ShadowedgeFFXI wrote:
The One and Only Poldaran wrote:
The vids you posted late-ish last night, you mean?
Yeah, I want to hear people either say Ron Paul is right or Ron Paul is wrong.
That's an unfair request though. No one is 100% right or 100% wrong and Ron Paul is no different. Many of the things he talks about are technically correct, but it's the conclusions he draws and the policies he proposes from those things that are questionable. It's true that puppies will crap on your carpet. Pointing this out does not make your solution of killing all puppies the right one. Similarly, many of the things Paul says about the Fed are true, but his solutions (or even his assertion that those things are problems) are not automatically made true because his starting "fact" is true.
Quote:
I can't really defend my position because I'm not an expert, but I have studied experts and I believe in Paul.
Tell you what. Don't read, watch, listen, or discuss a single thing Ron Paul says or does for 6 months. During that time, read and/or listen to every other economists you can find who might say something about monetary policy, the gold standard, and the role of banking in the US. Then go watch Ron Paul again and decide if he seems like more of an expert than all those other people.
It shouldn't be a matter of who you believe, but who's ideas make sense based on your own understanding of the subject. Become informed and educated and then make your own decisions.
Quote:
For those that don't believe Ron Paul, all I want is their answer why these conditions exist within the Fed.
Because they are helpful to our economy. The way the Fed works, while not perfect, is better than any other method we've tried. The conditions Paul describes are not problems.
Quote:
If the Fed isn't the problem, what is the problem. It's quite simple.
The problem is that some people assume that economics is a perfect system where nothing goes wrong. Or they assume that they can make it perfect somehow. Thus, they attack any methodologies within it which do not work perfectly, but often without providing a viable alternative (or are overlooking similar or even worse problems with that alternative). Governments almost universally moved off the gold standard for currency right around the same time period. Surely, they had good reasons for doing so?
Central banks have existed pretty much since the dawn of currency replacing bartering. Paul mistakenly ties the two together, but we'd likely have a central bank of some kind whether we have a gold or floating currency system. There are pros and cons to central banks, and while Paul loves to highlight just the cons and ignore the pros, the reality is that for the most part, when we've had a central bank, the US economy has performed better than when it hasn't. This has certainly been true since the Fed was established.
Paul rattles off "facts" that don't matter. Who cares if it costs $22 to buy something that cost $1 in 1913? As I've explained to you many times (and Paul is relying on ignorance of this among his audience), all money, even gold, is just a relative value to the production of goods and services. The question isn't "how many dollars does it cost to by a loaf of bread", but "how many minutes of my labor does it cost to buy a loaf of bread". And on average, Americans can buy bread with far fewer hours of their labor today than it cost them in 1913. Even the poorest Americans have slightly gained in this area over time.
We can debate all of those issues in detail, but Paul just tosses out surface statements, assumes some problem, and then moves on to calling for people to support him because he's the one who told you these things. He doesn't present real solutions. And that's why he occasionally has an interesting perspective on an issue, but doesn't get broad support. He's like the crazy uncle at the family holiday dinner who complains that there's some kind of conspiracy with how they label the cans of green beans. He's amusing, but no`one really takes him seriously.
