I'm looking at examples of fascism that are actually, you know, examples. Aside from Italy, this also includes Spain and Portugal, and many South American countries at one point or another. All of them were the same in that regard.

What you call "corporatocracy", OTOH, is not fascism. It's something else entirely. There is a confusion there because Italian fascists were corporatists, and sometime later, people, esp. native English speakers, confused the meaning of the term "corporatism" with the meaning of the word "corporation" that they're familiar with (but which is not at all what fascist corporatism was all about).

If you have to ask this question, I have to surmise that you're not familiar with a joy of an interesting job well done. Don't worry about it. There are enough people who are willing to work for the sake of doing interesting things and/or killing boredom.

There won't be anywhere where they can keep "more of the value". When you get into the situation where 99% are jobless because of automation, there are only two ways to go from there: either you have wealth redistribution, or you have a Luddite uprising that smashes the machines and rewinds the civilization back, and forces it to stay there to maintain social stability. The former option allows for further technological progress, the latter does not. If you personally had that choice, which one would you take?

There's no way to demand compliance when there are literally hundreds of people lined up behind you willing to do the job that you're currently doing.

History of past economic systems is generally not applicable to newer ones. If you tried to forecast the success of a capitalist system based on your personal experience in a feudal society, and the past historical track record in, say, Antique slave societies, you would have to conclude that it's an unrealistic utopia, because 90% of the population are needed just to grow the food for everyone else.

Thing is, as technology advances, it eventually accumulates enough changes to force a significant leap in how economics work. It's not really voluntary - the society either makes a leap (and this can also go smoothly or bloody, depending), or it falls off the progress bandwagon and gets stuck in past, and eventually gets conquered or otherwise pushed around by those who stayed on the track.

Capitalism is based on the notion of a workforce that has to work for a living, and on there actually being enough work necessary to satisfy the day-to-day demands that everyone has to do their parts. This assumption is not going to hold true for much longer. In fact, it wouldn't hold true in developed countries today already, if not for outsourcing - why bother with robots if Chinese ex-peasants are a dime a dozen? But those peasants will ride capitalism into middle class themselves, and then outsource to Africans; and then Africans will ride it, and then there's no-one to outsource to - and then it's robots anyway.

And just as feudalism couldn't survive and compete once agricultural techniques advanced to the point where the majority of the population didn't have to be involved in it, so capitalism won't survive once industrial production advances to the point where a single human is sufficient to control a factory that can supply the demands of an entire city.

It's acceptable to allow one that is bad, but noticeably better. If you keep iterating on it, eventually you'll actually get a decent candidate. More importantly, if you keep voting out the worse guys, being a worse guy will stop being profitable in politics.

All this is perfectly fine. Frankly, long-term our problem is going to be figuring out what to do with all the people out of jobs due to pervasive automation, and UBI is the obvious way to solve this. I fully expect us to end with an arrangement whereby the work of 1% (largely maintenance of automated systems that do all the "dirty work") will be sufficient to provide for the needs of the remaining 99%, and still have potential left. I also fully expect people to actually compete for the right to do that work.

The problem is that a few states have actually refused to recognize same-sex marriages from other states, and most purportedly "states rights" proponents in this debate supported them in that (I have no idea where Rand stands on it personally).

No, but you can at least ask him what he intends to do as a president. And if he says, for example, that he is personally against weed, but would legalize it on the federal level because he believes that a federal ban would be unconstitutional, that works for me.

Sure, because there's no way one can possibly get sick without making the "wrong choices".

As far as "the will of the people"; the people can speak of themselves. But you sure as hell don't speak for them.

Your definition of fascism is seriously weird, and not at all historical. Quite the opposite - most totalitarian regimes, including fascism (which, after all, what the word "totalitarian" was originally coined for - by Mussolini himself, no less!) have a huge, bureaucratized state apparatus with significant authority. Yes, that apparatus is used primarily to ensure that the few people on top of the pyramid stay on top, and that the rest are doing what those people on top want them to do, but that is not small government in any sense of the word, and is not at all what the Pauls are trying to sell.

As the productivity grows, the amount of wealth that one person can produce can (in fact, already is) well in excess of what that same person needs to live fairly comfortably. Today, that excess amount goes mostly to make the very few live lavishly to the point of grotesque. But there's no reason why that same amount can't be spread around more evenly for UBC.

As for taxing everybody the same: good idea! Let's start by making the capital gains tax rate the same as that for the personal income tax, hmm?

And how does that work once people that are married in one state travel to a different state, or conduct any sort of activity that is affected by their marital status across state lines?

The only way this can work given the Full Faith & Credit clause is if every state is required to recognize marriages made in any other state. Which would make same-sex marriage bans in conservative states largely meaningless.

The governments, perhaps. But not the people of those countries, in many cases. Especially since many of them aren't even democracies, and so don't represent their citizens even nominally.

Yet you're getting one, time after time. Perhaps it's time to make your criteria a little bit more narrow.

So they are, but the president does not unilaterally decide economic policy.

A Paul in the office would primarily mean two things. First, he'd dismantle as much of the executive as he could within the boundaries that are set out by the Congress (just to give one example in addition to this whole NSA thing - he could legitimately, by executive order, remove cannabis from all DEA schedules, effectively legalizing it on federal level). And second, he would veto most Congress bills, so only supermajority bills could pass. I suspect that budgets would ultimately fall into that category.

I'm somewhere between liberal and libertarian with a dash of socialism, personally (e.g. I support universal basic income guarantee), but I'd be willing to tolerate Paul's cookery on economic issues if this means a major advance in individual rights, more sane foreign policy, and further democratization of government (through electoral reform and decentralization). Hell, if US stops waging endless wars overseas, that alone will have a greater positive effect on the country's economy than any fiddling with taxes.

That would make you a minority, according to an experiment that those crazy Canadians have run a while ago to see what the social effects of universal basic income would be.

It has to do that because arrays of types are required to not have gaps between elements (so that address arithmetic works), and on the other hand they all have to be properly aligned. For modern Intel CPUs, the proper alignment for an 80-bit float is 8 bytes. Hence the smallest value that is equal to or greater than 10 bytes (80 bits) that is divisible by 8 - 16 bytes.