Thread: I Was Wrong About Ron Paul On Immigration

Also, I have heard him say that we need to bring troops home to put on the border and to build our military up.

"Also, I have heard him say that we need to bring troops home to put on the border and to build our military up.""

Yes, some more of Paul's inconsistencies. Why, then has he always voted to NOT put troops on the border?

Please! Look at his record it isn't that good!

Did you know there was a big amnesty in 2002? Ron voted FOR it.

Ron Paul’s Immigration Record

Paul’s Immigration Voting Record & Report Card on the NumbersUSA website:

(1) Paul consistently voted every year since 1999 against putting the military on the border:

2006: H. Amdt. 206 to H.R. 1815 2004: Goode Amendment to H.R. 4200 2003: Goode Amendment to H.R. 1588 2002: H. Amdt. 479 to H.R. 4546 2001: Traficant amendment to HR 2586 2000: Traficant amendment to H.R.4205 1999: Trafficant Amendment to H.R. 1401.

(2) Paul voted in 1997, 2001( H.R. 1885) and 2002 (H RES 365) to grant, extend or continue Section 245-i amnesties for illegal aliens.

(3) Paul voted NO on extending the voluntary Basic Pilot Workplace Verification Program (H.R. 2359),

(4) Paul voted NO on the border fence in 2005 (Hunter Amendment to HR 4437 - “Enforcement Onlyâ€

Originally Posted by nntrixie

I don't now anything about 'fiat money' - one thing I do know, we don't have 'free trade'.

We have one sided trades deals with countries that harm our workers and we subsidized some industries to harm people in other countries.

But for those who think Ron Paul has the wrong idea - what do we do - business as usual? How's that working for us?

Ditto that one "Trixie" I am just down right sick of business as usual, because "We the people" have been asleep at the wheel, this country needs huge changes..who is willing to make those changes even if it will be hard?



fiat money
n. Legal tender, especially paper currency, authorized by a government but not based on or convertible into gold or silver.
The Federal reserve just keeps printing money with out the gold or silver to back.

Fiat currency

Look up fiat in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.In economics, fiat currency or fiat money is money backed by government demand for it as legal tender in payment of legal liabilities, such as taxes. It is often associated with paper money because legal liabilities are created and settled by documents which are usually paper. Without government demand for certain kinds of paper as legal tender, such as bank notes, only specie is unlimited legal tender. However this is not universally true, as some currencies, (notably sterling issued by Scottish banks[1]), are not legal tender but are accepted by longstanding confidence (Scotland technically has no note of legal tender and thus no fiat money-- see Pound Scots).

A bank of issue whose notes enjoy legal tender status by government fiat can use its own notes, making their redemption in specie optional — a matter of the 'monetary policy' of the bank in question. Historically, the institution of fiat currency has preceded and enabled the demonetisation of specie, via a monetary policy decision not to offer payment in specie at par, e.g. by suspension, devaluation or redemption in bullion or foreign currency instead. Eventually this leads to no form of payment, redemption or exchange whatsoever being offered by the issuer and a system of freely floating national currencies, none of which is "redeemable" by fixed amounts of specie or any given commodity.

Originally Posted by nntrixie

I don't now anything about 'fiat money' - one thing I do know, we don't have 'free trade'.

We have one sided trades deals with countries that harm our workers and we subsidized some industries to harm people in other countries.

But for those who think Ron Paul has the wrong idea - what do we do - business as usual? How's that working for us?

I must admitt my self that I am not really well versed in "fiat money." But I believe the argument is that because our currency is not backed by assets, the economy is weakened, and we lose jobs overseas.

There are a couple of points I would like to make about this. First, the founders themselves printed money to pay for the Revolutionary War. Sure, this brougth about debt, but the founders constructed a tariff to balence the budget. I guess the Paul argument goes that the founders had to resort to the tariff as a means of correcting the inherent problems of printing money. The fact remains that the founders both printed money and constructed a tariff -- things that Paul is against. I guess the Paul reasoning is that money printing should only done in times of emergency like war, and that the federal reserve system has abused this principal, and led to bigger problems like job losses overseas. But the founders gave congress the power of the tariff. They believed in it as a way to protect American industry. They were not free traders. And the tariff was used for generations to do just as they had allowed it to do in the Constitution.

Another problem I see with Paul is that he is promoting many different ideas all at once, all of which are alien to our current government and society. He very well may believe that this alternate reality would keep American jobs here, but there are too many issues at play all at once to universally deride tariffs as a means to a positive end. For instance, I see no way that the IRS and Federal Reserve will diappear in our lifetimes, not even if Paul is elected by some miracle. These are entrenched institutions that have existed for almost 100 years in this nation.

Tariffs, on the other hand, have existed from the beginning of the republic, and exist to this day. In fact, they were a significant source of revenue and industry/job protection all the up to about 20-30 years ago. Tariffs existed and endured for a long period of time during the existence of the IRS and Federal Reserve. It was not until tariffs were slashed, NAFTA and WTO embraced, that we started losing jobs to the Third World. They coincided perfectly. I see that as far more responsible for the loss of jobs to the Third World than monetary policy (especially while similtaneously embracing unilateral elimination of tariffs), and less radical that we return to a protective tariff, or at least use it as a bargaining chip for balenced trade, than to eliminate the IRS and Federal reserve system.

Originally Posted by Once_A_Democrat

Originally Posted by AngelaTC

If ROn Paul is elected, he is committed to using our troops on our borders to stop the invasion of America. I support that.

Sorry You don't where RP stands by making the above statement.

You can't make statements here just out of the blue. Most here know better

Are you kidding? I spend hours and hours reading and watching him talk. He absolutely has said that our troops should be here, protecting our borders. And he has absolutely said that bringing the troops home is one of the few things he can do without Congressional approval.

Originally Posted by Once_A_Democrat

Originally Posted by AngelaTC

The bigger issue is that the Constitution doesn't even give the federal government the right to regulate drugs. .

Where in the Consitution does the right taken from the government on this?

Have you read it? 10th Amendment specifically reads : "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The Founding Fathers understood that top-down beaucracy didn't work.

They gave the job of protecting the borders to the Federal government. They did not give the federal government the right to meddle in about 99% of the stuff they meddle in though.

Originally Posted by BearFlagRepublic

First, the founders themselves printed money to pay for the Revolutionary War.

Ron Paul often points this out and says that the Founders understood the problems with fiat money and that is why the constitution says, that ONLY gold and silver can be legal tender.

"The drafters of the Constitution were well aware of how a government armed with legal tender powers could ravage the people’s liberty and prosperity. That is why the Constitution does not grant legal tender power to the federal government, and the states are empowered to make legal tender only out of gold and silver (see Article 1, Section 10)."
From: http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul118.html

Concerning what else you said above, I think the difference is that he approaches the problem like a doctor. ie: treat the disease not the symptom. He has diagnosed that fiat money is the disease and that eradicating it is the correct way to fix the disease (job loss) and poor economy.

At the same time he accepts the fact that tariffs are constitutional. From reading what he says about why he voted against NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO is that it has nothing to do with free trade/fair trade/tariffs. It all boils down to national sovereignty. Those agreements violate our national sovereignty.

"It is absurd to believe that CAFTA and other trade agreements do not diminish American sovereignty. When we grant quasi-governmental international bodies the power to make decisions about American trade rules, we lose sovereignty plain and simple. I can assure you first hand that Congress has changed American tax laws for the sole reason that the World Trade Organization decided our rules unfairly impacted the European Union. Hundreds of tax bills languish in the House Ways and Means committee, while the one bill drafted strictly to satisfy the WTO was brought to the floor and passed with great urgency last year.

The tax bill in question is just the tip of the iceberg. The quasi-judicial regime created under CAFTA will have the same power to coerce our cowardly legislature into changing American laws in the future. Labor and environmental rules are inherently associated with trade laws, and we can be sure that CAFTA will provide yet another avenue for globalists to impose the Kyoto Accord and similar agreements on the American people. CAFTA also imposes the International Labor Organization’s manifesto, which could have been written by Karl Marx, on American business. I encourage every conservative and libertarian who supports CAFTA to read the ILO declaration and consider whether they still believe the treaty will make America more free"
From: http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=412

Whether people agree with Ron Paul or not, he always errors on the side of liberty and national sovereignty.

Originally Posted by BearFlagRepublic

I must admitt my self that I am not really well versed in "fiat money."

The economic stuff makes me nod off too. But here's how part of it was explained in little words to me - when a quarter was made entirely of silver, it was worth about 2 gallons of milk. Now, if you were to sell a piece of silver that contains that same amount of silver today, it would be worth about $7.50. Roughly 2 gallons of milk.

Originally Posted by specsaregood

At the same time he accepts the fact that tariffs are constitutional. From reading what he says about why he voted against NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO is that it has nothing to do with free trade/fair trade/tariffs. It all boils down to national sovereignty. Those agreements violate our national sovereignty.

"

When any interviewer inquires how we would pay for things if the IRS was abolished, he always responds, in part, with tariffs and fees.

If we cut spending back to the year 2000 levels, we wouldn't need money from the income tax.

I wonder if people realize how broke we actually are. Both parties raided the Social Security excess, and spent it. They replaced it with IOU's. But those IOU's aren't included in the numbers that we see as posted as our official national debt, because the government uses essentioally the same accounting system that Enron did.

Basically fiat money isn't tied to any commodity like gold, silver or wheat or anything.

When it is tied to something like gold you could trade it for a set amount of gold if it was when you where a teenager or if you kept it, a Senior in your retirement.

Fiat means the amount of dollars can fluctuate independently of the amount of stuff there is to trade.

What is happening is that when we don't have any money and we decide to go to war the government prints up enough for them and the military industrial complex to make anything and everything they want.

So say before the war started you spent your life working hard and saving every penny. Say you saved a lot and you had half of all of the money in the whole world in your mattress.

(skip this paragraph)
The government goes to war. Not a real war like World War 2 but one of these illegal wars where they have lied about looking for something very scary or some other red herring. The war drags one because really the are rebuilding a nation and first they have to blow it all up and then they have to build things like Vatican sized embassies and military bases so the can do the same next door.

So they print up all the money they want and then they print some more just to be safe. Besides they are rich and they want it.

So now there is twice as much money in circulation as before the war.

One way to look at it is now your stash only represents one forth of all of the money in the world.

Another way would be if all of the money represented all of the stuff in the world you now owned one quarter instead of one half.

(Skip the next two paragraphs also)
Another way would be that it is sort of like playing with other children when you were a child. You know the ones that wanted to be partners with you in business. They would have all of these formulas they would lay on you to show you that all of the cost associated with the business were owed by you. They also had special formulas worked out when any money rolled in on why it was all theirs.

There I go again off on a tangent. That is actually how I see the way the Federal Reserve was set up and believe it still runs. I don't think they have ever built one of their buildings or paid a cent towards maintenance, ink or anything else. I think I base this observation mostly as reading people or maybe I remember something from High School. I'm not sure.

That is just the basic concepts. As you can see it is a complex problem. Every different money system has faults. Even if there was a dollar somewhere for every dollars worth of product on the earth, a dollars worth of anything is subjective or up to an individual to decide for him or herself.


Information is the currency of democracy.
- Thomas Jefferson