Live Blogging the 20th Debate on CNN
This post was written by AdamRBitely on January 30th, 2008.
Comments: 14
Comments
Comment from i love comment sections
Time: January 30, 2008, 8:53 pm
eh . . . comment section
Comment from Anonymous
Time: January 30, 2008, 9:11 pm
This is hilarious. The Republican candidates of 2008 are absolutely hilarious!
Comment from Jacques Lemaire
Time: January 30, 2008, 10:18 pm
Although we all know where your heart lies, Bert, this live blog of the debate was very entertaining for someone that missed it!
Comment from hawk
Time: January 30, 2008, 10:37 pm
thanx for telling us what actually went on at the debate. oh wait, all you did was enage in some second-rate, cynical mocking of the candidates; except of course Rep. Paul.
But you are right, thank God for Ron Paul. Thank God that he is there to make Romney and McCain look like the intelligent, well-versed adults they are, not whining sophomoric crackpots.
Ron Paul is the Republican Party’s Rip Van Winkel, he fell asleep last century, woke up in this one, and now is pissed off b/c he doesn’t know what’s going on.
Comment from Bert
Time: January 31, 2008, 1:54 am
Haha, thanks Jacques. I get a little grumpy watching the debates.
As for your comments hawk, I’m not exactly sure what what you think Romney or McCain are well-versed on. Certainly not military history or monetary policy. And please do tell why Ron Paul is a whining sophmoric crackpot.
Comment from hawk
Time: January 31, 2008, 10:21 am
gladly. first, monetary policy and military history aren’t issues, except for Ron Paul. Nobody else cares about them, b/c they don’t matter. his gold-standard stuff is ridiculous bunk, we went off the gold standard to allow our currency’s value to fluctuate based on the market value of our country’s products and services. if we were still tied to gold, our currency would be unable to grow in value based on the market.
Romney and McCain are well versed on issues that actually matter, like national security, spending, taxes, and healthcare. Ron Paul talks about none of those things, instead he mentions the gold standard, the industrial revolution(?), and an empire we don’t have.
he is the definition of sophomoric, he thinks he knows everything but in fact knows nothing. and his debate performance can only be described as whiny, all he did was complain about things that don’t matter.
Comment from Bert
Time: January 31, 2008, 11:32 am
Um hawk, as commander and chief, I’d sure hope the president knows something about military history so he/she doesn’t repeat the blunders we’ve made in the past.
Seeing as our whole society is structured around the exchange of money, you better bet it’s an important issue. We went off the gold standard because Roosevelt wanted to give us big government and “spend” us out of the great depression. The money supply doesn’t need to grow to increase prosperity. That is a fallacy. You can buy a suit for $130 or $20. You have still acquired a suit. If we had true capitalism (i.e. market determined money and no federal reserve system) prices would fall slowly over time, not rise rapidly as they have ever since 1913. The kind of system you embrace encourages big government and discourages true capital formation (of course, who would save when the inflation rate is higher than interest rates?)
As for not talking about taxes, healthcare, etc, I’m not sure what hole you’re living in but I suggest you start actually watching the debates. Paul’s only discussed these things in 19 of the last 20 debates.
Why you seem to think you know more than Ron Paul is beyond me.
Comment from Grozet
Time: January 31, 2008, 12:34 pm
good coverage. McCain looked assertive, but his statements weren’t up to par. It was truly sad when McCain started hitting Romney with full out falsehoods (Iraq timetable). George Will had a good article comparing McCain and Clinton in their use of leading and or false statements.
Comment from hawk
Time: January 31, 2008, 5:45 pm
you should actually listen to Ron Paul, instead of romanticizing him. he uses mainstream issues as a segway into his rants about empires, gold, and the constitution. he doesn’t actually address them the way McCain, Romney, and even Huckabee do.
and your still not getting it about the gold standard. quick lesson to help you out: capitalism creates wealth, both in goods and services. money is the system by which we objectively measure that wealth. since money must be objective, its units must be specific.
since wealth can change in a capitalist system, the value of the units of measurement must be allowed to change as well. that value is determined by the amount of goods or services (amounts can be measured in quality or quantity) one can get, in the open market, per unit.
thus, the value of the units of measurement (money) must be tied to the open market. tying monetary value to a fixed quantity of something, even gold, is counterproductive, becuase it does not allow the market to determine wealth. currency can only be worth as much as the maximum amount of gold we have, thereby stifling the market and ultimately slowing capitalism to a hault.
Comment from hawk
Time: January 31, 2008, 5:52 pm
oh, and Roosevelt was elected in 1933, not 1913, so you can’t say that rising prices are the result of going off the gold standard.
prices rise because there is more wealth in the system. more wealth in the system must be measured. since money is how we measure wealth, we must have more money.
Comment from Bert
Time: January 31, 2008, 6:03 pm
I do listen to Ron Paul and I’ve read a good deal of his writings. I’m not going to try to convince you he’s right but his analysis is far deeper and intellectual than the slogans offered by the other candidates.
As for the gold standard, you just plain don’t understand it. The market chose the commodity of exchange: gold (and in cases, silver). They were chosen for their high value/weight ratio and common appeal. Paper money is a creation of government, who has put a monopoly on money through the institution of legal tender laws. Your entire analysis is based on a false premise: that the market chose paper. It didn’t. In 1933, Roosevelt confiscated gold and dollars were no longer redeemable at home. In 1971, Bretton Woods broke down and foreigners could no longer redeem dollars.
And yes, inflation (and rising prices, which are a symptom of it) has to do with the government manipulating the money supply: if you have more dollars chasing the same amount of goods, inflation occurs. The government has done a wonderful job of this. The CPI (consumer price index), for instance, is off the charts now, thanks to our greedy and naive politicians. Wealth doesn’t increase by simply printing money.
Comment from hawk
Time: January 31, 2008, 7:24 pm
you are, in short wrong. gold was the commodity of exchange long before capitalism, b/c it was pretty, shiny, and relatively rare, not b/c of any market decision. yes, paper money is a mildly abstract means of representing value, rather than the simple, tangible commodity (gold) method.
the problem with gold, as i pointed out before and which you failed to address, is that it cannot accurately reflect the total value of the market.
the advantage of paper money is that the amount of it can be increased or decreased according to the total value of goods and services in the market. gold is incapable of doing this, and thus is inadequate for a large, dynamic economy.
rather than having $1 be worth a certain amount of gold, its worth is now determined by the total value of goods and services produced by the US economy.
Comment from Bert
Time: January 31, 2008, 10:35 pm
Okay.
1. Gold was chosen by the market (i.e. by the thousands of merchants and people involved in the purchase and sale of goods.) You obviously don’t understand how the market works to make such a statement.
2. Money does not reflect the total value of an economy. It is a commodity used to exchange goods. The problem (for some people) with gold is that it is extremely inelastic and does not permit the government to print up billion in excess. Of course, that is also one of its benefits.
I’m sorry but if you’re going to try to tell me how horrid gold is, you should have at least read about its benefits. You obviously know very little about the gold standard in practice.
Comment from hawk
Time: February 1, 2008, 12:31 am
you still aren’t addressing my point, even after i’ve explained it twice. so i’ll explain it again.
money is not a commodity. oranges are a commodity. money is a uniform phyisical representation of value. in our case, it represents the value of all goods and services produced in america. under the gold standard, money represented the value of a certain amount of gold. that’s why you could redeem you dollars for gold buillon or coins.
in practice, when a currency is fixed to the value of a commodity, whether it is gold, silver, or oranges, the amount of paper money in circulation can only be equal to the amount of said commodity that the guarantor of the currency (US gov’t) has on hand. this means that regardless of how large or small a country’s economy actually is, its currency cannot grow in value unless the commodity grows in value.
free of a commodity-based value system, a currency can then reflect the actual market value of goods and services produced. in short, money is our way of measuring how valuable our goods and services are. if we were to return to the gold standard, it would no longer reflect that, instead reflecting only the value of the amount of gold in US reserves.
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