Ron Paul warns Canada’s conservatives that the U.S. war on drugs failed

[silverpig]

You can't make much money off dead people.

You have some poor misconceptions that might require undoing of many years of institutionalised anti-capitalistic proselytism in order to have a more objective basis on.

What is "right" is about as subjective as it gets, which is exactly why less government interference in our lives (within reason) is good, not more.

Government does not ensure things are fair, government ensures things are the way government wants it. The more authority given to government means the more this is true.

[THERETOOL]

im gonna have a puff and think about this

[Scott Hartnell's Mane]

im gonna have a puff and think about this

[Mr. Ambien]

You can't make money off of dead people, but you certainly can make money off of killing people. And the guys running that company don't care if they don't have customers in 30 years because they'll get paid today.

Government gets things they way they want it, and the people vote the government in every 5 years. The people get what they want.

Public companies are bound by law to maximize shareholder value.

Who do you want put in charge of the forests and groundwater?

[Scott Hartnell's Mane]

Now we're talking about Canada? You're all over the place. You can naively put your faith in government that does it's best to both suppress information from the masses and spend exorbitant amounts successfully marketing toward them to squabble over petty issues, which is why they will eventually bring back C-30 in another form, because what the people want don't matter when the masses are this reliant upon big government. Note we're not talking about essential functions of limited government (running water, military, etc.) versus big government (war on drugs, behaviour nannyism, etc.) so please don't try and detract from the discussion at hand.

Companies are only responsible to their shareholders, but without people to buy into their product, they have no product, so the dramatic shooting and killing analogies are just plain stupid. If you want to connect crimes to corporations, you should stick with the ones that actually occur most like embezzlement or fraud. Murders are, in by FAR most cases, done by the poor and/or affiliated with gangs. Chances are, they aren't a board member or any major decision maker at a corporation.

Ron Paul advocates personal freedom. I know here in Canada that's bad news since we want government running our daily lives and being both our big brother and mommy/daddy like the babysitter UK but in the US they value individual freedoms significantly, which related to the topic means the individual freedom to put into your body whatever you want. This is an issue in the US, which still fights the War on Drugs, that is contradicting to that notion, which is why Ron Paul spreads that message in the US, and we have the same problem here in Canada which is why he came here. Remember, in the case of your fantastic "government is saintly" position, government is good, problem is, it's the government (in this case, US government) that for a myriad of decades ran this stupid War on Drugs and ran marketing campaigns aimed at making people believe smoking pot is akin to smashing an egg with a frying pan. You can go ahead and trust government that does this stuff and believe you're in control of that. Look at how much trouble voters in Colorado and Washington are going through just to have their sovereign voice heard, the one elected officials ignore, after a direct democracy initiative vote, they not only have to battle the federal War on Drugs but the retarded UN which has it's own multi-national drug policy too. Yay big government it's so great, it clearly works for the people!

[Mr. Ambien]

LMFAO.....I remember those commercials...hahahaha the ones with the egg...then the egg scrambling...saying...this is your brain on drugs...hahahahaha I beg to differ. One thing I have learned that has stuck with me over my entire life is I cannot trust this government, or anything it does, or anything it says...ever.

[Scott Hartnell's Mane]

If anything the War on Drugs is a symbol that this textbook belief that the people are this inherent check against government is patently bad logic. So those with this smug, what-can-go-wrong mindset like silverpig make me shake my head. People with government behind them have committed the worst atrocities in mankind.. and the same "trust the government!" morons behind them.

[Mr. Ambien]

Close. People with the Church behind them have committed the worst atrocities in mankind...but when those same lobbies started getting governmental backing...it made it ten times worse...and on a grander scale.

[CB007]

Everything Paul says is propaganda.

Examples:

1) 0.53. Interventionism. He implies that interventionism, whatever that really means, has purposely caused debts, inflation etc. And I don't know what kind of scholarly foresight he has to predict that "this type of system comes to an end too." He doesn't know that. He mentioned that every 'interventionist' countries in the West is facing problematic debts. What he doesn't tell you is that of course many leftist countries do not have high debts: Sweden, Norway and Cuba hover around 33%. China is 22% (compared to the US which is still far more right: over 100%)

2) 1:20. He implies that Keynesian Economics taxes people to the point where people cannot be taxed any more. This is as dumb as saying Adam Smith wrote nothing more in his career than just Supply and Demand (which of course is what a lot of us are fed to believe).

3) 1:45. He is borrowing the word "liberty" to sell his no holds barred style of economy system. "Liberty", according to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty

Liberty is a good thing of course, but economic systems is only a small part of it. Worse, he is implying that we do not have any liberty now, which is complete BS.

4) 3:30. He implies that 'Freedom' is the direct opposite of 'Interventionism', like it is either or. This is exactly the kind of black and white Republican politics that have divided the US. It dumbs down the issues, destroys rational thoughts and actual analyses.

5) 4:15. He keeps saying we are going in the wrong direction and it is coming to an end. Funny for a person who advocates individual freedom to be TELLING US which way we should be heading and which economic system is coming to an end.

While I will agree with him that labels are tricky, he is usually the one who brings up labels in all his speeches and debates. Just from memory, he loves calling himself a Libertarian and 'Strict Constitutionalist' in the Republican debates.

I have to agree with him on the stuff about the deceptive government stats. For about several minutes he actually tells the truth. But this portion of his speech has very little to do with the first 5 minutes or so of his speech. This line of script writing follows the good old sales philosophy of "People buy with emotions, defend with logic". He fed them with emotional sales stuff first, then gives them logic, which unfortunately in has case has very little to do with his system of economics. Multi level marketing companies use the same strategy to recruit people.

6) 8:45. It's a perfect example of Paul using perfectly rational logic to sell his irrational economic ideas. While it is probably true that the people have become more afraid after 9/11 and the govt probably has exploited that, it has nothing to do with his economic ideas he advocates in the first 5 minutes. This keeps going for terrorist and suspects.

7) 10:00. He is pitting 'individual rights' against 'taxes'. Actually, he is giving his audience an excuse to use self interest to trump taxes. Individual rights vs taxation is not a fair fight because, as words, 'individual rights' wins every time. But if you pit 'individual rights' against 'societal benefits', then perhaps you would get a more even results. Like the first thing I said, everything that comes out of his mouth is propaganda. He is very very good at it.

Everyone is equal under the law sounds like a great thing of course but taxation is only a very small part of this set of individual rights. I bet he is not going to talk about the rights of gay people, pregnant women and disabled people. Oh I forgot, he doesn't label people, therefore he doesn't have to worry about their rights.

I'll come back for the second half later.

PS. It is rather funny that at 10 minute mark he has not mentioned the word 'drugs' at all.

[Mr. Ambien]

Everything Paul says is propaganda.

Examples:

1) 0.53. Interventionism. He implies that interventionism, whatever that really means, has purposely caused debts, inflation etc. And I don't know what kind of scholarly foresight he has to predict that "this type of system comes to an end too." He doesn't know that. He mentioned that every 'interventionist' countries in the West is facing problematic debts. What he doesn't tell you is that of course many leftist countries do not have high debts: Sweden, Norway and Cuba hover around 33%. China is 22% (compared to the US which is still far more right: over 100%)

2) 1:20. He implies that Keynesian Economics taxes people to the point where people cannot be taxed any more. This is as dumb as saying Adam Smith wrote nothing more in his career than just Supply and Demand (which of course is what a lot of us are fed to believe).

3) 1:45. He is borrowing the word "liberty" to sell his no holds barred style of economy system. "Liberty", according to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty

Liberty is a good thing of course, but economic systems is only a small part of it. Worse, he is implying that we do not have any liberty now, which is complete BS.

4) 3:30. He implies that 'Freedom' is the direct opposite of 'Interventionism', like it is either or. This is exactly the kind of black and white Republican politics that have divided the US. It dumbs down the issues, destroys rational thoughts and actual analyses.

5) 4:15. He keeps saying we are going in the wrong direction and it is coming to an end. Funny for a person who advocates individual freedom to be TELLING US which way we should be heading and which economic system is coming to an end.

While I will agree with him that labels are tricky, he is usually the one who brings up labels in all his speeches and debates. Just from memory, he loves calling himself a Libertarian and 'Strict Constitutionalist' in the Republican debates.

I have to agree with him on the stuff about the deceptive government stats. For about several minutes he actually tells the truth. But this portion of his speech has very little to do with the first 5 minutes or so of his speech. This line of script writing follows the good old sales philosophy of "People buy with emotions, defend with logic". He fed them with emotional sales stuff first, then gives them logic, which unfortunately in has case has very little to do with his system of economics. Multi level marketing companies use the same strategy to recruit people.

6) 8:45. It's a perfect example of Paul using perfectly rational logic to sell his irrational economic ideas. While it is probably true that the people have become more afraid after 9/11 and the govt probably has exploited that, it has nothing to do with his economic ideas he advocates in the first 5 minutes. This keeps going for terrorist and suspects.

7) 10:00. He is pitting 'individual rights' against 'taxes'. Actually, he is giving his audience an excuse to use self interest to trump taxes. Individual rights vs taxation is not a fair fight because, as words, 'individual rights' wins every time. But if you pit 'individual rights' against 'societal benefits', then perhaps you would get a more even results. Like the first thing I said, everything that comes out of his mouth is propaganda. He is very very good at it.

Everyone is equal under the law sounds like a great thing of course but taxation is only a very small part of this set of individual rights. I bet he is not going to talk about the rights of gay people, pregnant women and disabled people. Oh I forgot, he doesn't label people, therefore he doesn't have to worry about their rights.

I'll come back for the second half later.

PS. It is rather funny that at 10 minute mark he has not mentioned the word 'drugs' at all.

[CB007]

While I can see the one-or-the-other way he goes about it can put people off, the method you use of dissecting tiny portions of his ideals clearly has you going off on a tangent causing you to miss the point completely or in other cases causes you to rant about his beliefs nonsensically.

[CB007]

What is the "War on Drugs" related to in the bigger picture? Aliens? Blow-up dolls? Or economics? That's a tough one..

What was the US justification for invading Panama.. hmm?

[CB007]

Watch this at around 9:10

He talks about his silver coin how in 2006, he can buy himself 4 gallons of gas, but today, he can buy himself 11 gallons of gas.

This is fine, but then he went on to say it is the preservation of value. Which is complete BS. Then he says money comes into effect in a natural way, which for this example is complete BS.

A silver coin tripling in value over 5 to 7 years is not preservation of value. It is an investment gain, not preservation of value. Invest rises in value because investor want to buy it. I'm not sure what he means by 'natural'. If he means let it determined by supply and demand, then there is nothing wrong with fiat currency because in a fiat system, value of the dollar is completely determined by the market. The government can only intervene in a limited way by controlling the money supply. For years we have heard all this doom and gloom about hyperinflation, so far we have not had any.

If we are to fix our currency to gold, then the value of gold will probably increase in value by 100 times or something. It would make a lot of gold owners happy. It is an arbitrary standard. There is nothing natural about it.

[Rink on Renfrew]

Ron Paul opposes a system of crony capitalism where "regulation" is actually doublespeak for collusion between government and industry. Even laws that appear legitimate are selectively enforced in order to exert control over the marketplace. It's entirely an insiders' game and the antithesis of a free market. Paul supports abolishing the private federal reserve system and preaches a sustainable economy with sound monetary policy and limited government. It's a very popular message, which is why the establishment media portrays him as a kook. He's an obvious threat to their big-government monopoly of power.

[Mr. Ambien]

Watch this at around 9:10

He talks about his silver coin how in 2006, he can buy himself 4 gallons of gas, but today, he can buy himself 11 gallons of gas.

This is fine, but then he went on to say it is the preservation of value. Which is complete BS. Then he says money comes into effect in a natural way, which for this example is complete BS.

A silver coin tripling in value over 5 to 7 years is not preservation of value. It is an investment gain, not preservation of value. Invest rises in value because investor want to buy it. I'm not sure what he means by 'natural'. If he means let it determined by supply and demand, then there is nothing wrong with fiat currency because in a fiat system, value of the dollar is completely determined by the market. The government can only intervene in a limited way by controlling the money supply. For years we have heard all this doom and gloom about hyperinflation, so far we have not had any.

If we are to fix our currency to gold, then the value of gold will probably increase in value by 100 times or something. It would make a lot of gold owners happy. It is an arbitrary standard. There is nothing natural about it.

[CB007]

Ron Paul has gone into this and so has people like Peter Schiff, and Niall Ferguson, smart people that don't include Paul Krugman, slowly but surely Krugman is seeing the light.. Krugman is a Keynesian Fed hack and take note who's side he takes no matter what, that's not an indicator of intelligence.

The gold standard meant the currency was fixed to a limited, yet valuable resource, meaning even if the dollar dropped in value it couldn't drop that much because it was tied to a valuable resource. That meant at the time the US was tied to the gold standard it was highly improbable for the US to go the way of Zimbabwe a few years back.

The only reason the US dollar continues to have any value is for two reasons: 1) Their standing in foreign reserves (which has more to do with aggressive foreign policy than anything, which is unsustainable as it would bankrupt them, 2) Monetary problems of other prominent currencies such as the Euro and RMB haven't put enough confidence to completely diversify from the dollar.

The two parts of the equation that will definitively put the greenback as a fiat currency will be when the remaining countries/banks buying US bonds stop doing so meaning they lack the confidence the US can pay back debts (if you notice the US must keep it's bond yields at 0% or near 0%, as well as general interest rates, to avoid another disaster, that tells you how fragile the situation is), and when remaining countries move their reserves from the dollar, completely rendering the currency as toilet paper and valueless. Ron Paul and Peter Schiff both refer to the dollar as a fiat currency because there's no political will to change the US course of debt accumulation, which include policies of ultra-aggressive interventionism and terrible economic policies spending vast amount on the War on Drugs.

[Mr. Ambien]

I'm not necessarily a leftist but the first paragraph of Krugman's wiki page says this:

Paul Robin Krugman (born February 28, 1953) is an American economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and anop-ed columnist for The New York Times.^[7][8] In 2008, Krugman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. According to the prize Committee, the prize was given for Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic concentration of wealth, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.

You do not accumulate this amount of credentials for having no intelligence.

On the other hand:

Ron Paul is a doctor.

Schiff works on Wall Street, what some people might call 'bankster' nowadays.

Ferguson got his chops so I'll leave him be.

I will not go into a prolonged discussion on why gold standard wouldn't work. Here is a list of reasons:

http://en.wikipedia....d#Disadvantages

But to briefly put, instead of having the governments from different countries intervening in the economy, the power will be shifted to gold producers who of course have no regards for anyone other than their shareholders. Imagine the gold producing cartel of the world decides that they will limit gold production to arbitrarily raise the value of gold, thus limiting the monetary supply and stalling economic growth? Yeah, that's very very bad! It will also disproportionately give power to countries holding the most gold, like China...

Hyperinflation will not happen in the US for now, it probably never will, because policy makers and central bankers know what they are doing. I think they are nervous about countries dropping the USD as their reserve. I call it the International Coup d'etat. It might happen. It would be a real issue. But gold standard is definitely not the answer as explained above.

It is easy to be sold by Paul's rhetoric on gold and sustainable growth and all that. It is just idealistic nostalgic theoretical talk with no empirical nor scientific evidence backing it up. When he does try to go factual on us, it's all wrong like that silver coin example.

I'm not necessarily against small governments and low taxes and that stuff. But this gold standard and international monetary policy stuff, Ron Paul got it all wrong.

[CB007]

On Krugman:

The guy is a macroeconomist, not an investment analyst or business consultant. Though I find it hard to believe that he recommended Wall Street stocks, but even if he did, so did many others. I wasn't here to defend him to begin with so I'll stop at this.

On Keynesian Economics:

I don't know in which book Keynes says reckless investment in speculative assets is a good thing for the economy, so blaming the current recession on Keynesian Economics is completely wrong. Government spending and taxation did not put us into this recession. Reckless investment at all levels of the economy, from the average folks buying homes they cannot afford using balloon mortgages given to them by mortgage and loan companies, to Wall Street repackaging them as sound investments and buying and selling them with each other is to blame. The countries that did not suffer from the recession much, like the Scandinavian countries, and emerging markets like Brazil and India, steered clear of all of this, regardless of their tax levels and amounts of government controls.

One can argue that Fanny and Freddie were big players in all of this, but that's just bad business, not Keynesian Economics per se.

On China:

When China depreciates the RMB is called currency manipulation to gain competitive advantage. When the US Fed implements QE and the USD gets depreciated as a side effect, it's call 'erosion of American wealth'. You see the hypocrisy?

On Ron Paul,

If he does possess true expertise in economics, I have yet seen it in any speeches or videos. Everything about the economy he says can be categorized into one of the following categories:

1) plain obvious (Debt, bad. War, bad),

2) oversimplication / biased opinions / misinformation / propaganda (the first 5 mins of the Sun video, and many others)

3) matter of perspective (CPI vs PPI, price vs value of dollar)

4) completely ridiculous (calling a silver coin tripling in value over 4 years preservation of capital)

I beg you to post one video or speech where he states indisputable facts beyond the plain obvious. Whatever you post can be categorized in the above 4 categories and easily disputed with simple economics.

Speaking of indisputable facts, and thorough analyses, here is an example:

You cannot dispute this. This analysis came from actual micro/macroeconomic research and policy implementation experience. You may raise a proper question: how are we going to pay for all this after the economy recovers? That's a proper question, yes (the answer is cut spending and raise taxes when the economy booms). But his analysis and explanation of the recession, and the method to recover, are indisputable. I have yet seen Paul produce a thorough and factual thesis at this level to support his ideas.

I do not disagree with Ron Paul's principle of balancing spending with income. It makes perfect sense. But even you ought to know that we are not in the correct time in history to do this. What do you actually think would've happened if emergency loans weren't given to Wall Street in 2008? If Wall Street did collapse? Please tell me.

What Paul advocates on the surface level has little reality to what he thinks we should do to get there. One simply does not equate with the other.

And just for the record I have to agree with his idea of non-interventionism with foreign policy. Most of the hate coming from the rest of the world stems from America flexing their military and economic muscles. This is well documented and understood.

[Electro Rock]

Any real economic fix hinges on getting the Federal Reserve and other private banking oligachies out of the game, you do that and the debt issues will probably take care of themselves.

[CB007]

First of all, Ron Paul is a better speaker than Krugman, but this is a perfect example of Ron Paul playing politics and the emotions of the people in this video. As soon as Krugman schools him on what Friedman actually said, Ron Paul switches gear and went with "98% of value lost since 1913 due to Fed policies" (paraphrasing) at around the 7:15 mark. This is complete BS, completely misleading (Paul talks category #2). The currency deflated in a nominal sense, sure, but so did every other relevant currency, and the basket of consumer products overall did not get more expensive, In fact our standards of living improved from then to now, this is indisputable.