Teller donated $2,300 to Ron Paul

[davefoc]

Whoa. Stop right there.

You know Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution, right?

Ron Paul on evolution:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JyvkjSKMLw

So Ron Paul is willing to pander to the religious right or he is some kind of true religious believer. And that makes him a less good candidate than which of the other Republican contenders on that?

The tacit deal that the secular moderate Republicans had with the party over the years is that it can give the religious right some of what they want as long as we moderate secular Republicans get something we want like honest competent governance and some reasonable support for the ideas of limited government especially in the economy. The current Republican Party has betrayed that deal. All that remains is hypocritical rhetoric about fiscal responsibility.

As far as the gold standard goes:
I think it's probably a bad idea, but I wouldn't necessarily write somebody off as a wacko because he supported it.

ETA: One thing to consider when deciding to write Paul off as a wacko is whether the country would have been better off with him as president or with Bush. I think it is highly likely that the country would have been much better off with somebody like Paul than Bush. It is interesting to me that lots of candidates that were written off as fringe from both the left and the right would have been better presidents than Bush. It looks to me like hundreds of millions of dollars and vast amounts of human effort were spent to select the 2000 and 2004 president and the net result of the process was probably to pick the worst of all the contenders.

 

[dudalb]

Teller isn't a member here, I haven't heard him speak of his political views, and it is irrelevant to his work as a skeptic. If he wants to come here and defend his political views, he is most welcome.

I would generally agree but would note that he has used his TV show B-----t
to push his Libertarian views at time. He has a perfect right to do so,but it does sort of damage B.......t 's standing as a Skeptical program.

 

[Elizabeth I]

Yeah? So? Nancy Cartwright donated $10 mil to the church of Scientology. I didn't throw my Simpson Dvds out.

Neither did I; on the other hand, I was really, really glad I had never bought any.

Archy was a cockroach, so he had an excuse.

EXCEPT FOR THE TIME THE "SHIFT LOCK" KEY GOT TURNED ON.

 

[corplinx]

I said many times that I like to root for guys that shake things up. Ron Paul is one of them. Teller is a libertarian and also likes crazy people like Ron Paul who rock the boat.

What myself and some other skeptics really hated was Ron Paul's supporters who were the bane of internet message boards and youtube. We lumped on Paul just because it ticked off all the neo-white-supremacists, conspiracy theorists, xenophobes, NAU tards, and various other garbage that came out to support Ron Paul in droves.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/s...Teller&txtState=(all states)&txtAll=Y&Order=N




Guess he's no longer a skeptic now, right guys? Because's he's a "political woo"? Perhaps if you see him at another Amazing Meeting you'll sneer at him because he's not a Democrat? Is it time to rebuke him and excommunicate him from the Holy Church of Skepticism?

Skeptics who have openly stated they are or lean toward Libertarian positions:

Michael Shermer
Phil Plait (Bad Astronomer)
Penn & Teller (I'm pretty sure they both are)



I'm sure there must be plenty more.

But Libertarian economic policies are as unworkable as communist and socialist economic policies. The evidence on human nature suggests regulated capitalism works best with a few services best kept within community control.

The political system should of course be separated from the economic system. If you have a bad government, then it doesn't matter what economic philosophy you have, it will be corrupted.

Bush and Cheney have been privatizing everything. But the cronyism has made a mess of it so it's hard to judge which are the problems with privatization and which are the problems from the cronyism.

By the same token, it is a false claim that government cannot run anything efficiently. Yes it can, the fire department in my city is evidence that the government sector can do an excellent job. Just because some government run businesses have been inefficient is no more the fault of the economic philosophy than Bush cronyism proves government contracting with the private sector is wrought with failure due to corruption.

 

[davefoc]

But Libertarian economic policies are as unworkable as communist and socialist economic policies. The evidence on human nature suggests regulated capitalism works best with a few services best kept within community control.

The roles of government in the regulation of a mostly capitalistic economy are varied and not all of them are as necessary or beneficial as many people believe (IMHO of course).

One absolutely necessary role of government is to protect third party interests. It is disappointing to me that libertarians and other kinds of free market advocates are slow to admit this absolutely essential role for government. When a mining company digs coal out of the ground who is there to represent the interests of the people whose air and water is contaminated, whose environment is degraded and who are put at risk from all sorts of threats from the mining if it is not the government?

Other roles for government regulation are not as necessary and often the regulations have unintended consequences that in net produce more harm then benefit. For instance, the rules put in place to raise the financial return to farmers because it was judged they weren't making enough money have been disastrous. The negative unintended consequences of these rules have been massive and the damage done has been beyond belief and yet the agricultural subsidy programs continue.

There is benefit from almost all regulations, but all regulations produce unintended consequences and one of the problems with a democratically run country is that many voters are often unaware of the unintended consequences of regulations and the required balancing act between benefit and harm is rarely done with any precision. Often the thought process runs along the line of "If rents are too high, lets pass a law and make them lower and if wages are too low lets pass a law and make them higher". The pain inflicted from these kind of flawed notions can be minor (perhaps minimum wage laws do about as much good as they do harm) to disastrous as with the union special interest rules that have played major roles in the ongoing disaster of the American automobile industry and the cities that depended on it.

 

[Chaos]

Skeptics who have openly stated they are or lean toward Libertarian positions:

Michael Shermer
Phil Plait (Bad Astronomer)
Penn & Teller (I'm pretty sure they both are)

I´m not sure where you get that about the BA from.

And if I remember correctly, Shermer said that he considered himself a "small-L" libertarian (as opposed to a "big-L" Libertarian).

I'm sure there must be plenty more.

But Libertarian economic policies are as unworkable as communist and socialist economic policies. The evidence on human nature suggests regulated capitalism works best with a few services best kept within community control.

The political system should of course be separated from the economic system. If you have a bad government, then it doesn't matter what economic philosophy you have, it will be corrupted.

Bush and Cheney have been privatizing everything. But the cronyism has made a mess of it so it's hard to judge which are the problems with privatization and which are the problems from the cronyism.

By the same token, it is a false claim that government cannot run anything efficiently. Yes it can, the fire department in my city is evidence that the government sector can do an excellent job. Just because some government run businesses have been inefficient is no more the fault of the economic philosophy than Bush cronyism proves government contracting with the private sector is wrought with failure due to corruption.

The problem with Libertarianism is that it states that government is by definition bad... yet Libertarians want nothing more than to BECOME the government. And, once they are there, there is nothing that forces them to do any better that didn´t force their predecessors to do better.

 

[Richard Masters]

The roles of government in the regulation of a mostly capitalistic economy are varied and not all of them are as necessary or beneficial as many people believe (IMHO of course).

One absolutely necessary role of government is to protect third party interests. It is disappointing to me that libertarians and other kinds of free market advocates are slow to admit this absolutely essential role for government. When a mining company digs coal out of the ground who is there to represent the interests of the people whose air and water is contaminated, whose environment is degraded and who are put at risk from all sorts of threats from the mining if it is not the government?

While I largely agree with your comments, I'd like to point out that Ron Paul does believe that the government's role is to protect third party interests. In particular he believes you can be held responsible for polluting your neighbor's backyard, or the river he drinks water from. I do too, and I find it difficult to believe many libertarians would not.

 

[davefoc]

While I largely agree with your comments, I'd like to point out that Ron Paul does believe that the government's role is to protect third party interests. In particular he believes you can be held responsible for polluting your neighbor's backyard, or the river he drinks water from. I do too, and I find it difficult to believe many libertarians would not.

I would like to think so also, but if shanek was representative of a typical libertarian, it seemed like they go to great lengths to see how third parties weren't usually subject to damages and if they were there was some free market mechanism to bale them out.

Actually I used to think of myself as a moderate libertarian. Shanek's and my views were so different at times that I began to think that I might be more a moderate than a libertarian.

It's far off the general topic, but I think as societies become more densely populated classic libertarian ideas need to be carefully thought out. My sense of it is that private property rights which can be nearly absolute in a sparsely populated society need to be significantly restricted in a densely populated society.

I own two pieces of real estate. I can't put a house of prostitution on them, I can't drill for oil on them, I can't tear the structures down on them and build a high rise, etc. So in some very real ways my property rights have been significantly restricted, but I think many of the restrictions are pretty reasonable and are justified by taking into account third party consequences. Shanek, JREF's most libertarian libertarian if you don't remember him, went nuts over this kind of thinking.