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Posted on 11/01/2007 6:38:53 AM PDT by traviskicks
It sometimes seems as if someone is playing a cruel practical joke on Ron Paul. He goes to a college and delivers the same speech he's given for the past 30 years of his political career, the one espousing the Austrian school of economics. Only now the audience is packed with hundreds of kids in RON PAUL REVOLUTION T shirts who go nuts — giving standing ovations when he drones on about getting rid of the Federal Reserve and returning to the gold standard. After a speech at Iowa State last month, when nearly half the crowd had to stand because there were only 400 seats, a hipster-looking student worked his way through the half-hour-long line to shake Paul's hand. This was surely it — the moment when the straight faces would break and Paul would be wedgied up the flagpole. "When you see Bernanke," the kid said, "will you tell him to stop cutting rates when gold hits 1,000?"
Politics might be rock 'n' roll for nerds, but the nerds aren't supposed to be quite this nerdy. The leader of the disaffected in next year's presidential election — the Howard Dean, the Ross Perot, the Pat Buchanan — is a kindly great-grandfather and obstetrician whose passion is monetary policy. Paul, a 72-year-old hard-core libertarian Republican Congressman who is against foreign intervention, subsidies and the federal income tax, is not only drawing impressive crowds (more than 2,000 at a postdebate rally at the University of Michigan last month) but also raising tons of cash. In the third quarter of 2007, Paul took in $5.3 million (just slightly less than GOP rival John McCain), mostly in small, individual donations. On Oct. 22, he aired his first TV ads, $1.1 million worth in New Hampshire.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
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(In before the same lame joke posted for the thirty-thousandth time)
isn’t iowa state a public uni?
“the same speech he’s given for the past 30 years of his political career, the one espousing the Austrian school of economics.”
Ron Paul doesn’t understand economics. I have a libertarian economic bent, too, but abolishing the Fed would ultimately be a precursor to a recession that would rival the Great Depression. True, the Fed is not perfect, and makes mistakes. But the money supply won’t just magically grow at a steady pace merely because you abolish the Fed.
Ron Paul is another clintonian ross perot plant.
Y’all can’t see that?
I’d be all for supporting him if his foreign policy did a 180.
Oh, go back to defending your boy Rudy. You sound a little more sane.
>> have ya’ll seen this chart:
That chart is a lie. It’s been debunked many times right here on FR.
You shouldn’t be spamming this forum with this nonsensical crap cut out of an ElRon Official Cult Site, either.
Rudy’s not my boy, unless he’s up against Hillary, Hussien or Breck girl.
No jokes just a serious question.
Have you given any thought to what would really happen if Ron Paul were elected president?
I believe he would immediately be isolated and rendered ineffective by both parties. There would be no retreat from Iraq or recall of soldiers from around the globe. The democrats simply aren’t going to make a republican into a hero of the left and the republicans will fight him every step of the way. The only option left to him would be an endless string of executive orders that would go against his own constitutional beliefs.
Personally I like RP and agree with him on a lot of issues but I’m a realist who has seen enough politics to know how things work. Just gaining power doesn’t magically make all the pieces fall into place creating utopia.
When President Jackson essentially put the Second Bank of the United States out of business, the United States operated without a central bank for about 80 years. While it was a period of strong growth, it also was one with an unstable money supply and frequent panics, or depressions. Since the establishment of the Fed in 1913, these sharp corrections have ended. Arguably, the Fed mishandled the monetary supply and credit during the Great Depression, but it was the rapid expansion of Federal power and regulation under the New Deal that prolonged that depression into 1939-40. While inflation has been an ongoing problem since the 1950s, the almost unending string of budget deficits the Federal government has incurred in that period has been a major element in price rises. While some have complained of the Fed's independence, the reality is that is not sufficiently so, as the central bank has been effectively blackmailed by Congress and the White House on many occasions.
Thanks for the thought-out post. I have some major issues with Paul myself. It's just frustrating that it keeps getting harder and harder to intelligently discuss them on FR. That said, I ppretty much agree completely with your points.
But Paul's popularity can't necessarily be explained by a previously undetected craving for gold-standard debates on college campuses. His message, even if packaged in obscure economic lectures, is that there is something very corrupt, very Halliburton-Blackwatery going on with our military-industrial complex, and that can attract some pretty weird followers. At the Iowa State event, a student stood outside in a tricornered hat and Revolutionary War–era suit, ringing a bell. Representative Tom Tancredo, another long-shot GOP candidate, tells me that after a debate in New Hampshire, one of his staffers walked up to a guy in a shark costume and asked him if he was a Ron Paul supporter. "No. They're all nuts," replied the shark. "I'm just a guy in a shark suit." There is a subset of Paul supporters who believe 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government. And there are anarchists as well: they've picked Nov. 5, Guy Fawkes Day, for a fund-raising drive.
"His supporters are the equivalent of crabgrass," says GOP consultant Frank Luntz. "It's not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff. They just like him because he's the most anti-Establishment of all the candidates, the most likely to look at the camera during the debates and say, 'Hey, Washington, f____ you.'"...
The Bible said the NWO is coming long before your gods Alex Jones and Ron Paul. They are not the ones that will save us. Don’t follow men.
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