Him said:
It's also a pathological ideology to trumpet that the country should cut loose everything and do nothing whatsoever to try to correct the ship of the US economy.
Duopololy be damned -- where's the alternative plan that actually stimulates the economy? Republicans can't find it and simply want to tar and feather Democrats. So here's your (and Paul-ites) chance to propose an alternative. People are listening.
But if the alternative is "I am mad as hell and think that the little people don't matter while mega industries do!" as that CNBC guy's rant was all about... well, it's not a plan. It's throwing a fit and managing nothing constructive.
To be clear, Santelli never represented anything but a guy who came up with a way to express an emotion, not a guy with a firm grasp on the ideas that are important to us now, or the reasons behind what we do.
Paulites have never just been stomping their feet with no solutions... in fact their solutions have been so straight forward that people usually just ignore them: stop deficit spending, shrink the size of military, get rid of government entitlement programs and repeal the 16th amendment.
These all come from a core fact about government: government, by definition, cannot increase economic output or wealth. There are two sources from which government can obtain money to spend. The first is taxes, in which an equal amount of money is removed from the economy as is spent on the economy, making the best case scenario (where there is zero efficiency lost through government intervention) a net neutral result. The second is debt, which since it is a claim on future labor, and always includes interest, is always a net negative as you are creating a larger liability than the asset you are consuming is worth at the time of consumption.
Thus government's only purpose is to redistribute wealth and efficiency, with a minimum of no net increase in output, to the potential for much more waste.
Paulites ideas that both spending and taxes (not for the rich, for everyone) should be slashed is based on the idea that by definition of its income sources the best case scenario in government spending is a net neutral outcome.
The solution to the economy is the same as the solution to the debt situation: the claims on debt need to be diminished. There are only two ways of doing this. Defaults and inflation. Right now we are giving financial institutions tons of money that will be taken out as debt, and as such be a claim on future human labor, and thus contribute to inflation, and inflation is essentially a tax on people who have most of their wealth in cash (which is almost nothing but the lower and middle classes). Defaults cause some of these rich guys who screwed up to fail, but do not decrease the purchasing power of the wealth that is left.
This is the problem you seem to not be grasping: the government cannot stimulate the economy through spending... no matter if that spending is on rebate checks or bridges or medicare, government spending by definition can only be at best a net neutral.
So when you ask "where's the plan to stimulate the economy", the answer is the plan that involves as little government action as possible. Such an option would absolutely destroy the wealth of the most wealthy individuals in the country, as they are the ones holding the bad bets and bad speculations which have soured now that credit is more expensive. Any government spending program that perpetuates the status quo, no matter what it is spent on and who that money comes from, moves wealth from the middle class to the upper class, as it is the upper class who is holding the distressed assets.
The Republicans and Democrats are both making the rich richer through government spending... the sole difference is that with the Republicans it is sent straight to them, and with the Democrats it makes a one time stop in your wallet (but only sometimes) before continuing on back to their distressed assets.
My position that the government should step out of the way is not pathological ideology, because I do not base it on the assumption that the other side(s) is/are simply wrong. I base it on the reasoned approach of cause and effect of possible outcomes based on past experiences and perdictable facts of our monetary system.
