Anonymous finds close ties between RON PAUL and White Supremacist orgs.

B.S.!!!

I heard he also cuts the "Do not remove under penalty of law" labels from mattresses too.

So there's at least two white hood wearing/swastika tattooed people on TT. Good to know!

I'm going to copy wholesale a nice comment from Fark.com which lays this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Daniel_Johnson ("Bill" mentioned above.) Note the picture of him at a Tea Party rally, directly in front of a Tea Party sign. But the Teabaggers aren't racists!

So yeah, don't let the fact that RON PAUL and son hang out with racists on a regular basis stop you from voting for him.

Prof Provo! Nice to see you again!.

Do you really want to pull out the cards of everyone who has supported and funded Obama? I mean it's not the cleanest of list, just some of the things his "spiritual advisory" and "church" he attend for years projected can match anything these people you reference can muster. I mean Van Jones (former Czar) thinks White People are responsible for pollution don't you know? I mean he wouldn't of had to be fired for spouting off hate speech or anything would he? Do we even want to get to Eric Holder and his out right lies and acts of perjury?

Look I'm not perfect as we are all racist or suffer from some form of classicism at some level, but I don't support anyone who believes anyone is a lesser human being for the color of their skin. But the US response to racism by creating a class of protected people has been an abject failure, minorities have not benefited from the current welfare system and they are hurt the most of by the war of drugs which our current minority President has beefed up during his time in office. So how is really the racist?

Cornel West - “I just haven’t seen the kind of backbone, I just haven’t seen the real spine, not just at the level of rhetoric, but in execution. It’s not just President Obama, but it’s the whole team,” West said. “They just tend to keep distance from black folk, politically” until election time; “then they come running back” - He criticized the President while mentioning race, does that make him a racist too?

"Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.

The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity. More importantly, in a free society every citizen gains a sense of himself as an individual, rather than developing a group or victim mentality. This leads to a sense of individual responsibility and personal pride, making skin color irrelevant. Rather than looking to government to correct our sins, we should understand that racism will endure until we stop thinking in terms of groups and begin thinking in terms of individual liberty."
- Ron Paul, 2002

“Libertarianism is the enemy of all racism, because racism is a collectivist idea that you put people in categories. You say, well blacks belong here, and whites here, and women here and we don't see people in forms..or gays. You don't have rights because your gays, or women or minorities, you have rights because you’re an individual. So we see people strictly as individuals. We get these individuals in a natural way. So it's exactly opposite of all collectivism and it's absolutely anti-racism because we don't see it in those terms."
-Ron Paul 2008

The sad thing is that they are trying to discredit Ron Paul with this "racist" thing, as opposed to just discrediting the intellectual fraud that is Libertarianism in the first place.

If the opposition is spreading lies and rumors about any other candidate, all it means is that the rumor-mongers are scared of the opposition.

And they are ALL afraid of him. At least, afraid of his ideas. I don't think they are that afraid of him actually getting elected. They are just afraid of his ideas.

Paul has some big questions to answer if these allegations are true. If the content of those emails are factual, I don't know how he could deny knowing anything about these people.

Sohio, how is Libertarianism an intellectual fraud? It essentially guided the States' relationships with our Federal government for 150+ years.

Really. Can you explain how?

Despite your disregard of the fact that I asked first, you can start with the basic concept of Federalism. States, which are inherently more receptive to their constituents, have been handing (or have had taken) their authority to the Federal government since its inception.

The smaller and closer a government is to those empower it make government more efficient and responsive to the needs of its constituents. To maximize your liberty, one could choose the state that best represented your needs, benefiting the individual. States had little to no say in how other states decided to handle their own affairs.

Post civil war, we had the rise of the administrative state, where dozens of new agencies were formed at the expense of state powers, homogenizing law. Your options for moving to find a political climate that suited you, and thus your liberty, were severely restricted if you wanted to remain in the country.

Federal income tax is another example. It didn't exist until 1913 and our government had managed to survive. Taxation is a restriction on your property. Government, by threat of force, is depriving you of the benefit of your work. With smaller, local government, bureaucracy is decreased and the individual has a better say of how to assess and allocate our tax dollars, increasing his or her liberty.

These are just a couple of examples. I could go on, but I have stuff to do. Gotta keep working so the Feds can keep fighting oil/religious wars in the middle east. Ohio hasn't declared war on anyone for 176 years and counting.

Intellectual fraud, guess all these people where frauds...

Lord Acton
Samuel Adams
Fredrick Douglas
John Locke
Thomas Paine
Sam Adams

Great world renowned writings such as Common Sense, Rights of Man, Part I & II, The History of Freedom and Other Essays, & Self Made Men are frauds too right? Some pretty smart dude from Harvard said this about Common Sense:

“Thomas Paine’s Common Sense,” reflected Harvard University historian Bernard Bailyn, “is the most brilliant pamphlet written during the American Revolution, and one of the most brilliant pamphlets ever written in the English language.

Bernard Bailyn is a fraud too right?

I did note that you asked first; but without waiting for an answer, you followed your questions with your own statement. I took this as a signal that you wished to have the floor, so I let you have the floor.

I'm still not sure how your examples directly justify Libertarianism, but I'll try...

Your first assertion that states have been "handing their powers to the federal government" is true, to a degree. We originally had the Articles of Confederation, which allowed for a weak federal government and strong states, and was a mess. The fathers saw a need for a more balanced approach, hence the Articles were done away with in favor of the Constitution. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution establishes it as the supreme law of the land. The Supreme Court has been handing down decisions upholding this clause since well before the Civil War. This is one reason why states no longer have their own currency or ability to declare war on other states.

The period you are speaking of, I assume, is the reconstruction and gilded age. I'm really not sure this was the period of government oppression you're painting it to be. There was, however, plenty of oppression on the state level, in the form of Jim Crow laws. So, if you liked that sort of thing, there were still plenty of states you could move to. There was oppression from the private sector, too...With the rise of industry and the lack of any substantial regulations, worker rights were trampled, child labor was common, women could not vote, and pollution was rampant. And the "free market" failed to stop several monopolies from forming (one was my alias: SOHIO, or rather, Standard Oil of Ohio). During the progressive era that followed, the federal government had to step in and make changes to address these issues. All of this was the result of laissez-faire capitalism, which Libertarians support.

That said, you can STILL choose the state that best suits your needs. The heavy hand of the federal government has not stopped certain states from legalizing (or not) gay marriage, legalizing (or not) gambling, or even requiring (or not) vehicle inspections (like Pennsylvania does). Each state sets their own tax structure, as does every municipality. Each state is a little bit different, and each state can do what they want as long as it is not found by the Supreme Court to be in violation of the United States Constitution. And states STILL have little or no say on how OTHER STATES handle their affairs. Your crying wolf that the fed is somehow usurping state's rights doesn't hold water; you are decrying the destruction of a system that is still very intact. There have always been powers granted to states, and certain powers granted to D.C. When there is a conflict, we
have a very handy Supreme Court charged with sorting it out and hopefully finding the truth. They don't always decide the way I'd like them to, but it works better than any system I know of...and, after all, I am not the only person living in this country. Who said I would always get my way?

Your statement that income taxes did not exist until 1913 is simply false. They did not become a constitutional matter until then, and it was then that the income tax took on the form we know of today. But income taxes had been levied, in various forms and degrees, off and on, several times in our nation's history. An income tax was enacted to help pay for the Civil War, and again years later with the Wilson-Gorman act, just to name two.

Taxation is not a restriction on my property. Taxation pays for several things that enhance my property, such as the police who patrol my neighborhood, the firemen who will come try to save my house if it ever catches fire, the dike that protects my land from the waters of Lake Erie, the street that leads to my house, and the nice park a few blocks away that I can walk to and use any time I want to, which adds value to my property. True, my taxes also pay for things for other people, and sometimes they pay for things I disagree with, such as certain foreign wars. But I am able to try and change that with my votes, or, I can vote with my feet. Taxation is part of the social contract we agree to when we accept citizenship. We can disagree about what should be IN the contract, and we can try to make certain changes. But the contract is there. Some level of taxation is unavoidable; it is a legitimate charge for necessary services; the only debate is how much
is fair and for what purposes. Collection of taxes is not "threat of force," it's enforcement of a contract. Nobody is forcing me to accept it, I can leave this country any time I'd like. Since most other countries would also have a social contract that would be similar or worse, and because I love my home, I choose to stay.

Oh, and Ohio does not have the RIGHT to declare war on anyone. That is a power reserved for the federal government.

Well, to be fair...most of the people and writings you have listed here are not really Libertarian in the contemporary sense. They may be persons or literature in favor of LIBERTY, but that is not the same thing.

Lord Acton: A Brit who sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War; i.e. the slavery side. A foreigner who apparently advocated [through his support of the Confederate states] the fragmentation of our nation, the United States of America. You idolize foreigners who want our country to be split in half?

Sam Adams [whom you listed twice] and John Locke are the closest thing to modern Libertarians that you've named. Although, I would argue that even in their cases, modern Libertarian ideals can't really apply. The world they lived in was quite different than the world we live in today. This nation was mostly agricultural, primitive in terms of technology, sparsely populated, and in Locke's case, the US was not even a nation yet. And Sam Adams, in conflict with the Libertarian ideal of not taking aggressive action against the property of others, saw nothing wrong with dressing like an Indian and dumping someone else's merchandise (tea) into Boston Harbor just because he thought something was unfair (not that I disagree with his actions...the guy kicked ass). And John Locke defended constitutional monarchy as a legitimate form of government in lieu of a democratic republic.

Frederick Douglass: A black man and former slave, Mr. Douglas would likely have little use for the modern-day Libertarian. Many libertarians of his day (although generally not called as such at that time) were southern slave owners, who during the Civil War believed they were defending their rights to their own property (slaves.) The right to legislate slavery state-to-state, and ultimately the right to secede, fell under the header of "state's rights," and Lincoln was seen as a statist tyrant using the federal military to force northern will on southern states; sometimes even by people who were against slavery, but in favor of secession (Lysander Spooner). Douglass was also an ardent advocate of desegregation, which Libertarians have historically opposed; as Ron Paul has spoken against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Thomas Paine: Libertarian? He was in favor of progressive taxation. And apparently some form of social security.

Here are some non-libertarian quotes from Thomas Paine:
"Pay as a remission of taxes to every poor family, out of the surplus taxes, and in room of poor-rates, four pounds a year for every child under fourteen years of age."
"It is painful to see old age working itself to death, in what are called civilised countries, for daily bread... pay to every such person of the age of fifty years ... the sum of six pounds per annum out of the surplus taxes, and ten pounds per annum during life after the age of sixty... This support, as already remarked, is not of the nature of a charity but of a right."
"There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it."
"Create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."

I'm not saying any of these men were all bad, or all wrong. In fact, in general, these were great men; even Acton had his good points. But were they Libertarians? Don't know about that.

Bernard Bailyn is a fraud? I don't know, is he? Did I give you the idea I thought he was a fraud because he praises a writing that has little or nothing to do with what we are discussing? COMMON SENSE had nothing to do with modern Libertarianism. It was a treatise on the importance of the colonies breaking away from Great Britain, written as a motivational tool at a time when support for the revolution was hit-or-miss. It also contained rebukes of John Locke's defense of

I get it. I disagree with some basic tenets of Libertarianism, so by your estimation, I disagree with every human being who has ever spoken in favor of Liberty...even if that person was barely, or not at all, a libertarian? Would it calm you to know that I agree with Libertarianism on nearly all of their social beliefs?

re: the last 3-4 posts: ^^Some of the best writing I've seen on this board, pro and con sides of a debate.

Hopefully someone won't "board bomb" this thread because this is really good stuff. Keep it coming...

Actually, discussion of big or little-l libertarianism is off-topic in this thread because the subject is RON PAUL's ties to white supremacists.

That is true, and it is my fault for bringing it up...sorry.