Kyle and Ethan talk to former congressman Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul advocated for non-interventionism, sound money, and individual liberty throughout his career and became the figurehead of a libertarian movement through his presidential campaigns. He is the author of several books including End The Fed and Swords Into Plowshares. Kyle and Ethan ask Dr. Paul about his faith, attempt to get libertarian answers on various modern problems, and try to get him to spill on how much gold he has under his mattress. We find out if Ethan accepts Ron Paul into his heart to become a full-blown libertarian in the subscriber portion. You can see more Ron Paul on his Liberty Report. Topics Discussed How Ron's faith and politics intersect and on setting an example Non-interventionism; blaming America, blowback, & war Ron Paul's foundations for his pro-life views On refusing to endorse McCain or Romney What is sound money and what is wrong with the dollar? The gold standard The Boom-Bust cycle. Ron Paul thinks the virus is being blamed instead of where the real problem lies at the Federal Reserve Subscriber Portion (Begins At 00:43:45) Coronavirus- is the government cure worse than the disease? Is it a HOAX? Is there hope for the future? Dan tries to explain inflation Kyle and Ethan discuss non-interventionism Does Ethan accept Ron Paul into his heart? The full interview is for Babylon Bee subscribers, so... Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Brian Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I'm going to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon Bee Interview Show.
All right, everybody.
It's happening.
This is it.
And I'm currently doing the Ron Paul, it's happening.
He's dancing like one of those used car lot things that's full of air that dances around.
They have an interesting name.
I forget what the official name is, but like Wacky Inflatable Tube Man, basically.
Yeah, wacky doodle.
I don't know.
I don't know the name.
Because I remember I tried to Google one once.
Oh, they're called Inflatable Air Dancers, if I remember right.
Inflatable Air Dancers.
Okay.
It's like an official brand name, Air Dancers.
Patent pending.
Anyway, so we're interviewing Ron Paul today.
Yeah, this is a big deal for you, but for me too.
I mean, it's weird when I interview people that, like, you know, he's pretty well known.
He is during a certain period.
If you were around for the presidential elections in 2008, right?
That was like.
Ron Paul was like the leader of the libertarian movement.
And that's the most steam I've ever seen the libertarian movement get.
Yeah.
Though I haven't been around long compared to a lot of people.
Yeah, libertarians were almost legitimate for like that brief window.
I mostly listened to talk radio shows that just mocked the heck out of the libertarian movement.
Yeah.
So I've over time, my wife, who I know, my wife now, and I didn't know her then.
She was a Ron Paul supporter.
You're one of my best friends, Ron Paul supporter.
I got all these people that are like libertarian now.
I've started to find myself like wondering, am I libertarian?
Especially ever since Trump took over the Republican Party and it just seemed to just happen.
Everybody's like fine with it.
I would say conservatives and libertarians agree on 95% of things, but there are a couple of big issues that I think there are issues where libertarians assign a lot more importance and weight to things like the Federal Reserve.
I got a Federal Reserve.
That would be something that libertarians say that's a huge threat to our liberty and to our money and to our security.
I don't even understand half that.
Well, that's why we got Ron Paul.
We're going to ask him all about it.
Okay.
Things like war, obviously.
So like you guys wouldn't be doing bailouts and stuff like that.
Right.
Yeah.
But I think the thing with libertarianism is it tries to address root causes.
You know, so it's not just, well, do you oppose the bailout or do you support the bailout?
It's what led to the situation in the first place.
So it tries to look at these unseen economic causes.
So, and the Federal Reserve libertarians would say is at the root of a lot of this.
So.
See, I've always just seen most libertarians I know of just like, okay, weed.
You can just get weed.
And so the thing is, libertarians don't do themselves any favors because they tend to be goofy and they tend to look like guys who just want to smoke weed in their mom's basement.
So it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, liberty.
That's a lot of conspiracy theorists or libertarian.
I always notice.
There's some conspiracy theory.
It attracts when I went to the Free State Project.
The main thing I noticed was that it was so eclectic.
You know, you had families, you had Christians, you had atheists, you had gay people.
Yeah.
You know, it was just like this, and everybody was getting along, which was cool.
You know, I don't know how sustainable that is.
Yeah, that's not on a weak scale, right?
But it was very cool.
And I think there was a lot of noble things there.
I mean, obviously, as with any movement, there's a lot of things that make there's a lot of people that become caricatures of the movement.
And I mean, that is extreme.
We've got the Vernon Supreme bumper sticker on our wall over there.
And he's this, I met him.
He's this crazy guy with this scraggly beard and he wears a boot on his head and he's running for president.
He seems like he's doing a bit.
It's a bit, but he is a libertarian.
He actually believes in liberty and stuff.
But it is a bit where he does, it's satire, you know, on his, on his site, it's like, I'm going to give a pony to everybody.
And he's trying to make a point, but then I think from the outside, people look at it and go, okay, that's those crazy libertarians and just kind of write it off.
So I don't know.
I think there is something to be said for Ron Paul and his son Rand Paul and how they've kind of entered the system that we have and tried to work within that.
I mean, Ron Paul was, he was always a little bit more of an outlier than Rand Paul in that he was always the one voting no on everything.
You know, there was, I think there were a lot of votes.
Maybe Dan can correct me on this, but there were a lot of votes where he was the sole no, you know, in Congress.
And so I really respect someone who's principled like that.
And I'm a huge Ron Paul fan, just, you know, disclaimer at the start.
So I'm just going to be cheerleading the whole time.
Yeah, Kyle might be doing the bulk of the talking, or he'll just be silent the whole time.
I could clam up, which is a possibility.
That's the weird thing.
Talk to your heroes.
Because everybody's met famous people here and there.
And it's always an awkward situation.
And you kind of get a few words out, but you can't do that when you're interviewing them.
You have to just suddenly act like you're friends off the bat.
Yeah.
It's really weird.
It's a weird thing to get.
Pretending to be smart has been the hardest thing about doing this podcast.
We're pretending.
Well, I am.
I don't know about you.
I'm in pretending.
I don't even try to pretend.
I do feel like I play the dumb guy.
Oh, I see what you're doing.
It kind of helps.
When I just kind of play the dumb guy, it helps me not have to be smart.
Yeah, I think after Trump won, I started kind of asking this question, like, because I was, you know, I felt like the left really wanted to really just get their like-minded, woke type people to overpower everybody else into believing and doing everything they do or get out.
And then it felt like the Trump thing was, MAGA, we are, you know, this is our movement, and we're going to smash this other half of the country.
And I kept going, is there a political philosophy that admits that our country's always going to be divided and have tons of different viewpoints in it?
And what's the best way to work within that?
And we're not going to crush, we're always going to have huge disagreements on massive things.
We're going to have multiple religions.
We're going to have atheists.
We're going to have all this stuff.
And that was like the moment I kind of went, oh, wait, is that what libertarian was the whole time?
Kind of.
I mean, kind of.
My weakness in the movement is, you know, it's hard to actually find a mechanism for preserving things we love and society.
And, you know, I guess if everybody's doing what they're doing, then how do you argue against a drag queen story hour or they're doing what they want to do?
Yeah.
And I guess some of that, again, goes to root causes because if you don't have public libraries that everybody's funding, then there is no drag queen story hour.
If somebody wants to go build one on their own, they can.
But again, some people say that's not good for preserving society.
So I'm interested in picking Dr. Paul's brain on this a little bit.
Also, one thing that really interests me is that he's a Christian and extremely pro-life.
He's told some interesting stories about witnessing abortions and delivering babies, being an OBGYN before he went into Congress.
And so I don't know.
I think there's a lot of interesting things that we can explore here for Babylon Beat listeners.
All right.
Well, we're going to talk to Ron Paul.
This is one of the few times we've done an actual introduction before we actually recorded, so we have no idea how this is going to go.
We haven't done the interview yet.
Dr. Paul didn't have a ton of time because he's a busy man.
The guy records podcasts every day at these videos and he puts them up.
85?
84, 85, something like that.
Yeah.
And it's, I mean, he's a machine.
Yeah.
So anyway, so we wanted to kind of give you an intro, pat it out a little bit, and then we're going to have a discussion afterwards about, you know, tell them we're padding it out.
No, this is all padding.
You can just fast forward.
Yeah, so we're going to do a little bit of a little bit of a mess.
We're going to find out if Ethan converted to libertarianism or not.
I guess usually we do these intros about the person while they're on the line.
But my point was we wanted to do that before we got him right online.
Yeah, before you can.
And I think it's dive right in a little bit.
We wanted to kind of use this as an opportunity to talk about Christians and libertarianism.
Yeah.
I'm curious about that topic.
So we could get into it more in another episode.
Yeah.
So yeah, this is the beginning.
This is the beginning of the podcast.
The true beginning.
So here it is.
Oh, do you hear the phone ringing?
Hey, hi, Dr. Ron Paul.
All right.
Well, thank you for coming on with us, Dr. Paul.
Nice to be with you.
So I started following you.
I know Dan was just telling you back in 2008, and I was the same way.
So there was just such an incredible movement of young people that were being turned on to the ideas of liberty, and you were kind of spearheading that movement.
And it was such an interesting time and such an exciting time.
And I know you've continued to do that through your Liberty Report and other things that you've been putting out.
So I just wanted to thank you for doing that and for getting the ideas of liberty out there.
One thing we're interested in, the Babylon B is a Christian side, and we have a lot of Christian followers.
So I know you've talked a little bit about faith, and I've read some of your books, and you've talked about how your faith has informed your ideas on things like non-interventionism and abortion.
And I was curious kind of how your upbringing and your faith has informed your politics.
Well, I've never felt like there was a conflict between what I do politically and my faith because the way I saw Christianity, and I don't pretend that I speak for many other people other than myself, but I saw Christianity being a deeply felt held religion of peace and Christ taught peace.
And, you know, even in the campaign, once in a while, I would bring it up that we're supposed to be the peacemakers.
We're not supposed to be the warmongers.
And it always discouraged me during the campaigns when some of the roughest crowds I ran into were the Christian crowds.
I remember one time, I think it was in Iowa, was a key rally that they were having.
And it was by a tax group.
And I was pretty good on taxes.
And the other was a Christian group.
But they excommunicated me and wouldn't let me come on.
But several times on many of the events, more booing came from a Christian crowd than any other.
And the issue usually was that I didn't like war.
And I thought that was not too difficult a position to have as a Christian.
And yet, even today, you still see, you know, a lot of people who, you know, are Christians or profess to be Christians are very, very militant.
And that to me is a conflict.
I'd like to see a little change in that because that's not the way I was taught.
It's not the way I read the New Testament especially.
And it's a position of peace.
And, of course, the libertarian principle of non-aggression, I think, fits into a belief in Christianity.
Of course, I think politically that is such a universal answer where Christianity and politics can reach out to people just because we can argue the case that non-intervention and non-aggression allows people to make their own decisions.
So if we think the world should be more Christian-like, then we have a job to deal with our own faith and our own belief.
We have a responsibility to our families, and we have a responsibility to our local community and our churches.
But it's all voluntary.
It has nothing to do with authoritarianism where government gets involved.
Now, we live in an age where the government becomes the religion, and literally to the point where traditionally much of history, and even now, the leader becomes a godlike figure.
And, of course, communism is based on that.
So my faith has always blended in with the political principles that I have.
And I never could understand why people who have, you know, who profess one thing Christian can be so anti-peace.
That is my assessment, even though I don't preach it in the sense that I don't go out and I don't go looking for a public debate over exactly what I believe.
I think it's more important that I try to set a standard.
I'd rather see people saying, you know, I wonder what he believes in.
He votes a certain way.
And I wonder why he does that.
Because politically, I've learned that you make very little progress by sort of grabbing people by the shirt tail or by the coat and saying, hey, this is what you believe.
You don't believe this.
And politically, you have to do this, whether it's political or religious.
I think that's the wrong approach.
And my approach has been quite different.
But I think my religious upbringing and my religious faith encourages me to take a bit more humble method of trying to convert people.
Yeah, so I've always been curious about that.
So I'm different from Kyle and Dan in that I wasn't part of the libertarian movement.
I was just kind of a paint-by-numbers Republican, I guess, at the time or conservative, just a young guy.
And I think there are certain things you don't question at that.
You're just like, yeah, America needs to be really strong.
We want to fight.
We'd rather be fighting the bad guys on other shores, not our own.
You don't put a lot of thought into it, which is actually, I've put more thought into it, I think, as I've met Kyle.
And it's such a serious thing, war, you know, and we do, we are very, we're loose with it here.
We get kind of, it's almost entertainment.
It's kind of, it gets kind of sick.
But I'm curious, so your president, imagine you're president.
And, you know, we talked about this yesterday, Kyle.
We had this thought of, you know, if say, yeah, well, the criticism of a non-interventionist policy would say, you know, that it's isolationism, that it's putting your head in the sand and ignoring enemies that we need to confront.
And so, Dr. Paul, yeah, if you became president, what do you do?
Do you withdraw all the troops day one?
I mean, does that create any kind of void or any kind of opportunity for enemies?
Or is that just the best solution in the long run?
I mean, if there's like a super.
All the troops should be home.
You can't do it in one day, but you could start the process.
That is one area where a president does have a little more authority moving troops around.
And, of course, if there's not been a declared war, he has the authority to move the troops wherever he thinks it's best.
And yeah, we could start bringing them home right away.
But There's the philosophy of non-intervention and bringing the troops home and the conditions that would permit it.
It wouldn't be permitted now because the demagogues and there'd be more demagogues that would say we have to police the world and we have to have more nuclear weapons or Republicans, and yet the Democrats are every bit as bad because they endorse it.
I often say that we have a bipartisan foreign policy and everybody complains, why don't you guys get together?
But on the really bad stuff, they're together all the time.
Not too long ago, when they passed the omnibus bill, they get together and they pass all the bad stuff.
And the military budget never really gets cut.
Sometimes the Democrats will use it to say, okay, we're going to give you guys all the money you want to build weapons, but you've got to give us more welfare.
So it's used as a technique of just getting more money.
But no, they get, they do quite well.
And it is a position where they believe in the militarism.
And I think that is one of the biggest problems that we have today because the military industrial complex is one of the most powerful lobbying groups that are in Washington.
And this is something that seems to be irrelevant to a lot of people who profess to believe in nonviolence and peace and Christian love.
And yet at the same time, just think of the horrors of the last 15 years or 20 years since 9-11, how many millions of people that we've been involved in killing around the world and destroying our liberties here at home, all in the name of our Christian duty.
And people don't want to hear it.
So as far as an individual president that believes this way of getting in and doing it, you know, Trump on occasion would say, this is what I would like when it had to do with Syria.
I need to stop this war.
I need to come home.
I've never liked this war.
And boy, did it come down hard.
And then there was backtracking.
So it is the sentiment that counts.
And that's why I think religion is so important because people should get their values, you know, not from the government.
And if people, if the people endorsed this non-intervention, they wouldn't have ever been sent over there.
So I don't deal with politics as much as I deal with trying to change people's minds.
And that's why I don't, you know, talk in a religious tone as much as I will talk in a moral tone and a constitutional tone on why people should come together with the sole goal of, I believe, you know, bringing Christian principles and Christian faith together because ultimately I think that will answer so many of our problems.
Interesting.
So let's move on to the topic of abortion.
I was reading in one of your books, I think it was Liberty Defined, about how you had, when you were working as an OBGYN, you had witnessed an abortion and also had seen a baby that was delivered that was about the same age.
And they had done everything they could to save the life of that baby, but the baby that was unwanted, they just let die.
And so how do you see the issue of abortion working with the idea of liberty?
I know libertarians are split on this issue.
Is that something that comes from your religious faith or is it just something from your medical background?
Well, I think all of that.
It was never discussed.
And one of my books I talk about, the word never came up when I was a medical student in the late 50s.
I mean, people knew about it, but there was never a deep conversation about it.
But I ran into that in the 60s when people were defying it.
The medical schools were defying the incident you were describing.
I was in a major university.
I was doing my residency there.
And so people all of a sudden challenge that whole system.
But I think that there's no reason why a libertarian can't be pro-life because they literally take an oath of nonviolence.
I'm never going to initiate a force against another individual.
They have to accept the idea that anything that has not been born, not delivered, is not a person.
And it's a unique situation.
Most libertarians are pretty agreeable in letting people solve their own problems and destroy their own lives, and they have to solve their problems on their own.
They don't want the government and this sort of thing.
But when it comes to that life within the uterus, all of a sudden, in order for a libertarian to accept abortion, they have to take the position it's not a live human being.
And, of course, my argument in my books on this is, well, it's live, it's a human being, and it has legal rights, too, because if I do something wrong with one of my patients and it injures the fetus, then I'm liable for this.
And there's inheritance rights sometimes the way a will is written, any children born of this marriage will inherit.
So there's legal recognition.
And if somebody has an accident and not involved with abortion, but there is an injury to the mother and the baby dies, the person who caused the injury, the accident, is held liable.
So I think the libertarians have weak grounds on saying, well, yeah, I'm for it because it's all for the mother, but it's all about the mother's rights to her body.
Well, I don't think it's that simple.
I think it has whether or not people recognize that the fetal life is a human life that has some legal standing.
And, of course, I believe that medically.
I believe it legally.
And it fits into my beliefs as a Christian that we shouldn't be aborting our unborn.
Yeah, it always seems like it's a, you know, if you recognize that as a person, then liberty works with it perfectly because now you're recognizing the rights of that baby that's in the womb.
It's like the same rules for murder, right?
Oh, yeah, it's a person.
You can't just kill this person.
Yeah, that's always what the divide comes.
Because I'll talk about women's rights.
But if you recognize that that's a person, then their rights cannot encroach on the rights of the baby.
So when you, during your presidential campaign, if I remember right, you didn't endorse McCain.
You didn't endorse Romney.
You didn't go and kind of support the two-party system after your campaign was over.
And what we've seen here in the Democrats is that they are now all rallying behind Biden after they were all slamming him during the primary.
It always seems like such a game to me.
It's so political when you see these people that are criticizing Biden on war or they're criticizing him on any number of issues that the Democrats are passionate about.
And then all of a sudden they just fall in line.
So why was it that you didn't endorse anybody?
Well, I really didn't think a whole lot about politics.
I didn't have much respect for politics and the system.
I didn't run to be in Congress.
I didn't run to become chairman of the banking committee.
I was there long enough that if I played all the games they wanted me to play, raise money for the party and vote the way they wanted me to, I had the seniority, be the chairman of the banking committee people and say, well, then you could do the things that you wanted to do what you believe in.
No, you can't.
That's not the way it works.
I was much more interested in changing the ideas that people hold because I think that ideas have consequences.
And I think everything wrong with Washington has some type of philosophical defense on this.
I mean, you have Keynesian economics.
You have authoritarianism in foreign policy.
And it's all a matter of ideas.
So I saw this as an opportunity in 1973 when I first gave my first political speech as a consequence of having this awakening about how wicked our monetary system is.
There's no honesty in weights and measures when it comes to what we were doing to our monetary system.
Because I got involved in that study in the 60s.
And then the 70s became chaotic and we abandoned absolutely the gold standard.
And things have monetarily and size of government and the loss of liberty has continued and has gotten especially bad here in the last two decades.
And it's mainly because of a dishonesty.
It's the endorsement of counterfeit.
It's the endorsement that you don't have to have truth in money.
So it was my motivation to speak out.
My wife was concerned about me doing that.
She says it could be dangerous.
I wonder what are you talking about?
And she said, well, you could get elected.
And I told her, don't worry about it.
It ain't going to happen because that's not my goal.
You know, she said something and she never pretended to be into politics.
She says, yeah, she says, I think you're going to get elected because I think the people will like to hear the truth.
And, you know, there's something to that because I would just sort of spout out the truth, even though when they were, you know, getting sort of ganging up on me in the debate, just spouting out the truth without being melodramatic about it, there's somebody like one of you there that might have heard something there.
And so that was my whole approach: trying to do that, not to win.
And some people criticized me.
I said, well, you don't really want to be president.
Well, in a way, not, but it's very important for me to do a good job because now it's very important for me to have a lot of votes because the votes I get or the endorsement will reflect if anybody cares about what I'm talking about.
So I had no real desire to be a president under these circumstances, but I had a lot of desire to present the case for liberty and do my very best.
But I also was very realistic.
And that's the reason why, you know, today isn't today isn't the day they're going to accept bringing the troops home.
But the troops are coming home.
The troops are coming home because we're witnessing the disintegration of a system that is non-viable, the monetary system and this nonsense for coronavirus.
All this taught the budget.
It's totally out of control.
And I think the dollar is going to disintegrate.
You see gold prices skyrocketing, which is a very good indicator of what's happening.
So that and the people's minds are changing too.
They have to change because this is this system we have today is going to go away.
But the big question is are the socialists that are being elected to Congress, are they going to dictate policy?
Or will it be people like you who aren't thinking seriously about freedom and religion and love and this sort of thing?
Are you going to have a say in it?
And are there going to be more people?
That's the only thing that counts as far as I'm concerned.
And that's where I'm optimistic.
Not what's going on in Washington.
I'm so disgusted.
You know, with the creation of financial bubbles, the bubble bursting, and then the way they, you know, concoct the statistics to say that the world is going to be destroyed by coronaviruses and they have to doctor up the numbers and lie to the people and scare them to death.
No, there's a transition today on my program, sort of bragged a little bit, not so much bragging, but identified and was positive on the fact that people are tired of even this locking people up in their houses.
People are out talking about this.
The whole thing is, one person said today, I read something and said, well, natural immunity is good.
We should be outdoors getting fresh air and getting sunlight.
So what have the government, what's the government done with all the stupidity?
They lock us up in our houses.
And that's supposed to solve our problems and print more money.
You know, it's insane.
But that is the end stages.
And that's what you will be witnessing and participating in the replacement of that.
That's the big thing.
What is going to take place of the current system?
And, you know, the Bill Gates of the world and the AOC people of the world have their goals, but I think liberty-minded people have some goals, and we have to spread that message the best we can.
I wanted to know this philosophy of yours, Liberty, has this always been your philosophy?
Was there a turning point in your life?
Were you headed down a different pathway point?
Or did you ever flirt with other ways of thinking?
Or has this always been kind of your personal philosophy?
No, I don't.
I think the one trait that I have that I think was worthwhile, I still have it, and I advise people to do it, is curiosity.
I was always wondering, you know, I can remember early in grade school, I was wondering, I was very curious about the order of the universe.
How did it come together and how long is it going to last?
That sort of thing.
So I've always been curious.
And then early on, I just came across Hayek's book, A Road to Serfdom, and different things like that and read a lot when Goldwater was running.
But I think I was curious and I always wanted to put it together where it made sense and I was consistent because I didn't want to have to fudge the figures.
But I think I don't know where it came from, but I had that determination.
And that's why I worked so hard to set a standard in Washington.
I knew voting by myself was not going to change the world.
Yet I found out it did more good than just going along to get along.
People said that that made a difference.
And even my most, even the enemies, so-called enemies, actually friends that disagreed, they say, one thing we can say is you're consistent.
And I was pleased with that.
But I was also working very hard to be consistently right the best I can to understand the issues and study economics.
And the other challenge I had that worked into this was, okay, if you don't have the government doing this, what are you going to do?
I mean, what if you didn't have a Federal Reserve?
What's going to happen?
What if you didn't have massive armies?
Is there an answer?
Why don't you have to have economic planning?
How are the poor going to eat?
And I think for me, I had to work out all the answers through both my Christian faith as well as free market economics.
And I think the answers are there, and I think they're delightful because there's so many positive things could happen.
And we were blessed with the freest country ever.
We had the largest middle class.
And in my lifetime, we've just seen the disintegration of this.
But I remain positive in that there's a lot of people out there.
I don't know how many people you reach, but I tell you what, you're reaching some people.
And if you reach them with a message of liberty and love and peace, you probably don't know how many people.
I never had any idea how many, but there is a remnant out there.
And on occasion, I bump into them, and I'm delighted.
So libertarians talk about gold a lot.
So you sound like a guy who's got a lot of gold buried in various places.
That's where all your wealth is.
So why?
Mattress full of gold.
Mattress with gold underneath or something.
So explain a little bit for people who haven't encountered this thing before.
What's wrong with our money and why would gold or anything else really be better?
You have to talk about gold depending on the circumstances.
Today, it's a way of protecting it against the disasters of what the government does with printing money.
And it can't be counterfeited.
And we work on a counterfeit system.
I think the best way to understand the importance of gold, it's sort of having like a universal measuring rod.
People say, well, you can't have a gold standard.
There's not enough gold for everybody to do it.
No, all you're doing is measuring value, say, an amount of gold.
That's the standard.
And that's something that is essentially determined by nature.
And it's not something that's overly rigid.
Nobody knows exactly what the value of gold is for everything.
But you have the value.
Now you have a changing value.
And then we have the whole thing is we destroyed one of the basic principles of a free market of measuring the value of a money, even a fiat currency, are the interest rates.
And that's what distorts the economy.
No measurement.
First, you don't have a currency that is definable.
And then you say you can't even measure how you charge on interest rates.
And so today, they just print, print, print, and destroy the value of the money.
It's just a total disaster.
And I think you can find a fair number of biblical statements that advocates honest weights and measures.
And I think it is universal.
It's been around for a long time.
And thousands of years ago, they noticed this.
It's a natural money, a natural money that came about.
And it ironed out the inefficiencies of measuring things like if you're trading a horse for a cow, you know, barter, very, very inefficient.
So it was the soundness of a currency, money, like gold, that facilitated, you know, trade.
But you can, it's just the measurement of it that is important.
You don't to have a gold standard, you don't have every single transaction handing over gold coins and all.
No, you just sort of trade things, but you define the value of things on a universal value, and that happens to have been throughout history as gold.
Now, I felt so strongly about the value of a sound currency.
One time I asked Bernanke, you know, just flat out, is gold money?
And he said, he paused, he paused, paused, he says, no.
And that's the way they are.
That's what people have been taught.
And that's why change in economics dominates the Federal Reserve System because that shouldn't even exist.
And it dominates the members of Congress because they haven't really looked into the economics that you've been looking into.
And that's why we have this mess.
But the goal is to change people's minds and understanding, have a better understanding on how economics really works and why the whole issue of liberty solves just about all the problems.
It's far from a perfect society, but compared to having a few clowns and politicians making all the decisions for all of us like they've been doing, you know, whether it was the Patriot Act after 9-11 or whether it was this coronavirus and all this lockdown and putting us in our houses,
that is, you know, so far removed from living in a free society that it's hard for me to understand why people wouldn't finally give up on all that authoritarianism.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
People say, well, we had a good 10 years, but it was all built on sand.
It was not built on a foundation.
The main thing that our readers wanted to know is, is there any hope?
We're going to jump over the wall, escape the gulag, and get to America.
How do the story explorer?
Oh, they always have like two things.
I'm the map.
I'm the map.
I'm the meap.
I'm the meap.
So, hey, Dan, explain to Ethan how the Federal Reserve creates bubbles.
Oh, man.
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