Ron Paul at Google
Candidate Ron Paul spoke last Friday at Google. According to the Mercury News:
Ron Paul, the Texas GOP congressman and long-shot candidate for president, credits a rabid Internet following with spreading his staunch libertarian and anti-war message into the mainstream media.... But he did not sanitize his talk for his Net-centric audience.
He said he does not support network neutrality, the concept that telecommunications companies should be restricted from controlling broadband access to the detriment of Web companies like Google, nor does he support tech-friendly immigration reforms in Congress recently. And he doesn't believe in federal student government loans, which a huge majority of the audience, by a show of hands, had used to make it through college.
Is this Ron Paul showing that he won't pander to any audience, or evidence Ron Paul is stuck in the same pro-big lobbyist mindset, where government continues to give large established industries like the telecom monopolies more power over markets even when they are stifling competition and innovation?
Maybe both?
4 Comments:
I think it just shows that pure libertarianism, like pure conservativism or pure liberalism, may be a good philosophy, but makes for a poor way of running a government.
This has been my beef with laissez-faire proponents: they have a demented belief that government intervention is always a bad thing while never acknowledging that collusion and monopolies are as damaging to the free market if not more so.
Yikes, guys. Monopolies have only been helped by government intervention. In a true free market the competition wouldn't allow for them. If government began to regulate the internet the big corporations would lobby the feds to regulate it their way. Here's a good paper on it:
http://www.mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_3.pdf
It amazes me a how few Liberals and Conservatives understand the difference between mercantilism and a free market. Most "real" Libertarians understand that you can not have mercantilism without regulation. (NAFTA despite the name it was assigned by the Ministry of Truth, is embodiment of mercantilism).
As a card carrying Libertarian I do have problems with Ron's immigration stance, and he's a little to "Fundie" in my mind. This however, is small potatoes compared to our looming monetary problems. It is scary that only Paul seems to have grasped this.
Calling him "pro big-lobby" is totally off-base. Try consulting a reliable data source like OpenSecrets.org and discover the truth. Paul is at the bottom of the list for the entire Congress, in the category of taking money from lobbyists. Don't you ever get suspicious when you see Orin Hatch and Diane Feinstein taking money from the same sources? Or co-sponsoring Copyright legislation?
On Net Neutrality, I can guarantee you that Paul also voted against handing over $200 billion to the telecoms in 2001, as part of Broadband infrastructure upgrade.
Look how well that worked out for us. Care to find out who else voted against this obvious case of Corporate Welfare? It had bi-partisan support!
The only difference I see between the two major parties is bickering over what percentage of our bureaucrats to arm.
There's no need for concern though.
The Dollar just hit an all time low against the Pound, yesterday. (Who cares, the M3 was a deceptive statistic anyway!) We just need to keep the our Asian lenders happy and it will all be fine. We can still afford the Sub-prime Mortgage bail-out, Universal Health Care and few minor Wars.
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