Ron Paul wants transportation matters handled on a local level. Small local government is always friendlier and more efficient than centralized economic planning.

"it's probably no surprise that Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, pictured at left, "believes that the U.S. Department of Transportation should be eliminated. Literally," the blog writes. We guess libertarians don't ride the bus too often."

We guess you're not familiar with mainstream libertarian philosophy. If you (plural) were, we would not have to tell you (plural) that private companies could and would provide cheaper, cleaner, and more energy-efficient buses than wasteful, government-run transportation departments do. Signed, us

You're right, we should keep the Department of Transportation - they did such a wonderful job of maintaining bridges in Minnesota. Oh, not enough money? Well, we seem to have enough money to bomb Iraq's bridges and then rebuild them.

How about all those other federal agencies that are doing such a great job? Department of Education? Teacher salaries are still inadequate, tuition costs are rising exponentially, and "No child left behind" has had a detrimental effect on our educational system. Well, how about Dept. of Homeland Security? Does anyone even know what they do, other than abuse the 4th amendment and take away our toothpaste? Ummm, FEMA? One word: Katrina. IRS? Don't even get me started!!!

Articles like this do nothing but try to trivialize real issues with snappy one-liners. The real problem is that government agencies are bloated and inefficient. Everyone knows this!!! Free markets are far superior at offering services than the government because free market businesses need to make a profit to survive. Therefore, prices go down and quality of service goes up. The government has no incentive to do a good job. They have the world's biggest credit card and they keep conning the American people to give them more money to solve all their problems. Meanwhile, our children are $9 trillion in the hole.

Wake up America!!! Ron Paul is the only candidate that understands the concept of free market superiority to government run "business". Don't let people like this author fool you. Do your own research. Their trivialization of real issues like this is nothing more than insulting.

There would be transportation under Ron Paul, privatized.

*it would be cheap, due to competition

*more comfortable for customers

*and more accessible

public transportation sucks

RON PAUL 2008!

Paul`s point is that taxpayer monies should stay at the state level where it can be most efficiently used for things like TRANSPORTATION. The states shouldnt have to beg, borrow, and steal from the federal govt to get a project moving! The fact is that the majority of federal employees and departments are nearly 100% inefficient, meaning that for all of that tax money going to D.C. 80-85% of it is wasted. This happens in many different ways and not all are unintentional (coruption). The bloated federal beast needs to lose some weight and you start with the programs and depts that are not working. The DOT through of its regs and red tape have cost every citizen immense amounts of money! Look at the dept of education. Do you really think education is better now than before that beast was put in power? Look at your schools, c`mon! A child raised in the heartland does not learn the same way someone in New York City does, so why force the teachers to teach the same way? It doesnt work. Thats your dept of educ. hard at work for us. Most of these Departments at the fed level were set up with good intentions but you know what they say "the path to hell is paved with good intentions" or something like that;-)

We guess libertarians don't ride the bus too often.

No, libertarians and strict-constitutionalists don't understand why someone in Chicago needs to pay taxes to support someone's bus fare in California, and why a Federal bureacracy with decades of history of overpaying and overspending should be the middleman.

How about Californians decide how to spend California tax dollars, and Illinoisans decide how to spend Illinois tax dollars?

It doesn't make ANY sense to make transportation a Federal issue. They failed with Amtrak, and they fail even worse with local transportation dollars.

One only has to look at the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis to see the damage that can result from mass-transit money (in this case, a "light" rail line) being taken from needed repairs.

This is on top of the deaths that have occured in Minneapolis as a direct result of the at-grade crossings in downtown.

Dr. Paul isn't against buses, nor even against transit subsides. Ron Paul is against *Federal* transit subsides, since the US Congress is only authorized to build "post roads" (roads for the movement of postage)

States (or even multi-state compacts) are perfectly entitled, and capable of funding mass-transit modes if that is what they think they need to do.

Later

No, not many libertarians ride the bus; we prefer to throw the neocons under it instead! :)

Seriously, some do, and they claim, true or not, that even though they oppose the whole thing, it's there and using it is a substitution for getting their taxes back.

Here in Los Angeles public mass transit is an illusion, as the overcrowded freeways can attest, and where it does exist it never goes where you want you want, either, especially on rails... :(

If you're a Libertarian, you also believe that the Federal Income Tax should be eliminated, which I DO! It's antithetical to what the founders of this country wanted for us. It's NOT FREEDOM. It's akin to Feudalism when we have to turn over a portion of our crop to the Lord of the Manor.

Enough is enough. I want to keep my own money and invest it in public transit PRIVATELY! I want to have a stake in what happens in my community! I don't want to send my money to Washington so bureaucrats can redistribute it according to whatever is today's fad or friend. The Federal Government should never have been in the business of Transportation. State governments...fine. If the people want that in their state, they should decide that. It took a Federal Reserve-generated Great Depression to get that mess started and it'll take a Ron Paul to see it ended.

Put control back in the hands of the PEOPLE where it belongs. If you're sick of what government is doing on your behalf, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, don't just sit there and nod your head along with some idiot who tells you that true economic freedom is a bad thing.

Think about it... What have income taxes done for you lately...besides paying interest to China on our national debt?

Ron Paul is against federal financing for a local mass transit project. Solving local and state mass transit needs are vital, but states need to come up with mass transit solutions that they can afford and which best serve their needs. The "nation" does have mass transit needs, the states do.

Libertarians ride buses - but they pay for them at the state or Local level. Why the federal government should be able to take your taxes, and then PLAY POLITICS with the money, before they give it back to you for transit ? Also, why should someone who lives in Rural Montana pay tax money for Norfolks transit system ?

I'm a libertarian that uses Chicago’s' public transportation. I also pay for it in taxes and with a CTA card. Paul is talking about transportation being handled by local governments and not federally funded.

I'd personally like to see public transportation privatized so it's cheaper.
*shrugs*

FYI, libertarians -- public transit used to be run by private companies. Which all went bankrupt by the middle of the century because, as the economic climate changed, you could no longer make money doing it. Cities and states took over said private companies because, while they weren't profitable, they were deemed necessary for those cities and states to continue to run smoothly. Feel free to try to privatize them and start the process all over again, though.

jf

Private mass transit can work if we'd actually give it a chance. Regardless, Ron Paul wants federal dollars out of transit. The states and cities are free to provide as their voters see fit. Out in Los Angeles "public transit" is basically welfare anyway. Most people don't ride the bus here because it's totally inefficient. I don't care if it's cheap, I'd prefer to get to work in under 2 and a half hours. Before you accuse me of being an elitist snob I rode the blue line to work for a year. It worked for me because there were no transfers. I can't do that with my current job so I drive instead.

Express, meet the RonPaulTards. They search for "Ron Paul" in Blogsearch, News, and Technorati, then leave comments en masse attacking any who would dare criticize their beloved Messiah, the free-market libertarian constitutional absolutist gynecological wonder, Dr. Ron Paul.

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/ron-paul-vs-new-world-order.html
http://www.blogpi.net/inside-the-ron-paul-machine-ii-on-the-assembly-line

Know who else was a doctor?

That's right: Joseph Goebbels.

Do don't need all these agencies in order to ride a bus. Get rid of them!
Rock On Ron Paul !!!

wow, looks like all the libertarians in the universe came out of the woodwork for this one blog post. what i'd like to know (seriously) is if there are so many of you out there, why haven't you been able to successfully been able to run a viable candidate at the national level?

The responses to this article are frankly terrifying. The fact that there are so many people who think that a free market will work the same way as a government subsidized service just goes to show that people didn't pay much attention in their civics and economics classes (assuming they bothered to pay attention between the bong hits). If we turn these services over to private sectors, you can expect to pay tolls on each and every road you drive on. That's right... pay to drive your kids to school (that you're gonna be paying through the nose for... if you can afford to provide an education for your children), then you'll pay tolls to get to work if a different person owned those roads. But the fun doesn't end there, because we are going to get rid of all government agencies here. So we can get rid of the FDA (who needs them?), Police departments, Fire departments, public libraries...

Take a history class. Take the time to learn about conditions in this country before the big, bad government started using its bloated bureaucracies to stick its nose into our private lives. Those times sucked. People decided that we needed to use the government to ensure public welfare (check the preamble to the constitution... then maybe read the rest of the constitution). Don't throw away what is left of the gift that we were born with.

IMGoph, there's no way these people are libertarians. *ugh* I will NEVER vote for Ron Paul after seeing these tactics.