Ron Paul-isms

On the Great Depression:

As for Social Security, "we didn't have it until 1935," Paul says. "I mean, do you read stories about how many people were laying in the streets and dying and didn't have medical treatment? . . . Prices were low and the country was productive and families took care of themselves and churches built hospitals and there was no starvation."

On immigration:

Paul recently waded a bit deeper into the immigration fray by introducing legislation that would deny citizenship to children born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents. He referred to those children as "anchor babies."

"As long as illegal immigrants know that their children born here will be citizens, the perverse incentive to sneak into this country remains strong," Paul said last month. "Citizenship involves more than the mere location of one's birth. True citizenship requires cultural connections and an allegiance to the United States.

"Birthright citizenship sometimes confers the benefits of being American on people who do not truly embrace America."

On crime:

Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficultly avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists -- and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.

Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action.... Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the "criminal justice system," I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

If similar in-depth studies were conducted in other major cities, who doubts that similar results would be produced? We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.

Your typical Ron Paul supporter (who are frighteningly, almost cultishly devoted to their man), will shriek bloody murder that I've included this quote. They'll point out that the Paul campaign has claimed that this wasn't written by Paul himself, but by some ghostwriter for Paul's own privately-published newsletter. There are a few problems with that.

1. phenry indicates that there is some reason to believe that this was, in fact, written by Ron Paul:
   

   For example, the article relates the observations of one Burt Blumert, who is labeled "expert Burt Blumert" but who is actually just a gold coin and bullion dealer in San Francisco who happens to be a longtime personal friend of... Ron Paul.



2. Even if the article were ghost-written, as Sara at Orcinus explains, that does not absolve him at all


3. It doesn't explain why he was defending these statements four years later:
   

   A campaign spokesman for Paul said statements about the fear of black males mirror pronouncements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has decried the spread of urban crime.

   
   See? A black guy said something we can vaguely pretend is close to the slur that we uttered--therefore our racism is sanctioned by this black guy, and isn't racism at all! And besides, we didn't even say it.

On the 16th Amendment:

True patriotism today has gotten a bad name at least from the government and the press. Those who now challenge the unconstitutional methods of imposing an income tax on us, or force us to use a monetary system designed to serve the rich at the expense of the poor, are routinely condemned. These American patriots are sadly looked down upon by many. They are never praised as champions of liberty as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. have been.

Non-violent protesters of the tax code are frequently imprisoned whether they are protesting the codes unconstitutionality or the war that the tax revenues are funding.

A more sophisticated and less well known technique for enhancing the state is the manipulation and transfer of wealth through the fiat monetary system operated by the secretive Federal Reserve. Protestors against this unconstitutional system of paper money are considered unpatriotic criminals and at times are imprisoned for their beliefs. The fact that, according to the Constitution, only gold and silver are legal tender and paper money is outlawed, matters little. The principle of patriotism is turned on its head.

On the 1st Amendment:

The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government's hostility to religion. The establishment clause of the First Amendment was simply intended to forbid the creation of an official state church like the Church of England, not to drive religion out of public life.

On domestic terrorism:

[Democratic candidate] Morris recently distributed copies of political newsletters written by Paul in 1992 in which the Surfside physician endorsed the concept of secession, defended cross burning as an act of free speech and expressed sympathy for a man sentenced to prison for bombing an IRS building.

On the United Nations:

I don't need to tell you that our American way of life is under attack. We see it all around us — every day — and it is up to us to save it.

The world's elites are busy forming a North American Union. If they are successful, as they were in forming the European Union, the good 'ol USA will only be a memory. We can't let that happen.

The UN also wants to confiscate our firearms and impose a global tax. The UN elites want to control the world's oceans with the Law of the Sea Treaty. And they want to use our military to police the world.

[Edit] And some more....
On Hurricane Katrina:

"Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government?" he asks. "Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people on the coast?"

On abortion:

Abortion on demand is the ultimate State tyranny; the State simply declares that certain classes of human beings are not persons, and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law. The State protects the "right" of some people to kill others, just as the courts protected the "property rights" of slave masters in their slaves. Moreover, by this method the State achieves a goal common to all totalitarian regimes: it sets us against each other, so that our energies are spent in the struggle between State-created classes, rather than in freeing all individuals from the State. Unlike Nazi Germany, which forcibly sent millions to the gas chambers (as well as forcing abortion and sterilization upon many more), the new regime has enlisted the assistance of millions of people to act as its agents in carrying out a program of mass murder.

On multiculturalism:

Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals. Racists believe that all individual who share superficial physical characteristics are alike; as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their intense focus on race is inherently racist, because it views individuals only as members of racial groups.

Conservatives and libertarians should fight back and challenge the myth that collectivist liberals care more about racism. Modern liberalism, however well intentioned, is a byproduct of the same collectivist thinking that characterizes racism. The continued insistence on group thinking only inflames racial tensions.

[Edit] I just found some posts that examine the above statement by Paul (here and here), and wanted to add them to my collection. I agree with a lot of what they have to say, though I would rail on some more about the bizarre notion that "liberty" will somehow free us from racism.

On the free market:

The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity. In a free market, businesses that discriminate lose customers, goodwill, and valuable employees – while rational businesses flourish by choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers. More importantly, in a free society every citizen gains a sense of himself as an individual, rather than developing a group or victim mentality. This leads to a sense of individual responsibility and personal pride, making skin color irrelevant. Rather than looking to government to correct what is essentially a sin of the heart, we should understand that reducing racism requires a shift from group thinking to an emphasis on individualism.

Shit like this is why I can't take libertarians seriously. If we didn't have all these gosh-darned government restraints, the Free Market Fairy will fly down and fix everything with her +5 Magic Wand of Capitalism! It's like they just slept through history class. We've tried it when the government wasn't regulating things, and it wasn't pretty. The laws that we have now are in place for a reason--because when they weren't, people did whatever the hell they wanted, and the Free Market Fairy wasn't fixing anything. The Civil Rights Act was passed because when people had the freedom to discriminate against blacks, they did it, and showed no indication that they were going to stop doing so any time soon. Trying to appeal to a person's rationality to fix racism isn't going to work because racism is irrational.

[Edit again]
On the bedroom:

Consider the Lawrence case decided by the Supreme Court in June. The Court determined that Texas had no right to establish its own standards for private sexual conduct, because gay sodomy is somehow protected under the 14th amendment "right to privacy." Ridiculous as sodomy laws may be, there clearly is no right to privacy nor sodomy found anywhere in the Constitution. There are, however, states' rights-—rights plainly affirmed in the Ninth and Tenth amendments. Under those amendments, the State of Texas has the right to decide for itself how to regulate social matters like sex, using its own local standards. But rather than applying the real Constitution and declining jurisdiction over a properly state matter, the Court decided to apply the imaginary Constitution and impose its vision on the people of Texas.

On the judiciary:

Americans need to better understand the role of federal courts. The Supreme Court is supreme only over the lower federal courts; it is not supreme over the other branches of government. The judicial branch is co-equal under our federal system, nothing more and nothing less. Yet we've allowed federal judges to pursue a social agenda that is at odds with a majority of Americans, in essence converting our courthouses into legislatures. In the process average people have lost even more power to affect the laws under which they must live.

...

Congress has a constitutional responsibility to stop rogue federal judges from using a flawed interpretation of the Constitution to rewrite the laws and traditions governing marriage. The Marriage Protection Act, if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, will protect the people of Texas from having marriage defined by federal judges rather than the Texas legislature.

On civil rights:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.

Of course, America has made great strides in race relations over the past forty years. However, this progress is due to changes in public attitudes and private efforts. Relations between the races have improved despite, not because of, the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

On health care:

For decades, the U.S. healthcare system was the envy of the entire world. Not coincidentally, there was far less government involvement in medicine during this time. America had the finest doctors and hospitals, patients enjoyed high quality, affordable medical care, and thousands of private charities provided health services for the poor. Doctors focused on treating patients, without the red tape and threat of lawsuits that plague the profession today. Most Americans paid cash for basic services, and had insurance only for major illnesses and accidents. This meant both doctors and patients had an incentive to keep costs down, as the patient was directly responsible for payment, rather than an HMO or government program.

...

We can hardly expect more government to cure our current health care woes. As with all goods and services, medical care is best delivered by the free market, with competition and financial incentives keeping costs down. When patients spend their own money for health care, they have a direct incentive to negotiate lower costs with their doctor. When government controls health care, all cost incentives are lost. Dr. Berry and others like him may one day be seen as consumer heroes who challenged the third-party health care system and resisted the trend toward socialized medicine in America.