inibo
02-12-2008, 07:31 PM
I'm posting this in both Maryland and DC because it started in Maryland and ended in DC.
Last summer I worked the GOP booth at the Montgomery County Fair. On afternoon an elderly fellow with a white cane (he was blind) came by and was asking for literature on all the candidates. He said he was from DC, but he enjoyed visiting county fairs in Maryland and Virginia. I said "You look like some one who remembers Barry Goldwater."
He turned to me and said "I liked Barry Goldwater, I wish we had someone like that now."
I read him a flier I had made up to hand out at the fair
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty, and in that cause I am doing the very best I can. Barry Goldwater, 1960
One thing is clear: The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens pay nearly half of everything they earn to government. Ron Paul, 2001
By the way, when I say cut taxes, I don’t mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing. Ron Paul, 2002
We need to understand that the more government spends, the more freedom is lost. Instead of simply debating spending levels, we ought to be debating whether the departments, agencies, and programs funded by the budget should exist at all. Ron Paul, 2004
Even today, individual income taxes account for only approximately one-third of federal revenue. Eliminating one-third of the proposed 2007 budget would still leave federal spending at roughly $1.8 trillion – a sum greater than the budget just 6 years ago in 2000! Does anyone seriously believe we could not find ways to cut spending back to 2000 levels? Ron Paul, 2006
He gave me his e-mail address and asked for more information. We corresponded via e-mail for several weeks and I sent him the original Ron Paul DVD. Eventually our correspondence tickled to an end. He never said whether or not he was going to vote for Ron Paul and I felt kind of bad about not staying in touch with him.
Well, yesterday evening I received the following e-mail which he had sent to a Stephen Toglia, the DC Volunteer Coordinator for HQ (I think) and cc'd to me.
Mr. Toglia:
Back in the late Summer, I attended the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair, and met the man there to whom this message is also being copied. He introduced Dr. Paul and his philosophy to me, but it was just over this past weekend, after attending Mr. Huckabee's rally at the University of Maryland, that I spent quite some time on Dr. Paul's Website, and came to realize that he may well, in fact, be the candidate for me! Though, for some time, I supported the war in Iraq, a retired Army NCO for whom I have much respect began to have me in doubt, and Dr. Paul's position on this, combined with his traditional conservative dubiousness about world government and world organizations such as the UN, etc., again has me thinking that, though it admittedly would be a miracle to say the least were he to win, he would probably now be the candidate with whom I would be most comfortable! And, though I still have much to learn about the monetary implications of what has often been called states rights, it presumably goes without saying that a state government can, at least in theory, spend less because it only has to serve a smaller portion of the populous. And, if care for the poor and otherwise-needy is transferred to churches and private charitable organizations, that takes a burden off the government which, according to Dr. Paul's understanding of the Constitution, is not government's role, the Preamble thereto only providing for promoting the _GENERAL_ welfare, however one wishes to interpret that. Yet, in light of his strong advocacy for decentralized government, how does one interpret "in order to form a more perfect union?" Does that primarily apply to providing for the common defense and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity? Please understand that I am _NOT_ posing these queries with adversarial intent, and actually did not originally intend to go this deep into matters here. Yet here is what I wrote for what it is worth! When talking with the man to whom this message is being copied, I must have wrongly gathered that this Candidate took what, in the 18th Century, would have been called a Deist position, that God usually does not intervene in the affairs of men. Yet I find that Dr. Paul himself is a Christian, but merely believes that it is not the role of Government to legislate matters of social policy. Though he is reluctant to discuss his faith in the political arena, I hope he is _NOT_ so in the private one! I intend, if all goes well, to vote for Dr. Paul in tomorrow's District of Columbia Republican Presidential Primary!
In retrospect I don't come off very well in that message--perhaps I didn't represent as well as I thought I did--but it is nice to know I had a least a small role in a small victory.
Last summer I worked the GOP booth at the Montgomery County Fair. On afternoon an elderly fellow with a white cane (he was blind) came by and was asking for literature on all the candidates. He said he was from DC, but he enjoyed visiting county fairs in Maryland and Virginia. I said "You look like some one who remembers Barry Goldwater."
He turned to me and said "I liked Barry Goldwater, I wish we had someone like that now."
I read him a flier I had made up to hand out at the fair
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests,’ I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty, and in that cause I am doing the very best I can. Barry Goldwater, 1960
One thing is clear: The Founding Fathers never intended a nation where citizens pay nearly half of everything they earn to government. Ron Paul, 2001
By the way, when I say cut taxes, I don’t mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing. Ron Paul, 2002
We need to understand that the more government spends, the more freedom is lost. Instead of simply debating spending levels, we ought to be debating whether the departments, agencies, and programs funded by the budget should exist at all. Ron Paul, 2004
Even today, individual income taxes account for only approximately one-third of federal revenue. Eliminating one-third of the proposed 2007 budget would still leave federal spending at roughly $1.8 trillion – a sum greater than the budget just 6 years ago in 2000! Does anyone seriously believe we could not find ways to cut spending back to 2000 levels? Ron Paul, 2006
He gave me his e-mail address and asked for more information. We corresponded via e-mail for several weeks and I sent him the original Ron Paul DVD. Eventually our correspondence tickled to an end. He never said whether or not he was going to vote for Ron Paul and I felt kind of bad about not staying in touch with him.
Well, yesterday evening I received the following e-mail which he had sent to a Stephen Toglia, the DC Volunteer Coordinator for HQ (I think) and cc'd to me.
Mr. Toglia:
Back in the late Summer, I attended the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair, and met the man there to whom this message is also being copied. He introduced Dr. Paul and his philosophy to me, but it was just over this past weekend, after attending Mr. Huckabee's rally at the University of Maryland, that I spent quite some time on Dr. Paul's Website, and came to realize that he may well, in fact, be the candidate for me! Though, for some time, I supported the war in Iraq, a retired Army NCO for whom I have much respect began to have me in doubt, and Dr. Paul's position on this, combined with his traditional conservative dubiousness about world government and world organizations such as the UN, etc., again has me thinking that, though it admittedly would be a miracle to say the least were he to win, he would probably now be the candidate with whom I would be most comfortable! And, though I still have much to learn about the monetary implications of what has often been called states rights, it presumably goes without saying that a state government can, at least in theory, spend less because it only has to serve a smaller portion of the populous. And, if care for the poor and otherwise-needy is transferred to churches and private charitable organizations, that takes a burden off the government which, according to Dr. Paul's understanding of the Constitution, is not government's role, the Preamble thereto only providing for promoting the _GENERAL_ welfare, however one wishes to interpret that. Yet, in light of his strong advocacy for decentralized government, how does one interpret "in order to form a more perfect union?" Does that primarily apply to providing for the common defense and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity? Please understand that I am _NOT_ posing these queries with adversarial intent, and actually did not originally intend to go this deep into matters here. Yet here is what I wrote for what it is worth! When talking with the man to whom this message is being copied, I must have wrongly gathered that this Candidate took what, in the 18th Century, would have been called a Deist position, that God usually does not intervene in the affairs of men. Yet I find that Dr. Paul himself is a Christian, but merely believes that it is not the role of Government to legislate matters of social policy. Though he is reluctant to discuss his faith in the political arena, I hope he is _NOT_ so in the private one! I intend, if all goes well, to vote for Dr. Paul in tomorrow's District of Columbia Republican Presidential Primary!
In retrospect I don't come off very well in that message--perhaps I didn't represent as well as I thought I did--but it is nice to know I had a least a small role in a small victory.