A new report about the state of freedom in the world from the Cato Institute and partners shows the US is not even in the top 10 when it comes to economic and personal freedom. We aren't number one? Why?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
A new report about the state of freedom in the world from the Cato Institute and partners shows the US is not even in the top 10 when it comes to economic and personal freedom. We aren't number one? Why?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
A new report about the state of freedom in the world from the Cato Institute and partners shows the US is not even in the top 10 when it comes to economic and personal freedom. We aren't number one? Why?
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
I want to talk about another index on freedom around the world.
We've talked about others and they've done frequently.
Where do we rate?
Are we the freest country in the world or are we the worst or are we in the middle?
And this is a new one and Cato put this together and it's rather extensive, complicated, and we've been looking at it.
But it's called the Human Freedom Index, a global measurement of personal, civil, and economic freedom.
But it is a serious investigation and we keep looking at these, even though I think we, as individuals thinking about this, aren't too excited about us becoming a freer country.
And guess what?
It doesn't verify that we're doing much better, but it comes out close to some of the other ones.
It says that we are number 20 in the world.
And they went over 152 countries.
So you know that included large and small and third world nations and everything.
But that's not very good because most Americans, I would think, I don't know how a poll would go if you just go to the man in the street and say, how do you rate our country today?
Do you live in a free country and are we the freest country?
It'd be interesting to see how they would respond.
Yeah, or how partisan politics would play in.
You know, no, we're not free because of Obama or, you know, this is the big picture.
But, you know, this came out in August, so it's still pretty fresh.
And, you know, I think we discussed before the show there are certainly a lot of problems on relying on these indices, indexes to, you know, to let us know who's free.
It's almost a game.
But there's still, even if you're skeptical about some of the methodologies, I think they're still very useful to gauge, you know, the relative strengths and weaknesses.
Right.
And to get a sense of where they're coming from or what they have found, I'll read the top six countries that they thought were the freest and were Hong Kong, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, and also Canada.
Did you know that Canada was freer than the United States?
I don't know how people respond to that.
But none of the thing there is shocking.
Hong Kong has been known to be a bastion of certainly economic liberty.
But it's interesting that they still rate it that high because they're probably under a little bit more gun now that it's controlled by China rather than Great Britain.
It was amazing to me when all Hong Kong had was freedom in the spite of the Cold War and all that going on and the Korean War and everything going on in Hong Kong.
They recognize it as a free area.
And I believe they had a GDP bigger than all of China.
They were so productive.
And I think that tells a story that a lot of people miss.
Switzerland, I think most people know that Switzerland has a reputation.
But even these countries, I'll bet you if we went and dissected everything out they do, we wouldn't say, hey, you know, these are libertarian countries.
They really understand the American Constitution and the concept of American liberty.
I don't think that would be our assessment.
That's one of the problems that I have with these kinds of indexes because, you know, the idea that there is one sort of essentially American-led idea of what freedom is, it's problematic.
It's very ideological.
So, you know, I have to sort of put those aside when I think about these.
But it's interesting you think about some of those on this very top elite list of six.
Some of those countries take about at least half your money when you work.
So that doesn't sound very free to me.
But you mentioned Canada and how could it be free?
Because we know they do have a lot of onerous regulations and they do have a lot of social regulations and things.
But one of the things that we talked about earlier too that I think about is Canada is probably freer because it's bigger and very remote.
It's a huge country where you can go places and the government can't get you.
You know, to me, that seems the real index of freedom.
And I mentioned to you earlier, I've been to some remote villages in Armenia, which is very low on the freedom list and probably for good reason.
But some of these places have dirt floors in the houses and they're so remote, there's no way the government can hassle you.
I would think a country like that or an area like that would be more free than somewhere like the U.S. where you come into contact with government all the time in some form or the other from DMV all the way on up and down.
You know, it's a shame, but many of us now have come to the conclusion that the government's generally the enemy of freedom, even though a proper-sized government theoretically should protect it.
And I think the founders are very sincere in trying to have that proper-sized government designed to protect our liberties.
And quite frankly, I think it's been a failure because we're not living in a free society.
But the other principle that I think has to be recognized if we want to protect individual liberty is the principle of sovereignty.
And sovereignty to me means the closer to home as possible.
If you have one monolith of world government, United Nations and WTO and all these regulations, that would be the opposite of saying that an individual may live in a free country as long as it doesn't do any harm to anybody else and assumes responsibility for him or herself,
that they would have individual sovereignty, which would never be tolerated because the people who don't want to work, because an individual would be very productive and they would claim that you have to pay your share and they want your taxes.
But even that could be worked out in a free society.
Maybe you could do it with a user fee.
You might have a way of paying to use the highways or something like that.
But that seems to be lost.
And unfortunately, we have become less free because we become less individuals who are responsible for ourselves.
We go to our local communities and they do more and more, the state, the federal government, and then worldwide government.
So I think the trend is very bad.
And hopefully we don't have to wait for a total collapse of this to have a new design.
But my argument when I go to the campuses is that the most important question that we as Americans, and especially young people, could ask is what is the proper role of government?
You know, is it to run the welfare state?
Is it to make people safe and secure?
Is it to police the world?
It's all those things.
And then you have to accept what we have.
But I don't see us moving in that direction.
I think we've moved in the wrong direction.
And these various different indices that have been tested, it shows that we keep slipping and slipping.
And I just hope the American people wake up and say, I'd rather live in a free society.
Could Third Parties Win?00:03:12
Among the different categories they have for freedom, and there are way too many to mention here, but a couple of them stood out that we chuckled about a little bit.
And one of them is freedom to form political parties.
And this is a classic example of how it works.
Of course we have the freedom to form political parties here in the U.S., except...
Right.
Yeah, we have a lot of them.
But from personal experience, we can't get on ballots, so there's no competition.
And I keep pointing out, and it's a more popular statement than ever before.
And what if we come to the conclusion?
What if the people come to the conclusion there's no difference between the Republicans and Democrats?
So the question is: when I'm asked, would you believe in a third party?
Do you think this is the way we should go?
And I said, I'm waiting for a second party.
No, it is true that we should have, you know, democracy is sometimes the issue is frowned upon because pure democracy is a mob rule of 51% not protecting the minority.
But we have this pretense ever since Woodrow Wilson that we're going to go about and make the world safe for democracy and just think of the Bush doctrine of redesigning the whole Middle East and spread democracy, spread democracy, demand elections.
And it's all pure hypocrisy.
We get in, we get the controls of these governments, demand that they have elections, we monitor the elections, and we don't get our guy elected.
Then all of a sudden we have to have to overthrow them like we did recently in Ukraine and different places and Egypt.
We have to do this.
But here in this country, we really don't have competition.
And you say, well, that's not true.
You can get your names on ballots and libertarians get on the ballot and the Green Party gets on, but they're totally excluded.
Would they ever consider having a Green Party candidate and a libertarian in a national debate?
I mean, the Republicans and the Democrats control the debates.
So that's not going to happen.
And the laws written by the states are designed to make it very, very difficult, you know, to get enough signatures to do it.
The time I tried it in 1988, I had to spend more than half the money I raised.
Back then it was significant, but it's still small compared to today.
But half or more was just spent on trying to get on the ballot.
And so we don't, we preach democracy, but we don't have it here.
So yes, you and I can go out and start a party tomorrow, but we're not going to get too much attention.
One person had the argument about how to allow so-called third parties into the debates.
If they can get on, if they go through this onerous process, if they can get on enough states where theoretically, if they won those states, they could win the presidency.
That was enough work and effort and they theoretically could win.
Because the other answer would be, what if there were 650 candidates?
You know, then you can't have a debate with them.
But you certainly could allow more democracy.
But I am absolutely convinced.
I experienced it in ADA in 2008 and 2012.
Enhancing Liberty in a Free Society00:02:02
There's a little bit of it going on in 2016 because they don't want to hear the answers coming from anybody who wants to talk about true liberty.
But this whole idea that we're slumping, say something in relationship to 9-11.
You know, it seems like it's changed, but has it really changed, or have we been slipping even longer than since 9-11?
Yeah, it's true.
9-11 was a catalyzing event where people were convinced to give up some of their security for some of their freedom for security, which we got neither of them.
But you're right, it has been going on much longer.
Look at the Patriot Act was written well before 9-11.
The authoritarians have been around for a long time, and I think that is the issue.
Do we want authoritarians to tell us what to do?
I always sort of bragged about the idea that I was running for president for a precise reason.
I didn't want to do a lot of things.
I said, I didn't want to run people's lives.
I didn't want to run the economy.
I didn't want to police the world.
First thing is, I'm not smart enough to do it.
Nobody is smart enough to do that.
Second thing, I don't have the moral authority to do anything like that.
And third, there's no constitutional authority to do it.
So this whole idea of what am I going to do for you?
What am I going to do for this group?
It's completely missing the point in a free society.
In a free society, the question is: What are you going to do to enhance my liberty and deliver the responsibility to me to take care of myself and for the government to get out of the way?
When there's a need to control violence, and that's a different story, or defend our country, that's a different story.
But all this mischief of telling people how to live their lives in a moral sense and how to run the economy and how to police the world, it's completely misdirected.
It's been that way a long time, and the more of that we have, the less free we'll be.
So, I think it's time that we decided that our goal ought to be freedom for the individual.
And under those circumstances, we have to see a tremendous shrinkage in the size and scope of government.