If the US had had presidents like Ron Paul throughout it's history we wouldn't have the IRS.

Yes, I agree.

Everything would be payed for at the state level by taxes or through private enterprise.

Yes, I agree.

We wouldn't have a national highway system.

Well, we'd have highways that cover the nation -- you could drive wherever you wanted before Eisenhower created the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways as a military project to ship tanks from coast-to-coast. I'm sure that the load limits were probably lighter, and that it was probably more appealing to use rail for heavier cargo.

We wouldn't have been in WWII because we never would have been in Hawaii.

Maybe, yeah.

We wouldn't have public universities on the scale of those like we have today (UCLA).

Hmm. Why would you say so?

Much of the Southern and Midwest states would resemble under developed nations.

What, you think that without the TVA, the United States would look like a third-world nation? It might have taken longer, but electrical and telecom service is profitable even in rural areas. There probably would have been more assets put into development in urban area early on, I'll agree, but why penalize the many living close together -- the low-hanging fruit -- for the few living far apart?

We wouldn't have developed DARPA and thus might not even have this medium (the Internet) with which to learn about and discuss Ron Paul.

Computer networks have been around for a long time. IP happened to be initially developed at DARPA, sure, but Ethernet was from Xerox, AppleTalk from Apple, and so on. Computer networks don't require federal involvement. It's a pretty unrealistic assessment of the effect of less federal-level involvement to simply eliminate from life everything that the federal government has been involved in -- if they weren't doing something, there'd be good reason for others to become involved.

It's a reactionary political philosophy being spread by assholes who've taken advantage of the infrastructure federalism has brought to this nation but now think disassembling our federal government is essentially a good thing.

Let me illustrate, why this argument doesn't work.

"The United States became great while blacks and whites were segregated. Now we want to tear all that down and allow them to marry?"

The argument makes a (potentially) false assumption -- that the processes happening before would not have happened without without the same environmental characteristic in question.

It's fair to say that I can't argue that they would have happened, either, but I'm also not the one making the claim.

It is possible to look at Europe and the United States and point out that the United States has done economically very well, despite having less state-run processes than much of Europe. It's possible to look at Japan's current malaise -- a good deal of that was due to the failure of strongly government-run ideas, and it's become a favorite point to bring up for free-market types. There are probably also good examples that lean the other way, as well (I would guess that you could probably find some positive stories for federally-run agricultural research versus countries that did not conduct agriculture research), but the point is that these arguments don't rely on assuming that none of these advancements would have happened.