Archive for the 'Ron Paul' Category

Date: December 7th, 2007, Filed under Ron Paul

From the Telegraph: It may seem sometimes that running for president is all about corporate jets, Secret Service protection and a fawning entourage. Not for Ron Paul, the libertarian anti-war outsider generating some fervent support and impressive fundraising totals. There he was at Washington Reagan airport last night lugging his bags onto the same Continental Airlines flight to Houston as me. On his own. Not an aide in sight.

Read the rest of this article and see the amazing photo at the Ron Paul site.

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Date: December 6th, 2007, Filed under Ron Paul

I currently maintain, operate and pay for 5 WiFi connections throughout the Chicago area (at my homes, and at my offices). This number will grow to around 10, soon, as I will have more WiFi routers in offices I spend time in.

All my WiFi connections are publicly available (although the public connections are throttled to limit people hogging up my connection). I’ve named all my WiFi access points “RonPaul” As I post this, 4 of my neighbors are using one of my connections. Another 3 people in an apartment building next to my office are also using that connection. Even though the signal is fairly weak, it is a great outreach tool to get people to see his name.

Read the rest of this article at the Ron Paul site.

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Date: November 14th, 2007, Filed under Ron Paul

Since I am a anti-voting anarcho-capitalist, many of my friends, family and readers wonders why I support Ron Paul for President so strongly. I get at least one to two e-mails per day asking if I have given up my stance on anti-voting. I have not.

My support for Dr. Paul is based on his message: contrarian, strongly anti-state, and meek. There are less than 10 politicians in the world that I respect, and Dr. Paul is one of them. If you watch a video of him today versus one 20 years ago, his message is strangely consistent. If it wasn’t for the greying of hair, you’d be hard pressed to figure out when the video was recorded. This is an amazing consistency.

Read the rest of this post at the Ron Paul site.

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Date: November 8th, 2007, Filed under Ron Paul

A must, must, must view video. This happened today.

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Date: November 6th, 2007, Filed under Ron Paul

When the founders created the Constitution, and subsequently the Bill of Rights, the text in my opinion was fairly clear: The Federal government was not about legislating actions or crimes, but about protecting the rights that each individual has inherently. The Federal government was also entrusted to coin money, which at the time was strictly gold or silver. States are required to pay in gold or silver (another Constitutional text disregarded by modern day politicians). The few “crimes” that the Federal government had to deal with are either international in nature (i.e. piracy), or in protection of money (i.e. counterfeiting).

When I explain Ron Paul’s ideals on health care, social security, gambling, drugs and other issues, the most common response is that we can’t leave certain things up to the States to make decisions. If the U.S. government removed all Federal drug laws, some people think the U.S. will become a nation of drug users. If you ask any teenager today, we’re there already, even with the laws.

Let’s look at one area that the U.S. government has stayed out of: prostitution. Prostitution is not a law on the federal lawbooks. It is illegal in most states. Even in hooker-friendly Nevada, it is illegal in their main area of Clark County.

In my town of 75,000 residents, we have approximately 50 known prostitutes. They’re dealt with at the local level (both by customers, and by the law). Just like the War on Drugs, a War on Prostitution would be impossible to legislate from the Federal level. In my town, the average person is not interested in prostitutes, and yet the active (and advertising) 4 dozen that work here aren’t a target. Neither are any of the casual drug users, or even the amateur drug dealers — so why do we have a drug war at the Federal level?

When we look at the massive growth of Federal government, there is one common tie: the ability to make money out of thin air. This coincides both growths (abusive legislation and the growth in spending) with the Federal Reserve in 1913. Once government of any size can make their own money, abuses will happen against inherent rights and towards the growth of bureaucracies.

Before the Federal Reserve, the U.S. government had only one way to take in money: taxes. People hate taxes, and the more you tax, the more unhappy people become. The switch to printing new money is the most insidious hidden tax because it devalues your money by an unknown percentage. If the government increased taxes by 5%, you’d have an idea how much you are losing. By instead inflating the currency supply by an unknown and undocumented amount, your savings and investments are depreciated, but no one knows by how much. To try to counteract people from asking, the very same government that counterfeits new dollars also reports on their value for inflation, which of course does not include food or energy costs.

Like prostitution, most Federal legislation should be dismantled and sent to the States to decide how and why to legislate certain actions. Education is definitely a local issue, and parents (and non-parents) could make living decisions based on the tax burden and education-focus of each State. This is a powerful feature of the Constitution, which uses State’s Rights as a check-and-balance on abuse by the States. Few people would live in a State with 90% tax levels; few people would live in a State with 0% tax levels and almost no State services. Yet this opportunity in choice gives each individual much more freedom to decide where they should live: Progressives can move to 90% tax States with universal health care, free education at all levels, and high minimum wage laws. Libertarians can move to 5-10% tax States with market solutions for all of the above. The system works, even for those who are poor (nothing prevents a poor person from moving as a poor person is likely not in ownership of a home or massive assets that would be costly to move).

The best asset for freedom that we have at the State level is their inability to print money out of thin air. States MUST abide by their income, and if they take on debt, that debt is immediately apparent to the taxpayers who will see higher taxation in the long run. It is a wonderful check-and-balance on tyranny.

Ron Paul is the only politician running for President that would work for both Progressives and Libertarians, due to his ideal monetary policy (stop inflationary theft) and his hardcore belief in State’s Rights. He knows that each State will design their services and tax systems based on what their citizens want. Some States already speak out against Federal government growth, because their populations are against large government growth. Yet due to inept judicial response from the Supreme Court, these States have not been able to back out of the unconstitutional programs forced on them by the Feds.

In order to truly have a free and growing society and economy, we have to remember that giving a government the power to create money, and to create laws, greatly diminishes the citizen’s ability to discern if the system works.

Ron Paul’s campaign can be summed up in what I would consider the ultimate lawsuit to cross the legal dockets:

The People of the United States versus the Federal Government of the United States

I’d love to be on that jury.

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Date: October 4th, 2007, Filed under Ron Paul

Schaumburg, IL
By A.B. Dada
—

I was reading the Andrew Sullivan’s summary of an article in the NY Times regarding the renewed torture effort by the U.S., and it is obvious that both the mainstream press, and the blogging media, forget one issue that is bigger than the debate as to what defines a war criminal: the obvious destruction of the Separation and Balance of Powers that the U.S. Constitution outlines. When a Federal employee who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution violates that oath, we have a far bigger crime than a war crime.

The idea of using torture is one that is despicable to me, because history has shown that people will admit to anything under torture, even if they have no knowledge of what they’re admitting to. We’ve seen videos of journalists undergoing controlled torture, who have caved in minutes or less to admitting to crimes they didn’t commit. We’ve seen decades of “criminals” on death row who admitted to a crime, only to be cleared of the crime after DNA and other evidence surfaced, and those very “criminals” speaking of the torture they were interrogated under.

Yet is torture a war crime if we haven’t had a Declaration of War? If you go to your neighbor’s property and kill them, that is murder. If you go to your neighbor’s property and pummel them, that is initiating unprovoked force against another in an offensive fashion. Both of these are property crimes, which are supposedly government’s job to protect against and judge against. I don’t agree that we need government to handle property crimes, but if we are to understand why we need government, we need to understand what their purpose is: to handle property disputes and to handle property crimes.

A Declaration of War is an act of Congress, and only Congress. The Declaration of War is important because it puts every Congressional Representative on the line as responsible for pushing for a war. Without a Declaration of War by Congress, there is no accountability in the actions of the military, from the top down. The Executive Branch takes the Bills passed by Congress (and the Senate) and executes them, within the confines of the Constitution, a document that limits what the Federal government can do. Without a Declaration of War, the Executive branch can not act aggressively.

Without that act of Congress, actions taken against foreigners are criminal actions. Murdering a foreign soldier on foreign land is murder, yet a Declaration of War can limit that to being an act of self-defense during war if the act is against a soldier that is attacking the one defending themselves. We don’t have a Declaration of War by Congress, and haven’t had one since World War II. Why? Because Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Judicial Branch have all violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. What we have now is an unconstitutional action that should be investigated immediately — but it won’t, because the Balance of Powers and the Separation of Powers are gone. Instead of having 3 branches of Federal government fighting against one another in trying to keep Federal government small, we have 3 branches of Federal government all colluding together to produce a more powerful State, which makes each employee more powerful as well. This is not the intention of the Constitution, a document that is an easy read even for an 8th grader.

Dr. Paul’s view on returning to a Constitutional Republic show strength on many levels, but I believe his best view is returning the strong Separation of Powers back to the Federal branches. We don’t need to see Democrats versus Republicans versus Independents battling in Congress, we need to see the Supreme Court and the President battling all of Congress, and vice versa. Separating the powers of each branch will go a long way to keeping Federal government small, since each branch has an oath to uphold.

Personally, I don’t know who is a war criminal, and what the penalty should be if they were convicted of being a war criminal. I do know that most every top official of every branch of government is violating the oath to uphold the Constitution as their primary job. That means sticking to the intent of having a small, unobtrusive and particularly weak Federal government that leaves MOST laws and regulations to the States, or preferably to the People if they can handle the responsibility.

It’s important to understand that if anyone is indicted as a war criminal, we must look beyond just the Executive branch. All 3 branches colluded together to destroy the Separation of Powers, and all 3 branches should be investigated, indicted, and tried based on the succinct and specific powers they extended beyond as laid out in the Constitution.

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