"the gold standard wouldn't work anymore"

may I ask why not?

"he's against gay marriage"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul197.html

Actually, reading the link provided, I'm not sure you can conclude that he is against gay marriage. You can conclude he is a supporter of state's rights, which seems consistent with his other stands. He is not trying to nullify gay marriages in states that voted to allow that - in fact, his position would seem to fully support he states to pass that law.

The gold standard won't work because any country on it would dump it and devalue its currency at the first crisis. Everybody would know this and stay away from that economy since they'd be guaranteed to lose money during a crisis.

I don't think just having the money be backed by nothing is a good idea, but nobody's gonna play by the gold standard's rules any more.

"Chief Justice Rehnquist to be appointed without having earlier served as a judge. But it’s worth remembering that Rehnquist himself wasn’t an outlier: Of the eight Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon appointees, a majority — White, Goldberg, Fortas, Powell, and Rehnquist — hadn’t served as judges. (The ones who had served as judges were Marshall, Burger, and Blackmun.)"

oops, wrong thread

Hibiskiss, you do know that Ron Paul won that primary challenge you mentioned with something like 85% of the vote? This was in spite of the fact that the Republican establishment was backing one of the primary challengers.

Invictus, are you seriously suggesting that countries with fiat currencies don't devalue their currencies in economic crises? The nice thing about a gold standard is that devaluation is obvious and immediate. It would also cause a big political scandal, which politicians don't like and would prefer to avoid. With fiat currencies, however, it is almost imperceptible, since we don't know how many dollar bills roll off the printing presses every year. We just know our money becomes less valuable over time, but have no way knowing the rate of decline over time.

The United States faced many economic crises throughout its history, but the Gold exchange rate remained constant until FDR's devaluation in 1933 (after all the private gold reserves had been seized). The Gold Standard wasn't completely abandoned until Nixon; in the years previous, of course, the Dollar replaced the Pound as the world's reserve currency, after Britain abandoned the gold standard in the '30s. That proves pretty conclusively that people would prefer a gold-backed currency to a fiat currency, even with the knowledge that it can be devalued in a crisis.

I'm not saying that at all. Who would ever say that? That's what a fiat currency is. Fiat currency is no good, but the gold standard is impossible because everyone would cheat and run right back to fiat.

I'm not an economist, and neither are you, but I do know the world or even just the US returning to the gold standard is a pipe dream. It would be nice, but so would a lot of things whose time has passed.

"@The_Master_Warrior - I wasn't expressing an opinion, I was just saying that it definitely hurts Romney that he is a mormon. "

I agree that it does. And it's quite unfortunate. I don't see why people have a problem with Mormons. They're as American as anyone else. As for Ron Paul, his radical views still beat the left's views.

Well, honestly, if Obama is able to dig himself out of the hole he's created for himself in the next two years, and if he ends up doing even a decent/good job, then I'm sure it won't matter who the GOP candidate is, because everyone will re-elect him. =P

He won't. To dig himself out, he would have to reverse everything he's done in the last two years and actually start going in a positive direction.

And if he reversed on everything, the GOP would rip him up for being a hypocrite.

I just hope to God it's not Sarah Palin. She's in no way electable. I'm hoping for Chuckabee and Romney's the second best.

This is from way back in the thread, and I'm not even sure Adversary is still following it, but I'd like to respond to this:
"Chrispminis, aha! See, you actually thought to yourself, "Yeah, we don't vote on issues... How would we do that? Gee, 300 million people would make that difficult, if not impossible." And just like that, democracy is dead again. And bottom line, it doesn't matter what you would "rather", you will take what you are given because you are powerless to affect change. So am I. So are we all... right?"

Representative democracies are hardly a dead democracy. Just because it's not a pure populist democracy does not mean it is not a democracy. I was saying I'd rather the rule of law than rule of majority because I don't actually believe a pure populist democracy would be a good thing. It would quickly lead to the tyranny of the majority without the rule of law to protect the minority.

Are you saying that the aggregate will of the people is inconsequential because we only elect officials who act on our behalf and do not vote directly on the issues? Try running for public office and tell me that citizens are powerless to enact any change. While I would agree that on an individual level we have very little power to enact any change on the level of government, but the same is true of every other citizen and the same would be true in a pure democracy where your vote is lost in the ocean of aggregate votes. However, it is not true that the aggregate will of the people does not have the power to enact change.

LJ TYLER DURDEN +1

@TMW:
This is not the place for a debate about Obama. If you want to turn it into that kind of thread, continue with your little comments. I personally believe he hasn't gone far enough on any of his policies.

For the record, the USA is not a democracy...it's a constitutional republic.

@ Tantris

It's a thread with a political theme. Obama occupies (arguably) America's most political office. If I want to talk about him (I started this thread), I will. But I don't. Personally, I think he's a puppet. The person really running the show is Pelosi or Reid. I don't like scapegoating Obama, because I know I'd be doing exactly what the left did to Bush for eight years. I'm holding the Democratic leadership responsible for their actions. Thank God that Obama isn't a complete idiot when it comes to Afghanistan. He's doing the right thing over there.

@ SteevoKun

Actually, it's a (mis)representative democracy. American politicians have ignored the Constitution for the better part of a century.

Earlier in the thread, someone said he first read the title as "..if he's a moron." Just now, in glancing through forum topics, I read it as "...if he's a woman."

@ TMW

I wasn't saying it was effective, lol. Let's just say in my mind the federal government is the biggest bunch of crap...and government in general isn't much different.

It's sad that the government is now run by lobbyists and backroom deals.

It's sad that government exists. The government that is best is that which governs not at all, to pull from Thoreau.

@TMW:
I forgot, it is you. Ugh.

Nothing Obama, or Congress, has done has been in any way fringe. The, whoever you want to say is in control, put forward a bill that was decidedly Republican for health care reform. It is actually based on the main Republican counter-proposal during the Clinton presidency. The fact that you actually believe what you are saying means you have one of the right wing propaganda sources feeding you all your information, which is sad.

The Constitution has not been being abused. It is being used in the same way it has been since the founders. There was a debate about the expansive nature of it, at that time. Jefferson argued that the Constitution could be used to do almost anything, and then when he was president he used it in that manner.

Annoying hearing ignorant children complaining about stuff they know nothing about.

@ Tantris --

Your most recent post has little relevance to anything I said. I just said that the Constitution has been ignored for the better part of a century. I went on to DEFEND Obama, and apologize on behalf of my conservative allies. I could have been referring to Johnson's constitutionally questionable expansion of the Vietnam War for all you know.

"Annoying hearing ignorant children complaining about stuff they know nothing about."

Name-calling makes you look more ignorant then the person you are accusing. If you have a case, then make it, but when you start resorting to name-calling then that tells me that your case isn't very strong so you have to add a little extra.

" It is actually based on the main Republican counter-proposal during the Clinton presidency."

Regardless of who supports this bill, it is crap. If McCain had been elected and tried to pass this bill you would have been hearing the same amount of criticism as you are hearing now. There might be some that only oppose the bill because of the fact that the Democrats passed it, but the majority can see that it takes away from the rights of the people and gives more power to the government.

"put forward a bill that was decidedly Republican for health care reform"

Are you talking about Republican as in the system in place, or the GOP party? because if it is the latter, then I would respectfully disagree. The GOP has always stood for smaller government, and this bill is the opposite. There are some Republicans now that are much closer to the left ideology, and the only claim they have to the Republican party is their family values.

TMW: As I've asked you before, if you're going to make claims like that, you have to provide some evidence. Saying "the Constitution has been ignored for the better part of a century" sounds great, but just because you say so, it doesn't make it so.

So please explain..... I look forward to refuting you.

"The GOP has always stood for smaller government, and this bill is the opposite."

From the very beginning, the GOP has been the party of corporate welfare and a tool of the New England banking and mercantile elite. Lincoln for instance was what we would today call a lobbyist who steered tons of taxpayer money to the railroads in the years before he was elected president. The Republican Party donned the "Less Government" mask only when the Democrats put it down in the early/mid 20th century, and even then, it's been nothing but a vote-grabbing facade. Not a single Republican president since Eisenhower has appreciably reduced the size of government, and even Ike (who had a Republican congress to work with) did nothing to eliminate the army of New Deal bureaucrats and programs - some of which still plague us today. Even the hero of modern conservatism (Reagan), government spending increased by 2/3. And let's not even get started on Bush II (always amused by all the people who are ticked off about Obamacare but didn't raise a peep about Bush's Medicare prescription drug benefit, which costed taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars for essentially the same end).

"Saying "the Constitution has been ignored for the better part of a century" sounds great, but just because you say so, it doesn't make it so.

So please explain..... I look forward to refuting you."

Well, I'm not TMW, but I will offer up this most obvious constitutional violation: drug prohibition. Alcohol prohibition required a constitutional amendment to be constitutional. Why is there no constitutional amendment prohibiting the use of what are today called 'illegal drugs'? I recognize that today's Drug War is justified legally by its proponents by the 'Interstate Commerce Clause", but then why didn't the ICC also apply to alcohol?

@ Tolstoy --

I'm not going to argue in favor of your point because I disagree with it, but I can provide at least one broad example of a Constitutional violation.

LBJ's socialist "Great Society" programs. They were not covered by the ICC or the NAPC, and they were actually illegal under the Tenth Amendment.