against federal education, against
government expenditures.In fact he said this about Katrina victims.
Voted NO on sending aid to Katrina victims.
"Last year, Congress decided to send billions of dollars to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Guess how Ron Paul voted.
"Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?" he asks. "Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?"
I found this at the American Prospect blog tonight. Some of it is alarming to me. He would wait a while to actually end Social Security while letting younger people choose other options. That is a view that is so dangerous I get shivers. Young people will, like those before Social Security was enacted in 1935, have to provide financially for their parents' care far more than they realize.
What Ron Paul doesn't say is that when you have less funding coming in, then you have to cut benefits.
Ezra Klein presents the Full PaulHe is speaking of the Paul interview with Russert.
But it's also useful to read the transcript in its entirety in order to better grasp the coherence within Paul's thought. His Constitutionalism does not limit itself to anti-imperialism: He's also against the Civil Rights Act, and federal education, and maintaining Social Security, and funding government expenditures. Paul is, to be sure, probably not a cruel man, and he does not come off as such here. He admits the need to retain Social Security in the short-term, but says, "I think we need to get--give--offer the kids the chance to get out." That is to say, he wants to destroy the program. In 1998, his platform included the abolition of public schools. Now, it's softened, and he just wants to devolve the authority to the states, which is, in most forms, a way of destroying public schools at a slightly lower rate. He does not oppose the Civil Rights Act on grounds of racism, but because "it's a property rights issue." But whether these positions are motivated by malice or originalism is somewhat beside the point: They are still wrong, and their outcomes would indeed be cruel.
Moreover, they are all of a piece, inseparable from the whole of his ideology. It is what Paul calls "liberty." It is anti-imperialist, anti-PATRIOT Act, anti-wiretapping. But it is also anti-foreign aid, anti-Social Security, anti-Medicare, anti-government. His would be a world in which the United States neither invades Iraq nor uses its tax code to fund a system of pension supports and health care guarantees for the elderly. A world in which we cut our military aid to Israel, and end the minimum wage. A world in which we close down the wiretapping program, and allow states to close down a woman's access to an abortion.
This is the world he is selling to his supporters, this is the definition of liberty that his candidacy will seek to propagate.
Stop Social Security, slowly demolish public education, do away with abortion, demolish Medicare, keep the government from helping people, stop health care guarantees for the elderly...and so on.
This is the scariest agenda I have heard, and so many young people are falling for it. He says if Paul continues with the large donations pouring in, it will become a movement with negative consequences for our country.
It will also be a movement dedicated to a strident version of individualism, an unremitting hostility towards government intervention in the economy, a profound loathing of regulation, and a narrow, negative definition of "liberty" that most progressives would find antithetical to their beliefs.
..."it's particularly disastrous, as it redefines a basic political concept -- "liberty" -- in an extreme and deeply conservative way.
One of the comments from the blog caught my interest.
Ron Paul has no chance whatsoever of becoming the next president. He's a fringe candidate polling in the single digits. Sorry, this is the real world, not the fantasies of Ayn Rand. Americans, like the vast majority of voters in rich countries, sensibly value the economic stability afforded by government-provided social insurance, consumer protection laws, and prudent regulation of the economy. And there’s a reason such things are popular, by the way: for millions of people, life was brutish, nasty and short before the advent of the evil welfare state.
Ron Paul’s radical libertarianism is thankfully a fringe movement. The numbers don’t lie.
I do hope that person is right. His beliefs would go beyond what Bush wants to do, they would turn our safety nets for the poor and elderly upside down. Young people often don't think of those things.
They are already privatizing Medicare without saying it. They are sending massive numbers of ads around to sign up for new programs....these will divert a person from the traditional Medicare. They may not be able to get back on it.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
