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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."
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"
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
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.In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
That's good. Now, if only we can get Reaganomics recognized as the science that it is.
Considering the economic wreckage that "science and empiricism" have delivered to the door, I wouldn't be too proud of traditional economic schools of thought right now. Measuring economic progress by the state of the stock market is a complete bust. The middle class and below are in pretty severe trouble right now. and have been for some time. A doctor's visit that cost $5 when I was a kid (the 60's) is now $90 (18x); fuel is up from 30 cents to three bucks (10x), cars from a few thousand to tens of thousands (10x to 20x and more), houses... houses are insane. In the face of all of this, minimum wage has risen from $1.25 in 1965 to $5.85, an increase of 4.7x altogether.
Maybe it is time for money to be backed by something tangible and valuable, instead of the federal nothing-in-reserve notes we have now, backed only by the printing of nothing-in-reserve notes on the one hand, and the incineration of nothing-in-reserve notes on the other. Maybe it is time for infinitely corrosive tax schemes like the income tax to go away. Maybe it is time we stopped trying to be the world's police presence, and shut down all those foreign bases. Maybe it is time for us to stop borrowing money, pay back our debts, and begin to spend only those monies that we can afford to spend.
Not that anything like this will happen. The US is going to find out what continuing these policies far past where they even appear to be doing any good takes us, because very few people are willing to disturb the status quo.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Backed by something? Other currencies aren't backed by anything tangible either. That's not the reason the US dollar is crapping out.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Gold is tangible, gold is scarce, but valuable? The high value of gold is built on intangible desires just like the value of paper and ink that we place on money. It's metal. I don't have gold, I don't have any use for it, and I don't want the metal. I want the cash value of gold though.
A gold standard is just changing one object for another as a unit of exchange. You can use deer skins, rocks with holes in them, it's still money. If you want serious value behind the unit of exchange, exchange a valuable unit like a car or piece of machinery. Except those don't fit so well into a pocket. So you exchange cash. But cash makes your pocket fat, so we carry credit cards.
The real goal of a gold standard is to combat uncontrolled money expansion. There are a number of ways to accomplish that without arbitrarily pivoting on some random and irrelevant metal.
Ron Paul has some good ideas I'd support, but the gold standard isn't one of them.
I was elected to be a delegate on Feb. 5 for my precinct in Colorado, and I plan to go through with representing Ron Paul to the county level March 2 (and then possibly also to the state level on May 31) so that he does not lose any of the projected 42 delegates nationwide he is counting on.
There is one last additional hope to further spread the message this cycle, and that is if Ron Paul can get first place in four states (he has no first place finishes so far, at least according to official tallies), then he will be allowed to speak at the Republican National Convention. And perhaps if that happens, some of the "limited government" planks of pre-2000 Republican party platforms can be reinserted. Not that a Republican president elected in 2008 would honor that, but it would ensure that in the 2012 debates that a small-government candidate can score points by quoting the platform and criticizing the neocons.
I will tell you why I gave Ron Paul some financial support. I don't agree with all his politics, but I am a conservative who is against torture, is against the police state, is against the surveillance state and is against this war. I supported Ron Paul because every debate he shows up at he fucks up the unstated agreement among ALL other Republican candidates to not talk about any of that shit. He disrupts their big snow-job on the American public about the sins of the Republican party for the last eight years, and I love every minute of it.
That you even ask the question is surprising to me. Minimum wage sets the floor at which jobs create an earner's ability to interact with the economy. Minimum wage also sets the base cost of anything that requires workers to create, be it product or service. From there, costs and wages go up as skills become scarcer. So minimum wage is a critical issue for both earners and job providers. Furthermore, minimum wage, by setting the earning level for the very lowest earning class of people who actually work within the system, places a hard line that cannot be crossed with regard to what such a worker can obtain within the system. You can't get below it, because you can't be paid less. An hour of labor gets you a minimum of $5.85, period. No less. About ten hours of work gets you one very short, very cursory doctor's appointment. An hour of work gets you about two gallons of gas. And so on. Earlier, you would have gotten more product or service, for less work on your part. This is a direct and concrete measure of economic conditions for the lowest class of earner, which is what I was talking about above.
This is irrelevant; there *is* one and there has been for some time, so we can use it to measure available standards of living at the lowest participating tier at any point during the period which it has been enforced. You want to argue economic issues based on a situation that does not exist. I am simply pointing out the situation that actually *does* exist. My observation is that given the demonstrated effect on earning and buying power that our current economic system has had at the base level, we are going backwards. What one would hope for is that purchasing power would increase, not decrease. It has, however, decreased in real terms, and because of that, I think change is called for.
Minimum wage *is* the actual wage paid for the lowest levels of people participating in the system. It has been since the 1930's or thereabouts. This gives you a direct lever, at the bottom, to relate an hour's work to the purchase of various goods and services. That's what I'm telling you: At the lowest economic level, it took less work to see the doctor in 1965 than it does today. That's going backwards. It took less work in 1965 to buy a house. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work in 1965 to buy a car. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work to buy a gallon of fuel. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work to put your kid through college or trade school. That's going backwards. It took less hours of work to buy heat for your home. That's going backwards. Life is getting more difficult for these people, not less difficult. That's going backwards. It is as plain as the nose on your face if you'll just stop and think about it for a minute.
There are areas in the economy where people get more for their hour of work (electronics is one such instance) but in general, and especially for the basic requirements of day to day life, the ratio of hours worked to products and services obtainable are all going the wrong way.
Proceeding in a course of action(s) that continues to make life more difficult for the lowest levels will eventually result in a situation where life within the systems is perceived as too difficult and people will turn to alternative means of making money; this is where black markets, under-the-counter wages, illegal products and services all gain a foothold in the economy. When working within the system fails to provide people with a tolerable lifestyle, they will look outside the system for relief. And furthermore, they will inevitably find such relief in a society that encourages out of bounds earnings mechanisms with laws that insist upon characterizing all manner of consensual acts as crimes.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I cannot believe no one has mentioned the contributions yet! Is Ron Paul going to keep the tens of millions in contributions that he barely spent? Is this going to disillusion a whole generation of politically active geeks?
Ron Paul should donate a large portion of that money to the EFF, ACLU, and anyone else staying in the fight for our civil liberties! We did not contribute for his reelection to congress!