Posted on 12/02/2007 1:00:24 AM PST by elhombrelibre
The GOP presidential candidate says U.S. sovereignty is at risk. Highway and trade officials and transportation consultants say there are no plans for such a project.
WASHINGTON -- The man from Arlington, Texas, could barely contain his smirk as he looked into a computer video camera to pose a question of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
That’s unfortunate, but you speak the truth. I’m a Hunter guy, but it upsets me that Paul’s legitimate views on issues other than the war are discounted by people who should be allies.
I don't agree with Paul on some of his foreign policy views, and on monetary too though I'm not familiar with it and need to do some research. But he deserves a seat at the GOP table. The GOP and their dwindling lock-steppers are making a huge mistake attacking and marginalizing him.
His monetary ideas make sense too. What they really boil down to is that the government shouldn't be able to arbitrarily create new money. I don't think any of the other candidates in either party have the slightest clue what the Federal Reserve does.
Whose ox is gored by allowing Mexican truck drivers to deliver their goods? Is it the Teamsters Union or who?
Taxation and trade interacted. For a long time in historiography, it was thought that exportation of bullion and coin in exchange for consumer nondurables like silk and spices, combined with a gradual decline of the mines (like the Rio Tinto, still producing today) to depress the Roman economy from the time of the Severi until the fall of the Western Empire.
But the diversion of capital into real estate, and of real estate to cash-crop production (olives for oil, grapes for wine), played a large part in the gradual change of the Roman economy, and this diversion was accelerated by favorable tax treatment legislated by, guess who, the owners of the agribusinesses who had, beginning during the Punic Wars, gradually displaced the yeoman farmer population, who became the Mob -- and the Army.
Someone -- Michael Grant, I think -- has noted that the income of the average senator increased throughout the period of the Empire's decline, trebling from the time of Augustus to that of Honorius and the Symmachi, from about 60,000 aurei in the earlier age to 180,000 gold solidi -- they were "about" equivalent-weight coins, weighing almost as much as an English sovereign -- in the latter. Sheltered from imperial tax collectors, this wealth-hoarding shifted the rising weight of government from the equestrian and senatorial landholders to the dwindling base of unprotected freeholders. The Army's needs increased from the third century onward, during the military emergencies of that century, partly because of Gallienus's reforms in about 260 that created a Persian-style (elaborately-equipped, and therefore expensive) heavy-cavalry field army whose headquarters, in that difficult age, became the de facto capital of the Empire; and from Diocletian onward, a swelling imperial bureaucracy increased the needs of civil administration and simultaneously instituted a numerous and pestilential tax administration.
So burdened, the freeholder was driven to seek the false "protection" of senatorial grandees, who bound him.
Senatorial landholders used their power to cosset themselves. Their tax preferences stimulated production of cash crops and a shift from free to bond agricultural labor, and emptied the countryside. Smallhold farms became factory-farms or disappeared. Tax-subsidized output rose, prices fell, freeholders starved and sank beneath their rising tax bills until they, too, became bondmen. The senators and administrators became medieval noblemen, their greater titles deriving from the late-imperial dignities they had once enjoyed: dux "duke", comes "count".
But they would not reflect the larger public interest, or attempt to achieve public goals, but only the much-smaller, private goals of their owners, which are anchored on revenues and profits, not mobility.
All American workers. The concept is to remove the American worker from the importation of cheap Chinese goods.
Containerized Chinese goods would travel in Chinese-crewed Chinese bottoms to the west coast of Mexico, obviating California longshoremen, and would be loaded by Mexican longshore labor onto Mexican trucks driven by El Cheapo Mexican drivers (who make about 15% of what American drivers do -- and no benefits), who would then haul the goods unimpeded to an "inland port" for rubberstamping and a wave-through to the receiving dock of some Wal-Mart or Target store in the Upper Midwest or Canada, where it would be offloaded and emptied by (wet) loading-dock hands being paid substandard wages under the eagle eye of a (wet, but dry-cleaned and motor-votered) formerly Mexican receiving manager and broken out for shelf placement by his (wet) stockboys.
The greeters would presumably still be American or Canadian citizens, paid peanuts of course. But they wouldn't count -- since they wouldn't actually touch the goods before they were grabbed up by customers.
That's the New Model. No work for Americans, total gross-margin capture for us.
I get your point. But note that the trade problems you point to are the direct result of the tax system.
It's worth also noting that the point of no return was Diocletian's edict freezing everyone in their current occupations - which he did for tax purposes. From that point on everyone in the Empire except the major landholders were in practice slaves already.
Chicken and egg. Purchases of land by the senatorial and equestrian classes under the Republic were the first step in the process, preceding even the legislation.
Interest came first.
There is no way to objectively determine what larger interests are and how relatively important they are. The best approximation though is always the free market since participants have to demonstrate their preference by spending money.
But this accumulation of land was accomplished using political advantage and corruption. It wasn't the result of trade.
I disagree, mildly. I think the failure of the Gracchan reforms were the point of no return. The process of concentrating land ownership in the hands of the political class and their closest clients (the equestrians, who were actually the financial class moreso than the senators) was never seriously disrupted afterward.
Even though the Caesarian party claimed to represent the declining citizenry, in the moment of its complete success in the Civil Wars, the party, led by Octavian (Augustus), made a grand compromise with the equestrians that gave them a large share of the imperial administration (the great prefectures, created by Augustus as a counterweight to the senatorial governorships) and, in return for their support, confirmed the propertied classes' gains of the preceding 200 years -- with a special exception for turnovers of property seized from proscribed persons and distributed to Caesarian clients and supporters. Individuals were thereafter sometimes deprived of life and property for the fisc (usually for "treason", which became a racket in the later Empire), but the old arguments from principle of the popular party were given up -- or sold out.
The senatorial class was never thereafter seriously threatened in its ability to extract value, increase its holdings, and shelter its property and income from taxation.
“What do you mean not planned? This thing is real and has been a big issue in Texas politics for a couple of years now.”
Because something is an issue does not mean it’s real.
Example: In the late 70’s into the 80’s there was a big issues that high voltage power lines cause cancer. Come to find out...they didn’t really.
Everything that is wrong in the world today seems to have a piece of Giuliani behind it.
Marketarian analysis fails public priorities.
Your solution would reflect the outlook and goals of the high bidder only, whereas the idea of government is to realize the goals of the society as a whole.
In a way, you are allowing the richest man in the room to leverage his resources to decide issues for the whole polity. He would decide, it isn't difficult to divine, to do things in a way that would most quickly replenish his store of capital. No way do his interest and the public interest coincide.
Believe me, it's real. I've seen the dirt moving (see my post upthread).
OK first let me reiterate that these are political actions and consequences, and are not the result of trade - just to close the loop on where this started.
The reason I chose Diocletian's edict as the point of no return was that I think the empire could have been saved by a reversal of policies at any point before it. But after everyone was frozen in place the division of labor began to erode. You can't just reverse that by rescinding an edict.
This is fallacy known as methodological wholism. "Society as a whole" is not an individual. "It" does not have goals. Only individuals have goals.
I have to spend time on this issue before I want to add any two cents. It is complicated in many respects.
From the Article
"Federal and state highway and trade officials and transportation consultants reacted Thursday with befuddlement and amusement. The fearsome secret international highway project Paul described does not exist, they said.
"There is no such superhighway like the one he's talking about," said Ian Grossman, a spokesman with the Federal Highway Administration. "It doesn't exist, in plans or anywhere else."
"It's complete fiction," said Tiffany Melvin, executive director of NASCO, a consortium of transportation agencies and business interests caught in the cross hairs of anti-highway activists. "This is the work of fringe groups that have wrapped a couple of separate projects together into one big paranoid fantasy."
A loose confederation of conservative Internet bloggers and some right-wing groups, among them the John Birch Society, has seized on a burst of activity in federal highway projects in recent years as evidence that the Bush administration is pushing toward a European Union-style government for North America.
The problem, public officials said Thursday, is that the new emphasis on highway construction reflects a growing concern about renewing the crumbling U.S. road system, not a secret extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement."
Of course they would say this as they are all part of the cue the ominious music PLOT.
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