seem to be less critical of big government. In addition, the state in those two countries takes responsibilities that don't upset people so much, and they are more heavily taxed too: an example of the classic case from Hobbes through Locke being that people are willing to give up a proportion of their liberty to be protected by the state from personal attack, usually accomplished through law and order. Since the mid-20thc if not before, this has been extended to cover education, which is seen as an investment in the future as well as a process of socialisation of the individual; health care which in the past was provided by charity; and public transport, from which it is notoriously difficult to make a profit.

Capitalism preceded the growth of the modern state and particularly the state bureaucracy which has mushroomed mostly since the 1950s, which is why the two have often collided: the last quarter of the 19thc in the USA (similar to the 1990s in Russia) appeared to be a free-for-all where robber barons and indutrial pioneers like Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Vanderbilt and Carnegie to name just a few, made staggering fortunes obliterating their competitors, often by cheating and lying and possibly murdering their way to the top. The Sherman Act of 1890 on the one hand stands in contradiction to free trade, but was a response to the monopolies that were appearing in railroads, oil, communications and so on: it was a capitalist government using the state's legislative powers to intervene to create the competition the free market had strangled.

These days it is being pursued from the opposite direction: with the idea that welfare takes responsibility away from the individual and gives it to a state/tax-financed agency: that regulatory agencies tie up businesses with red tape and inhibit investment in new industries and jobs; that rents taxes rates and so on imposed by state or federal govt also prevent job creation. But in fact is this opposition coming from 'the people' or is it in fact the commercial lobby orchestrating a critique of policy for not giving it the freedom it wants?

I see no problem about debating what the state is for, and for increasing transparency in government -after all, these are our governments- but I see a lot of the critique of the state as a worn out argument for free enterprise that history shows works in an uneven way, I guess a case of history being written by the winners...but history also suggests that unregulated free enterprise can lead to the very monopolies that strangulate competition, so I don't see how people can claim at one and the same time that government inhibits freedom when it should act to maintain it. Ultimately, we live in capitalist societies, it may be the best system we have so far, but it needs looking after -and if the state is significntly reduced, taxes with it, why have an elected government anyway? All we would need are administrators.

[trish]

history also suggests that unregulated free enterprise can lead to the very monopolies that strangulate competition

Not only history but mathematics. Von Neumann and Morganstern in their famous treatise Theory of Games and Economic Behavior prove from very simple first principles that players in n-person games will inevitably form coalitions that effectively reduce n. Coalitions within coalitions will also form creating the necessary leverage to eliminate "team" members from the game entirely. In the limit every n-person game reduces to just two or three players. In economic terms, without regulations, watchdogs and enforcement monopolies are inevitable. Bye bye free enterprise.

Every steam engine needs a governor. Every motor a regulator.

Organization (i.e. government) is required to resist the exploitation of organized coalitions of thieves, thugs and bosses.

[Stavros]

Thanks Trish! A good reason for getting rid of Coalition Government!

[trish]

Well I don't know if its an argument against, but it certainly describes the ongoing dynamic.

[Ben]

POLITIFACT.COM...
The Truth-O-Meter Says:
The U.S. military "is in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world."

Ron Paul on Monday, September 12th, 2011 in a Republican presidential debate in Tampa

Ron Paul says U.S. has military personnel in 130 nations and 900 overseas bases

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Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, gestures during a Republican presidential debate on Sept. 12, 2011, in Tampa.

During the Sept. 12, 2011, Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas -- a staunch advocate of limited government and a more modest military footprint -- offered a surprising statistic about the reach of the U.S. armed forces.

"We're under great threat, because we occupy so many countries," Paul said. "We're in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world. We're going broke. The purpose of al-Qaida was to attack us, invite us over there, where they can target us. And they have been doing it. They have more attacks against us and the American interests per month than occurred in all the years before 9/11, but we're there occupying their land. And if we think that we can do that and not have retaliation, we're kidding ourselves. We have to be honest with ourselves. What would we do if another country, say, China, did to us what we do to all those countries over there?"

That statement includes a lot of different claims, but we’re going to focus on just one of them here that a reader asked us to check -- that the U.S. military "is in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world."

We’ll split this into two parts -- checking whether the U.S. military has personnel in 130 countries, and whether the U.S. has 900 overseas military bases.

Personnel

For the personnel question, we turned to a Sept. 30, 2010, Pentagon document titled, "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional Area and by Country."

We tallied up all the countries with at least one member of the U.S. military, excluding those with personnel deemed to be "afloat." We found U.S. military personnel on the ground in a whopping 148 countries -- even more than Paul had said. (There are varying standards for what constitutes a "country," so that may explain the divergence from Paul’s number.)

However, we should add a caveat. In 56 of these 148 countries, the U.S. has less than 10 active-duty personnel present. These include such obscure locales as Mongolia, Nepal, Gabon, Togo and Suriname.

By contrast, the U.S. has disclosed only 13 countries outside the United States and its possessions that are host to more than 1,000 personnel. They are: Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Japan, Bahrain, Djibouti, South Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.

In addition, this is a snapshot of the global military footprint, so it may not include all temporary training missions and humanitarian assistance activities. "Such activities are so pervasive you almost have to wonder how the other 70 countries manage to avoid hosting such operations," said John Pike, the director of globalsecurity.org, a national security think tank.

Bases

For this question, we turned to an official Pentagon accounting of U.S. military bases around the nation and the world, the "Base Structure Report, Fiscal 2010 Baseline."

According to this report, the U.S. has 662 overseas bases in 38 foreign countries, which is a smaller number than the 900 bases Paul cited. But here again, the list omits several nations integral to active operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it’s conceivable that the actual number of sites approaches 900.

The Pentagon "is very reluctant to label anything a ‘base’ because of the negative political connotations associated with it," said Alexander Cooley, a political scientist at Barnard College and Columbia University who studies overseas bases. "Some of these facilities, such as the Manas Transit Center in Kyrgyzstan, may not be officially counted as ‘bases,’ but it is the most important U.S. facility in central Asia, staging every U.S. soldier transiting in and out of Afghanistan and conducting refueling operations."

Still, caveats are in order here, too. Of the 662 overseas sites listed -- that is, those outside the active war zones -- all but 32 of them are either small sites (with a replacement value of less than $915 million) or sites essentially owned on paper only.

For instance, the sole site listed for Canada is 144 square feet of leased space -- equal to a 12-foot-by-12-foot room. That’s an extreme case, but other nations on the list -- such as Aruba, Iceland, Indonesia, Kenya, Norway and Peru -- have just a few U.S. military buildings, many of them leased. Some of the sites are unmanned radio relay towers or other minor facilities. "Most of them are a couple of acres with a cyclone fence and no troops," Pike said.

Cooley said that the "true figure is tough to determine and involves judgment calls about the nature and purpose" of the activities involved. "The fact that host countries often choose not to disclose a U.S. military presence adds to perceptions of a ‘secret network’ " that is larger than the officially disclosed number of bases.

Our ruling
Given the incomplete figures available from the Pentagon, Paul’s topline figures -- 130 nations, 900 bases -- are plausible when active military operations are included. "My eyebrows were raised many times" during the debate, Pike said, but this comment "was not one of those times."
Still, we think it’s worth pointing out that many of the personnel deployments and facilities included in Paul’s number are fairly minimal in nature. On balance, we rate Paul’s statement Mostly True.

[Ben]