Ron Paul Takedown

I just need to vent because I'm obsessed with libertarians (and their retarded cousins, the objectivists) and the more I think about their policies and how many young people of my generation fall for Ron Paul's naive worldview, the more explosively angry I get. That being said, I'm going to be super fair and try not to strawman his positions until I start to blow a fuse halfway through writing this.

1. Ron Paul thinks that we should go back to the gold standard. I'm sorry, since when was the modern global economy centered around mineral extraction? Our economy is not based on gold mining, and tying the money supply to gold extraction/inventories is disastrous policy in that it places a completely arbitrary limit on monetary expansion and a corresponding dampener on economic growth. People who don't understand economics love the idea of gold as currency. It's portable, shiny, and it has nice fuzzy historical associations. It's also not very strong and therefore not incredibly useful for building things so people decided it was a convenient store of value, for lack of a better purpose. But gold, just like any currency (from treasury notes to corporate stocks to municipal bonds), only has value by dint of social convention and legal contract. It makes no sense to impose an artificial mineral brake on a modern money supply that needs to grow in proportion to GDP.

2. Ron Paul thinks that inflation has undermined the USD and destroyed savings wealth. It's true that the USD has lost most of its value in the past century due to inflation... But unless your idea of good monetary policy revolves around protecting the nest eggs of a group of people who live 120 years without spending or investing money and just hoard cash (i.e. gold) under their beds awaiting the next revolution, this is not the most rational point you want to be making. 

3. Ron Paul thinks that you should have a right to buy a semiautomatic assault rifle without a background check and bring it to your local high school auditorium on a concealed-carry permit (though in his reckoning, forcing someone to even apply for that permit is a tyrannical government intrusion on civil rights). 'nuff said - this guy's a loony. 

4. Ron Paul believes that "amnesty" for illegal immigrants will encourage more moral hazard and reward law-breaking. Tough shit. If you were brought to this country illegally as an infant, you were not complicit in any illegal activity and anyone who says otherwise is a fascist racist piece of shit. Besides, how fucking dare anyone question illegal immigrants' love of America? Did you risk your life to come live in this country? I didn't. I was born here and got to enjoy freedom and prosperity by birthright and I can't even imagine what those people lived through so they could wash our toilets and then get insulted by fascist Republican racists like this man.

5. Ron Paul wants to repeal Roe v. Wade and doesn't believe that abortion has ever been needed to save the life of a pregnant woman. Dr. Paul has never heard of an ectopic pregnancy.

6. Ron Paul's energy platform promises to drill for more oil and fight "cap-and-tax" proposals in Congress. Cap-and-trade is a system hatched up by capitalist Republicans to align incentives among polluters by allowing markets to price the cost of carbon emissions. Also, the guy doesn't believe global warming. Maybe we should argue about gravity, evolution, and cosmic microwave background radiation too. 

7. Ron Paul opposes the drug war. Agreed. But what kind of fucked up, reality-contorted universe do you live in to think that this makes up for Points 1 through 6?

I love being a self-righteous liberal, because it makes me better than other people.