Ron Paul the Racist

[trish]

Limiting government diminishes the power of others to use the threat of violence in order to intrude upon individuals decisions...

Yes, however not all decisions, but decisions like, “I won’t do business with blacks,” or “We won’t accept Hispanics in our school,” or “I won’t pay a women what I would a man to do this job, because woman just don’t have the ambition to it as well.” Ron and Rand seem to claim the people are overreaching when they enact legislation to empower individuals by limiting the ability of those who would unreasonably obstruct their right to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. I disagree. It is not overreaching to protect our shared resources or our right to participate in the shared marketplace whose products depend in part on those resources.

Clearly legislators are susceptible to the bribes of rich and powerful. All the more corrosive are the consequences of greed when unchecked, even in principle, by law and regulations. At least legislators are placed in office by the electorate. If we continue to elect corrupt politicians into office, that’s our fault. We have no sway over the Koch brothers.

Our positions, I would hope, are not so irreconcilable. No liberal claims government is the solution to every problem. No libertarian holds government is never the solution. The problem is agreeing on a balance. There is no philosophically unique and correct answer as to what that balance is. There’s no right answer to the question, “Exactly what is the proper role of government?” Societies evolve toward balances that work for them. Ron, Rand and perhaps you want the right (whether you exercise it or not) to decide not to do business with African/Americans. I want the right to ban firearms from my classroom. We may neither of us get what we desire. That’s called “compromise”: a term conservatives in Washington and elsewhere have forgotten.

[Faldur]

YI want the right to ban firearms from my classroom.

If your classroom is part of a privately held business you have that right. Gun toters are not part of the "federally protected classes".

[hippifried]

Let's get this out of the way first: This really isn't about the 1st Amendment at all. I have no problem with anyone claiming the right of free association, but it's the 9th that applies. Rights are rights (as opposed to priviliges or immunities) because they're inherent.

Public is public. There's no exceptions. If you choose to be public, then the social rules apply. There's no such thing as a nation of hermits. Business owes its existence to the society it works in. Everything that's "open to the public" is part of the commons while open. That goes for churches too. When they put up that welcome sign, there's no "except for...". Once they lock the doors, they're free to all the Satanic orgies they want. They don't have to accept people they don't like as members of the congregation either. In fact, there's a church exemption in the hiring section of the Civil Rights Act. The klan is a private secret terrorist organization, with a lock & armed guards on their clubhouse, so nobody tells them they have to accept black folks, Jews, or Catholics as members. Just like nobody tells the boys who built the treehouse that they can't put up a sign that says "NO GIRLS!". All this whining about infringement of rights is just fanatical bullshit. Following the social rules in public isn't even an inconvenience. Failure to do so can get you banished from the society. Freedom to be an asshole doesn't equate to impunity. That little factoid seems to slip right past most of the egoists who call themselves "libertarian" (a deliberate misnomer IMHO). There's no demand that anyone abandon their principles. Believe any inane bullshit you like. Live your private life any way you like. But there's always been limits on public display. We codify & enforce those limits through our governance because without that, the response (reaction) to assholes is usually violence. The society is made up of people who all have the exact same rights to accept or eschew whatever. Nobody's required to put up with assholes by anyone's philosophical ideology.


Don't confuse "companies" with "industries". Other than AIG (already a monopoly in underwriting private bank to bank lending), all the bailouts were industry wide or given to the States. Picking American over foreign based companies isn't the same as the claim you're making. But then again, all the claims are skewed. TARP was a lie. Paulsen was bailing out Citi. He had to hand it out to the others to keep up appearances. I'm not 100% positive, but I don't believe Geithner ever gave away any of the half of TARP he was allocated. At the time, the vast majority of plastic in the US was running through Citi. That's changed in the last couple of years. Citi's still in trouble, but they won't crash the entire retail market. I hate this shit, but I'm glad they did it. We were well on our way to something really really bad, & all the principled ideology in the world wasn't going to help anything. It never does.

There's all kinds of different things that can & do contribute to the formation of monopolies. But without regulation, you have no prayer of ever getting a handle on it. The very idea that regulation is or ever could be the primary cause of monopoly formation is ludicrous at best. There's a name for monopolist or corporate control of government. It's called fascism. I, for one, don't want the US to be the next to devolve, like Spain under Franco. Ideologue hocus pocus be damned when it becomes a social detriment. There's no philosophy that covers all contingencies. Ideologies don't don't take non-ideologues into account for the most part. That's why they don't work in practice.

[NYBURBS]

Let's get this out of the way first: This really isn't about the 1st Amendment at all. I have no problem with anyone claiming the right of free association, but it's the 9th that applies. Rights are rights (as opposed to priviliges or immunities) because they're inherent.

Public is public. There's no exceptions. If you choose to be public, then the social rules apply. There's no such thing as a nation of hermits. Business owes its existence to the society it works in. Everything that's "open to the public" is part of the commons while open. That goes for churches too. When they put up that welcome sign, there's no "except for...". Once they lock the doors, they're free to all the Satanic orgies they want. They don't have to accept people they don't like as members of the congregation either. In fact, there's a church exemption in the hiring section of the Civil Rights Act. The klan is a private secret terrorist organization, with a lock & armed guards on their clubhouse, so nobody tells them they have to accept black folks, Jews, or Catholics as members. Just like nobody tells the boys who built the treehouse that they can't put up a sign that says "NO GIRLS!". All this whining about infringement of rights is just fanatical bullshit. Following the social rules in public isn't even an inconvenience. Failure to do so can get you banished from the society. Freedom to be an asshole doesn't equate to impunity. That little factoid seems to slip right past most of the egoists who call themselves "libertarian" (a deliberate misnomer IMHO). There's no demand that anyone abandon their principles. Believe any inane bullshit you like. Live your private life any way you like. But there's always been limits on public display. We codify & enforce those limits through our governance because without that, the response (reaction) to assholes is usually violence. The society is made up of people who all have the exact same rights to accept or eschew whatever. Nobody's required to put up with assholes by anyone's philosophical ideology.

Honestly, what kind of backward statement is that? This is most certainly about principles underlying the First Amendment. The 9th Amendment? That people retain unenumerated rights? Yes, rights that go against government encroachment, and most certainly my argument (and Paul's) has been to forbid government involvement into the issue one way or the other. Rather, it's your expressed view that it's proper to involve the government into the issue.

There are religious exceptions to the civil rights law, ones that protect religious groups rights to exclude, but forbids others to exclude them based upon a dislike of their religious beliefs. Religion, political affiliation, social movements, these are all idelogical beliefs that are suppose to be beyond the reach of the government one way or the other.

Change it to a view point of nations. Nation A dislikes the human rights stance of Nation B, so Nation A refuses to engage in commerce with them. Is Nation A wrong? Especially given today's global nature of commerce? Should Nation B be deprived of our service and products simply because we disagree with them? Now take it to a local level. The Church Of Imaginary People has been showing up to military funerals to call the dead a bunch of evil dammed bastards whom the King of Imagination land will burn and torture for all eternity, and this is a sincere and integral part of their religious belief system. So you're a local grocery store owner and want no part of supporting this church, so you refuse to do business with them because of their stated religious views and practices. Are you wrong? Should you be prosecuted by the federal gov't or sued by the Church of Imaginary People? Yes the civil rights act came about because of inexcusable government supported (mandated) segregation; however, what was codified went much further than it should have, and that's what libertarians are pointing out.

[NYBURBS]

Don't confuse "companies" with "industries". Other than AIG (already a monopoly in underwriting private bank to bank lending), all the bailouts were industry wide or given to the States. Picking American over foreign based companies isn't the same as the claim you're making. But then again, all the claims are skewed. TARP was a lie. Paulsen was bailing out Citi. He had to hand it out to the others to keep up appearances. I'm not 100% positive, but I don't believe Geithner ever gave away any of the half of TARP he was allocated. At the time, the vast majority of plastic in the US was running through Citi. That's changed in the last couple of years. Citi's still in trouble, but they won't crash the entire retail market. I hate this shit, but I'm glad they did it. We were well on our way to something really really bad, & all the principled ideology in the world wasn't going to help anything. It never does.

Lehman Bros wasn't bailed out, it was picked as a loser. Also, it's naive to think or say that others wouldn't have risen from the ashes of those giants. Yes it would have hurt, but it's still not for the government to force the public to save particular companies or industries.

[hippifried]

Lehman Bros wasn't bailed out, it was picked as a loser. Also, it's naive to think or say that others wouldn't have risen from the ashes of those giants. Yes it would have hurt, but it's still not for the government to force the public to save particular companies or industries.

Lehman wasn't a bank. They really weren't much of anything but a fiduciary fraud. It was all debt & trick accounting, propping up their own stock. They had no assets. Call it Enron II. They collapsed over a couple of days. They'd tried over & over to sell the company, but all potential buyers begged off as soon as they saw the audits. There was no place to hide. The LIBOR players abandoned them, so they couldn't borrow their way out of trouble. They weren't a member of the Federal Reserve, but Geithner took a look anyway trying to bail them out with a loan. He couldn't justify it at all once he looked at the actual numbers. There was nothing there to bail out. What's naive is thinking that the government had anything to do with the collapse of Lehman one way or the other.

This doesn't make your point at all. They were pretty much unregulated. There wasn't much regulation in the "investment banking" industry anyway. It collapsed & got swallowed up by the big banks. The only two that were able to convince anybody that they were solvent were Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley. They petitioned for a change of status to become service (real) banks, & joined the Federal Reserve. They managed to weasel their way into TARP later. The rest, like Meryl Lynch went down the tubes, along with the mortgage brokers. How was any of this caused by regulation?

Like I already said: The only TARP bank that was really in trouble was Citi Group. Yeah, I guess they could have gone through some kind of standard bankrupsy if there was anything in the bankrupsy statutes that covered it. The main concern was winding them down smoothly while everybody's credit cards got spread around through the banking system. TARP didn't bail out the banks. It broke up the credit card & bullshit investment insurance monopolies. The "market" caused all this, & wasn't going to fix it. Without the interference, things would have gotten more consolidated. Monopolies are anathema to a free market. Wishful thinking won't change reality.

[hippifried]

The Civil Rights Act isn't a Constitutional Amendment. It's a piece of legislation that tries to cover all contingencies. Impossible to do, but that's the nature of codified law. Perfect is a pipe dream. Utopian anarchy would be wonderful, but it can't work because humanity gets in the way. The same way it gets in the way of all purist ideologies.

To deal with imperfection, we base our societies around the universal moral code. We're all expected to behave in public. The universal code of human interaction is just one rule. The ethic of reciprocity, AKA "the golden rule". The code is what allows us to live in close proximity to each other. Otherwise there's no society, mankind can't group together, & we don't survive as a species. That's the social rule that governs our dealings with each other in the commons. In private you can do what you like, but we're not talking about "in private" here. Everybody has the same rights. We like to mention the poetic ones that are listed in the founding documents, but the number one human right is the right to be free from victimization at the hands of others. That's the violation of the code, & is recognized in all cultures & societies, by every person as soon as it happens. So while everybody's talking a bunch of hypothetical bullshit about some mythical right to be an asshole, there really isn't one because there's no right to violate the code.