Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

A Surge by Ron Paul?

The results of a new Zogby Poll suggest that the campaign of former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ron Paul is showing signs of life. According to the poll, 3 percent of the Republicans surveyed identified him as their preferred candidate, putting him ahead of fellow conservative dark horses Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter. Even more interesting is how well Paul seems to be doing among women--a full 6 percent of Republican women claim to be supporting his candidacy, which is the same percentage that are backing Fred Thompson.

Discussions - 61 Comments

Yes, this should really upend the race. Not.

Ugh! The new correction feature is broken. I will try without the spacing. Go Ron Go! He is definitely the internet candidate. Check Digg, myspace, etc. He definitely could wind up being the

No luck. I’ll try again later.

Doesn’t look like you had anything to say anyway.

Paul is the anti-war alternative to Tancredo and Hunter. They don’t really draw from the same pool of voters. He’s great on spending and national independence though.

I am sooooo underwhelmed by the Republican candidates.

I wonder what people are looking for in the Republican candidates. There seems to be someone out there to fit every possible requirement. We’ve got pro-war and anti-war, liberal and conservative, big spenders and budget hawks. Or is it more of an image thing than a problem with positions that is bothering people?

Dan,

Can you email me ([email protected]) the entirety of your comment so I can see what you were going to say next? It’s possible that whatever word you were using is causing a problem, but we can’t seem to replicate the problem on our end.

Sorry for the inconvenience while we try to get this working properly.

I made the worst mistake of my life by voting for GW ("Guest-Worker") Bush, and I am not going too vote for some liberal (McCain, Giuliani or Romney) or some neocon (Thompson, Gingrich, Brownback) who supports the third-world invasion of the USA. Unless Paul or Tancredo gets the GOP nomination. I’m voting Constitution Party.

Definately a Paul supporter here. Lifelong Republican now disgruntled.

The internet inthusiasm for paul will not be contained much longer. In a couple of months we will be talking about "electability". Given how terribly the Republicans have done ... wars going bad, debt up, corruption or the apprearance of it every where ... scandals, grand jurries, on and on ... The impeccable and defendable character of Ron Paul ... the Beltway outsider may be the only thing that the Republicans can latch on to.

55% of Americans polled say the perceived character of the candidate is more important than the issues.

Ron Paul is a wacko. Whenever you hear about a handful of Republicans deserting the GOP to vote with the Democrats, you can be assured that Ron Paul is likely among them. He is no Republican except in name. Some of the craziest notions of all time come out of the guy. Fortunately, large numbers of Republicans already know this. And those who dont, never heard of the guy. With any luck they never will either.

@Gmax

Could you give me an example of "wacko" ideas that come from Paul?

I’m just a bit curious to find out if you believe the Constitution is a "wacko" framework for government.

I couldn’t disagree more. Dr. Ron Paul is a very logical man, who is knowledgeable about economics, our constitution and is the closest person to our Founding Father’s in congress that we have today. Dr. Ron Paul believes in limited government, a return to sound money tied to a gold/silver standard that more and more central banks are buying into. Ron Paul knows and understands there are no controls to paper, fiat money. It can be printed at will and can be used to corrupt politicians, nations and businesses, especially well healed large corporations in the form of lobbyists and special interest regulations written into the laws in their favor to control prices and production. In addition, paper money adds to inflation and has robbed the American people of the value of their hard earned incomes.

In addition, Ron Paul believes in free markets, from the Austrian school as opposed to Milton Friedman’s Chicago school, which is also acceptable. The bottom line is: free markets are the best guarantee of lower prices and competition which benefits the consumer. Ronald Reagan had praise for Dr. Ron Paul. With Ron Paul in the White House we would have an advocate for greater freedom.

Thomas Jefferson: Freedom is when the government fear the people; tyranny is when they people fear the government.

Here is what I originally tried to post.



Go Ron Go!



He is definitely the internet candidate. Check Digg, myspace, etc.



He could easily wind up being the "conservative alternative" candidate al la Buchanan (’96) and to a lesser extent Keyes (’00). I think if he wins or does very well in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, the smear bund will go into overdrive as they did with Buchanan.



But Paul’s candidacy can be nothing but good news for the anti-intervention side since Paul is such an articulate and passionate defender of that position. I can’t wait for the debates.

Why dont we let Ron speak for himself. Does this sound like a conservative to you? How about a wacko, umm I mean a paranoid with limited grasp on reality? About right I would say. Voted against the surge too for what that is worth. Ron Paul in his own words:

"If you don’t like the government spying on you, telling you what you can read and what you can do on the Internet, and this invasion of your privacy and looking at your library cards and arresting you without search warrants and going into your houses and holding you without habeas corpus," Paul asks. "How is that gloomy?"

Not gloomy Ron. Looney. you just misheard them!

400 thousand people cant be wrong!

Vote total of Libertarian candidate for President Ron Paul in his national run for office. Isn’t it amazing that after running for President virtually no one outside of his home district around Galveston ever heard of the nutjob?

Me too. Unless Paul or Tancredo gets the nomination, it’s going to be Constitution Party all the way.

Eh, those "republicans" are really just libertarians...Paul’s primary constituency. I’m not impressed...I think this is his peak...yep, pretty much.

Yes, Ron Paul is a libertarian. And he’s going to be in the debates all year long. For the first time ever, a national audience is going to be allowed to hear that point of view, which differs significantly from the neocon/fascist/imperialist view that currently dominates the Republican Party. This is the blackout buster, and nothing could be better. Dr. Paul is a man of utmost integrity, and this time the media can’t shut him up. Expect those numbers to rise.

OK 400,001 Yawn

Ron Paul has my vote.
* He has never voted to raise taxes.
* He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
* He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
* He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
* He has never taken a government-paid junket.
* He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.

* He voted against the Patriot Act.
* He voted against regulating the Internet.
* He voted against the Iraq war.

* He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.

* He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

Ron Paul breaks from the Libertarian party on social issues such as abortion and immigration, those two issues alone are huge for many Americans, and will make him quite electable. Paul is a small-l libertarian, and libertarians can definitely bring back that small government conservatism that was critical in Reagan’s time, and current Republicans have all but forgotten.

Let’s remember that almost 30% of Republicans in many recent polls have said they’re not sure who they’d pick - and I bet most of them have yet to discover our beloved Dr. No. So keep on telling people about the best man for the job, regardless of party affiliation. I know a hundred Democrats who’d cross over if they knew about Ron Paul, and so do you!

I’m exited about having a Constitutionalist like Ron Paul running for President.

I’m "exited" about Ron Paul, too! If I’m going to vote for a dark horse, it’d be Tom Tancredo...go Tom go!

Ron Paul has my vote. I met him back in ’88 when he ran as a Libertarian. I had a chance to spend 2 hours talking with him one to one, and he warned me THEN about all of the things that have been happening - rising prices, terrorism, the Patriot act (yes it was written BEFORE 9/11 - years before), the unwarrated wiretaps, the "new money" with traceable RFD strips, the whole thing.
He is a student of history and knows that the course our country is on is one that must be changed it we are to avoid disaster.

1. Ron Paul is not a wacko. Trying to tack on such a label shows a lack of real arguments against Paul.

2. Ron Paul has a national consitutency of libertarians. He regularly receives contributions from all 50 states for his re-election efforts to Congress.

3. Ron Paul is a conservative in the old sense - he’s not a neo-conservative. He’s pro-life. He’s anti-immigration. He’s moderately isolationist. He believes very strongly in a limited Federal government.

Those who have problems with Ron Paul need to look deeper at their own prejudices - be skeptical and question authority now and then, and you will be more informed and a better citizen.

Don Wills

Dr Paul a Republican in name only? Are you kidding? Just because most Republicans vote wrong just shows how much we need Ron Paul there to remind them of that it isn’t that hard upholding the Republican platform! He is the only Republican that would get my vote in 2008.

Hey Bradley why dont you, using your logic, just call a bunch of Democrats "republicans". Cuz they vote right, that is who Ron Paul votes with on many many issues.

So you see its just that we have all been mistaken in the name we have given the GOP candidates. Now that that is cleared up, I guess I am not a Republican voter any more. I would not vote for Paul if he were the only candidate running against Clinton.

Gmax, dichotomous thinking is so easy. GOP = good. Democrat = bad. Eliminates the need for real insight. I envy you. Your life must be so care free. No complex dilemmas. No grey areas. It is all so child-like in its simplicity.

Read the quote of Ron Paul above that I posted. Then take your smarmy little comment about dichotomous thinking and file it under "where the sun dont shine".

Ron Paul is a nutjob who is absolutely paranoid about the government, advocates a return to the Gold Standard that I have not heard from anyone else in about 25 years and votes with the Democrats as often as Jim Jeffords. But at least Jeffords had the decency to admit he is no Republican and call himself what he is.

The good news is that no one will take Paul as a Presidential candidate seriously and he can go back to tilting at windmills and looking under his bed for ghosts!

Gmax,



You assume voting with the Democrats is bad. But isn’t it possible that the Republicans might be wrong. If he votes against a Republican budget it is because it contains unconstitutional items. When the Dems vote against it, they do so because it doesn’t spend enough. Hence, my dichotomous thinking reference.



A true constitutionalist would have to vote against the vast majority of legislation because so much of what the government does is not authorized by the Constitution.



Also, 100 years ago the Gold Standard was an article of faith for conservatives. Have the principles of conservatism changed? Or have so-called conservatives abandoned those principles? Your derisive reference to 25 years marks you as the knee-jerk progressive that you are. I shouldn’t have to remind you that conservatives look to the past.

NO I did not assume the dicotomy that you propose. NOwhere do I say good or bad. Lets just quit calling a guy who votes with the Democrats a hell of a lot, a conservative and anything other than a RINO.

A 100 years ago, Ford was busily making as many open air black cars as he could force down an assembly line. Things have changed. Needing to assure the masses that there is a stack of gold in Fort Knox to back up our currency instead of the full faith and credit of the government and its ability to tax a humming economy is certain quaint. And silly.

No progressive here. But several of the commenters above with their "rage against the imperialist" comments sure sound a bit to the left of Trotsky on the old left right continuum. Does that bother you in the least?

"Let’s just quit calling a guy who votes with the Democrats a hell of a lot, a conservative and anything other than a RINO."



Gmax, this is not complicated. He votes against the Republicans very often precisely because he IS a conservative/paleolibertarian. Voting against liberal Republican proposals is not the same thing as voting "with" the Democrats. The term RINO implies that someone is a moderate or liberal Republican. Ron Paul’s “problem” is that he is too much what the Republicans claim to be but really aren’t.



Regarding your Ford example: yes technology changes, but sound principles do not. If being for Gold backed currency was the undisputed conservative position at the turn of the last century, when Bryan was running on free coinage, then it is the conservative position today. If being against the Fed was the undisputed conservative position in 1913, then it remains so today. Authentic conservative principles have not changed. YOU have walked away from them.



I don’t think the language imperialist is helpful so I don’t use it. But if you think the people commenting above are Trotsky style leftists, you need some poly sci 101.

If the shoe fits, dance MF dance.

What in the hell is a "paleolibertarian," and how is it different from a "paleoconservative?"

Gmax is living in denial.

Poor neocon.

Sorry to rain on your pitiful little impromptu victory parade for Ron Paul. I don’t even know what a neocon is, and the only people I know who use the word, use it as a code word. They really mean conservative Jews who support the war. This is objectionable on several levels, primarily due to its racist tinge. As a matter of fact I am not of Jewish heritage nor have I converted from my Protestant upbringing. Now that we have that cleared up.

The echo of far left liberals keeps coming through in the supposed libertarians posting here in response to my factual claims about Ron Paul and what he has said and what he clearly believes. HMMM either you are trolls disguising yourself for some unknown reason or you think and talk just like Kossacks but assuage yourself by calling yourself something other than what you are. But continue to ad hom me if it makes you think that you are helping total unknown and soon to be departed from the race, Ron Paul to achieve the REPUBLICAN nomination.

A quick thought, maybe Ron can convince Hagel to join his ticket and we can have a ticket chocked full of folks who are despised by the very folks who must vote for them to become elected.

Dr. Paul actually votes to uphold both the Constitution and the Republican Party platform:

https://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul201.html

which is backed by recent Nobel Prize winning economists such as Robert Mundell and his call for a return to a sound money gold standard--which is why he won the prize:

https://www.robertmundell.net/NobelLecture/nobel3.asp

I guess at least one of the posters here needs to get out in the real world more and stop ignorant trashing on topics on which one is unqualified to lecture.

Another note on the gold standard and Republicans:

At the nominating convention for Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp got a standing ovation calling for "a dollar as good as gold."

Reagan then named Alan Greenspan to chair the Federal Reserve because of his outspoken call for a return to the gold standard (including a 1980 WSJ column on how to do it). This view was reaffirmed multiple times in his Congressional testimony, "[fiat money] is not free market. Central banks, of necessity, determine what the money supply is. If you are on a gold standard or other mechanism in which the central banks do not have discretion, then the system works automatically.

The reason there is very little support for the gold standard is the consequences of those types of market adjustments are not considered to be appropriate in the 20th and 21st century. I am one of the rare people who have still some nostalgic view about the old gold standard, as you know, but I must tell you, I am in a very small minority among my colleagues on that issue."

Steve Forbes included a gold standard as part of his campaign platform in 1996 and 2000. Of course, ignorant posters here might argue Mundell, Forbes & Greenspan are "nuts" who know nothing about money.

I’m sympathetic to a gold standard, but I think it would be difficult to overcome the problems with it that Milton Friedman identified. Ultimately I think the monetarist approach is sounder.

Ron Paul was one of a handful of members of Congress who endorsed Reagan over Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination. John Ashbrook was another. Congressman Paul was chair of the 100-member strong, 100% Reagan-supporting Texas delegation at the RNC. At the time, Rumsfeld and Cheney were the most influential members of the Ford-Rockefeller administration. Many of today’s neoconservatives were liberal Democrats supporting Hubert Humphrey or Henry Jackson for president. It’s funny to hear admirers of johnnies-come-lately accuse Paul of not being a "true conservative."

Paul was more of a Reaganite than Reagan during the 1980s--that is, he stayed truer to the GOP platform and the principles on which Reagan campaigned. Ron Paul has been pro-life from the beginning and a consistent supporter of constitutional government and fiscal responsibility. No other candidate comes close.

Congressman Paul is the closest thing we have to a Congressman Ashbrook in this race. There is even a parallel in the way in which their principled presidential campaigns are dismissed as quixotic by less-principled conservatives. But maybe the real John Ashbrook isn’t remembered anymore. To me, "No Left Turn" would rule out candidates like Giuliani, McCain, Romney, etc. What was Ashbrook’s 1972 campaign all about? Making the party safe for a Rockefeller Republican three decades later?

Alan Greenspan served at Chairman of the Federal reserve over multiple terms and multiple administration but somehow never got around to proposing a readoption of a gold standard ? Is that really your position? Or did he write about a gold standard say 25 years ago, (as I have commented above in a different context), and grew to appreciate the current system a bit more over time.

So who exactly needs to get out more?

Reagan was last President 20 years ago too. How about something conservative that Paul has done lately. Anything.

Dr. Taylor,



Thanks for chiming in with your very wise words. The irony of the Ashbrook name was not lost on me either, but I had been holding off on dropping that bomb. Unfortunately, Ashbrook was a very staunch Cold Warrior, but other than that the Ashbrook/Paul comparison is sound. If the Ashbrook Center was true to its name it would be a center FOR purist, Quixotic candidates and ideas.

On December 13, 2001, Ron Paul voted against the No Child Left Behind Act so desired by George W. Bush and Edward M. Kennedy. The same week, Senators John McCain, Sam Brownback, and Fred Thompson voted for it. Governor Romney supports NCLB. In fact, a couple years ago, he "embraced expanding No Child Left Behind in high schools," going beyond the current standardized tests for 10th graders. (Sentinel & Enterprise. Fitchburg, Mass., May 18, 2005, p. 1)

Dan - Point taken about Ashbrook and the Cold War, but of course there’s nothing wrong and much right about being anti-Communist. It’s true that Goldwater and Ashbrook veered a little from the sound foreign policy views of Robert "Mr. Republican" Taft when they supported non-defensive military intervention overseas, but Taft correctly saw the danger and immorality of Communism from the beginning. It was faux conservatives like Rumsfeld and Cheney who were with Gerald Ford when he snubbed Solzhenitsyn in 1975 and promoted a policy of detente with Communist dictators in Moscow and Peking. That was the bipartisan foreign policy of the Establishment: Rockefeller Republicans and Humphrey Democrats. They’ve had a happy reunion in the White House under GWB.

When Paul gets criticized for being a RINO, the irony is that sucking up to Reds for economic gain, federal control over education, budget-busting domestic legislation, and support for Specter over Toomey are all components of Bush Republicanism, which used to be known as Rockefeller Republicanism or RINO. The whole "Choice Not an Echo" thing. It’s not Ron Paul’s fault that he often votes with a handful of truly liberal Democrats. It just means that the Democratic elite is joining with the Republican elite in their typically bipartisan way to screw the little people and violate the Constitution. Nothing new about it. Ron Paul who hasn’t changed since the 1970s. The word "conservative" has definitely changed.

Actually NCLB was modeled on the program spearheaded by Ross Perot and implemented in Texas. The intent of the program was to try to introduce some accountability into the public school system and give parents some broad measure of how to evaluate the education their children were receiving. It includes opt out provisions for children stuck in failing schools.

Surely it is not a good thing that the school teacher unions and their lobbyist groups have totally subverted the educational system in broad swaths of our nation. Oddly a not dissimilar system exists in higher education, and goes by the name of tenure.

Bush has not been a particularly conservative President. We certainly agree there. Where I guess we differ is whether folks like Jim McDermott is a truly liberal democrat. Not to my way of thinking, if what you mean and I mean by the term is a classical liberal. He and I would not likely agree on the time of day. But on many many votes Paul and McDermott are listed in the same column while Sam Johnson and Pete Sessions are in the other column.

Gmax - I’m sure you and I agree on a lot of things. I appreciate that we can discuss things without personal rancor. Whatever its intent at the Texas level, I’m opposed to NCLB on principle because the federal government has no business being involved with public education. I just think it’s a bad idea from the get-go. It has no business setting standards because that implies control. And dollars from Washington always come with strings. It’s one thing for a state to set up standards for local school districts. It’s another for the federal government to violate the 10th Amendment and do the same thing.

The problems with NCLB did not start with teachers’ unions. They started when Bush created the program and the Republican Congress overwhelmingly approved it. It should have been a tip-off when Ted Kennedy was the co-creator!

McDermott and Feingold are truly liberal Democrats--more sincere and more consistent than the hacks who lead their party. We can disagree with their positions, but I do think we should give them credit for being something other than a Clinton or a Kerry. They have interests that go beyond personal power and wealth. For example, Feingold voted to confirm Ashcroft because he believed it was the right thing to do. I don’t mean that they are classical liberals in the Adam Smith-Thomas Jefferson sense, although they’re closer to laissez-faire economics and decentralized politics than Pelosi and Reid. Nobody uses the word "liberal" anymore to refer to classical liberalism...at least not in common useage.

I meant that those on the "extremes" (as defined by the Vital Center media and party establishments) do find common cause on occasion because they tend to oppose the VC agenda. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a difference between a Ron Paul conservative and a Dennis Kucinich liberal. They may end up at the same place on some primary issues, but often it’s for different reasons and there are a host of secondary issues on which they disagree.

Thanks for clarifying. I’m glad that we can agree that Bush shouldn’t be thought of as the gold-standard for conservatism. That wasn’t the case for most self-described conservatives when he was riding high in the polls.

Dr. Taylor,



I looked for an e-mail at your website but did not see one. Would you please e-mail me at phillips_de(at)mercer(dot)edu.



Thanks

Dr. Taylor

I do understand the general sentiment about Government and in particular the Federal Government and its bureaucratic tendency to grow tenacles and spread like dandelions. In fact I think it was Thomas Jefferson who indicated the Federal government should form a standing army and mint a common currency and then stay the hell out of nearly all else.

Still there is a huge problem in education. And it is not being addressed in many parts of the country because the teacher’s union is so politically powerful and at least one of the parties will not take them on. When we have ghettos where third generations now reside in the same squalid settings, it seems to me the burden must fall to someone to try to attempt to create a way out. Since you are the beneficiary of even more years of education than even myself, surely this is not a bad thing. (If it were to break the stranglehold that the Democrat Party has on minority votes and most particularly the Black vote it would also have much benefit to the entire population, in my humble and perhaps insignificant opinion!)

But you have paraphrased me to claim that "the problems with NCLB did not start with teacher’s unions". I make no such assertion. The problem is the teachers unions are looking out for themselves and have forgotten their mission is to provide everyone with an education, not simply a babysitting service. Incompetent teachers are protected not winnowed out. Students are not challenged and standards are routinely lower to a regression towards the mean approach.

So I assume we agree there is a problem. What is a libertarian approach that will fix it? Remember Perot was as close as we have come to a libertarian with significant popular support in a Presidential election in my lifetime. If this idea is not it, exactly where is the libertartian idea hiding on this? I am truly curious not just being argumentative. Show me a solution not just a criticism of someone who tried to fix a problem, however flawed the attempt.

Gmax,

Your position is that 1) Dr. Paul holds "nutjob" monetary views that 2) no one has annunciated in 25 years.

I show that Dr. Paul holds the same monetary views as Reagan, Kemp, Greenspan, Forbes, Mundell et al. (including Jesse Helms and all other true conservatives) which you discount or ignore.

Two, the Greenspan quotation linked in my comment is from 2000 (but there are more recent as well) and Mundell’s were recognized by the Nobel prize in 1999.

Let the scales fall from your eyes...

I ve got an even better I idea. Why not return to issuing "silver certificates" as we did as a nation for many many years? Heck it allows any holder of a dollar that states it is a silver certificate to turn in in and get it face value in silver! I am sure you will think of that as an incredibly wonderful idea. And since its old, its therefore conservative, at least I think that how the argument was posed up thread. Forget of course that we dont have that much silver, minor point.

So why did not Greenspan ever proposed officially as Chairman of the federal reserve for 12 years, a return to the gold standard?

I could give you a lot reasons why its silly, but pick up any Econ textbook. And the thought that there really is enough gold to fully back a currency, especially one the size of the USA is laughable on its face. Fort Knox as a giant repository worked for the Depression era, but was really pretty quaint by the end of the 50s. Since then its hard for me to give it much credence at all.

18 years not 12, typo sheesh.

The point of the appeal of a gold standard is to return to market-determined interest rates instead of central planning through central banking. Under a free banking approach, silver certificates could compete with any other market alternative--just end the government monopoly. Central banking’s history is one of war finance and is receding as more countries adopt currency boards, dollarize, etc (basically operating under the gold standard rules). It isn’t the quantity--it’s the price and whether that is determined by government fiat or the market.

Regarding textbooks (and it’s pretty clear you’re another example of public education, another government failure), check out Mark Skousen’s analysis of the different editions over the years of the Samuleson textbook and how it evolved from a simplistic view of monetary policy towards a more market-oriented one.

Just because you don’t understand more complex and sophisticated ideas such as Greenspan’s gold bonds, Mundell’s gold-based currency regimes, Kemp/Forbes gold price rule, or Ron Paul’s, doesn’t make them "nutjob."

Bradley you are an absolute ass. I refuse to have another discussion with you about anything, as you seem to be all about ad hom attacks instead of knowing much of anything about which you speak. Have a good life.

I worked on the Banking Committe in Congress for a few sessions and followed monetary policy fairly closely (after a few years editing an economics newsletter forecasting foreign exchange rates among other related jobs). Gmax, you have a good life too (hopefully, it will include lessons in civility and readings on the topics to which I exposed you here).

Gmax - I agree with you about the teachers’ unions. They’re a problem. I have a problem in principle with public employee unions because they come between the citizens and their government. Plus, union leaders tend to be self-seeking--putting their own money and power ahead of students. I’m not saying all public school teachers are this way, of course. I work at a state college myself and I try not to fall into that trap.

We also agree that Perot’s 1992 and 1996 runs had some merit. I voted for him in ’92. Not because he was ideal but because he was the best libertarian-populist candidate in the general election with a chance of getting enough votes to attract some attention from the professional politicians and perhaps create a lasting popular coalition.

I don’t have a good answer for the public school dilemma. I don’t think increased federal involvement is the answer. I don’t think increased power by the unions is the answer. And I don’t think throwing money at the problem will necessarily help either. Except for four years at a private college as an undergrad, I’m a veteran of public education from K to PhD. For the most part, I received a pretty good education. I do think things have gotten worse since I was in grade school, in terms of PC’ness and the latest fads being taught while some important things--including humanities---have been tossed out. And in certain school districts, as you point out, there have been generations of bad schools. I think "school choice" is good because parents should not be forced to send their kids to a public (=government) school. But not everyone can afford to opt out of the public education system. I think the push for school consolidation has been a big mistake overall. I think we would be better off with lots of small school districts and neighborhood schools than we are with what we have today. But it’s hard to turn back the clock.

A big part of the problem with schools is cultural. Teachers can only do so much. Expectations at home and parental roles have changed a lot. The culture is more coarse, materialistic, and violent than it used to be. There isn’t a simple political fix for that. The roots run deep. NCLB was never the answer (at the federal level; maybe at the state level uniform standards would help). I’ll admit I don’t have a lot of good answers to propose as an alternative but we’re better off doing nothing than doing something wrong. As with medicine, the first principle of public policy should be "Do no harm." Thanks for the exchange of views.

Ron Paul is popular with white supremacists:
https://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php/true-white-patriot-ron-paul-376849.html?p=4062811

He�s also big with conspiracy nuts.

Wacko huh? I'll bet you think the American revolution was a "wacko" idea,as did the british at the time. Go RON GO!

thanx open this web site

People deserve wealthy life time and home loans or just auto loan would make it much better. Just because people's freedom depends on money.

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