What's up with this blog?

Posted: June 5th, by Duff OMelia

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I’ve been quite discouraged about politics for the better part of a decade. I’d been asking for awhile why our government officials don’t seem to follow the Constitution. Why isn’t there someone on the floor of the House or Senate standing up and saying that they don’t have the constitutional authority to pass the legislation they’re proposing? It seems they don’t care a lick about the Constitution.

Then a few weeks ago, I discovered Ron Paul on the internet. It’s pretty difficult to miss him if you spend any time out here in the internet world. He’s running for President in 2008 and he’s the only candidate who really cares about the oath of upholding the Constitution. In fact, he’s the best candidate I’ve ever seen. He HAS been standing on the floor of the House for 10 terms voting no when a bill is unconsitutional. Needless to say, Ron Paul’s writings and speeches have completely rejuvinated me. I have never been this excited about politics in America.

This excitment about Ron Paul and the potential for his campaign means that I’ve been talking about him a lot lately. And I’ve been reading every article I can find that Ron Paul has written. There are a ton of them. I’ve learned so much about the role of government and public policy by reading Ron Paul’s consistent and logical views. I don’t think I really understood what freedom meant before reading Ron Paul’s book. All of this learning and excitement can certainly start to aggravate people when I have trouble talking about other things. :) My wife Kelly is sick and tired of hearing about Ron Paul. And so are my family and friends. They’re all voting for Ron Paul of course, they’re just sick of hearing me talk about him.

That’s why I’ve created this blog. I’ll have an outlet to share the things I’m learning about liberty and government and I won’t overload the people around me.

Aleks

Ron Paul isn’t going to win the vote no matter what. He will never be our President and if you take a look at the other candidates for two minutes then you’d understand that. You are completely blinded by his ideas that you don’t understand what he is actually planning on doing to this country. For instance, take his anti-IRS policies; he plans to completely outrun the IRS by nearly abolishing taxes (at least one third of the Federal taxes).

Now, to begin with, how do you expect the government to fund new organization building or to create jobs for the people that are below the poverty line? How can we fund the building of homes for the poor if we barely have enough money to contain the war in Iraq. I’m a liberal (not a democrat or republican) and I’m completely against the war, but we are in it right now and we barely have the funding to keep that stable when we throw money across the ocean and are also expected to keep our streets clean and our roads safe. You can’t expect the government to print more money or pull it out of no where so that they can continue to better our country if we don’t expect to give up our money to provide for ourselves. Unless you want the government to print billions of dollars so that we can go into a depression like Germany during WWI to the extent where our money comes to the worth of 1 Euro to every 100 billion US dollars.

It’s terrible the position that we are in and we shouldn’t be in it, but we are. The only way that we can ensure that we continue to better this nation is by fueling our government. MA just established a universal health care plan that we are looking to establish in (hopefully) more states. Please don’t try to tell me that you are so greedy that you aren’t willing to give up money to help out your society if it doesn’t benefit you directly back. This country isn’t about me, me, me, it’s about us and strength as a “we.” You should understand this, especially if you are a Christian, as you are supposed to care for your fellow man, not just yourself.

With universal healthcare, we provide enough support for even the poor to feel safe and free, just as this nation is supposed to do. Listen, I respect your fight for freedom and your ability to comment on how you feel, especially regarding the lack of freedom that we find ourselves with, but please don’t attempt to force them onto your fellow man or you’re trying to take their freedom, too. Taking back taxes is taking from your environment and your society, from the people around you. There are plenty of countries that do that for themselves, but those countries continue to decline today, where as we are striving forward to unify ourselves as Great Britain and France has. The day that we find ourselves on such a cliff, looking down on the beauty that we’ve created, only then can we say that we’ve found purity and created a common good for a common man. But until then, we need to continue to fund, not for the government, but for the people that you live amongst.

Duff OMelia

Aleks – I don’t think that being against universal healthcare makes one greedy. It’s my belief that a truly competitive marketplace without government interference would provide the best care to the most people.

I’m a bit surprised that you think Ron Paul has so little chance to win the presidency. It should be a pretty exciting race.

dthomasdigital

What a great blog Duff, I too have found Ron Paul and he is rock solid. Aleks – you just don’t get it, start making over 30,000.00 a year and then lets see you talk about giving your money away.

Barry Day

Aleks – You make some intelligent observations that are actually in support of Ron Paul. But you’d still benefit from a course in basic economics, and could benefit from looking at current events in other countries like Zimbabwe.

Economically, we’re well down the course that fear already. The fourth largest “department” in the Federal government today is the interest payment on the national debt. It’s currently at 8.8 trillion dollars, and the interest payments in 2006 totaled over $400 billion. That’s less than the Department of Defense, and Health and Human Services, but more than every other department. The dollar is hitting historic lows against major world currencies. How much clearer can our predicament be?

In this environment, should the government be responsible for creating the jobs for “poor people”? When is the last time you spent money (willingly) at a government “store”? What, pray tell, would these government employees do?

I think you would benefit from moving to a country that fully embraces a centrally-planned economy of the sort you desire. Try Zimbabwe, for starters. But don’t give up your citizenship just yet, though. You may find that starvation is a high price to pay for depending on government to create jobs.

Note that Ron Paul has never said that the individual States could not create their own big government with socialized medicine for all of its residents. Ron Paul is just against the federal government doing this. He believes that the 50 experiments of each state can give rise to better ideas for tackling this enormous problem which by the way is not new and has never been solved by the feds even though they spend gobs of money on it. By socializing health care we add friction and inefficiencies that don’t exist in a free evolving market. The net effect of socialized medicine is that it pushes the costs out of reach for everyone (including the fed gov).

Duff OMelia

Jo – I agree. That’s one of the reasons I’m a big fan of states being responsible for much of what the federal government is currently handling. At least then there’s competition between the states.