Even though the world is in pretty bad shape, perhaps there are some things that we can be thankful for. Enjoy this special holiday edition of the Liberty Report. Happy Thanksgiving!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Even though the world is in pretty bad shape, perhaps there are some things that we can be thankful for. Enjoy this special holiday edition of the Liberty Report. Happy Thanksgiving!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Even though the world is in pretty bad shape, perhaps there are some things that we can be thankful for. Enjoy this special holiday edition of the Liberty Report. Happy Thanksgiving!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in today on the Liberty Report and on Thanksgiving Day.
Happy Thanksgiving Day to you Daniel.
Happy Thanksgiving Dr. Paul.
Well good.
You know the stories we hear tell us that the world's in bad shape so we have to sort of search around.
Maybe we can find some things that we can be thankful for.
But I think the stories about how desperate the world is sometimes are overblown for a reason.
You know, there might be a strategy there to make things look bad so governments can grow.
But I want to start off with quoting a former CIA director.
His name is Jack Devine.
And he claims this is the most dangerous time ever.
And I don't tend to agree with that.
I think there's a lot of danger and a lot of problems.
I see a lot of danger toward our liberties and danger from our government.
But as far as the danger around the world, you know, I remember the tail end of the Depression and World War II and the various wars, the Cold War and being in the military in the 1960s.
There was a lot of danger there.
So I don't, just offhand, without dissecting this, I tend to want to challenge this.
But what Devine says here is, I think this is the most dangerous time in terms of sustained violence.
I've never felt more uncomfortable than I do today.
Some percentage of the world is always either unbalanced or radicalized when you have a small group of people who are willing to lose their lives and kill anyone.
They can.
We're all vulnerable.
So he's very, very despondent about this and the great danger.
And my goal is to try to put this into perspective and then talk about some of the things that we should be grateful for.
Yeah, it is interesting.
I mean, I wonder when that has not been the case.
You think about the 80s in Central America with all the different death squads.
And you think about Angola, you think about all these civil wars that have been going on forever.
So it may be fashionable now to type up this fear, but it's hard to see the truth in that.
Yeah, because I think the strategy is to build a lot of fear.
You know, the Russians are coming, the Soviets are going to hit us, Saddam Hussein will bomb us.
And then those who like world government and they want to promote our aggressiveness and promote our empire, they can use this political propaganda to motivate the people.
And unfortunately, that seems to be the case in many ways.
But I just think compared to the things I mentioned in my lifetime, there was a lot of deep concern about it.
But it might be that maybe I'm right and the conditions aren't that bad, but people have lost a lot of confidence in themselves.
And we have established a system of government and dependency of perfect safety and perfect economic safety nets.
And therefore they see some problems that can be realistic and they're uncertain.
So therefore they're thrashing out and saying this is the most dangerous time in our history.
And that's not to downplay many of the dangers that we talk about, whether they're foreign policy or economic policies.
But it's not like people just should throw up their hands.
I mean, if this is the worst ever, what are they going to do about it?
Take more of our liberties.
But I think he may have a point inadvertently.
I mean, I think these are some of the most dangerous times ever.
But one of the things I was thinking about when we talked about this topic is there's such a huge danger, the ability to use mass media to really propagandize the masses, to motivate the masses to demand the government to protect them.
I think this may be unprecedented in history, the ability that they have.
And look, you know, here's an example of this Paris bombing.
Horrific.
We both think it's terrible and awful, and ISIS is evil.
But our old friend Paul Pilar, who we had speak at your office, who was a CIA counterterrorism expert, he wrote an excellent article in the national interest where he talked about the amateur-ish attacks in Paris.
And he said, you know, they basically didn't do anything that anyone else couldn't have done, which in a way is more frightening, but they're calling them the masterminds and get everyone terrified.
But he said, essentially, even in the stadium attack, they blew up one other person other than themselves.
He said, this is one of the consequences of a free society.
And along with that, what would it be like if they weren't getting any assistance from us?
What if we weren't subsidizing and helping them and getting buying their one of our allies buying the oil and these different things?
I mean, they would even be more inept.
So it's not like they're so powerful and they're going to control the world.
Better Understanding Needed00:06:38
It's that it means that if we're on the right track, the solution isn't that difficult.
Maybe just good common sense, non-intervention, and protecting people's liberties might do a lot in the move in solving some of our problems.
Well, if there's no way we can have, in Western society, if there's no way we can have total protection without becoming absolute gulag prison states, then exactly the answer is looking somewhere else, looking toward blowback, looking toward the causes of some of these things, which is what you've been saying all along.
Yeah, and I think there's some progress there, just like we have recently recognized the fact that there are more articles now showing that ISIS is just not, ISIS just popped out of the air and they're all-powerful, and here they're getting a lot of assistance from our allies and from our CIA and the whole mess.
So that should raise questions about just how powerful they really are.
But where I'm optimistic is I think in the progress of the understanding of personal liberty and the progress of the human race, which it's slow and tedious and there's ups and downs.
And I sort of used the date 1215 with the Magna Carta where a few people spoke out and said there should be some protection of civil liberties.
And that's been a lot of ups and downs.
And, you know, of course, we had our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution with an effort to emphasize personal liberty.
And there's been ups and downs and erosions.
But I think there's so much better understanding.
I mean, the world is a much closer place today and is, you know, because of travel and communications.
I think that there's reason to believe that ideas can spread more easily.
I think there's a better understanding of economic policy, although the changes haven't come.
I mean, free market economists and people who believed in liberty knew that communism was a failed system.
But we also, at least I believe strongly, that the economic system that we have today, interventionism and inflationism, a planned economy, is close to, well, not only is it corporatism, but it's approaching fascism.
And so we see all this, but we know the answers to this.
We have a better understanding on economic policy, a better understanding on monetary policy.
And people get discouraged and they say, well, yeah, but it takes a majority of the people to endorse it, which I challenge because it takes leadership.
It takes a small group of people.
Leadership in this country today has control over that propaganda machine.
So that's what we're up against.
But you know, there are so many things to be thankful for, too.
I remember I really enjoy the story that you often tell about when you first started looking into these ideas and you would send off to somewhere like FEE and you'd wait a few weeks for your book to come, you know.
And now we do have the technology at our disposal as well.
It's been a great equalizer for us against the state, against the totalitarians that we can do a show like this and it can be live every day.
We still have that freedom.
And everybody has access to more information and we have a tool where if we're confident enough and get enough support, we can send a message out.
And you know, the magnificent, exciting thing for me is, you know, if you talk to a few people, you don't know where it goes.
I mean, it spreads more so than ever.
Ideas were always that way, but more that way than ever.
And I tell the story of a recent visit, you know, travel at an airport.
I had two people stop for pictures, which is not too unusual, but they were two young black men.
They weren't together.
Separately, they came and they both came from Africa.
And they were all excited because of what they saw on the internet.
And they love the idea of liberty.
And I thought, well, this is magnificent.
So, yes, we should be thankful for the freedoms that we still have.
We should be thankful for the people who are interested in promoting these liberties and have a better understanding.
And we shouldn't be all that disturbed that we are witnessing the chaos of the end of an era.
But we also can be thankful that the end of an era that I lived through, and that was the Cold War when 1989 came, 1990, that Soviet system that had all these nuclear weapons and we were up against each other the day I was drafted was, you know, over the Cuban crisis.
We got by those.
Sometimes the solutions come much easier than we ever dreamed.
But I do believe that the only thing that can rectify all this is to have a growing number of people, especially young people who will be moving into positions of leadership, understanding what personal liberty is all about, what it means that liberty is an individual event, and that you have to follow a couple rules.
One, you have to reject the notion that anybody or any government can ever initiate violence against somebody else to have their way.
And boy, if they could just follow that rule.
And then it takes another thing that's less prevalent today among some of our candidates, and that's a little bit of tolerance and understanding.
So if we have killed 3 million Muslims over the past 15 years, we ought to recognize that and not think that all the violence comes from the other side.
We have to be really very honest with ourselves.
To me, that is what really counts, is honesty with ourselves and an honest approach to looking at the issues.
But once you come to the conclusion that you believe in individual liberty and do you believe in nonviolence and you believe in tolerating other people who have different views and different religious views, as long as they're not forcing their values on us, it would be a much better place and a much better world.
I think we're further advanced than we have ever been in the understanding of these issues, disregarding all the problems that are on the surface that motivate people to say that we live in the most dangerous times ever.
I think we live in one of the most exciting times in effort because all of a sudden, you know, peace may break out and liberty may reign.
I hope that certainly will be the case and we should be thankful that we are able to participate in this debate and spread this message.
I want to thank everybody for tuning into the Liberty Report and happy Thanksgiving.