2006-07-17 14:41:17.703727+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments
Congressman Paul's Legislative Strategy? He'd Rather Say Not. (via Dave's Picks).
Mainstream party platforms are riddled with inconsistencies; Paul tries to run what he believes is a straight course through every vote. Smaller government is better. That's why he winds up aligned with the most liberal of Democrats and the most conservative of Republicans.
[ related topics: Politics Libertarian ]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2006-07-17 19:45:31.401055+00 by: ziffle
He is interesting. Were it not for his Christian centered views and errors on things like abortion (under the assumption he would find that a government had the authority to prohibit such) he would be great.
#Comment Re: made: 2006-07-17 23:22:51.787613+00 by: ebradway
Paul's a revisionist:
"Where to begin with this one?" asks Michael Katz, a historian of poverty at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied charity case records from the early 20th century.
Referring to Paul's desire to return to the "Good ol' days" of the 19th century. Sure, they were good ol' days for the rich but there really wasn't much of a middle class.
#Comment Re: made: 2006-07-18 22:49:41.962375+00 by: ziffle
Actually Dr. Paul is not the revisionist, but someone is; the 19th century was the most glorious in history, the flowering of mans mind over nature; the industrial revolution created the middle class.
"By 1880 Europe entered into a period which could well be described as the classical age of the 19th century. It was the mid-Victorian era -- the era of middle class domination. The middle classes of Europe settled back into their comfortable bourgeois chairs, fully imbued with the virtues of middle class existence. In England, industrialization and free trade had made the middle class."
It is only the Marxists still left in our universities who continue to try to revise the facts to fit some fallacious dream of class warfare; they are the revisionists. Their time is coming to an end - Dave Horowitz is making progress: "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" tells what is happening and his 'Academic Bill of Rights' is being adopted to counter the Marxist nonsense being disseminated in our universities, like the comment of Michael Katz.
But a 'middle class' is not the goal - it is the freedom of any individual to act uninhibited or directed by others that is the hallmark of freedom and its result, the industrial reviolution and prosperity.
#Comment Re: made: 2006-07-18 23:39:41.034704+00 by: Dan Lyke
To look at it economically, up until the Great Depression (heck, in some ways up until the re-adjustment of farming subsidies in the '70s by the Nixon administration) we had an agricultural class, and that's disappeared now. Some of that disappearance is a product of the industrial revolution, but I think that a lot of the reason that farming has disappeared as a business with reasonable income that strongly builds wealth for the family is that government policy has created special subsidies for large industrial producers.
I can't speak to how much dying from starvation there was pre "New Deal", but if you've read some of "the other place", recent experiences have made me question that alleviating that particular poverty has caused less pain.