emazur
01-02-2011, 02:06 PM
I posted about this over the the rp2012 subforum but since nobody goes there I'll try again here. It's been on the DailyPaul (http://www.dailypaul.com/node/153391) frontpage (http://www.dailypaul.com/) a couple days now and if you search google news for Ron Paul (http://www.google.com/search?q=ron+paul+2012&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US%3Aofficial&tbs=nws:1&q=ron+paul&aq=f&aqi=g5&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=b07f551f8262d809) it should be right up there. I wrote it BTW:cool: and it's really long (too long to cut and paste all of it here) but here's the intro (everything is linked & cited in the actual article):
http://www.nolanchart.com/article8231.html
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/153391
"Then everything changed. The housing bubble burst, banks stopped lending, and the Federal Reserve became an object of contempt. It was the world Ron Paul had prophesied, and he had a seductive story to tell about why it had happened—the Austrian [free market economics] story... It does not seem at all far-fetched to think that Paul could have a much greater impact on the race than last time. The Republican primaries are sure to be about economic and size-of-government issues."
-Joshua Green, "The Tea Party’s Brain", Atlantic Magazine Nov. 2010
The Long Road to Prominence
Two time presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican with a 22 year career in the U.S. Congress in Texas's 14th district, has been fighting against big government his entire career. Known for his advocacy of keeping the government out of citizens' personal and economic lives, he was influenced by the Austrian free market economist Ludwig von Mises who stated that no matter how well intentioned, any attempts by the government to steer the economy would result in malinvestment that would lead to the boom-bust cycle where the pain of the recession would feel far worse than the temporary high experienced during rising economic activity. Mises is known for predicting the Great Depression and he turned down a job offer from Austria's central bank in 1929 knowing that a crash was coming which eventually ended in a hyperinflationary collapse. Similarly, when Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1971 and enacted wage and price controls, Ron Paul knew the government's attempt to steer the economy would eventually steer it directly into an iceberg. Not one to go down with the ship, Nixon's interventions gave Ron Paul the impetus to enter politics and he won his first election in 1976 and became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Dr. Paul went against the grain from the very beginning. Representing the party that supposedly advocated free-market economics, Republican Richard Nixon was attributed with the phrase "We are all Keynesians now", referring to British economist John-Maynard Keynes who inspired Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal economic policy during the Great Depression. Ron Paul stresses that the economy was not repaired by New Deal intervention but by the expansion of capitalism through production of consumer goods that was made possible when U.S. soldiers returned home after World War II. Whatever the case, government had made the decision that even after WWII it should be in charge of steering the economy and repairing it, as if it were something mechanical like a watch, when things went wrong. NPR's report concluded that
"One way the economy is not like a watch is that you can repair a watch without politicians. Politicians took the Keynesian message that government spending can be good and ran with it. They paid for the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam. They sent a man to the moon. All the while, they piled up the federal budget deficit, convinced that Keynes gave them a free pass.
Prescribing Keynesianism to some politicians is like prescribing crack to a coke addict. In the 1970s, the patient hit rock bottom. The U.S. had high unemployment, and the Keynesian solution stopped working. The national government spent and spent, but unemployment only got worse. Then came inflation, something Keynesians had no answer for."
Such was the climate that Ron Paul encountered when he first entered into political office. Though Keynesianism had supposedly become passé due to the failures of the 1970s, Paul maintains that Keynesian economics never died and that government still tried to control the economy through the manipulation of interest rates through the Federal Reserve. The Fed's ability to control interest rates along with its ability to create money out of thin air to rescue banks that made bad investments, combined with Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that had the ability to buy up, and therefore guarantee, private banks' mortgages, created what Paul had predicted to be a perfect storm leading to malinvestment in the housing sector. In a speech to the House floor on October 27, 2005, Paul spoke of the GSE Crisis
"One of the major privileges the federal government grants to the GSEs is a line of credit from the United States Treasury. According to some estimates, the line of credit may be worth over $2 billion. GSEs also benefit from an explicit grant of legal authority given to the Federal Reserve to purchase the debt of the GSEs... "Ironically, by transferring the risk of widespread mortgage defaults to the taxpayers through government subsidies and convincing investors that all is well because a "world-class" regulator is ensuring the GSEs' soundness, the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market. This is because the special privileges of Fannie and Freddie have distorted the housing market by allowing Fannie and Freddie to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions. As a result, capital is diverted from its most productive uses into housing. This reduces the efficacy of the entire market and thus reduces the standard of living of all Americans.
Despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government's interference in the housing market, the government's policy of diverting capital into housing creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing."
"Perhaps the Federal Reserve can stave off the day of reckoning by purchasing the GSEs' debt and pumping liquidity into the housing market, but this cannot hold off the inevitable drop in the housing market forever. In fact, postponing the necessary and painful market corrections will only deepen the inevitable fall. The more people invested in the market, the greater the effects across the economy when the bubble bursts."
"Instead of expanding unconstitutional and market distorting government bureaucracies, Congress should act to remove taxpayer support from the housing GSEs before the bubble bursts and taxpayers are once again forced to bail out investors who were misled by foolish government interference in the market."
The economic crisis he foresaw, along with a desire to educate Americans on other important topics, must have been the impetus for Dr. Paul to run as a GOP contender for U.S. President in 2007-2008. In his previous run he successfully became the Libertarian Party's nominee in the 1988 election against George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis.
Dr. Paul was however treated by both his own Republican Party and the media as something of a crank, with "crazy" ideas like abolishing the Federal Reserve, ending the income tax, allowing school choice, opposing torture, and bringing the troops home. For instance, during the January 17, 2008 South Carolina Republican debate, Fox News moderator Carl Cameron derisively asked
"Congressman Paul, yet another question about electability …. Do you have any, sir? There's always the question as to whether or not… you are, in fact, viable. Your differences with the Republicans on the — with the rest of the Republicans on this stage has raised questions about whether or not you can actually win the general, the Republican nomination, sir."
Paul replied that he was a strict constitutionalist who voted against more spending and waste than anyone in the room, and reminded participants of the Republican Party's previous positions on education and foreign policy. It was a tense moment that ultimately attracted cheers and applause for the Texas doctor. Through these televised debates and his appearances in cities and college campuses nationwide, Ron Paul was able to attract a huge grassroots following who helped him break records in fundraising. In anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, on Dec. 16, 2007 a "moneybomb" was organized that raised over $6 million in one day, the largest single day of fundraising in U.S. presidential campaign history. The L.A. Times reported that Paul was
"the most successful Republican fundraiser in the last three months of 2007. By a Texas mile. By the thousands, Paul's fervent followers donated $19.95 million to the "Ron Paul Revolution." He spent $17.75 million, and at year's end, had $7.8 million cash on hand, making him the only Republican candidate to increase his fundraising totals in every quarter of 2007."
Paul supporters even managed to fly a full size blimp in the air for 6 weeks advertising the Ron Paul Revolution with the message "Who is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul". Despite his fundraising and grassroots support, Ron Paul was excluded from a January 6 New Hampshire debate sponsored by Fox News. When Ron Paul was routinely left off television polls and ignored by polls organized by the AP and other professional pollsters, it felt like rubbing salt in a wound for his supporters.
Ron Paul ultimately lost the Republican Primary to John McCain. But neither he nor his supporters had given up. On June 10, 2008 the Campaign for Liberty was formed with Ron Paul's support for the purpose of spreading the word of a constitutionally limited government with free markets. On September 2 of the same year, the Campaign for Liberty organized and held the Rally for the Republic, an event that shadowed the 2008 Republican National Convention where John McCain and Sarah Palin were officially nominated by the GOP as Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates. Despite the competing GOP convention, Paul's Rally for the Republic, which aired live on C-SPAN 2, drew in a crowd of over 10,000 and included speakers such as Barry Goldwater Jr., Governor Jesse Ventura, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, and tax activist Grover Norquist as well as music performances by country music star Sara Evans and pop-rock singer/songwriter Aimee Allen. The event solidified that Ron Paul and the ideas he believed in were here to stay. The economic crises in late September 2008 that Paul and the Austrian school economists had been predicting had given credibility to the ideas they had long been advocating. Paul, along with his economic adviser Peter Schiff, received due attention in the media for their predictions. "Peter Schiff Was Right", a collection of clips from Schiff's various TV appearances throughout the years, went viral on Youtube. It showed a man who stuck to his guns when faced with opposition that mocked and even laughed at his gloomy economic predictions. His 73 minute speech to a crowd of mortgage bankers from 2006, also on Youtube, laid out exactly how the collapse would happen and showed that Schiff's predictions were based on reason and not luck. He said much of the same in his previous speech in 2005. With newfound credibility and a continuous flow of new supporters, the long ignored Ron Paul began to catch the attention from his own Republican Party. Just 2 weeks before Barrack Obama's inauguration, the Wall Street Journal headline was "Ron Paul–Finally–Gets His Due". Author Susan Davis writes
For much of the 2008 campaign, Texas lawmaker and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and his supporters served as a thorn in the side—or a punching bag—for the mainstream GOP establishment.
Yet today, the six men vying to run the Republican National Committee praised the grassroots enthusiasm Paul tapped into during his campaign—and discussed how they would like to capture that enthusiasm to expand the party’s appeal.
The article went on to describe the praise for Ron Paul by the likes of former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson, Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis, former Mike Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman, and incumbent RNC Chairman Mike Duncan. In other positive signs since then, Ron Paul's son Rand Paul successfully won the 2010 Kentucky U.S. Senate race on a philosophy and platform not much different than his father, and shortly after Ron himself was selected as Chair of the House Sub-Committee on Domestic Monetary Policy. No longer would it be so easy or wise to marginalize Ron Paul and his ideas.
http://www.nolanchart.com/article8231.html
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/153391
"Then everything changed. The housing bubble burst, banks stopped lending, and the Federal Reserve became an object of contempt. It was the world Ron Paul had prophesied, and he had a seductive story to tell about why it had happened—the Austrian [free market economics] story... It does not seem at all far-fetched to think that Paul could have a much greater impact on the race than last time. The Republican primaries are sure to be about economic and size-of-government issues."
-Joshua Green, "The Tea Party’s Brain", Atlantic Magazine Nov. 2010
The Long Road to Prominence
Two time presidential candidate Dr. Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican with a 22 year career in the U.S. Congress in Texas's 14th district, has been fighting against big government his entire career. Known for his advocacy of keeping the government out of citizens' personal and economic lives, he was influenced by the Austrian free market economist Ludwig von Mises who stated that no matter how well intentioned, any attempts by the government to steer the economy would result in malinvestment that would lead to the boom-bust cycle where the pain of the recession would feel far worse than the temporary high experienced during rising economic activity. Mises is known for predicting the Great Depression and he turned down a job offer from Austria's central bank in 1929 knowing that a crash was coming which eventually ended in a hyperinflationary collapse. Similarly, when Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1971 and enacted wage and price controls, Ron Paul knew the government's attempt to steer the economy would eventually steer it directly into an iceberg. Not one to go down with the ship, Nixon's interventions gave Ron Paul the impetus to enter politics and he won his first election in 1976 and became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Dr. Paul went against the grain from the very beginning. Representing the party that supposedly advocated free-market economics, Republican Richard Nixon was attributed with the phrase "We are all Keynesians now", referring to British economist John-Maynard Keynes who inspired Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal economic policy during the Great Depression. Ron Paul stresses that the economy was not repaired by New Deal intervention but by the expansion of capitalism through production of consumer goods that was made possible when U.S. soldiers returned home after World War II. Whatever the case, government had made the decision that even after WWII it should be in charge of steering the economy and repairing it, as if it were something mechanical like a watch, when things went wrong. NPR's report concluded that
"One way the economy is not like a watch is that you can repair a watch without politicians. Politicians took the Keynesian message that government spending can be good and ran with it. They paid for the war on poverty and the war in Vietnam. They sent a man to the moon. All the while, they piled up the federal budget deficit, convinced that Keynes gave them a free pass.
Prescribing Keynesianism to some politicians is like prescribing crack to a coke addict. In the 1970s, the patient hit rock bottom. The U.S. had high unemployment, and the Keynesian solution stopped working. The national government spent and spent, but unemployment only got worse. Then came inflation, something Keynesians had no answer for."
Such was the climate that Ron Paul encountered when he first entered into political office. Though Keynesianism had supposedly become passé due to the failures of the 1970s, Paul maintains that Keynesian economics never died and that government still tried to control the economy through the manipulation of interest rates through the Federal Reserve. The Fed's ability to control interest rates along with its ability to create money out of thin air to rescue banks that made bad investments, combined with Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that had the ability to buy up, and therefore guarantee, private banks' mortgages, created what Paul had predicted to be a perfect storm leading to malinvestment in the housing sector. In a speech to the House floor on October 27, 2005, Paul spoke of the GSE Crisis
"One of the major privileges the federal government grants to the GSEs is a line of credit from the United States Treasury. According to some estimates, the line of credit may be worth over $2 billion. GSEs also benefit from an explicit grant of legal authority given to the Federal Reserve to purchase the debt of the GSEs... "Ironically, by transferring the risk of widespread mortgage defaults to the taxpayers through government subsidies and convincing investors that all is well because a "world-class" regulator is ensuring the GSEs' soundness, the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market. This is because the special privileges of Fannie and Freddie have distorted the housing market by allowing Fannie and Freddie to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions. As a result, capital is diverted from its most productive uses into housing. This reduces the efficacy of the entire market and thus reduces the standard of living of all Americans.
Despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government's interference in the housing market, the government's policy of diverting capital into housing creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing."
"Perhaps the Federal Reserve can stave off the day of reckoning by purchasing the GSEs' debt and pumping liquidity into the housing market, but this cannot hold off the inevitable drop in the housing market forever. In fact, postponing the necessary and painful market corrections will only deepen the inevitable fall. The more people invested in the market, the greater the effects across the economy when the bubble bursts."
"Instead of expanding unconstitutional and market distorting government bureaucracies, Congress should act to remove taxpayer support from the housing GSEs before the bubble bursts and taxpayers are once again forced to bail out investors who were misled by foolish government interference in the market."
The economic crisis he foresaw, along with a desire to educate Americans on other important topics, must have been the impetus for Dr. Paul to run as a GOP contender for U.S. President in 2007-2008. In his previous run he successfully became the Libertarian Party's nominee in the 1988 election against George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis.
Dr. Paul was however treated by both his own Republican Party and the media as something of a crank, with "crazy" ideas like abolishing the Federal Reserve, ending the income tax, allowing school choice, opposing torture, and bringing the troops home. For instance, during the January 17, 2008 South Carolina Republican debate, Fox News moderator Carl Cameron derisively asked
"Congressman Paul, yet another question about electability …. Do you have any, sir? There's always the question as to whether or not… you are, in fact, viable. Your differences with the Republicans on the — with the rest of the Republicans on this stage has raised questions about whether or not you can actually win the general, the Republican nomination, sir."
Paul replied that he was a strict constitutionalist who voted against more spending and waste than anyone in the room, and reminded participants of the Republican Party's previous positions on education and foreign policy. It was a tense moment that ultimately attracted cheers and applause for the Texas doctor. Through these televised debates and his appearances in cities and college campuses nationwide, Ron Paul was able to attract a huge grassroots following who helped him break records in fundraising. In anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, on Dec. 16, 2007 a "moneybomb" was organized that raised over $6 million in one day, the largest single day of fundraising in U.S. presidential campaign history. The L.A. Times reported that Paul was
"the most successful Republican fundraiser in the last three months of 2007. By a Texas mile. By the thousands, Paul's fervent followers donated $19.95 million to the "Ron Paul Revolution." He spent $17.75 million, and at year's end, had $7.8 million cash on hand, making him the only Republican candidate to increase his fundraising totals in every quarter of 2007."
Paul supporters even managed to fly a full size blimp in the air for 6 weeks advertising the Ron Paul Revolution with the message "Who is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul". Despite his fundraising and grassroots support, Ron Paul was excluded from a January 6 New Hampshire debate sponsored by Fox News. When Ron Paul was routinely left off television polls and ignored by polls organized by the AP and other professional pollsters, it felt like rubbing salt in a wound for his supporters.
Ron Paul ultimately lost the Republican Primary to John McCain. But neither he nor his supporters had given up. On June 10, 2008 the Campaign for Liberty was formed with Ron Paul's support for the purpose of spreading the word of a constitutionally limited government with free markets. On September 2 of the same year, the Campaign for Liberty organized and held the Rally for the Republic, an event that shadowed the 2008 Republican National Convention where John McCain and Sarah Palin were officially nominated by the GOP as Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates. Despite the competing GOP convention, Paul's Rally for the Republic, which aired live on C-SPAN 2, drew in a crowd of over 10,000 and included speakers such as Barry Goldwater Jr., Governor Jesse Ventura, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, and tax activist Grover Norquist as well as music performances by country music star Sara Evans and pop-rock singer/songwriter Aimee Allen. The event solidified that Ron Paul and the ideas he believed in were here to stay. The economic crises in late September 2008 that Paul and the Austrian school economists had been predicting had given credibility to the ideas they had long been advocating. Paul, along with his economic adviser Peter Schiff, received due attention in the media for their predictions. "Peter Schiff Was Right", a collection of clips from Schiff's various TV appearances throughout the years, went viral on Youtube. It showed a man who stuck to his guns when faced with opposition that mocked and even laughed at his gloomy economic predictions. His 73 minute speech to a crowd of mortgage bankers from 2006, also on Youtube, laid out exactly how the collapse would happen and showed that Schiff's predictions were based on reason and not luck. He said much of the same in his previous speech in 2005. With newfound credibility and a continuous flow of new supporters, the long ignored Ron Paul began to catch the attention from his own Republican Party. Just 2 weeks before Barrack Obama's inauguration, the Wall Street Journal headline was "Ron Paul–Finally–Gets His Due". Author Susan Davis writes
For much of the 2008 campaign, Texas lawmaker and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and his supporters served as a thorn in the side—or a punching bag—for the mainstream GOP establishment.
Yet today, the six men vying to run the Republican National Committee praised the grassroots enthusiasm Paul tapped into during his campaign—and discussed how they would like to capture that enthusiasm to expand the party’s appeal.
The article went on to describe the praise for Ron Paul by the likes of former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson, Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis, former Mike Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman, and incumbent RNC Chairman Mike Duncan. In other positive signs since then, Ron Paul's son Rand Paul successfully won the 2010 Kentucky U.S. Senate race on a philosophy and platform not much different than his father, and shortly after Ron himself was selected as Chair of the House Sub-Committee on Domestic Monetary Policy. No longer would it be so easy or wise to marginalize Ron Paul and his ideas.