Fallacies are the mainstream media's stock in trade. Conventional wisdom reigns supreme. But not on the Liberty Report! Today Ron Paul takes a sledgehammer to a few MSM fallacies. Drug war, debt ceiling, Paul "Nobel" Krugman, and more -- Ron takes them on!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Fallacies are the mainstream media's stock in trade. Conventional wisdom reigns supreme. But not on the Liberty Report! Today Ron Paul takes a sledgehammer to a few MSM fallacies. Drug war, debt ceiling, Paul "Nobel" Krugman, and more -- Ron takes them on!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Fallacies are the mainstream media's stock in trade. Conventional wisdom reigns supreme. But not on the Liberty Report! Today Ron Paul takes a sledgehammer to a few MSM fallacies. Drug war, debt ceiling, Paul "Nobel" Krugman, and more -- Ron takes them on!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Today, I will be visiting with Chris Rossini, who is the editor of the Ron Paul LibertyReport.com, and the program will be a little bit different.
We're going to be talking about myths and fallacies that we hear and read about every single day.
Chris, good to be with you today.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Thank you.
Well, great.
I understand you've looked around and didn't have any problems finding some of the fallacies that we have to endure so often by the media and the politicians.
What do you have in store?
What can we talk about today?
Unfortunately, you don't have to look far, and we have several different quotes that you can address today and put these fallacies to rest.
We'll start with the Republicans and Democrats.
The two parties have done it once again with the debt ceiling.
They always find a way to bicker with one another, but when it comes to going further into debt, they become as one without any problems.
And as usual, the chicken littles were out warning us that the sky was going to fall if the debt ceiling was not raised yet again.
And we'll start with one with the named Lindsay Kushgarian, and she was from the National Priorities Project.
She says, if the debt ceiling cannot be raised or suspended, it would have caused havoc in the U.S. economy.
It could have cost us jobs, our credit rating in the world.
It's very important that we're able to suspend the debt or raise the ceiling to avoid economic disaster.
Always scare the people and scare the people into doing what they want to do, and that is spend more money.
There's a disaster.
If you don't spend more money, you have to raise the debt to spend the money.
It's the same thing in foreign policy, scare the people so that we go to war at the drop of the hat.
But it is a bipartisan thing.
The Republicans and Democrats get together.
And since they passed the bill, I think when it was put into law, the national debt jumped over $300 billion all at once because they have been acting outside the law anyway.
But if you look at all the obligations of the government, we're trillions and trillions of dollars in debt, much more than the $19 trillion, which will go to $20 trillion.
So the debt obligation is unrealistically high.
It's out there.
It's hidden.
So when people try to scare and say, oh, the credit of the United States is at stake if we don't give license to more and more spending.
To me, the amazing thing is that if you have 20 or 30 individuals who finally get fed up with increasing the national debt and they start speaking out because they were elected to do something about it, then everybody gangs up on them.
The Republicans and the Democrat leaderships gangs up on these people and they say, well, you're obstructionists.
You're blocking the, you're closing down government.
Well, why is it that the people who want spending never are closing down government because they won't vote for a budget that's more reasonable?
But it's universal when it comes to leadership because they want the spending.
For instance, in this budget agreement, what they did was they got rid of sequestration.
They're going to dramatically increase the military budget.
They're not going to cut anything whatsoever.
And the problem is going to get much worse.
So big government is on the run and it's going to continue and people will not ask the important question and that is, is it doing any good?
And of course, they say, well, if you back off, people are going to be suffering.
The people will be thrown out in the street into campaigns.
Used to be that to describe to us: if you want to do what you do, who has to sacrifice in order to have a more reasonable budget?
You know, I don't think, you know, in a free society, if we could return to a free society, nobody sacrifices anything.
Everybody gets something.
So, if you get your freedom back to do what you want, and you get to keep what you earn, and you get the government off your back, and the society is deregulated where people can do what they want as long as they don't hurt other people, and the wars won't be fought, and the people won't be suffering from the wars and the financial crisis and the inflation.
That's not a sacrifice.
Yes, it's an adjustment period if we decided to cut back and live within our means.
But the adjustment period isn't eternal.
But these are scare tactics when they come along and say that we have to raise the national debt.
It's been going on for a long time.
There's a lot of spending that is secret.
Just think of the trillions and trillions of dollars the Fed spent in the last bailout period.
That was never on the budget.
And there's a lot of dark budgets, and they have ways of financing things.
But the biggest illegal financing goes through the Fed because they have this power.
They can bail out foreign governments, foreign central banks, corporations, banks, the whole works.
And that's the big problem.
But the biggest problem is what has the American people allowed our government to become.
And the acceptance has been that we can't live without the welfare state and we can't live without a warfare state, and that costs a lot of money.
And the economy is shrinking.
The revenues will go down in real terms, and we can't afford it any longer.
But they won't ask the right question because it's painful to cut back.
They won't ask the important question: what should the role of government be in a free society?
And obviously, the role of government and free society should be protecting liberty, not policing the world, not regulating our personal lives, and not telling us how to spend our money.
So I would say this is a major fallacy that has been floating around for a long, long time: that we have to raise this debt limit or the world will come to an end and everybody will be out in the street.
The most that's ever happened on a government close down is that some people couldn't go into the Washington Monument.
Everybody got back pay after they went back to work and nobody noticed that they weren't at work.
So it's something that we should address, but right now people will be complacent because the powers to be, Republicans and Democrats, got together, just saying, Boehner and Pelosi did this.
It wasn't just the Democrats or just the Republicans.
It's a coalition, and they have come up with a grand bargain that the spending will continue, take the national debt up to $20 trillion, and there will be no cuts.
That is a tragedy.
It is a tragedy, Dr. Paul.
And not only does the government place financial burdens on our backs, they also monitor what substances we can put into our bodies, what plants a person is allowed to smoke with their own free will, what they're allowed to do.
The drug war has been a big failure.
And finally, slowly, the states are starting to come around to realizing that the drug war has failed and marijuana is becoming legalized more and more.
Recently, there was a vote in Ohio that didn't pass.
And we have a quote from Alan Pike from Think Progress, who has something to say about the government's role with marijuana.
He says: any state that legalizes the drug for recreational sale has a legitimate interest in monitoring and controlling the supply of cannabis in the new market.
Such oversight is critical both for the kinds of public health issues inherent to any biological product and to ensuring legalization states can harvest tax revenue accurately.
What do you think about that, Dr. Paul?
I've heard in a long time, and there's a lot of those out there.
This violates so much common sense.
First, you know, I never talk about, you know, drugs.
We need to be able to legalize and use drugs.
What we need is an understanding of legalizing freedom of choice and an assumption of responsibility for doing risky things.
So it is risky.
People might eat too much sugar, they might drink too much alcohol, they might smoke cigarettes, but all of a sudden to say that other drugs have to be regulated, you know, because they're so dangerous.
But the principle is that the governments can't protect us from ourselves.
If they do, they have to do it with the destruction of liberty.
Now, it was interesting that the Ohio vote went down dramatically, and you think, well, this is a setback because most of the time the votes will go favorably and for legalization and for the use.
So the one thing that came up on the vote in Ohio was the fact that they were establishing a monopoly on a very narrow way of the companies who are already in the business and prepared to provide the marijuana.
And even the libertarians, I understand, were opposed to it because it was such an atrocious proposal.
So I don't think this is a setback at all for common sense.
But, you know, the issue, the issue of drugs should be the issue of liberty and making freedom of choice.
You know, we allow responsibility to go to individuals.
We teach our children what is dangerous and what is not.
This idea that we protect them means that you should never give up on prohibition of alcohol.
We obviously should prohibit the smoking of tobacco, and it goes on and on, and you have to control the diets and everything else.
But, you know, we hear the people say, well, somebody in my family, you know, died with a drug problem, and therefore we have to make him illegal.
Where is it in the Constitution that this is the responsibility of government?
So that's the issue of liberty.
But then what about the practical argument?
The practical arguments are overwhelming.
It doesn't do any good.
That's why the American people at least had common sense to get rid of prohibition of alcohol because it wasn't accomplishing anything.
Matter of fact, it caused more harms.
It caused more harm because bad alcohol was being drunk and it was something that created a tremendous amount of crime.
And this is obviously the case with the war on drugs.
So this is an issue where I believe we as libertarians have made a lot of progress.
And just recently I made a trip to Mexico and they were very interested in the issue of marijuana.
And I just think, I just saw just recently there was a major court ruling in Mexico that said, boy, we're going to step in the right direction and allow people to make their own decisions about marijuana.
Just think how much better if we just got rid of the drug war, what our borders would be like, and the border between Mexico and the United States would be so improved.
But just think of what it would be done to law enforcement.
You know, we probably wouldn't need so many law enforcement officers and so many prisons if we could take these drug laws and just get rid of them.
And that to me is what should be done.
And unfortunately, we have become dependent and we live in a nanny state.
We think the government has to provide economic security.
They have to take care of us personally.
But, you know, just think of there is a lot of danger with drugs, more with the prescription drugs than with the others.
So there is a danger out there.
The question is who should regulate it.
But what about the damage done over the centuries?
Has there ever been any damage done by the distortion, gross distortion, and the gross use of religion?
Just think of what's been done in the name of religion.
It's been horrendous.
And just what about philosophy?
What if you talk about the philosophy of the Nazis and the philosophy of the communists?
Well, it's a philosophy and can be in a book.
But we didn't solve that problem by burning books and saying you can't read about it.
So if we allow the freedom to use your own religion, even when religion can cause harm, we don't decide it's the government's role to dictate religious principles.
We don't decide the government should, even though there's a lot of people right now who would like to dictate which books we read and in our schools.
But it's been accepted for way too long that it's the responsibility of the government to determine what we put into our body.
So if we allow people to deal with their everlasting soul and their brain on what they're going to read and study, you know, we should advance in this study of freedom to the point where we should allow individuals to make up their own mind what they put into their body.
And of course, they have to suffer the consequences that they make a mistake.
But when problems come up and they say, well, it's the government's fault if they would have only prevented me from doing this.
And I think that is an excuse.
And I remember one time in the presidential debate, they asked me, you mean you'd even legalize heroin?
Of course, I've never run a campaign on legalizing heroin.
It's never been it.
But technically, yes, what I've been talking about is you'd legalize drugs and it would have to be done in the marketplace.
But I asked the audience, which was very hostile, I said, if we made heroin legal tomorrow, how many of you would use it?
Of course, none of them would use it.
It's not them who would violate it.
It's those dumb people out there.
It's the people who are ignorant and weak.
And that's why we have to have government to take care of them economically and on their personal habits.
That is a major fallacy that government can take care of our problems instead of individuals who know what freedom is all about and acting responsibly.
I agree totally.
It's a big tragedy that the prisons are filled with people who use drugs, didn't harm anyone else, but just the fact that they did something the government said you're not allowed to do.
It's a tragedy.
And going along those lines with prisons, while she's not the only one who is not averse to cronyism, Hillary Clinton must not receive too much money from the private prisons because her view is that we need to end private prisons and detention centers once and for all.
Now, what's wrong with that view, God?
Well, I don't believe in private prisons.
I don't think that's the way it's set up.
If you are going to have a government with laws, it invites a disaster if you make a deal and you become a partner with a private owner of a prison.
Because the mistake there is that if you're in the business of making money, you're going to make more money if you have more customers.
So how do they have more customers?
Well, you have more laws.
So the problem are the laws that we have.
So I don't endorse the idea of private prisons.
And this, of course, is the reason that so many people get awfully confused with this.
But the answer to this is not just dealing with private prison.
Laws And Prison Profits00:08:46
The answer is getting rid of too many laws.
We have more prisoners in our country than any other country, more than even China, which is a total disaster.
And most of them are victimless crimes.
So these people should all get pardoned.
Should be released.
And then there would be no demand for private prisons.
But I think it should be greatly reduced.
You know, the prison population.
But I think the proper role would be to get rid of all the private prison, to get rid of so many laws.
You know, there's so many laws that are victimless crimes, and yet the busy bodies are writing these laws.
They like it.
There's an industry out there.
There's a government industry in the judicial system and the drug industry.
A lot of people who deal in drugs like the laws because they keep them busy.
But no, we don't need private prison.
What we need are a lot less laws, and we need to do away with the war on drugs.
Next, we're going to get a little more personal.
Personal.
The king of the Keynesians, Paul Krugman, always finds the time to try to rib you a little bit, Dr. Paul.
And he did so once again the other day.
This is what he wrote.
Oh, and former Congressman Ron Paul, who has spent decades warning of runaway inflation and is undaunted by its failure to materialize, is very much in a business of selling books and videos showing how you too can protect yourself from the coming financial disaster.
Well, I've tried to address this, but he didn't listen to my lecture one time that I gave.
But I think he lacks a little understanding.
It's unbelievable.
No, I guess you can believe it under the circumstances that he wins a Nobel Prize for economics.
But, you know, we have a president that won the peace prize, the Nobel Peace Prize for peace, and yet we have not had peace.
So I guess those prizes don't mean a whole lot.
But no, he's working on a major fallacy of the definition of inflation.
And of course, for us who believe in the free market and sound money and Austrian economics, inflation is the increase in the supply of money.
Just arbitrarily.
It's not by the marketplace.
And when you do that, you have a lot of things.
He doesn't realize that my greatest concern about inflating the money supply isn't, you know, just the rising prices, which there's plenty of.
It is the malinvestment that occurs.
That is the bubbles that are formed, the overinvestment in housing, and right now we're back doing that again.
The overinvestment, the massive inflation of the debt market, the bond market.
I don't know what he calls that if that's not an inflated price.
The stock market's back.
It's inflated again.
And so they want to avoid that.
They want you to key in and believe that the only measurement for inflation is a government-rigged CPI.
If the CPI is not going up, there's no inflation.
But you know, that was a fallacy in a period of time that he wrote about, and that was the 1920s and the 1930s.
They said that there was no reason to worry during the 20s because the government was, the Fed was inflating.
They were just a young organization, but they were inflated for World War I, and they were inflating again in the 20s.
But the CPI wasn't going up.
There was productivity and kept prices down, but there was still a lot of investment, and the inflation went into the financial instruments.
They went into the stock market.
So the bubbles were there, and the crash was there.
And it was, of course, prolonged because they tried to prop up prices.
They did back in the 30s exactly what we've been doing, what Japan has done, and just to prolong the agony.
So he rejects the whole notion that the Federal Reserve has something to do with the business cycle.
And as long as he takes that position and follow that, the only thing he can say is print more money.
And he argues debt doesn't matter.
Print more money and everything will be okay.
But that's what they've been doing, especially wholesale since 2009, and into the tune of trillions and trillions of dollars.
Now, his whole point is: well, those of us who worry about inflation will see only that we're only talking about a Zimbabwe inflation.
I don't see that in the near term.
It's always a possibility.
But this whole idea that the CPI indicates there's no inflation for the consumer, the other day it was announced that Social Security beneficiaries would get no boost because there's no inflation.
Well, that helps the government's finances, I guess.
At the same time, they announced that Medicare was going up, Medicare B was going up 52%.
And just ask the elderly whether there's an inflation and food prices, and why is it that nobody has any money if there's no inflation?
And the bigger question is: if, see, inflation for us is related to why the middle class is disappearing and why the true unemployment rates are so much higher.
So he does set the stage for a little bit of a discussion, but I rather think that he would not be too anxious to have an honest debate with anybody, and especially those of us who believe in the free market.
So I think he will continue to do this.
But I think what drives him to do this, why should he worry about me?
I haven't won the Nobel Prize and nobody pays that much attention.
So he's probably thinking about himself that what's going to happen to his predictions?
Because his predictions are going to devastate this economy because we've been following his advice for a long time and we're not doing that well economically.
We'll close with, we'll stick with the Fed, Dr. Paul, because it's such an important issue and so important for people to understand.
And this next quote shows just how far belief can go in both the Federal Reserve and central planning.
It actually comes from a U.S. representative named Brad Sherman, and he believes that central planner, Fed chairman Janet Yellen, should wait until May to raise interest rates.
And this is what he believes.
This is why she should wait till May.
As I argued then, back in the summer, God's plan is not for things to rise in the autumn.
As a matter of fact, that's why we call it fall.
Nor is it God's plan for things to rise in the winter through the snow.
God's plan is that things rise in the spring.
And so if you want to be good with the Almighty, you may want to delay until May.
This is pretty astounding.
And you know, I watched him, you know, on a video on the internet, and he actually sounded like he was believing in what he was saying.
You know, but it is so silly that this is probably about where they are intellectually in Washington because there weren't that many people interested in the Federal Reserve.
There's a lot more attention in the country today since the collapse of the economy eight years ago.
But I think there's a lot more interest in the Fed as well.
But for him to say this, it's almost, he can't possibly think this is serious.
And maybe he doesn't, but that's what it's led to.
I mean, that's the most he can say about Federal Reserve policy: that we have to wait until the weather has changed, then we can do it.
And I think that's probably what has driven monetary policy.
When you think about this on again, off again in the last many years about what interest rates should be, well, they don't know what interest rates should be.
They don't have the vaguest idea what they should be.
They're incapable of knowing what they should be.
And they're incapable of comprehending that the inflation, that the monetary policy has to be curtailed.
So this is something that will be around for a while, and we will have a lot of inflation of money.
And you will see prices continue to go up as well as the price of gold.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today, and I hope you enjoyed the program.