Has Ron Paul Quit?

Lally Singh sends us to the inside-the-Beltway blog Wonkette for a quick take on a letter Ron Paul sent to his supporters. In this analysis, Dr. Paul has basically called it quits. "Late Friday night, Dr. Congressman Ron Paul posted a letter to his fans basically saying it's over, but he will continue talking about his message, and plus it would be completely embarrassing for him if he also lost his congressional seat."

Comments

Real summary.

[Romancer]

FTA:

"Let me tell you my thoughts. With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties -- just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.

I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.

In the presidential race and the congressional race, I need your support, as always. And I have plans to continue fighting for our ideas in politics and education that I will share with you when I can, for I will need you at my side. In the meantime, onward and upward! The neocons, the warmongers, the socialists, the advocates of inflation will be hearing much from you and me.

Sincerely,

Ron"

Re:Real summary.

[daddyrief]

Wouldn't that be instituting two nearly opposite policies at once..?

Re:Real summary.

[uhlume]

You do realize that Paul (like most big-L Libertarians, though perhaps even more extremely than most) is firmly and explicitly opposed to any such "New Deal" domestic policy, right? (We are, after all, talking about a man who would seek to completely eliminate the Department of Education and defund education spending at a federal level.)

If an end to expensive and counter-productive military adventurism and a re-commitment to New Deal-style domestic programs is something you feel strongly about, you might find yourself better served by a candidate like Barack Obama.

Re:Real summary.

[Anonymous Coward]

The federal Department of Education is pretty much the definition of useless beurocratic waste. I don't understand why any sane person would be opposed to abolishing it.

Re:Real summary.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

It's not entitlements that's killing us, it's INCOMPETENCE. When you're not doing billions in hand outs to your buddies and giving high offices to political hacks, things actually get done.

It's not enough that you cut taxes, it's that you cut spending as well. The opposite is true too. I don't mind being taxed if my ride to work is smoother and traffic is better managed.

Re:Real summary.

[slysithesuperspy]

This is the New Deal type of thing that helped make the 30s recession last until the war. Sounds like a good thing to be opposed to. And why do you think people at the local level are too stupid to care about their kids?

Re:Real summary.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Libertarian foreign policy would have us weaker and in a world of shit. The government's number one duty is to protect us, not line your pockets. And more of the "New Deal" type of socialism would have us bankrupt. If you really want that, move the fuck somewhere else. Don't ruin this country.

Re:Real summary.

[uhlume]

It appears you're a little confused. (In fact, according to Wikipedia, "in Roosevelt's twelve years in office the economy had an 8.5% compound annual growth of GDP, the highest growth rate in the history of any industrial country...")

Re:Real summary.

[cetialphav]

The Department of Education uses 2% of the federal budget. Their total budget is less than $60 billion dollars. Most of the money goes right back to the taxpayers in the form of Pell Grants ($13 billion) and various grants to the states ($24 billion). Those things do not sound like useless waste to me. Since this money goes into helping people go to college and improving schools in less affluent areas, I feel this is a good investment. A more educated workforce is great for the economy, and therefore good for me. Dollar for dollar, I think we get a better return on Pell Grants than we do on a new aircraft carrier ($13 billion).

Now, I think the debating the merits of Federalism vs state control and the proper role of the federal government of in education is a worthwhile debate. I enjoy hearing different ideas on the best way to fund and run the education system. But I can never take seriously any politician who just says that we should close down the Department of Education. That just ignores the important role that it plays today.

Re:Real summary.

[gaspar ilom]

Ron Paul on religion:

"The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers.
[...]
The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance. Throughout our nation's history, churches have done what no government can ever do, namely teach morality and civility. Moral and civil individuals are largely governed by their own sense of right and wrong, and hence have little need for external government. This is the real reason the collectivist Left hates religion: Churches as institutions compete with the state for the people's allegiance, and many devout people put their faith in God before their faith in the state. Knowing this, the secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation's Christian heritage. Christmas itself may soon be a casualty of that war." Barack Obama:

"I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the most spiritual and kindest people I've ever known, but grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so did I."
[...]
"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all."

Which approach Sounds better?

Discuss.

Misleading title and summary

[The One and Only]

Having read the Ron Paul letter, he's not dropping out: he's just admitting that his Presidential campaign is simply going to be a platform for his ideas, and that the real focus will be on his re-election to Congress. Here are some important bits:

But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run.

I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.

Re:Thank goodness

[Uart]

Lew Rockwell is not the founder of the Austrian School. He is the founder of a think-tank that advocates that particular school of thought.

The Austrian School was founded by Ludwig von Mises and (Nobel Prize Winner) F.A. Hayek, among others.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Now there are 3 Liberals to decide between..

[ScienceDada]

I got the email last night. So now 3 liberals to decide between... I believe that Obama is the best of the worst and I predict that he will win by an enormous landslide, perhaps even greater than Johnson. A significant number of those who would normally vote for Republican candidates are extraordinarily pissed off at the travesty that is the RNC and "party" now. And this is the party of Lincoln? I think not (at least, not in any recognizable form). It has been hijacked.

And I would probably be considered "a staunch conservative" by most slashdotters, even though I am really a moderate (at least according to http://www.politicalcompass.org/).

Re:Now there are 3 Liberals to decide between..

[XnavxeMiyyep]

http://www.politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008 actually lists all three of the as conservative.

Re:Thank goodness

[the eric conspiracy]

The problem with gold or similar physical standard is that the amount of gold available is not tied to the size of the economy; the amount available grows much more slowly. If you have an expanding economy as is the case in most of the world you want the amount of money to expand with the size of the economy to prevent deflation (i.e. decreasing real prices) which is just as bad if not worse than inflation.

Re:Thank goodness

[alexgieg]

This is a very poor understanding of the Austrian method. What it actually does is to provide some very broad concepts which constitute what me might call a "metatheoretic framework". This framework, called "praxeology", is in turn used to develop theories about specific economic phenomena. And these theories can be falsified.

So, for example, using this Austrian methodology, the leading theorist of the school, Ludwig von Mises (who in fact gave the thing its name, "praxeology"), made an extensive list of very specific predictions on what would happen in any strongly planned economy that followed Marx' system, writing them in his book Socialism (available for download, so you can confirm for yourself). Note that this was just a few years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before Lenin had had time to barely start implementing his projects, and without any factual feedback on what was happening in Russia. So, 70 years later, when the iron curtain fell and Western observers could go into the USSR and see things for themselves, not through Soviet propaganda, what did they find? That every single prediction made by Mises was fulfilled. He didn't miss the mark on any of them. As a result, one can say with confidence that the Austrian theory on the effects of socialist planning is, as far as we know, correct. Or, at least, "falsifiable, actually tested, and so far not yet falsified", to put it in a more popperian way.

But what about praxeology itself? Why can't it be falsified? Simply put, because it isn't a theory, nor is it meant to be taken as one. It's a tool. Roughly speaking, you could say that it serves, in Austrian theories, the same purpose served by mathematics in Physics. Can you falsify mathematics? No, because one does not "test" mathematics, one "uses" it to construct tests. Does it causes Physics theories to not be scientific? Of course not, because these theories (that in turn use mathematics) are testable. The same applies to praxeology. And let's not forget that both praxeology and mathematics have the same metatheoretical basis, logics, which for the same reason is never "tested", only "used".

Now, the problem in the text you linked is this: both its author and the person whom he mentions aren't talking about the precise same thing, and since neither know the correct way to clarify the discussion, each understands what the other is saying under the wrong assumption. So, both would profit a lot from studying some philosophy of science, as it helps to understand the differences between theories and metatheories. After all, if you take a metatheory as if it were a theory, as they both do, you end up talking nonsense, no matter whether you're "for" or "against" it.

Libertarianism != Libertinism

[slysithesuperspy]

Libertarian principles are exactly why people are falling down the economic ladder in the first place.

Libertarianism does not mean no rules, no regulations. What you speak of sounds more like libertinism. Also, if there was sound money they couldn't lower interest rates and make stupid loans so the problem couldn't have occurred in the first place. Also, don't forget the equality laws which encourages reckless lending. And, just because Greenspan was a libertarian/objectivist before does not mean that whatever he did was based on libertarian principles.

Re:NOT the same old entrenched politics

[the_raptor]

Or he actually realised that the world isn't black and white, despite what most liberals seem to think. There are times when things like waterboarding (which is NOT TORTURE, you can spin it however you want but it's not) are necessary. It's amazing how many 'smart' people are really so stupid.

So would you voluntarily undergo water torture to prove this point? Would you be happy with other countries using it against your spies and soldiers?

I don't see how something that tricks a persons brain into thinking they are drowning could not be called torture. Torture is not equal to causing physical damage.

Re:What about the CONTRIBUTIONS?

[witherstaff]

Presidential contributions are separate from his congressional run. It's the law.

As to why this thread says 'quit' when it sounds more like scaling back for fiscal conservation is beyond me.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Libertarians (and many IT drones) are about as divorced from reality as it gets. The intersection stems from model building and model simplification, which is of significant importance in writing software, managing networks, etc. Libertarians deduce an ideology from a set of axioms, not unlike a mathematician deduces theorems from axioms and definitions, or how a programmer builds systems out of datasets. Except for Platonists, mathematicians don't confuse what they study with reality. If a correspondence exists between a natural phenomenon and their work, then the applied side can worry about it, but that is not the purpose of mathematics (see Hardy).

Libertarians, on the other hand, are rationalist kooks (see Descartes). They don't look at any empirical feedback to shape their ideology. They accept a set of simple axioms, reason them out as far to a conclusion as makes them content, and then stop. If confronted with the effects of their policies they will either say "too bad" or make appeals to optimism, depending on their level of intellectual honesty.

Re:Waterboarding not torture

[Anonymous Coward]

US soldiers undergo waterboarding as a standard part of training.

No we don't. The only people that generally get exposed to waterboarding are interrogators and certain members of special forces.

- U.S. soldier currently in Iraq