GOOGLE RON PAUL

The thing of it is that Paul did know who wrote the letters. He was an aide who was fired, and the style of writing in the letters and statements from former Paul staffer Eric Dondero confirm that the author was Rockwell, who has been an advisor to Paul in the past.

I talked about this a lot already in my chocojournal, but the Mises Institute is pretty fucking awful. There was an Austrian economics organization in Romania that considered calling themselves the Hayek Institute because Rockwell has so thoroughly smeared any association with Mises. Mises himself fled the Nazis, and now Herman Hoppe, a Mises Institute author, is a holocaust denier.

Around 1988 Rothbard suddenly became anti-semitic and started appealing to far right paleocon sentiments. The idea was that using a message of hate would foment a class war that could overthrow the state. Of course it was fucking insane and would never work, but it's smeared Rothbard's positive contributions and Rockwell has carried on the tradition.

I doubt that Paul is a racist and just has a lot of racist friends, but he is practically a neoconfederate, which basically means he shouldn't be president ever.

The fact that libertarians have known about these letters for a long time but their support has only waned once it's become an MSM talking point is very telling about the dangers of personality cults.

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I doubt this fine bit of propaganda is aimed at libertarians.

Not sure if I'm breaking this to you, but this isn't propaganda. Everything I know about Rockwell and the Mises Institute suggests that Paul is probably a neoconfederate, especially considering his We The People Act.

What happens to libertarians is the association with Paul. Libertarians latched themselves onto his bandwagon before everybody understood that he's more of a paleoconservative than a real libertarian, and the association of Paul with libertarianism in the public sphere will discredit the movement since libertarians have come to the defense of Paul in the past. Even if, to be fair, that defense has usually been an answer to criticisms of his foreign policy, and not allegations of racism, though I was a denier when the news of the letters first broke.

How ya doing, buddy?

Ah, I see what you're saying. Regardless, libertarians shouldn't be supporting a candidate just because he wants to end the war in Iraq and the War on Drugs. We shouldn't have to form a coalition with 9/11 Truthers and Stormfront to do so, either.

How ya doing, buddy?

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Reading the article I was surprised how much of a conspiracy crackpot survivalist he is,

I still get newsletters from the campaign, and it seems like there are more and more codewords for the Infowars people to pick up on.

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Originally Posted by Arainach

I don't fear racism or homophobia. I don't like them, and wouldn't vote for politicians who blatantly support them, but they don't affect me and I'm rather selfish.

Boy, that William Jennings Bryan sure was a card, huh?

I was speaking idiomatically.

Gravel supports the Fair Tax.

Kucinich endorses a bill that would ban psychotronic space weapons.

Batshit insanity, what?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Watts

So does Huckabee and a lot of other conservatives. The Fair Tax is something a lot of left and right wingers can agree on. Just for different reasons.

That does not make the Fair Tax any less crazy.

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The primary appeal of the Fair Tax to conservatives is the opportunity to get rid of the IRS, and while the eradication of the IRS has its own utility, the problem is that it necessitates a new bureaucracy to monitor reported consumption and transfer the necessary payments. That would be the case if we implemented tax credits for perishables, but even if we simply did not place excise taxes on edible goods, you'd still need a new agency to monitor and collect the excise tax.

Yet even with the absence of a belligerent tax collection agency (belligerent to the average joe maybe), the concept of a Fair Tax along with any other tax on consumption runs into an inevitable problem: it's regressive. The wealthy do not consume their incomes the same way that the poor or middle income earners do, and even if you except the poor from taxation you've effectively shifted the tax burden to those who earn a middle income.

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What figure makes you believe that? See, tax burden means that the middle and lower classes would pay more in taxes than the wealthy would, but wait -- the Fair Tax is designed to tax not income, but WEALTH, because your wealth is what you take to the store to purchase items.

That's a faulty argument because wealth can also remain sedetary or be invested, which the wealthy do far more of than consume. A real tax system based on wealth would require taxation based on all payment transfers, including the purchase of stocks and bonds, and in that case I bet you conservative support for a "wealth tax" would bottom out.

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Now while the percentage of federal taxes for the lower and middle classes rises to just under 7 percent and the upper class drops to 45 percent, the fact still remains that the wealthy's tax burden is significantly higher.

Your argument just doesn't make sense.

The point is that an increase of the tax burden on the poor and middle income earners is bad because it reduces their purchasing power. Even if the gross tax income from lower incomes is smaller than the tax on that wealthy 1% the actual tax rates will still factor into people's concepts of justice, and if the poor and middle income earners consume at a higher rate than the wealthy then they are paying a higher tax rate, and that's stupid.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Night Phoenix

Yes, the wealthy do allow their money to sit in banks and invest it more than others, but that's only because they have more money to work with. It does not, however, mean that because the wealthy tend to invest more that they do not spend money on the retail level at a far higher rate than the lower income brackets, because me and you both know that's not the case.

The savings rate in the U.S. is in the negative, and the people skewing that number are not the ones in the top 1%.

The point is not that the wealthy do not spend money at retail, the point is that as a percentage of their income, consumption for the wealthy is not nearly as much as it is for lower income earners. This basically means that middle income earners pay higher rates of taxation than the wealthy do.

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Actually, I'm not even sure if that's true, because under the Fair Tax system, since they aren't getting hit with payroll taxes, their purchasing power actually increases (maybe, I'd have to look at the figures more thoroughly) because they get all of their money instead of having it looted before it gets to them. When you factor in the prebate, I really don't see how you can say that their purchasing power is effectively reduced.

If the Fair Tax is intended to replace the current income tax system then it will reduce their purchasing power because the government will attempt to achieve similar levels of collection. Imagine being taxed 33% on all of your purchases.

In everything is politically realistic fantasy land, I don't see how the Fair Tax is more appealing than, say, setting a flat tax rate on all income above 90,000.

How ya doing, buddy?

There's no way to track the money that's been taxed from you in the first place. Not to mention that government projects are not always financed from a tax pool.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.