Letters to the Editor
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Hee Hee "Freedom to Starve"
You're free to eat tainted food because nobody is inspecting it. If your kid dies from eating E. Coli-infested hamburger, just don't eat at McDonald's any more and the free market will eventualy resolve the issue. You're also free to buy dangerous consumer products because safety standards won't be enforced. After you get electrocuted by your poorly-wired toaster, you won't buy a new one and the free market will correct itself.
You're free to starve if you lose your job because there will be no unemployment insurance or social safety net. If you do find a job, you're free to work for pennies because there won't be a minimum wage. And you are always free to throw yourself upon the charity of others -- assuming that your fellow citizens have enough spare change to give to their favorite charities instead of needing it all to keep themselves afloat.
You're free to breathe polluted air, drink chemical-laced water, and live on contaminated land because there will be no EPA to enforce air pollution controls, no federal standards for drinking water, no funds to clean up toxic spills. Don't like it? Don't buy that company's products. The free market wins again!
Brilliant!
Well said.
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Let's be realistic
Cutting taxes:
I spent a lot of money buying my house and lots more in taxes so lazy pos can't live where I live. If Ron Paul cuts taxes then some very undesirable folks might lower my property values.
Ending War on Drugs:
How are we suppoed to keep blacks in their place withoutt he war on drugs?
Ending Iraq
We have elaborate and mutually beneficial treaties witht he House of Saud and the sultans of the Persian Gulf to protect them fromt he populism of Iranians. how can we thrown away their sucurioty by ending the WoT amd nation builidng in Iraq?
Making entitlement programs responsible
The government (as per the wonderfully machiavellian president Johnson) has an agreement with the old, lazy, and infirm to back up the status quo by voting for the people who feed them with public money. Requiring people to worry about where their own handouts are coming from will break this political pact and cause undue stress among the old folks struggling to live on 60,000 per year in benefots and pensions.
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So what about Dennis?
He doesn't exactly have the same die-hard supporters, but he's got a similar thing going. Certain areas of YouTube have basically turned into a battle ground between the KoochieCrats and the RonPaulicans. I think it's time for Salon (and the MSM) to take Dennis at least as serious as Paul.
In fact, what people constantly forget when touting "their" honest candidate, is that this time there are four of them: Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel. All four say what they mean and mean what they say, and oppose the establishment, no matter what. Their each one's fans sometimes forget the others, and the MSM (and, shamefully, Salon) have deigned to take seriously only Paul and Huckabee. Odd, as they are more extreme than the other two. Huckabee wants (HIS) religion to guide politics, Paul wants to get rid of the Income tax, and eliminate most of government. But at least they're honest, right?
Except that so are Gravel and Kucinich, and their ideas are NOT totally on the fringe. In fact, they represent what most Democrats actually do believe (no Kucinich does not believe in aliens, to infer that is BS). So the whole thing is kind of unfair.
So, I challenge Salon to write some serious articles on Gravel and Kucinich. None of this UFO crap. Trust me, it won't hurt. And the establishment won't come get youm either. Liberals are reig´ning themSELVES in!
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The things left unmentioned
I think it's great that the more fringe candidates are getting some coverage, especially as I am not particularly enamored of the mainstream ones. However, in a race that is in large part being waged over social issues, why such little discussion on Paul's views of reproductive rights, particularly abortion? Yes, this country is in a hole. We can barely keep the economy from drowning, national debt is spiraling to levels of absolute despair, and the Iraq war is one the worst events in our country's history (not to mention how the Iraqis must be feeling about it). But Ron Paul is adamantly, unapologetically anti-choice. I fail to see how someone who is so pro-individual liberties can deem a woman as unworthy to decide for herself and for her own body what is best. Views of whether reproductive choice is a right tell us a lot about views of rights and liberties more generally and who deserves them. It isn't about not liking abortions, liking babies, or any of the usual rhetoric put out there by even pro-choice folks. It's about who has the right over the integrity of their own bodies. We have seen in history that when people lack bodily integrity, it is not such a far leap to remove other sorts of rights. Paul's speeches and sound bites might focus on the economy, taxes, and the war, but it does little service to the readership to ignore his social views, especially when Paul is trying to woo those in the embittered Left, too.
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I am astonished
at the constant assumptions that the corporations in America are somehow any different than the government. Who do you think runs the government right now? Us? Nope.
There's a slanted perspective on the power of corporations in America because corporations have never, over the course of the industrial revolution and into the twentieth century, been unable to coerce the populace through borrowed governmental power. When the national guard breaks up the union strike, that's an example of corporacracy. Ditto regulations and bureaucracies, which on the face of it control environmental degradation or promote consumer rights, which instead actually just promote the corporate status quo by stifling innovation.
When McDonald's feeds your kid that e. coli burger, you sue them for criminal neglect! That's where the government should be involved in the market... in the courts, to protect the rights of individuals, not in the bureaucracies, to protect the rights of corporations.