Myth-Busters: Making America Great By Abolishing Liberty?
Presidential candidates and pundits on TV appear to be in a race to abolish as much liberty as they can. If America is to be great again, we need to go in the other direction! Ron Paul takes a stand for freedom in this latest edition of Myth-Busters!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Presidential candidates and pundits on TV appear to be in a race to abolish as much liberty as they can. If America is to be great again, we need to go in the other direction! Ron Paul takes a stand for freedom in this latest edition of Myth-Busters!
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Presidential candidates and pundits on TV appear to be in a race to abolish as much liberty as they can. If America is to be great again, we need to go in the other direction! Ron Paul takes a stand for freedom in this latest edition of Myth-Busters!
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 we do our program on myth busters.
And with me will be Chris Rossini, who is the editor of the Ron Paul LibertyReport.com.
Chris, good to be with you today.
Great to be with you again, Dr. Paul.
Thank you.
Well, good.
I know it's never been difficult for you to find some myths that are existing out there, inconsistencies, and the nonsense that goes on in politics.
But what kind of things have you found for us today to talk about?
Yes, Dr. Paul, let's start off with the elephant in a room.
It will do us no good to tiptoe around it.
Donald Trump is grabbing all the headlines this week with his plan to make America great again.
And apparently he wants to do so by abolishing a lot of liberties.
Many people who are viewing this have probably already heard his statement on a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.
That's a very important topic to address.
And he also threw this one in there this week, which may have is not as well known as the first one.
He says, we got to maybe do something with the internet.
We're losing a lot of people because of the internet.
We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's happening.
We have to talk to them about maybe in certain areas closing the internet up in some ways.
Somebody will say, oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.
These are foolish people.
Dr. Paul, what do you think?
Well, my first thoughts on this is that Donald Trump does not sound like a libertarian.
He sounds like an authoritarian, and I think most people are realizing it.
But the sad part is there's a lot of people looking for an authoritarian to be told what to do and take care of them, whether it's economics or whatever.
They want to be coddled, cradled to grave.
And when you run out of money, people get frightened and people are scared.
They're afraid that the terrorists are coming and everybody's going to suffer economically.
So you have to have government, you have to have safety nets, and he's the guy that can fix it.
But dealing with the Muslim quote, most people thought, well, this is over the top.
This will be damaging because it really challenges the basic concept of civil liberties and generally speaking, what America at least pretends to be for.
But it turns out, though, that he's dealing with this in the wrong way.
Because you can't say, well, why is he even talking about there is no danger?
Anybody can come here and they're all going to be safe and the Second Amendment will protect us so we don't even have to pay attention to our borders.
I don't think that's going to sell very well.
But what I could suggest is that the danger that he gets into is the challenge to what the concept of liberty is.
Because if there is a danger for somebody to come to this country and that individual happens to be a Muslim or of the Islamic faith, and then he says, well, we have to ban all Muslims.
So he does it in a collective way.
I've always criticized this whole idea that liberty is something that belongs to a group.
When we had slavery, we punish people.
Or Jim Crow laws, we punish people because they were in a group.
And then we came along and the correction was always, well, we give benefits to the group.
But liberty is individual and it should be individual.
So you look for violent people.
You don't look and say, well, what group did this violent person belong to?
And therefore, we have to deal something, do something about that group, and take away their liberties.
And that, of course, is at fault.
It's sort of like if guns cause problems and somebody uses a gun illegally and kills somebody, what we have to do is punish everybody that has a gun because they belong to the group of a gun ownership, which makes no sense whatsoever.
But the same way with his language, you know, when it comes to civil liberties and the internet, is he still doesn't look at the concept of liberty being something individual, and that means you have to protect privacy.
But his language and his approach and his xenophobia means that he scares, he wants to scare people.
But I've always maintained that if you understood what libertarianism was all about and individualism all about, it brings people together automatically.
Because as long as you accept the principle of nonviolence and non-aggression, everybody who wants their own way to do what they want with their liberties economically and socially should all be for liberty.
And so that means that we should galvanize people and bring people together of all the groups.
And it's unifying.
But exactly the opposite is happening.
I think Donald Trump, you know, he gets a lot of attention for it, and the American people think this is it.
You just demagogue it, blame it on a group of people, and it's divisive.
And I don't like divisiveness, and I think that the true libertarian society brings people together if they truly understand it.
I think it's more popular now than ever.
But we have a way to go to convince the majority of the American people that libertarianism and belief in personal liberty and property rights.
We have ways to go to convince enough people to once again strive for a society that can follow those rules because I at least believe sincerely that we would have a lot more peace and prosperity under those conditions.
Yes, we do have a lot of work ahead of us, and Donald Trump sure has a lot of opponents.
And many of those opponents, their ideas, they don't have a sound philosophy and they're not guided by strong ideas like the strong ideas of liberty and individual freedom.
So what ends up happening is they resort to name-calling, which is a very weak way to argue any position.
And here's a quote from Lindsey Graham, and he goes on a name-calling tirade of Donald Trump.
And he says, You know how to make America great again?
Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.
He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.
He doesn't represent my party.
He doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear uniform are fighting for.
And he's the ISIL man of the year.
What do you think, Dr. Paul?
Well, he also goes on to say that Donald Trump, because of the attitude that you just expressed, he provokes Islam to be radical.
And he's at fault.
You know, if we follow Donald Trump, they're going to react poorly to a tough position like Donald Trump has.
And I got to think: who's saying this?
You know, in a way, Graham is right about that.
Some of the things that Trump is saying, you know, that we're going to keep all Muslims out of our country.
Yeah, that's just more provocation.
You know, they're provoking people.
And yet at the same time, Graham is the arch neoconservative who for decades now has been preaching, you know, exactly the foreign policy that provoked Islam.
So I found it so ironic that he can lecture Donald Trump on the danger of his rhetoric because he's actually going to make conditions worse and antagonize Islam and some of the radicals.
And I think a much more consistent position should be, of course, is to change our foreign policy and not accept Graham's attitude on how we treat him.
And actually, you know, look at this in a serious way to show that Graham lecturing Trump on his attitude because it might antagonize Islam.
I mean, that is a far stretch.
It's our foreign policy intervention that is the problem.
And it's not the fact that all of a sudden Donald Trump started saying things that are over the top, but really coincide with the very problems that Graham and John McCain have been stirring up for a couple decades.
Right.
The Tax Battle Overview00:05:44
Let's move on next to some government desperation.
Now, we all know the financial condition of our government is beyond pathetic with the trillions in debt and the liabilities that they can't possibly pay.
So when government gets into this position, they look for more ways, as if they haven't found them already, to tax us.
Hillary Clinton now wants to hit the corporations with what she calls an exit tax for companies that merge with other companies that are located overseas.
And she claims that it's to escape U.S. taxes.
Hillary says, I want the Treasury Department to do everything it can to stop that kind of behavior and call it for what it is, gaming the tax system.
Yes, and it's interesting that liberals, progressives, and people who follow economists like Paul Krugman, deficits don't matter.
It doesn't hurt, and debt is not a problem, and the Federal Reserve is not a problem, except they'll use debt as a reason to justify higher taxation.
Well, if deficits really don't matter, why worry about collecting taxes?
But the other thing that she fails to do is, yes, it's probably true.
There's probably some taxes taken away from our government because our taxes are too high and we ruin the environment and we send people looking around for a better environment.
So this has happened.
But she doesn't say, well, maybe let's look at our tax system compared to others.
Maybe there are other countries where the capital gains tax is 10% or 12% instead of 35%.
Maybe that's the reason.
They never think in that terms.
It's always a use, it's always a motive to use government to put more controls and tax business people.
This subject in a way came up during the campaign when I made the statement that border protection and building walls was dangerous because someday it would help be used to keep us in rather than just keeping people out.
Matter of fact, today somebody had a statement recently that more people are going back to Mexico than they're coming in.
But there are Americans who want to leave for various reasons and there's been a definition of when does a free country no longer be free and that is when you can't leave your own country when you please and take your own money with you.
And so we're getting closer and closer to that and that's part of it is control.
And when a country gets into severe financial trouble, capital leaves.
So in a way, this is capital leaving our country.
And right now, China is experiencing some financial problems.
And therefore, capital leaves the country.
So you have to look at the problems that we have and the economic problems that can be corrected with policy changes rather than just saying, tax them, that'll solve the problem.
We'll have enough money to do whatever we want.
Finally, Dr. Paul, we're going to deal with a case of empire denial here.
For those who are watching, we all know and many Americans know that there are U.S. troops all over the world.
And we all know that it costs us a fortune to run this empire.
And yet, Charles Krauthammer is able to go on Fox and say in a straight face, it's the new reality of living in America when we have spent seven years abdicating our role in the Middle East.
How can he possibly think something like that, though?
Well, from his viewpoint and from his mistaken viewpoint, is that he's disappointed that we haven't done a whole lot more.
And he wants us to be the policemen of the world.
And some of that police activity and warmongering backed off a little bit under Obama.
Less military people, for instance, have been killed.
Our foreign policy still is in shambles.
But for him to say this was a disaster in the seven years because Obama, you know, wouldn't be neoconish enough to go and expand it, you know, he is in denial of what is happening.
But what about how long has this been going on?
It's been going on really since the early 1990s.
Our involvement overseas has been carried out by Republicans and Democrats, by the military industrial complex, our banking interests.
They all promote this.
And regardless of who is in Washington, in the executive branch or the congressional branch, they're all in favor of this.
But it takes a bit of audacity for him to say that we have shirked our responsibility as if the world is coming apart because we haven't had more troops and been more involved and become more aggressive.
And we allow some countries to exert themselves and say, we're sick and tired of you occupying our country, putting sanctions on our country and whatever.
This is truly a battle.
It's a battle between the neoconservatives and the non-interventionists.
Hopefully we as the non-interventionists win the battle and I know a growing number of Americans are in support of that viewpoint.
I want to thank everybody and I thank you, Chris, for joining us today.
Thank you again, Dr. Paul.
Good.
And we'll be back again with a Liberty report soon.