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Comment by HotKFreshSwag | Hacker News Reader

Kooky is the wrong word to describe Ron Paul. Lets be clear about what Ron Paul's principles are. Ron Paul wants to eliminate the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.

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Many of those departments are completely unnecessary. Was the US really at risk before the Department of Homeland Security came around after 9/11? Did we learn nothing in school before the Department of Education came around in 1980?

The Department of Education first started 100 years previous, but then was demoted to part of the Department of the Interior, then Federal Security Agency, and then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. FEMA used to be part of Housing and Urban Development, and before then there were many different federal organizations involved in disaster management, with no clear leadership. DHS of course is made of a number of separate groups, including the Coast Guard.

In other words, it wasn't that there was nothing, but rather it was a reshuffling and reprioritizing of what was already there.

WTF? -2 karma for pointing out that we had federal-level organizations involved with education even before we had a DoED? And similar for the other departments mentioned?

Do you also think that before the DoD was created in 1949 that there was no federal response to defense?

Or do you justify even bad logic in support of your view of how the government should work?

"Kooky" is in the eye of the beholder.

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