Ron Paul Believes the Federal Reserve’s Days Are Numbered

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Risk-based and timely compliance activities are essential to effective regulation of firearms. Police’s key firearm licensing information system does not effectively support the entity to carry out its licensing and compliance activities. Basic licence and compliance information is unreliable and hard to get.What we see here is the difficulty of administering even the most draconian of gun laws. Even a country with supposedly “stellar” gun control laws like Australia will have trouble enforcing those laws. No matter where you go, law enforcement resources are tight. Adding more administrative work through gun control legislation will make it harder for law enforcement to pursue real crimes. Despite being marketed as the answer to gun violence, Australia’s gun laws have not been a cure-all for shootings and other forms of violence. In fact, a mass shooting took place on June 4, 2019 in Darwin, Australia where four people were killed by a gunman who used an illegal gun. On top of that, after Australia’s passage of the National Firearms Agreement in 1996, there have been numerous troubling trends regarding other forms of crimes such as rapes and sexual assaults. In 400 Years of Gun Control, Howard Nemerov demonstrated that Australia experienced a 21.4 percent increase in the rate of rapes and sexual assaults during 1995 to 2006. In contrast, America witnessed sexual assaults fall by 16.8 percent. One theory behind why this trend occurred is that increased gun ownership benefits weaker segments of society— elderly people and women — when confronting criminals who generally overpower theme with brute strength. When dealing with the issue of crime, there are numerous factors at play, and they usually don’t involve gun control. One thing to note is that in the West there has seen an over-arching trend of decreasing violence over the last 50 years. In fact, the U.S. has experienced decreasing crime rates while liberalizing various state laws during this period. Nevertheless, policy experts should probably reconsider gun control laws’ impact on crime rates. There are very likely much larger factors such as cultural cohesion and social trust that explain why certain countries have higher crime rates than others. Australia is a peaceful country, but it’s likely not because of its gun laws, which appear to be harder to enforce these days.
“Once you start adding in the tariffs and start talking about what Trump wants to do at the end of the day it gets harder and harder for Trump and Republicans to claim that they are cutting taxes for the middle class.”Even Trump’s tax cuts, which were a positive first step, ended up being offset by the previous tariff hikes. According to Tax Foundation research, the lowest fifth of tax-paying wage earners in America were hit by a 1.1 percent tax increase. Individuals in the middle fifth saw their taxes increase by 0.3 percent. Further, upper middle class earners witnessed the gains they made from the Trump tax cuts effectively nullified. On the other hand, the top 5 percent of wage earners were still in the positive by experiencing a net tax cut of more than 1 percent on the year. All in all, tariffs are regressive in nature, with the lower classes tending to shoulder the majority of the tax burden. In some regards, tariffs are preferable to the current system of taxation in the United States. They used to be the primary way that the government funded itself. But there’s a caveat— government spending was much lower, standing at 3 percent of GDP. Furthermore, there was no bureaucratic managerial state nor was there a central banking system causing economic distortions. In short, the government was much smaller when tariff rates were high during the late 19th century. Context is important, and that’s why tariffs are not the silver bullet in dealing with countries like Mexico. There are other measures that can be pursued by the Trump administration to get Mexico’s act together. Overhauling the U.S. immigration system so that it is more merit-based would be a good first step. It should be easier to work in America, rather than making it easier to vote. Emphasizing political activity before work is putting the cart before the horse. Ideally, we would also scale back the welfare state, which is effectively a huge migration magnet that ends up becoming a massive burden for taxpayers. National sovereignty is a key component of maintaining a secure nation. A modest proposal would be to drastically reduce our presence abroad and bring back troops to guard certain vulnerable spots on the southern border. There’s no need to create an intricate bureaucracy. Instead we should use the resources —troops— that our current foreign policy has misallocated. Incentivizing Mexico to help out should also be on the table. Mexico, a country that depends heavily on American trade, has a vested interest in having a secure border so that goods and people can move without trouble. This issue does not need to be an exclusively American affair. The more hands on deck, the better. Ending the Drug War would also help reduce the influence of border cartels and stem the flow of violence across the border. Drug prohibition artificially inflates cartel profit margins and turns the efforts of otherwise ragtag groups of criminals into well-run enterprises. All these policy alternatives should be considered before even entertaining tariffs. We can have a conversation about raising tariffs once the U.S. government is put on a major diet. Until then, other alternatives should take priority.