steve wrote:And working conditions, pay rates, employee equity and the general welfare of the working poor were what, better before all this nasty regulation and unionization?
Markets, meh.
Markets only work for a few very specific, very fluid commodities. If you're buying hundreds of tons of sand or feed corn or potassium nitrate, then it doesn't really matter who you buy them from, and market forces will establish the price you pay for them, often standardized to the fraction of a penny from every vendor.
But if you go to the corner store and you need tomatoes, you'll buy the tomatoes if they look good, won't buy them if they look bad, and price variations of, say, 20-50 percent won't make any difference in the number of tomatoes you buy. That the same tomatoes are available a mile away for less will make no difference, because you're standing there in front of them, and they look good enough.
Markets are basically bunk for anything with a perceived value other than a commodity value, including labor. I get paid more than some engineers, less than others, and I'm pretty sure there's no market deciding that. I've set my rates at a level I can survive at, and which doesn't make me feel like a creep. Other engineers try to extract every penny they can from their clients, and they still get work.
Look at water. It's delivered basically free into the homes of nearly everyone, yet people will pay up to $20 a gallon for it if it's bottled for them, and many different brands of chemically identical water each have market shares at different prices. If markets were as infinitely powerful as libertarians imagine, then all those bottled water companies would go broke, or at least charge the same for their identical products.
Libertarians hang everything on the power of markets, but markets are basically bullshit. They only work in certain narrow classes of transactions, and pretending that they are everywhere and omnipotent is ridiculous. Extending the market model to public services and obligations like education, health care, police work, prisons, military support, fire and emergency response, etc. has been an unmitigated disaster, warping public policy and spending to the benefit of the corporations "competing" for the business.
Things needed as support and infrastructure for a whole society which require extensive investment and universal access are best handled by government, otherwise poor people (also poor neighborhoods, cities and states) get very little benefit from them, and everyone ends up paying more than necessary for them to support the unquenchable lust for increased profit.
Just look at incredible waste of the private sector war infrastructure and the insane incarceration rates needed to justify privatized prisons.
Quit appealing to market forces. They are bunk.
Well, since this is a thread about Ron Paul and not libertarianism, I don't want this to get railroaded too much into a discussion about the latter. But as to your first point:
And working conditions, pay rates, employee equity and the general welfare of the working poor were what, better before all this nasty regulation and unionization?
Ron Paul has openly admitted that on issues such as slavery, child labor, etc. the United States 'got it wrong'. However, he has made a point to differentiate between government regulation and government ownership. I remember in one of his earlier interviews Ron Paul said the government either 'bans or subsidizes' in domestic policy. In the foreword to A Foreign Policy of Freedom Lew Rockwell casts U.S. Foreign Policy in a similar light, something to the effect that it 'bombs or subsidizes'.
For all I've heard and read, Ron Paul advocates a system of government that can uphold laws of liberty and individual freedom (of which your above conditions violate), yet stay out of the ban or subsidize cycle that we are too familiar and comfortable with these days.
As to the rest of your post, Rick basically addressed that the way I would have. Ron Paul alone cannot dismantle the government in the way so many people fear. He would be the first to acknowledge that in his superior understanding of the role of the executive branch. I prefer to vote for him based on what he can do (limit spending, quit subsidizing foreign and domestic programs with fiat currency, get out of the war), and not on what he cannot do.
