ok, but just a warning, I can not present a meaningful argument in sound bite/talking point form. I must go into a certain amount of detail to outline the logical flaws. I'll try and keep it as short as possible.
My main beef with Ron Paul is that he's an extremist when it comes to economic issues. He is a free market purist. There has yet to be an industrialized country in the history of the word that has had an economic system to the right of where Ron Paul would like to take us.
Corporations are a business tool. Like a saw's purpose is to cut wood, the purpose of a corporation is to make a profit. The purpose of a corporation is not to look out for the best interests of the people or the planet, it's to make money at all costs.
I don't think that is a bad thing or that corporations are evil or any nonsense like that. I just believe that corporations are a tool with a specific purpose. Because of what corporations are they must be regulated in order to provide a net benefit to society. If they are not regulated, corporations will turn to any means to create a profit. That includes screwing over the people they are supposed to benefit.
The financial collapse is a perfect example of that. Financial corporations found a way to exploit a huge profit margins buy bundling bad mortgages together and disguising them as solid investments. They were not breaking the law by doing this because the laws that prevented them from screwing us all over were eliminated. That was a financial regulation we needed, but people preaching deregulation as a way to increase profits threw those regulations out without thinking about the long term consequences.
Ron Paul is a free market fundamentalist who believes that a good way to make a buck is to remove all the financial regulations that are designed to protect the people. Well he's right, that is a good way to make a buck. It's also extremely harmful to the people of this country.
Ron Paul believes that the free hand of the market will eventually sort everything out on it's own and therefor regulating it is unnecessary. He's right. It will. But the flaw in his logic is that he isn't thinking through the costs of letting the free market sort itself out.
He also doesn't think about who a free market would ultimately benefit. The eventual result of a free market are winners and losers. Unfortunately over a long enough time span, there are fewer winners scoring greater wins while everyone else suffers. The evidence of that is the lack of social mobility in America compared to European countries with more moderate mixed economies. If you look bad to 1880's America you see the result of a long period of time with two few economic regulations. We had the Rockefellers, JP Morgan, the Carnegies, and then we had the majority suffering so they could make extreme profits. Today we are not far from that. The wealthy control more now than they have since the time of the robber barons. The middle class is disappearing.
Back in the 1940s-1960s (the most prosperous time in our history) our economy was thriving. Back then when you got a certain amount of wealth, you paid a high tax rate that went to making our country great. People still made money. There were still rich people. The profit motive and capitalism worked fine. In fact with all the strict financial regulations and high tax rates we had back then, this country and capitalism worked even better than it does today because so much of that money went back to investing in our communities. Now our cities and infrastructure are falling apart, we are debating doing terrible things like cutting education, infrastructure spending, and health care for tax cuts to the people who need it least.
Ron Paul wants to take us in the opposite direction from the time in our history the country was most successful. I think that's wrong. I think capitalism is just great, but you can't let corporations just make money however they want because that hurts the people economic success is supposed to benefit. You see evidence of that today. Look at the stock market. It's almost completely recovered to pre-recession levels. But look how high the unemployment is. The corporations have recovered, but they've recovered in a way that does not employ Americans. They are not doing what we need them to do, employ people. We can regulate them in a way where it becomes more profitable to employ Americans or we can deregulate them even further to where they are making profits at the expense of the American people.
Some people will call me a socialist/communist/marxist for thinking this way. But I'd argue that my views are basically in line with the republican party in the 1950s-1970s. It isn't me moving to the left as much as the country moving too far to the right economically. It just isn't healthy or in our best interest to move too far to the right or left economically. An extreme free market purest like Ron Paul is not the answer.
