plucky tree

arguments against ron paul

I’ve been a Ron Paul supporter on and off for 23 years now, casting my first ever Presidential vote for him in the 1988 election. Two things have remained 100% consistent since then:

1. Ron Paul’s convictions and beliefs
2. The arguments against Ron Paul as a potential President

For me, the arguments against him, however legitimate they may be, are an order of magnitude less significant than all the wars we are involved in and how many people die and suffer every day as a result of them. Here are the usual arguments against him:

1. He’s supposedly anti-abortion
2. He’s a Christian and/or creationist and somehow that’s the worst thing ever
3. He’s a Libertarian, so that’s automically terrible or something
4. He’s supposedly racist

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how the government worsens income inequality

Let’s say you have some friends that are starting a small business. They set themselves up as a Corporation or LLC and are looking for investors. You decide, sure, why not, I’ve got a few thousand dollars saved, I’ll invest.

Well, turns out you probably can’t!

Unless you have a liquid net worth over $1 million or earned more than $200,000 in the last couple years. To buy any shares in a private company, you need to be an “accredited investor”:

SEC: Accredited Investors

If you find some already rich people, they can invest, that’s fine. So, this is one of the many ways that government actually worsens income inequality. When people are clamoring for the government to “do something” to fix this inequality, perhaps they should step back and look at all the ways they have caused it in the first place.

if only plastic canoes were our biggest problem

Giant waka seen as ‘cheap’

If only our biggest problem here in the US were the government potentially wasting money on a plastic canoe.

Only $2 million? I guess it wasn’t a no-bid contract!

Instead, we have to wonder what country we’re going to bomb next.

the seductiveness of net neutrality

It’s hard to be against something with such a benign and positive name like “net neutrality”. It’s like being against the Clean Skies Act, which, as it turns out, is one of many pieces of legislation whose name doesn’t accurately describe what it contains

Despite the seductiveness of net neutrality, I believe any government intrusion into the Internet would spoil the one place where true freedom still exists.

Here’s a great article by presidential hopeful Gary Johnson on the subject:

Opinion: Government Should Keep Its Hands Off the Internet

here’s to the crazy ones

Not sure how I missed this article when it came out, but this is a brilliant analysis of what passes for political discourse in the US currently:

Who are the real “crazies” in our political culture

This meshes in very nicely with Jon Stewart’s commentary on the manufactured “battle” between the right and the left that the media force feeds us:

The Maddow/Stewart interview, uncut

the win-win scenario that we’ll lose

If there were some way to reduce world government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars a year, while significantly reducing CO2 emissions and igniting the alternative energy market, you’d think the government would be all over that, right?

Not so fast:

Call to Stop Fossil Fuel Subsidy

People think that libertarians don’t care about the environment or only care about money. The truth is that libertarians are keenly aware of how money motivates people and businesses. If you subsidize something, you encourage more of it and you hurt free market alternatives that would likely be better.

Instead of doing the sensible thing, I expect we will continue to subsidize bad industries while at the same time subsidizing the clean industries, but not so much that the bad industries get worried and put pressure on their congressman.

Fossil fuels would be long gone by now if not for government intervention, keeping them artificially cheap and delaying the time when renewable sources will become highly competitive.