legit questions for the Ron Paul philosophy
Submitted by WelfareFTW on Sat, 02/11/2012 - 02:02Hi All,
I would like to first state that Ron Paul is 100 nay a 1000 times better than any of the other candidates out there and poking a hole in any of the other candidates' philosophy if they have one is almost as easy as just blindly pointing to any part of it.
However, I do have a couple of legitimate concerns though, because what I want is a cohesive policy that I can support 100%. I realize some issues are complex so if you want to point me to books or links that's fine.
Q1: Environment: Ron Paul's stance is private property rights and you don't have a right to pollute your neighbour's air or space. a. How does this work interstate? The stance seems to be to sue companies. b. Is it realistic for a typical private citizen with little or no resources to try to marshall a legal challenge to companies like, say, PG&E who have armies of legal people devoted to this. How is justice served in such a lopsided system?
Q2: Free trade: How will the US unilaterally opening up and being a free trade partner solve the problem of a country like China artificially lowering the exchange rate of their currency. Yes, the Chinese are hosing a large portion of their population and businesses, especially those that are dependent on imports, but if they run a system of devaluation for say 10-15 years, that is sufficient to gut the manufacturing in a country like the US. How would Ron Paul answer that?
Like Q1 a lot
You're right with where we protect our right to our air and land and water. Your question is how do we protect this.
This is a great question. In a freed country, government's only function would be to provide you the ability to protect your individual rights. Right now, the system is set up for the monied interests. I'm not sure how to set a government infrastructure up so that an individual could protect his air should a coal factory set up next door.
Right now, look at what happens. A coal factory sets up. The coal factory has to pay politicians some political contributions to make this happen. They then pay for various treatments in order to reduce the outflow. Whether it's the appropriate amount or not has no relationship to the harm to the neighbors.
In a freed society, a coal factory couldn't buy off the politicians in order to get their plant approved. They couldn't capture the regulatory body in order to continue polluting. They'd have to make agreements with their neighbors. The agreement might look like a cash payment (note, instead of to the politican who sells the neighbor's lungs, the payment goes directly to those harmed.) It might also include buying out neighbors who disagree. And it incluedes decreasing the emissions to a level that the neighbors agree to.
If the coal started fireing up, the issue would be handled in court -- likely on contingency as class action. Alternatively, neighbors could band together.
But, and this is important, the court system must be reforme d so that it's no longer ignoring personal property issues in favor of non-violent crime, but instead is primarily focused on protecting private property rights. Right now it is a crime in my mind that the government does absolutely nothing for the neighbors.
Don't Vote For Ron Paul for anything less than
Re[love]ution & Renaissance
Dennis
Very simple
Q1: You get your redress from the State, not Federal court system.
Q2: Slash personal and corporate taxes and government regulations. Industry and investment will come flowing back to the US.
Can help with Q2
Can't help much with the first question other than to say that the Paul-type legalist approach to environmental pollution is arguably better at protecting the environment and the wellbeing of people, on balance, than the EPA is, what with the EPA being vulnerable to corruption and reducing the productivity of my businesses in the US. I don't see a lot of hard evidence for either side of that argument though. This is an objection that my liberal friends bring up every time I talk to them about Ron Paul, and it's hard to convince them given that our legal system is not very ideal.
Q2 I can field though, with a little help from Milton Friedman - you should really watch is series of videos "Free to Choose" if you haven't already, you can find them on youtube. The fallacy is in this notion that the Chinese are taking advantage of us and that we aren't getting anything in return, or that the Chinese are getting something for nothing. You never get something for nothing in economics.
You have to look at how the Chinese are "manipulating their currency". Not coincidentally, they are doing it by purchasing US federal government debt. That debt goes to financing all of the things that we know America really needs, the welfare state and the warfare state. Friedman says that when we pay for Chinese goods in dollars, the Chinese can't spend it in China - they have to spend renminbi. One way or another, those dollars have to come back to the US. We're simply choosing to have it come back to the US as deficit financing, instead of additional demand for US goods or foreign investment that would create jobs. This is just one reason why Ron Paul's platform of deficit reduction is so important. We get frustrated with what they're doing, but the Chinese really couldn't do it without us.
To illustrate, suppose that there is actually a long term trade imbalance where Americans are buying more Chinese goods than the other way around, as often appears to be the case. Then there will be more demand for Chinese renminbi to pay for Chinese goods than for American dollars to pay for Chinese purchases. Dollars will flow into the currency exchange traders, outnumbering the inflow of renminbi. At the current exchange rate, dollars will outnumber renminbi and there will be a "shortage of renminbi". In other words, some willing buyers will be denied the opportunity to buy renminbi at the current price. Of course, there is a market solution to this - the "price" of renminbi goes up and they become more valuable. Now some people who would have bought Chinese goods at the old price are finding it less attractive, and conversely some Chinese people suddenly find it more attractive to buy US goods.
In real life, this exact scenario is circumvented, but economics itself is not. Chinese prices would still be lower without their currency policy, but we are no worse off for their "currency manipulation", in the sense that the dollars do all come back. We simply choose to receive them as financing for social security, medicare, government pensions, and military bases around the world. No one gets something for nothing, and that includes us.