• Tag Archives Ron Paul
  • YouTube Removes Ron Paul Page From Website, Cites ‘Repeated violations of Community Guidelines’

    On Thursday, Ron Paul said YouTube had abruptly removed one of his pages without warning.

    “Very shocked that @YouTube has completely removed the Channel of my Ron Paul Institute: no warning, no strikes, no evidence,” Paul said on Twitter. “Only explanation was “severe or repeated violations of our community guidelines.” Channel is rarely used. The appeal was automatically rejected. Help?”

    A separate page operated by the former Texas Congressman and presidential candidate, the Ron Paul Liberty Report, remains active on YouTube.

    The news comes one day after the Washington Post ran an article noting that YouTube, which is owned by Google, is blocking “all anti-vaccine content and banning prominent anti-vaccine activists.”

    “YouTube is taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who experts say are partially responsible for helping seed the skepticism that’s contributed to slowing vaccination rates across the country,” the Post’s Gerrit De Vynck reported. “As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vaccine content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous.”

    This is not the first time Dr. Paul has run afoul of Big Tech.

    In January, Paul found himself locked out of his own Facebook page. The company later said the issue was the result of a page administrator’s access accidentally being removed, a mistake Facebook corrected.

    The growing problem of social media censorship is a thorny issue for libertarians. As private companies, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have the right to decide what content they choose to allow on their platform. (Although the government has no right to intimidate these companies into censoring, as it evidently does.) That said, many see the cultural values of viewpoint diversity and the free exchange of ideas as the cornerstones of a tolerant society and classical liberalism.

    This is why many viewed bans on controversial figures such as radio personality Alex Jones and former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos as dangerous, even if they disagreed with many (or all) of the things they said.

    “Twitter is a private company. It can set its own speech policies, and those policies don’t have to be fair. There’s no universal human right to own a Twitter account,” Reason’s Robby Soave pointed out after Milo Yiannopoulos was banned in 2016. “But if Twitter wants to live up to its stated commitment to maintaining a public forum where provocative, controversial, and even occasionally rude or hurtful speech is tolerated, then it should consider restoring Yiannopoulos’s profile.”

    Unfortunately, Big Tech has not listened to these sensible pleas. And as some predicted, the bans did not end with Jones and Yiannopoulos. More and more people have found themselves purged from social media platforms for Wrongthink.

    How did we get here? I asked this very question when Paul was locked out of his account by Facebook earlier this year.

    Banning the president of the United States was shocking. Taking action against Ron Paul is horrifying. It is senseless. Paul is a man of principle and peace. He is 85 and not active in politics. Paul does not incite violence and is a threat to no one.

    How did we go from banning Alex Jones to taking action against Ron Paul in the space of two years? The answer is not hard to find. It lies in a principle abandoned.

    “Once you start making exceptions to a universal principle/general rule, you begin to undermine it; it becomes easier to make further exceptions,” FEE’s Dan Sanchez pointed out in 2017. “If the hate speech of Nazis are to be restricted, why not the hate speech of traditionalist conservatives? If the violent, seditious rhetoric of Nazis are too dangerous to allow, why should the violent, seditious rhetoric of communists be tolerated, or any fundamental criticism of the government?”

    Americans need to remember that having the power to silence someone is not the same thing as being correct. (As Tyrion Lannister noted in Game of Thrones, “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”)

    Free speech and free expression are vital to a vibrant society. And yet while stifling scientific discussion (even on sensitive topics like vaccines) runs counter to the very idea of scientific inquiry, Google and co. are under no obligation to embrace these values.

    Fortunately, we live in a market economy. That means users have other options, and as some on Twitter suggested, it may be time for Americans to seek these options out.

    Jon Miltimore


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Dr. Ron Paul: Unleash the Market to Lower Drug Prices

     

    Whenever politicians say they’ll “do something” about high drug prices, disastrous discussion of price controls isn’t very far behind. It makes no sense because price controls lead to shortages and rationing which, in the case of pharmaceuticals, could cost lives.

    Proponents of price controls pretend that high drug prices are a result of a free market in pharmaceuticals. This is the exact opposite of the truth. The real reason pharmaceutical prices are so high is government policies that allow big pharmaceutical companies to exclude their competitors from the marketplace. Therefore, an effective way to bring down the price of pharmaceuticals and increase access to the drugs is to reform by changing government policies that stifle the development of a competitive market in prescription drugs.

    The CREATES Act

    What we need is legislation that would inject needed competition into the drug industry, and we have that in the CREATES Act (H.R.2212;/S. .974). The CREATES Act creates a way to lower drug prices. It does so by making it much easier for drugs with expired patents to be sold in less expensive, generic brands.

    Support for the bill crosses party and ideological lines. Liberal Democrats such as Dianne Feinstein and Richard Durbin and very conservative Republicans including my son Rand and my Senator Ted Cruz support this bill. Also included in the coalition are organizations as far afield as my Campaign for Liberty and the AARP.

    This bill is broadly popular because it reforms government policies that allow big drug companies to obtain long-term monopoly protection by keeping their generic competitors out of the marketplace. This is key. Patents grant makers of new drugs temporary monopolies only, so they can recoup huge investments in research and development and use some of their profits to chase other cures. Once a patent has expired, other drug manufacturers are supposed to be able to reproduce a “generic” but effectively identical version of that drug so that consumers may purchase quality medicines at lower prices.

    Whatever you think of this system (and there are good libertarians on all sides of this debate) most agree the current system is not working the way Congress intended. This is because too many drug companies exploit the complexity of the post-patent rules to make it very time-consuming and costly for competitors to enter the marketplace. They can even withhold supplies of their drugs from companies that—under Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules—must obtain them to make sure they’re copying them correctly. The result is the big drug companies are able to extend their de facto monopolies well beyond the intent of Congress, thus keeping the supply of the drugs artificially low and prices artificially high.

    In one case that will not go away, drug maker Turing refused to sell its off-patent drug Daraprim to would-be competitors. That might not have been so bad but for the fact that the same company then turned around and hiked its prices from $14 a pill to $750. That they could get away with that with off-patent medicine is a sign that something needs to change.

    The long-term solution is to reduce the power of the FDA and create a true free market in pharmaceuticals. The CREATES Act takes a step toward creating a competitive marketplace by ensuring generic drug companies can obtain the necessary samples to get FDA approval for their products and thus allow consumers to benefit from lower prices.


    Ron Paul

    Ron Paul is an American author, physician, and former politician. He served on the board of trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.



  • Bernie vs. Ron Paul: There’s No Comparison

    Super Tuesday may have been the beginning of the end for the Bernie Sanders campaign, but the ideas that propelled it are likely to linger for quite some time. With some writers comparing Bernie to Ron Paul (not in terms of economics and philosophy, of course, but as insurgent candidates), now seemed like an opportune moment to examine the Sanders message and legacy, and compare it to Ron’s.

    Like Ron, Bernie surprised all the pundits with his fundraising, polling, and electoral success. In fact, so successful has Sanders been that Hillary Clinton has been reduced to a pathetic and unconvincing “me, too” campaign — I can be just like Bernie, if that’s what you rubes want!

    Bernie has gained a lot of traction from his complaints that Hillary is in the tank for Wall Street and the big banks. He’s likewise pointed to the six-figure honoraria Hillary has earned from speeches given to the big banks.

    The best the now-hapless Bill Clinton could do in reply was to note that Bernie, too, had been paid to give speeches. Technically, Bill was right. Bernie had earned money from public speaking: a whopping $1,800 over the course of a year. The year before that, Bernie had earned $1,300 from public speaking. All of this money was donated to charity, as is the requirement for US senators.

    It’s true that Bernie is better than Hillary on foreign policy, but in keeping with Rothbard’s Law — everyone concentrates in the area in which he is worst — Bernie speaks very little about issues of war and peace. And even there, consistency and principle are elusive: he supported Bill Clinton’s bombing of Serbia over Kosovo, an act of terror based on propaganda that rivaled anything George W. Bush ever peddled. Sanders favors the ongoing drone campaigns, too, and even supported the F-35, one of the biggest boondoggles in the Pentagon’s long and sorry history.

    Bernie’s primary legacy will be to have resuscitated the idea of socialism in the minds of many Americans. It is a very confused socialism, to be sure. The young people who follow Bernie can’t even seem to define socialism, according to recent surveys. And in fact Bernie’s economics is really just a hyper-Keynesianism rather than out-and-out socialism. But by suggesting that the Scandinavian countries constitute a model that the United States should emulate, he has encouraged the idea that only large-scale, systemic change in the direction of vastly increased government power can produce the kind of society Americans want.

    Capitalism ought to be our default position, since it conforms to the basic moral insights we acquired in our youth: keep your word, live up to your agreements, don’t take what doesn’t belong to you, and do not cause anyone physical harm.

    But thanks to years of propaganda to the contrary, socialism has come to appear to many people as not simply a morally plausible position but clearly and obviously desirable and superior to the capitalist alternative. The free market, they are convinced from what they recall from their elementary school textbooks, leads to “monopoly” and oppression.

    Bernie speaks as if the system is rigged against the people because of business influence in government — a fair enough point, as far as it goes — but it’s hard to take this criticism seriously when his proposed solution is to extend the influence of politics over more and more areas of life and increase the powers and scope of the very government he is supposed to be criticizing.

    The Sanders narrative is rooted in two major historical claims, both of them dead wrong.

    First, Sanders believes “capitalism” was to blame for the 2008 crash. But as mises.org readers know, that downturn, like the Great Depression before it, was preceded by years of Federal Reserve credit expansion. According to the Austrian theory of the business cycle, the artificial lowering of interest rates below free-market levels sets in motion an unsustainable economic boom. The economy is set on a path that could be sustained only if real resource availability were greater than it really is. Eventually, when real savings and resources turn out not to exist in the abundance that the Fed’s interventions misled people into expecting, projects have to be abandoned and the phony prosperity becomes real recession.

    Sanders supporters will no doubt point to the great number of bad mortgages originated by private lenders. But would these mortgage loans have been extended in the first place if institutions like Countrywide couldn’t sell them to the government-privileged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Fannie and Freddie enjoyed special tax and regulatory advantages and had a special line of credit from the US Treasury — a line of credit everyone knew would be essentially limitless if push ever came to shove.

    It was the perfect storm: the Fed’s crazed monetary policy injected huge quantities of additional credit circulating throughout the economy, and the federal government’s various mandates and regulations made real estate an artificially attractive outlet for all that new money. When this ramshackle edifice came crashing down, capitalism — which, in the midst of all this money creation and regulatory lunacy, had never been tried — took the blame.

    Indeed, what could be intellectually easier than blaming the “free market” for a phenomenon a critic doesn’t understand? Ron Paul, on the other hand, never tired in his own presidential campaigns of going beyond surface explanations to account for what really happened in the disaster of ’08, and identify who the real culprits were.

    The other part of the Sanders story — Scandinavia — is shallow and misleading, too.

    In fact, Denmark’s own prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, finally had to correct the Vermont senator’s references to his country as “socialist.” “I would like to make one thing clear,” Rasmussen said. “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

    Still, there’s no question Denmark has a large public sector. And it’s starting to suck the life out of the place. Denmark’s various benefits subsidize idleness to an absurd and unmanageable degree. In the country’s 98 municipalities, guess how many have a majority of residents working. If you answered three, you know far more about Denmark than Bernie and his supporters do.

    It’s a similar story in the rest of Scandinavia. For instance, Sweden’s welfare state was able to develop only because of the wealth created by decades and decades of a prosperous market economy. Private-sector job creation was anemic to nonexistent in the decades following the radical expansion of the Swedish welfare state. And as for Norway, there are lots of “free” things there, it’s true — if you’re prepared to pay a 75 percent effective tax rate.

    The comparison of Bernie to Ron goes like this: both launched insurgent, anti-establishment presidential campaigns while in their 70s, shook up their respective party establishments, and attracted large youth followings. But Bernie is no Ron.

    Just on the surface: Bernie is a grump and difficult to work with; Ron is a kindhearted gentleman who always showed his appreciation for the people in his office.

    More importantly, Ron urged his followers to read and learn. Countless high school and college students began reading dense and difficult treatises in economics and political philosophy because Ron encouraged them to. Bernie’s followers receive no such encouragement. And why should they? Bernie’s platform merely regurgitates the fallacies and prejudices his young followers already imbibed in school. What more is there to read?

    Ron’s followers, meanwhile, were curious enough to dig beneath the surface. Is the state really a benign institution that can costlessly provide us whatever we might demand? Or might there be moral, economic, and political factors standing in the way of these utopian dreams?

    Bernie’s supporters demand material things for themselves, to be handed to them at the expense of strangers they have been taught to despise. But like Ron himself — who as an OB/GYN opposed restrictions on midwives even though doing so was not in his material interest — the young Paulians embraced the message of liberty without a thought for material advantage.

    It’s not hard to cultivate a raving band of people demanding other people’s things. Such appeals arouse the basest aspects of our nature, and will always attract a crowd. It’s very hard, on the other hand, to build up an army of young people intellectually curious enough to read serious books and consider ideas that go beyond the conventional wisdom they learned in school about government and market.

    Full article: Bernie vs. Ron Paul: There’s No Comparison | Mises Daily