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[Paul Eres]

i'm just saying that you have to distinguish between two things: what he believes government should do, and what he'd actually do in office

for instance, he doesn't believe government should provide for the retirement of people, and believes people should handle their own retirement costs

but it does *not* follow from that that his platform is to cut social security, because he's specifically said that he would not cut it and wants to save it, and doesn't like when other gov programs take money from the social security fund. people already paid into social security, so to cut it would be basically reneging on a promise to them, to something they already paid for

it just seemed like your posts did not make the distinction above. it's possible to believe theoretically that government should not do x while not intending to change or reduce x

what you are basically claiming is "ron paul doesn't believe you have a right to health care, *therefore* he will cut your health care". but the second part *does not* follow from the first part at all, even though the first part is true

[Capntastic]

Actually I'm saying that if he doesn't see the importance of every citizen having basic health care regardless of profitability, then he really has no business governing a country.  Same thing with you asserting that even if Paul were in the KKK he'd be a better president than Obama, given the latter's track record:  Obama didn't personally kill or torture people, and his actual roll in being for or against those human rights abuses is not something I care to debate- sometimes poorly regulated government bodies do shitty things, and not all of that blame is to be put on the president.  The point stands though, that just as if Obama thinks bombing children and assassinating civilians without trial is the correct way to run a government, if anyone truly thinks the 'white race' is superior, and under threat of genocide by other races, he has no place governing a nation.

[Paul Eres]

i doubt very many presidents of the US believed that health care was a right -- is it also true of them that they had no business running a country? did washington and jefferson and so on all have no business running a country (even though they founded it)? if you will never vote for anyone who doesn't believe health care is a right, then your voting choices will be pretty limited, because that's a very minority view in politics in the US, even among democrats. if universal health care is that important to you then i respect that principle tho

also, obama actually did, and does, kill and torture people. if you say "well, he didn't do it with his own two hands!" then has any dictator in history personally tortured and killed? don't they usually just order their minions to do it? did kim jong il personally kill anyone, or did he just order them killed? obama personally took credit for ordering the drone strike on an american citizen, that's not in dispute. it's not just poorly regulated government bodies, it wasn't generals acting without his knowledge, it was his decision directly. just like it was his decision not to close guantanimo bay, to continue bush's warrantless wiretapping policies, to escalate the war in afghanistan, and so on. you can't blame all of that on other parts of the government

also, this is a side issue, as far as i understand the positions of white separatists, they don't believe they are under threat of genocide from other races, generally they just believe that the white race is being diluted (intermixed) and out-bred by the other races. from what i've seen, genuine white racists hate whites who marry and have children with blacks even more than they hate blacks

[Capntastic]

I'm talking about him specifically saying that health care is not a right, and that hospitals by no means are required to help you in an emergency.  If someone doesn't have the barest empathy to value a person's life over the resources and time required to stabilize them (in most emergency situations, like a car accident or gunshot), then they have no place overseeing any form of society.  The founding fathers would almost certainly believe that if a wounded man arrives on your doorstep, it is your duty as a countryman to lend basic aid.  To do otherwise is to deny the social contract.

Either way you're continuing to create a false dilemma of "Get rid of Obama and replace him with Ron Paul Or:  Stick with Obama"

You have other options: 

A:  Vote for someone that isn't Ron Paul who holds similar good views without the bad ones.  This guy in particular has a pretty decent anti-US Imperialism stance.

B:  Take Obama to task for his failures.  As the whole anti-SOPA debacle has shown, people can affect government decision making process to an extent.

If you're considering support of Ron Paul as a protest vote, why not pick the best protest?

[Paul Eres]

i think it's strange to say that if you don't think someone should be forced to help you, that they have no empathy. that would make pure pacifism impossible; pacifists do not believe that you should force anyone to do anything. so then are all pacifists completely lacking in empathy, because they don't believe that you should force people to help others? that seems to be turning a personal disagreement in ideas into a personal attack on someone's character

EDIT: also, to be fair to ron paul, he has also said that he believes that doctors should treat people for free, out of duty. in fact he spent a lot of time doing charity work as a doctor, treating people for free, personally. he just doesn't believe you should send doctors who don't do what he did to jail

also i'm not saying rp would be any better than obama, just that of the types of things rp is bad at, obama is as bad or worse at. i think all presidents are by necessity equally bad. i'm not saying you should vote for rp as a protest vote at all, since as i said earlier, i view the act of voting as the initiation of force, and as a legitimization of government

[Capntastic]

A pacifist would create a system where you don't need to 'force' people to help people, and ensure the social contract is ensured.  

Why not have the state provide health care for all citizens?  That way doctors are compensated for their work, and people don't die of gunshots and car accidents because they are poor.

[Paul Eres]

that is exactly what RP is doing, though. he's outlined a system where people are not forced to treat people for free, but which people will be treated for free anyway. here's a quote:

In the days before Medicare and Medicaid, the poor and elderly were admitted to hospitals at the same rate they are now, and received good care. Before those programs came into existence, every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate and free medical care was the norm. Hardly anyone is aware of this today, since it doesn’t fit into the typical, by the script story of government rescuing us from a predatory private sector.

he believes that health care costs are artificially inflated by the corporate-state alliance (in particular the drug industry's alliance with the FDA), and if that those were gradually phased out, prices would lower to a tiny fraction of what they are now (similar to health care costs in many other countries; if you import a drug it can often be imported at like 5% or less of its price in the US)

this goes back earlier to what i said about us living in a post-scarcity world, one which generates artificial scarcity. if there were no state and no big drug companies, and if medicine were focused on prevention rather than treatment of symptoms, health care costs would cost next to nothing

and, no pacifist could self-consistently support any state, because the state is law, and law is violence. but i suppose there are levels of pacifism -- some half-pacifists might be against war and murder but for law, or something. but any truly consistent pacifist is also an anarchist -- tolstoy and gandhi were both pacifist-anarchists for instance

[Capntastic]

Just because some people were receiving free care in Ron Paul's nostalgic view of the past does not mean that health care needs for the entire population were met.  Free clinics actually exist today, for instance, and demand for health care far outpaces their supply.

Regardless, do you know what inflates scarcity?  Capitalism.  Do you know why people would inflate the value of their products, to withhold it from people that need it?  Capitalism. 

There's no reason to believe that people's needs would be met by expanding free market tendencies.  Look at where America falls in terms of health care versus socialist states.  Look at the distribution of wealth in other countries.  We've been declining for decades due to hoping to subsist off of trickle down scraps.  As has been illustrated, unregulated corporations will do as much harm to people as they can get away with.  If you're going to make an appeal to pacifism, cut throat capitalism is far from the correct context to do so from.

[Capntastic]

America's GDP (macroeconomics) is something like 15 trillion dollars these days; divied up amongst the population that would bring us to 43k dollars of wealth created annually for each person.  If you only paid the proportional share of the GDP to those that provided services or goods that people used (ie, were employed, and recieved something similar to a W2 detailing how many hours worked), and used the rest of the wealth created by the US as a whole for socialized things such as roads and health care and regulation, the entire country would be doing pretty good.  This sort of system isn't an if/then game of who deserves what, and allows every person in the country to have a decent life without fear of starvation of illness ruining them financially. 

The money an individual earns can in fact be spent on goods and services within the country (microeconomics), so stacked right on top of socialized life-necessities you can have a regulated capitalist system that provides for innovation of technology and competitive pricing, etc.  Economy of scale would allow for prices to fall as well.  Socialized medicine would be 'cheaper' to produce when governing bodies can forecast how much of a particular medicine would be needed, and not 'gamble' by going all in on hoping people are gonna need boner pills. 

So there you go, a taxless, socialized society where everyone has the basic things they need, and access to capitalism.  Obviously, it's a very basic outline, a very simplified view, but it's no more naive than "the free market will make everything cheap and everyone rich".  It's actually based on economic principles that haven't been disproven, for one.

Norway is swimming in small businesses, thriving, because of their social safety nets.  People have the freedom to take risks because they won't starve on a frozen gutter if luck doesn't shine upon them.

So yeah, I have no problem with capitalism so long as it's not turned into some social darwinistic hole.  And no, relying on private charity has never in history guaranteed anyone's survival.

[Capntastic]

law is violence.

"Rousseau's striking phrase that man must "be forced to be free"[6] should be understood this way: since the indivisible and inalienable popular sovereignty decides what is good for the whole, then if an individual lapses back into his ordinary egoism and disobeys the leadership, he will be forced to listen to what they decided as a member of the collectivity (i.e. as citizens). Thus, the law, inasmuch as it is created by the people acting as a body, is not a limitation of individual freedom, but its expression. Thus, enforcement of law, including criminal law, is not a restriction on individual liberty, as the individual, as a citizen, explicitly agreed to be constrained if, as a private individual, he did not respect his own will as formulated in the general will. Because laws represent the restraints of civil freedom, they represent the leap made from humans in the state of nature into civil society. In this sense, the law is a civilizing force, and therefore Rousseau believed that the laws that govern a people helped to mold their character."

So yes, libertarianism has been known to skew the definition of law into force into violence, showing their anarchistic roots.  There are times when restraining someone or even physically harming someone is ethically justifiable.

"One more statement on coercion: Coercion is only a negative if it results in a negative outcome that harms society as a whole. Economic freedom is only a means to an end, and not an end in and of itself. A society's purpose is to increase quality of life for its members as a whole, not to allow anyone to do whatever they please without regard to the ramifications of their actions."

There's also the fact that taxation and laws are violence but applying dire market forces on people to drive profits, putting competing companies out of business causing them to lose their shirts, or even straight wage-slavery is painted as non-coercive because "free market", despite it being just as painful a force.  You can avoid breaking a law, but you can't typically avoid needing food or medicine.

"
The key to a lot of libertarian thought is that it's basically a semantics game. Coercion is not coercion if it's not a direct threat of force. The fact that "or starve to death" can in practice have equal coercive power is immaterial to them. It's not "real" coercion. Enforcing property rights using force so that you will starve and die isn't government coercion, either, apparently.

Similarly, quasi-government-like-entities as well as quasi-slavery can exist in many proposed libertarian systems. But that's OK because, even though there's an entity that functions just like a government or a mechanism that functions just like slavery, it's not actually a government or slavery. It's not-slavery, which is just like slavery, but it was brought about in a rights-respecting way using acceptable libertarian social mechanisms like debt, "consensual" contracts, etc.. The fact that slavery, by any other name, is still more or less slavery and just as bad doesn't enter. So long as the original premises were moral and valid, and the reasoning is sound, then ALL outcomes are also moral and valid, no matter how monstrous they appear prima facie. This is the basis of many, many libertarian viewpoints.

Similarly, a well-functioning "statist" system where people are happy and free is unimaginable to a libertarian because, by definition, true freedom and justice can only exist without "government coercion." You might practically be free, and it might be indistinguishable from the ideal outcome in libertopia, but it's not real, purestrain freedom and real, libertarian justice. It's a pale approximation, even though it may be identical in almost every respect. This is why libertarians, though they claim to be "realists," are actually insanely "idealist." A libertarian would actually be mad about a good system that worked well with just outcomes simply because the theoretical bases for that system are not perfect deductions based on their immutable premises. "

[PompiPompi]

Norway has a population of 5 million, the US have 300(?) million. Economy doesn't scale up so easily.
It's just like in a city of 4 million people you have a violent crime commited every 15 seconds. (I think I saw the link here?)
To be honest, if you want to care for everyone, you also need to care for all the Chineese.
That means, no dirt cheap electronics anymore. That means spreading the wealth with billions of people, which would mean a lot less wealth for every "citizen of the planet".
With the simple differential equation of depicting resources usage compared to population, and with the never stopping exponential population growth, spreading the wealth means a safe route torward exhausting resources\food and probably some sort of world scale catastrophe.

The brutal truth is, if you are a citizen of a westren country and you don't live in the street, your wealth(however small you may think it is) was already made on the backs of millions of poor, starving, tortured and under slavery conditions people.

[Mikademus]

The brutal truth is, if you are a citizen of a westren country and you don't live in the street, your wealth(however small you may think it is) was already made on the backs of millions of poor, starving, tortured and under slavery conditions people.

Probably true. And what does that have to do with the idea of health care as a right for citizens of a country and that the European socialistic model of health care being superior to the current American corporate-liberal one and a hypothetical libertarian voluntary model, which was what was being discussed?

[PompiPompi]

The brutal truth is, if you are a citizen of a westren country and you don't live in the street, your wealth(however small you may think it is) was already made on the backs of millions of poor, starving, tortured and under slavery conditions people.

Probably true. And what does that have to do with the idea of health care as a right for citizens of a country and that the European socialistic model of health care being superior to the current American corporate-liberal one and a hypothetical libertarian voluntary model, which was what was being discussed?

I think I just responded to the idea of spreading the 15 trillion GDP of the US equally to it's citizens, which sounds like more of an ideology that everyone will have a saftey net, because that's the "nice" thing to do. Rather than the hirerachy structure of capitalism, which I think is more efficient in making the average wealthy(but not the minimum wealthy).

[peanutbuttershoes]

Maybe da banks should bail out da government. Lulz

[Superb Joe]

ron paul is a blank slate upon which the autistic project their dreams and wishes, not unlike a final fantasy character. thats why they can just continually hand wave away things like his briefcase spilling open in congress and it being full of hand painted portraits of hitler and really nice silk banners of the n word. because it's not canon in their political fanfiction.