Horrible events like yesterday’s attack in New York capture our attention. The mainstream media focuses non-stop on every imaginable aspect of such events. Unfortunately there is little attention to tragedies of a far greater magnitude in places like Yemen which are largely due to our interventionist foreign policy. The US government has partnered with Saudi Arabia to completely flatten Yemen, with thousands of innocents killed in the process. We should pay attention to tragedies at home, but also tragedies overseas that are being perpetrated by Washington in our name. More in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
My heart breaks when I think what could have been and what has become of America. At night before I try to sleep I wonder how the world might be different had we listened to and possibly even elected Ron Paul in 2008. Perhaps Rand could convince Trump to seek his fathers wise counsel.
I supported Ron back in 2007. I truly believe he is the best politician in American history. There has never been a statesman with more integrity and honesty. I am optimistic about Rand. The fact he is a sitting senator is a huge advantage already.
Let’s rethink our situation. We are spending trillions of dollars and thousands of service men’s lives in a battle against Islamic extremists so they will not commit acts of terrorism in the United States. Another way: Do not let any potential Islamic terrorists into the United States. However, even with vetting we would let in potential terrorists. Therefore, do not let any people of the Islam faith or people from nations that are predominately Islam into the United States. The political problem is that this solution reeks of prejudice. So, let’s be fair and treat everyone equally: stop all immigration into the United States. With a population of 320 million we do not need any more.
I have been a big supporter and admirer of Ron Paul.
Who’s this “we” you keep talking about? Got a mouse in your pocket or something?
It’s not up to you to decide whether or not I “need” a friend, family member, employee, or employer who might have, at some point, crossed your favorite street gang’s turf lines without permission. If you don’t like immigration, feel free not to invite immigrants to your house, hire them at your business, etc.
So you’ve been a big supporter and admirer of Dr. Paul, but understand nothing about his politics, so you advocate for protectionism, something Dr. Paul has warned us about for decades?
Dr. Paul is all about peaceful cooperation and free markets. Markets require the free movement of goods, capital, and people to function. If we were to take you advice, we’d quickly become impoverished. Imagine what food would cost without cheap labor, or the thousand other things you dismiss in your sweeping recommendation.
How about we rethink the situation of having hundreds of overseas bases, undeclared wars, drone bombing campaigns, or regime change programs that destabilize entire regions. Do you think we would not have so many enemies if we didn’t actively make so many? If someone bombed my friends funeral, or wedding, killing the innocent along with the malevolent, I’d be angry at those who perpetrated it also. Think about it.
generalisimo, I agree with you that we should stop our wars, stop our drone bombing, stop our regime change programs etc. The problem is that our last three presidents, despite their very different characters, but common campaign promises, have pursued these wars. Their justification to Congress is that they are destroying ISIS so it will not cause terrorism in the US. Let’s take away this justification and press Congress to rescind the 2001 AUMF. A way to remove this justification is to prevent potential ISIS terrorists from entering the US.
The key word in your last sentence is “potential”. A crime is an aggression against a right, an act. If an aggression/act has not occurred, then no crime has occurred. So to instigate a policy of closing borders aggresses upon the rights of individuals who have committed no crime, which itself is criminal, as it aggresses upon the rights of innocent people.
Also, you are impeding people from exercising their rights of free association and contract that drives the economy through exchange and again is a criminal aggression of rights.
Bottom line, free trade and peaceful cooperation is preferred to protectionism and violent aggression, unless your aim is power for the sake of power. This is Dr. Paul’s message. He uses the economic arguments of the Austrian school, and the moral arguments of Rothbard’s property ethics, natural rights, to make his points. He is a libertarian.
The biggest threat to the American people is the destruction of our economy and currency by the inflation of the money supply, not the remote and distant enemies that hate us because of their ideology or because we have aggressed against them. This inflation funds the policies that create our enemies. End the Fed and the money shenanigans of the central banks and so many of the problems this creates go away.
Dr. Paul understood the need to fight back against those who would attack us. That is why he urged congress to declare war, or to issue letters of marque and reprisal, which are their constitutional means to do so. They did not, instead they chose to ignore the highest law of the land, give the executive war powers, sustain policies that enrich the political class and their cronies, grow government by seeking to solve problems government causes, and all funded by spending outside our means and deferring the consequences to our children. Disgusting!
More of the same is not the solution. The solution is to earnestly respect rights and to abide economics, as has been demonstrated by Dr. Paul again and again through his record of voting while in congress and his writing and speeches he gives to encourage the same.
Liberty is the answer. This is the message of Dr. Paul. Closing our borders is not liberty, but tyranny.
I agree with you about ending the Fed etc. but it world have no effect on our foreign wars.
People who are not citizens or do not live in the US do not have Constitutional rights. The citizens of the US are free to decide who does or does not come into their country.
If the fed gov wished to go militarily adventuring into Backwardistan, and could not fund it with inflation of the money supply, they would have to raise taxes or deficit spend (borrow). How do you think this would go?
“Dear christiansmiller, we would like to invade a foreign country, so were going to need you to kick in an additional $40k this year, and the next, and the next. That is at least until we need more. What do you think, you in?
Sincerely, your fed govt.”
I don’t see a public accepting those costs if they were not obscured by inflation and accounting fraud like what happens today. But who even asks the public or their representatives any more? there hasn’t been a declaration of war since Pearl Harbor. Congress has ceded this power to the executive and has violated the constitution in the process, which is treasonous. Not to mention the plain evil nature of war for anything other then defense.
Rights are not privileges gifted to us by government, but a part of what it means to be human.
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” Sound familiar, it should, this is the Declaration of Independence?
You are correct that foreigners do not have constitutional rights, as they are not American subjects/citizens. The rights enshrined (and ignored) within the constitution are natural human rights however. If we agree that we have them, we acquiesce that all have them. As all humans have exactly the same rights. Like the DoI asserts.
While it may not be illegal according to statute to violate the rights of other human beings who are non-citizens/subjects, it is always immoral. How can you diminish someone’s humanity simply due to the accident of where they were born? Do you condemn 6 billion others to an existence without the same rights you have because of the accident of their birth?
Besides, what of the rights of citizens to their property?
You claim America is “our” country, but there is an inherent conundrum or paradox there in that statement. If I “own” America or part of it, I should be able to exercise my rights of ownership and dispose of the property as I see fit without harming the rights of another, but I cannot. See, it is the tragedy of the commons, that everyone and no one owns public land, or America. If the state owned no land, then this is simply an issue of individual property rights, and how dare some bureaucrat tell you who you can invite over to your house for dinner. Or for that matter who you may exclude for whatever reason.
It is because the state assumes ownership that we have these issues at all. So if you wished to exclude all Muslims from your property, more power to you, but to dictate that for other property owners is an aggression against their right of property, is immoral, and ought to be illegal if we wish to be consistent and moral. The state necessarily violates rights, which is immoral and should be minimized or eliminated all together.
The issue is the understanding of rights, and the ethics of equal rights for all. Nationalism, protectionism, socialism all require you to dispose of rights, which is immoral. This is the cry of the nationalist, the statist, the tyrant, that rights must be subjugated and subordinated to power, but for the greater good. Some must be sacrificed at the alter for the sake of others, but not by their own free will, but by coercion.
Again I agree with you about our wars and the funding of those wars. We agree on the goal of ending these wars. We disagree on the means.
I do not have an ethical problem with ending all immigration into the United States. This country is our collective home and we can collectively decide who is allowed in. Personally I do not want to 6 billion people to come into the US. We already have too much congestion and problems dealing with a population of 320 million. Life was fine in 1950 when we had half that population.
On war, do you seriously think that either party is genuine about rollback and downsizing the fed gov? Rs and Ds are statists with slightly varying agendas, but each thinks that the state is the best means to solve our problems, despite the moral and economic arguments otherwise, theirs is simply an emotional argument. More and more is the trajectory. I don’t see that changing, so I suggest we cut off the oxygen instead of trying to negotiate.
But what of the right of the property owner who wishes to let others on his property and is forbidden by the state, so do his rights not matter?
And what of the tragedy of the commons? Do you not even want to address the issues with letting the state “own” property and the problems and paradoxes that arise due to it? Congestion and population simply become private property issues if we diminish the state. Now you have either guests or trespassers, plain and simple.
There is no going backward in time to 1950, there is only the here and now, and the future. We can either respect rights and do the moral and economic thing by allowing markets to operate and economize, or not. State solutions like sweeping immigration laws and wars abroad are folly. They will and do violate rights and decrease wealth, that much we can know for sure. Why would you choose to operate from such a deficient position? Why not let property owners choose, and let markets economize, and maximize liberty and wealth in the process. It is irrational if you say you desire liberty and wealth, but then act counter to those ends. Either you do not truly value those things and pay them lip service, or you hold a flawed theory of causation concerning rights and wealth/utility.
Reducing a property owners ability to invite and contract with foreigners will simply raise prices for everyone and lower the growth we all experience in toto. It is short sighted and counterproductive if you wish to see an increased standard of living. And again, property owner have rights also.
Agree about the population thing and that we should be very careful about immigration, but not because of religion!
Screw your collective. You and immigrants have a lot in common. Both of you want to run their lives.
Having 6 billion people coming into the US would make my life miserable. I don’t want to run their lives, I just don’t want them to come into our country. When you say “Screw your collective, you imply screw our nation.”
I don’t just “imply” screw your nation, I’m happy to just say it. Nationalism is the recipe for turning tribalism into authoritarian statism.
“The citizens of the US are free to decide who does or does not come into their country.”
No, in a free market with individual property rights, an individual decides who or who does not come on to their own property. If I wish to rent to, hire, or otherwise associate with an “illegal” immigrant, that is my business, not the business of your precious socialist government.
The United States is not “a free market” as you describe. It is a representative democracy. If you do not like it, you are free to attempt to move to another country, but I cannot think of any country that is “a free market” as you describe.
Some of our laws do not allow me to deny employment or rental to anyone. There are building codes and regulations applied to my home, but they help protect the neighborhood. If a house burns it affects its neighbors.
“If you do not like it, you are free to attempt to move to another country”
I am also free to try to change it into a free market. The fact that there are no free societies in the world, does not mean that there never can be.
“If a house burns it affects its neighbors.”
That is why insurance companies exist, and these companies could quite easily impose their own building codes, as a requirement for being insured. Why does the government have to do it? Because it’s always been done that way?
“Some of our laws do not allow me to deny employment or rental to anyone.”
And these laws are unjust and wrong, as are laws prohibiting me from extending employment and housing to people of my choice. Two sides of the same coin.
Why should I have to move. You’re the one who wants to live in Pyongyang.
I believe that our government has become too large and intrusive, but our society requires some laws and regulations e.g. we are all required to drive on the righthand side of the road. Are you suggesting we should be free to drive in any lane as we see fit?
Which side of the road to drive on is properly up to the owner of the road in question. And the owner should never be the government.
Do you think there should be no government and nolaws?
I believe in a pure free market. That means no rulers, but not, necessarily, no laws. Whatever system of law or administration of justice which would exist, would be created and maintained by market forces. Whatever agencies provided these services, would not have a monopoly on their market. Our current system of “government” (technically, a State), possesses such a monopoly, and maintains and enforces it with gun violence. The vast majority of people who would live in such a society would be much less inclined toward violence than the people in our current society, because they would explicitly endorse the concept that violence is justified, at most, for self defense. I see no reason why we would even need socialism for providing law or defense, as these are simply services which could be provided by the market, just as any other service could.
People will always govern their mutual affairs, and that will always resolve to some kind of framework of “law” even if it’s as minimal as e.g. the old Salic Code’s weregild.
The not quite 400 year old failed experiment known as the Westphalian Model nation state is coming to an end, and I heartily approve of that fact.
In your system, if I kill someone, is the justice by vigilante?
Since I don’t have a system, the question doesn’t make any sense.
+1 for Salic Code’s weregild
I love history by the spoonful.
“I agree with you about ending the Fed etc. but it world have no effect on our foreign wars.”
Without the Fed monetizing the debt, the federal government would be unable to pay the Trillions of dollars required to fund these wars.
We and Israel have supported ISIS!
Your attack on Moslems is unfounded. If we let them alone, they would retaliate. Prior to the 1973 Israel attack and war, there was no ME terrorism. You let off the hook the biggest culprios – your friend the ziofascist neocons and Israel. Americans are dying for Israel’s wars. Americans pay for their great health care and social services that we are denied, etc., etc. Wake up and smell the Zionist fiction!
The neocons and Israel are certainly not my friends and are a big problem. Our immediate problem, however, is how to stop our senseless foreign wars in the Middle East and South Asia.
Then I take it back! My apologies
“With a population of 320 million we do not need any more.”
Actually, even with current immigration rates, it appears that the US could experience an underpopulation problem within the not too distant future. Birth rates have been plummeting. Some of this is voluntary, people simply deciding not to have children. But there is also a scarier aspect of this trend. Men’s sperm counts are rapidly decreasing, and not just in the US. This could be simply from environmental conditions, nobody really knows. In any event, I would much rather live in a US with a billion residents where liberty prevailed, than in one with 300 million residents where socialism/fascism prevailed, and freedom of movement was legally restricted.
You and I just disagree. Your kind of unrestricted individual “liberty” will not prevail. Increased immigration will only benefit the rich.
OK, what are the statistics of how many vehicular homicides in the U.S.? No, says ye…. well neither do I says me. There were a lot of Republican lawmakers who have tried to LEGALIZE Murder by Car. When the Racist Scum in Charlottesville murdered one and injured many more with the weaponization of a car the Right Wing Extremists cheered en masse.
How many Muslim drivers were involved in THAT ramming Terrorism
Attack?
. How many Christians killed other Christians in America this
last year? Decade? In the U.S. Civil War half a million mostly white
mostly Christians were slaughtered by other Mostly White Mostly
Christians. Not counting the plagues and Death by Poverty from the
collapse of the economy of the south. AND…. let’s see, aside from
the Indian Wars most of the people slaughtered in American Wars were other Christian White Europeans. The English Immigration was NOT regulated, they just showed up and started stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, and stole some crowbars to steal the stuff which was. And killing people and Deporting Americans for the “heinous crime” of Not being born White.
So who are the Terrorists in America, historically and lately?
Now think on this, an inflexible permanent freeze on immigration, how will that be regulated? The U.S. has the Sh.ttiest reputation with regard to Civil Rights violations by both Government and NGO agents. The Charlottesville attack was the result, directly, of the Civil War, which spawned the Klan and other ‘christian’ Terrorists. The South maintains that the slavers were the victims of massive civil rights being denied by the yankee government. Then there’s Waco. And the Indian Wars. And so forth. The ones who screech the loudest about Immigration and especially those who are non-white or non-christian, think of themselves as being victims of government oppression.
The same Government which would be administering the Immigration Ban.
What will you do? Will you obey the Government Police State like
little puppy-dogs? The Identification needed, what would be the
foolproof method to do that? Maybe a tattoo or a chip on your
forehead and or your right hand? Isn’t there something religious
involved in all that? The Miami Herald wrote this up after the
Charlottesville Terror Attack at this address Read more here:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article167065952.html#storylink=cpy
This was published long in advance of the New York solo attack. The ones who are pushing for legalizing that form of Terrorism, as long as the perpetrators are White and the victims Not., they’re well known. No need to dig or to waterboard to find out their agenda.
I am attempting to end our senseless wars by removing the rationale our government (Bush, Obama, and Trump) uses to justify these wars. The “rationale” (irrationale?) is to prevent ISIS attacks on the United States. Remove the rationale by banning all immigration into the U.S. I am not suggesting that the ban will reduce terrorism in the U.S. only that it will remove the reason our government gives for conducting these wars.
But that entails a draconian level of police state bureaucracy. The next logical step to calling out the lies told to support perpetual corporate welfare/warfare would be to somehow convince la gente buena that the reasons aren’t valid, AND convince and educate them to resist. Which about 30% of any population won’t resist at all. 10% of any population are extremely gullible, an advertiser’s dream, and 10% who are just plain mule-headed and won’t be convinced to change any belief system they already have. Short of lighting them on fire. This was presented in a college (Tarrant County Junior College) psych101 course. I also placed it along with the Basic Training used by the U.S. military and kept finding the same pattern, 10-30-20-30-10. The 10s on the ends are extremes of suggestibility, the 30s are leaning hard left or hard right and would need a lot of education to change their minds and the middle 20 can be convinced without a lot of conditioning, provided you have a valid platform. All the percentages can be challenged but the advertisers use that pattern more than any other.
I got into that because I had recently been in the Air Force and upon release from that burden I got into anarchist politics.
The biggest part of that explanation can be summed up thus: you most likely won’t be able to convince enough people to close the borders FOREVER and convince enough to spend the money to essentially buy our own slave chains. Isolation would need that level of persuasion. It would also need a method to determine any person as being prone to terrorism. Massive as in Every Person In America would be tested and then what? Most ‘americans’ are descendants of ethnic invaders, so who would be the ones to be deported and who would make that determination? Who would be the ones to do the deportations and how would that be funded? And the existing domestic war is just as pervasive as the foreign war we’ve been fighting since the founding of the U.S political system.
Google “King Canute” for half of the answer to what happens if all immigration to the US is banned (the other half is the imposition of a police state — already well under way for decades) on the pretense that Congress/POTUS can command the waves.
Mr. Knapp, Unlike Canute, we now exercise some control over who comes into the United States, just expand the effort enough to refute the military’s justification for our wars. Regarding our citizens, I favor a reduction of our “police state”.
If every US soldier, sailor, airman and Marine, as well as every sworn law enforcement officer in the US, was assigned entirely to “securing the border,” it would still remain a fact that almost anyone who wanted to get in, would get in. The US has 95,500 miles of border and coastline.
The border areas have been little copies of East Germany for decades already. One time I got pulled over by Border Patrol in Southern California and had to show my ID, along with all the other occupants of the vehicle. It was a bus, clearly labeled “US Marine Corps,” and everyone aboard it was a US Marine in uniform. Had the exact same thing happen in a four-passenger car one time as well in Arizona. And yet the people who wanted in managed to get in.
You can have open borders and no police state, or you can have open borders and a police state. Those are the two choices. Those are the ONLY two choices. You don’t have to like it. That’s how it is whether you like it or not.
If we really had open borders, a billion people would come to the U.S.
There you go with that “we” again.
Why — and how — would a billion people come to the US?
Hell, Florida has a much better economy than Mississippi. For that matter, so does Tennessee. Better not let Mississippians know, or they’ll flood over those open borders.
A lot of people prefer living where they were born, where their families live, and where their jobs are to packing their trash and spending a year’s income to move in next door and listen to you whine.