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#21
10-12-2007, 12:21 PM
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Re: Is Ron Paul Serious?
[ QUOTE ]
Eliminating the income tax is far, far important than eliminating the Fed. natedogg [/ QUOTE ] QFT 
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#22
10-12-2007, 12:26 PM
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Re: Is Ron Paul Serious?
[ QUOTE ]
Having a currency backed by gold is gonna be fun when someone discovers a new mine of gold which adds 25% more gold to the circulation than we have accounted for now. Voila, the discoverer of that gold is worth more than all the holders of US dollars combined. Having your money backed by one mineral is beyond redicolous, and I doubt Ron Paul supports that position. [/ QUOTE ] Your hypothetical is pathological. Do you see why? And yes, Dr. Paul very much supports the position that competition in money be legalized, and were that to be the case, gold and silver would certainly remonetize. It's not a matter of "backing" money with minerals. Gold and silver would *be* money. The best primer on this history and nature of money, and the history, nature and implications of government monopolization of the monetary system and implementation of a fiat money standard is without a doubt Murray Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money?
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#23
10-12-2007, 12:37 PM
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Re: Is Ron Paul Serious?
[ QUOTE ]
Eliminating the income tax is far, far more politically saleable than eliminating the Fed. [/ QUOTE ] The income tax and the Fed have served as the twin tools of the expansion of the welfare-warfare state over the past century. But it is clearly the Fed and it's ability to hide the costs that is the far more insidious of the two. Military adventurism of the scale engaged in by the US over the last century could *never* have been paid for if it had to be paid for explicitly and solely through overt war taxation. It is only the ability to debase the currency that allows the United States to fund it's endless foreign military adventurism. However, the public *sees* the income tax, and not the debasement of the currency; most think price inflation is just some inherent feature of the market, whereas the opposite is the inherent nature of the operation of the free market and a commodity currency. Extremely few people understood the rampant inflation and recession of the 1970s as the cost of the guns and butter of the 1960s, for example. The inflation tax is far more insidious, but the income tax is far more visible. Also, the income tax disproportionately burdens the upper income classes, whereas the inflation tax disproportionately burdens the lower income classes, particularly those on fixed incomes.
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#24
10-12-2007, 12:58 PM
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Re: Is Ron Paul Serious?
[ QUOTE ]
Also, the income tax disproportionately burdens the upper income classes [/ QUOTE ] This is not particularly true if you include the SS/Medicare payroll tax when figuring the tax burden of an income class.
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#25
10-12-2007, 01:03 PM
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Re: Is Ron Paul Serious?
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] Also, the income tax disproportionately burdens the upper income classes [/ QUOTE ] This is not particularly true if you include the SS/Medicare payroll tax when figuring the tax burden of an income class. [/ QUOTE ] Fair enough, but that is generally treated as a different tax.
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#26
10-12-2007, 01:09 PM
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Re: Is Ron Paul Serious?
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] Also, the income tax disproportionately burdens the upper income classes [/ QUOTE ] This is not particularly true if you include the SS/Medicare payroll tax when figuring the tax burden of an income class. [/ QUOTE ] Fair enough, but that is generally treated as a different tax. [/ QUOTE ] Indeed, which is a nice marketing trick.
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#29
10-12-2007, 01:49 PM
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Re: Is Ron Paul Serious?
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] Having a currency backed by gold is gonna be fun when someone discovers a new mine of gold which adds 25% more gold to the circulation than we have accounted for now. Voila, the discoverer of that gold is worth more than all the holders of US dollars combined. Having your money backed by one mineral is beyond redicolous, and I doubt Ron Paul supports that position. [/ QUOTE ] And having a currency backed by nothing is better? You can increase the money supply of paper currency with a few key strokes. [/ QUOTE ] This is true, but it's not that much different from the GS. If you recall, the US once had a GS. Then times got rough, politicians wanted to print more money, and they got rid of it. [/ QUOTE ] How does that make the gold standard useless? If they got rid of it because it was constraining the politicians, then it was serving the very purpose of its creation.
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#30
10-12-2007, 02:30 PM
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Re: Is Ron Paul Serious?
[ QUOTE ]
How does that make the gold standard useless? If they got rid of it because it was constraining the politicians, then it was serving the very purpose of its creation. [/ QUOTE ] It politicians are able to get rid of the gold standard as easily as they could increase the money supply of paper currency "with a few key strokes", then it wasn't any kind of constraint at all, which I suppose is what bobman was saying when he claimed it having a currency backed by nothing was pretty much equivalent to having it backed by gold. I forget the exact wording of the quote and where I read it, but I think the gist of what bobman is getting at is this: the gold standard isn't really useful -- if your elected officials are responsible stewards of money, then they don't need it; and if they aren't, they won't be able to stay on it long anyway.
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