Anyone here like Ron Paul?

[mindstalk]

A review of bills he's sponsored.

Bills to declare zygotes to be people, to ban flag burning, to remove abortion from the jurisdiction of inferior Federal courts, to defend the Electoral College, to repeal the "Motor Voter" act, to put us on a gold standard and ban fractional reserve banking. And I'm just listing things which might give an actual libertarian pause, never mind the other bills liberals/progressives would be horrified by.

[Update: the flag-burning amendments were apparently an attempt to get the Republicans to face up to the Constitution, or something, with Paul himself opposing banning flag-burning. So that's one libertarian point restored.]

Comments

rhys

[(Anonymous)]

Zygotes are a form of human life, his bill says that, not that they are people. If zygotes aren't human life, what form of life are they?

And, about flag burning, I don't know where you got that. He is against pollution, so he doesn't believe that plastics should be burned. Since most flags are made out of polymers and not natural fibers, I don't think you should be able to burn plastic either.

Fractional Reserve banking is government subsidized big business. I don't want our government subsidizing big oil or big baknks. Since the Fed is private, it is a banking cartel. Are you really a Democrat?

Re: rhys

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I got the flag burning from the link which I presume you didn't try reading, and which links directly to Ron's proposed amendment (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d105:h.j.res.80:), which completely fails to mention anything about plastics.

As for the zygotes, the bill (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.2597:) says

(1) the Congress declares that--

(A) human life shall be deemed to exist from conception, without regard to race, sex, age, health, defect, or condition of dependency; and

(B) the term `person' shall include all human life as defined in subparagraph (A); and

(2) the Congress recognizes that each State has the authority to protect lives of unborn children residing in the jurisdiction of that State.

and the amendment (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d097:HR00392:@@@L&summ2=m&) says

Constitutional Amendment - Declares that the right to life vests in a human being from the moment of fertilization.

Banning the Fed would be one, very libertarian, thing. But fractional reserve banking is a centuries-old, private, market-driven practice, which the Fed was created to regulate after all the bank panics of the 19th century; between it and the FDIC it's been pretty successful, at least after the initial fuckup of the Great Depression.

Re: rhys

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I did some fact-checking, and
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#Influence_of_central_banks) suggests some terminology conflict:

Some political libertarians and some supporters of a gold standard use the term fractional-reserve banking in reference to fractional-reserve banking by central banks in particular, where the nation's central bank holds fractional reserves of gold bullion or specie (gold coin). This occurred before the adoption of irredeemable fiat money in most developed countries in 1971 with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, when the US government ended the convertibility of the US dollar into gold. This usage is superficially similar to the standard usage in economics, in that the ability of a country to redeem only part of its currency in gold can be seen as analogous to the ability of a bank to redeem only part of its deposits in cash, but referring to partly-reserved currencies as a form of fractional-reserve banking may create more confusion than it alleviates. Mainstream economists do not generally make this analogy.