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Dec. 29, 2016 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
22:35
Ask Ron Paul - Tariffs, Populism, Disinfo, And More...

A year-end edition of "Ask Ron Paul," where we turn to our viewers to pose the questions. We had a good crop of questions this time around! A year-end edition of "Ask Ron Paul," where we turn to our viewers to pose the questions. We had a good crop of questions this time around!

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Tariffs on American Shoes 00:04:50
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Today, we have a special program, a little bit different format.
Co-host, though, is exactly the same, and that's Daniel McAdams.
And Daniel, good to see you.
What do we have on our schedule today?
Well, it's good to see you, Dr. Paul.
You know, we often get so caught up in the events, and there's so much to cover that we forget how much maybe I hope you enjoy doing the Ask Ron Paul series.
And we haven't done it in a while.
And whenever we put out the hashtag, we get so many responses.
This time, I think it was better than ever.
We were just flooded with great questions, and we had a tough time picking a few.
We actually probably picked too many.
But so if you're ready to be in the hot seat, I will serve it up.
And I'm all set to go.
Okay.
Let's go with question number one for Dr. Paul.
Do you think jobs will be created if Trump imposes the tariff on American manufacturing or at least stimulate the economy?
This is from Jason.
Yeah, this is very interesting.
The way this is phrased, they're talking about tariffs on American products.
And you can do that theoretically.
You can interfere with American products in many ways.
But the truth is that usually when you refer to tariffs, that's putting a tax on things coming in.
The one time I think that is an example of putting on American products would be that some countries, and we did it with oil, that we prohibited exporting certain goods because we thought it should stay here instead of the market deciding which should be exported, which should come in.
That should all be decided at the marketplace.
But what has been in the news is tariffs and taxes and what Trump thinks about it.
And I think everybody knows about it because even those strong supporters of Trump are saying, oh, yeah, he's good here on taxes and regulation, but he's sort of wrong on protectionism and tariffs.
But they sort of think, well, maybe he won't do this.
But no, Trump has been very strong on saying he should have tariffs.
And they're more punitive type of tariffs.
Punish American countries, American companies that go overseas.
And I guess that would be a tariff on American products, bringing them back in.
So that's an import tariff.
And he also has said that if China doesn't do his bidding, he's going to put a 35% tax on Chinese products.
Well, the first thing is, is if you did have a tariff and they're legal under the Constitution, they should never be punitive in picking certain products and certain companies to punish.
It should be very uniform and very small, if at all.
But I think it will not create jobs, whether you're dealing with just the American companies that go overseas or the Chinese.
It seems like, oh, yes, this will immediately allow Americans to build products.
But let's say we put a high tariff on the importation of tennis shoes from China.
Instead of getting a pair of tennis shoes, and I may not know these prices right, put a tariff on tennis shoes that you could buy for $25.
Okay, we're going to manufacture them in the United States and pay $125.
Well, no, it's not going to work.
It sounds good, but they're not going to create the jobs.
What happens is those goods come in in a different way.
Then you'd have to go and say, well, we don't want tennis shoes coming from anybody.
So one interference leads to another, very disruptive.
And it's been very well known that tariffs lead to trade wars.
There's retaliations.
There's no net benefits from it.
And the biggest fear is when you get too aggressive with trade wars and tariffs and trying to get the upper hands, even with manipulation of currencies.
And that subject had come up a lot in the campaign.
We've got to punish them because they manipulate their currency.
The one thing is if you have free trade and you have the sound currency, you can't manipulate gold.
You know, gold is gold in every country, and that was why the gold standard works so well.
But when you have trouble in an economy, and people don't understand that it's a lack of a sound currency and lack of freedom in production, they say, well, what we need is a protective tariff, and we need to manipulate our currency, and that leads to trouble.
Right now, our exporters are going to face a problem because the dollar, as a consequence of interference in these past several months, the dollar is very strong, so it's going to be very hard on our exports, and that is not going to be easy to solve.
But basically, taxes are bad.
Taxes on imports are bad.
Taxes, if you do that, you're actually punishing our consumers.
And our consumers should have the right to buy products wherever they want.
Dollar Strength and Export Challenges 00:03:50
All right.
Now let's look at number two, if we can.
And this is a foreign policy question, and I think it's a very relevant one about our changing foreign policy.
Do you think America should rethink its relationship with Saudi Arabia?
The answer is yes.
We need to do that.
The sooner the better.
We should have awakened a long time ago.
But really, our illegitimate or our wrong association started with FDR during World War II.
And that was to treat Saudi differently because they had the oil.
And if we provided their national defense and took care of them and supplied them with weapons, they would supply us with oil and keep the price down.
But it led to problems.
And certainly the Congress, as I think it was universal resentment toward the Saudis, and they passed a law that said that the families of the people who were killed on 9-11 had the right to sue the government, which is an obvious assumption that Saudi Arabia had something to do with it.
A lot of people believe that.
The 9-11 Commission really never tells the truth.
And I don't think you should have any country where you give special privileges or hurt people.
And we've given a special privilege status for Saudi Arabia.
So it's not to turn around and say you're going to be our ultimate enemies.
We're never going to talk to you.
We should be friends with nations that want to be friends, but we should not go out of our way to capture them and put in our dictator as we have and end up with an empire.
But I think Saudi Arabia has given us a lot of grief.
And not only is there an association with 9-11, matter of fact, bin Laden said one of the reasons that al-Qaeda wanted to hit us was the fact that we had military weapons and military bases in the holy land of Saudi Arabia.
And that was one of the three incentives for hitting New York on 9-11.
So yes, this is just a very strong argument for neutrality and staying out of the business of all these countries, no entangling alliances, and we should change it.
And while we're at it, we probably ought to change our relationship with just about every country in the Middle East because we're either too friendly or too harmful.
Instead of taking a steady approach to saying, yes, we will be friends with all countries, willing to be friends, and we should trade with them, but we should not get involved in the entangling alliance and worrying about these border disputes.
And this is exactly what happened with the Kuwaiti invasion by Saddam Hussein, which we more or less gave a green light to.
And we've been over there ever since 1991.
And the relationship with Saudi Arabia has never been beneficial to us, only on the short run, that we may have gotten oil down a little bit cheaper than it should be, but it also has after effects from that, which are more harmful than when we get involved.
Once you get involved and you intervene at one point, you create two new problems and you have to intervene again.
So the best thing is to support the case of the founders and say, stay out of the internal affairs of other nations and stay out of entangling alliances.
The whole world would be better off if we did that.
Okay, let's move on to number three, and this is something that we've been discussing a lot on the show.
Libertarians and Populism Clash 00:13:41
How do libertarians deal with the Trump era, with the rise in populism?
How do we coexist?
Where do we criticize and where do we try to find some positives?
And so the next tweet we have that we're going to ask is from Carol's Little World.
How do you see the role of the libertarian in this new dawn of Trump populism?
Can both movements and sentiments coexist?
Well, I guess, conceivably, they can coexist, but they're contradictory.
True populism is not libertarianism.
And sometimes populism is a term that's used too loosely.
And if you have a desire to help the average person and the middle class, it's sort of populistic.
And I think libertarianism is populistic in that sense.
But true populism means that you believe in easy credit, artificially low interest rate, designed to help farmers and the small businessman.
You believe in printing money.
You don't believe in the Federal Reserve because the Federal Reserve manipulates it and gives it to the big bankers.
But a populist would have the Congress do it.
And popular vote, you would decide how much money there should be.
And it's not really an answer.
But populists are also free, are for protectionism and for tariff.
So in a way, Trump does express terms that are very closely related to true populism.
And it probably helped them a whole lot in the election because when people get hurt from interventionism that is designed to help the bankers and the corporations, then there is a backlash and then populism comes in.
But if you're looking for libertarianism, it's going to be a challenge.
There will be some things that Trump will say that wouldn't be truly populism, but he might want to reduce regulations and lower taxes, which would be beneficial to everyone.
So libertarians should get along fine with that.
But the one real mixed bag would be on foreign policy.
Populists generally stay away from foreign entanglements.
And Trump has said things that sound like that is true.
He's had a more balanced, a reasonable approach dealing with Russia, but not with Iran and not with China.
So it's such a mixed bag.
So libertarians have a lot of work to do to try to sort this out.
When he's supporting a libertarian position, of course, we want to support him.
But if he's supporting something which is intervention, but just designed, instead of supporting this group, the rich group, we're going to have an intervention that's going to pass out the money to the poor people.
What we want is the market to work.
And that means we have to create an environment, an environment where the voluntarism of the marketplace works.
You have a sound currency, you have very limited government, freedom is the real issue, and that staying out of the internal affairs of other nations, that is what we want to do.
But they're not, in some places, they're totally incompatible.
Libertarianism, incompatible with populism.
At other times, there will be some overlap.
Just as libertarianism, there's an overlap with progressivism.
Progressives sometimes can be better on civil liberties than the average Democrat or the average Republican.
So under those circumstances, you have to sort it out.
That is why the libertarian message is so important because you can put it together.
It can be concrete.
The basic principle is not complicated.
It's all based on this promise and assumption that people cannot initiate violence against other people to have their way.
And governments can't do it for an individual or for a group.
Nonviolence, non-aggression, and when you apply that consistently, you have a society built up on liberty.
And you don't get into all these big discussions about who gets taxed and who gets the bonuses, who gets the bailouts.
And that leads to trouble.
It usually leads to a period of time where debt is monstrous and the debt brings us down.
And populism, generally, they are not good on worrying about the debt.
And I think that will be the case with the next administration because there are a lot of plans in the pipeline to spend a lot of money.
And that will be a job of not only the libertarians to check after and look after, but also for the constitutional conservatives that also believe that debt is a great burden.
Well, the next question is something that we've talked about a lot.
As a matter of fact, you talked about it in a letter you wrote to our supporters for the Institute just this past week.
And this is this Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act.
It was snuck into the NDAA, which is where they put all the bad stuff.
For sure.
And what it does is it creates a unified government group across CIA, FBI, and others to counter what it calls foreign propaganda.
And we know from the Washington Post article in November that they consider shows like ours, like the work that the Institute does, anything that challenges U.S. foreign policy as foreign propaganda, no matter if you have any connection with foreigners.
So the next tweet deals with this.
I think it's very timely and important.
What's the best way for independent media to proceed freely with the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act?
Well, it's a very great challenge because we don't know how hard they're going to come down on us.
The only thing we can do is present the truth.
Truth does win out in the end, but this is very difficult and very, very dangerous.
This is a direct attack.
There's a lot of indirect attacks on the First Amendment, but this is a direct attack on it.
And this whole principle of the Ministry of Truth is coming in.
I see this as canceling out this whole notion that you can't use prior restraint to check people who are going to put out information.
They say, well, we're stopping propaganda.
We're going to stop this fake news.
Who's going to stop the fake news and the propaganda?
The government?
And the politicians?
They're the ones who propagate all this.
They're the worst producers of fake news.
And they're going to be in charge of watching us.
And because we take a policy and make a position and say that it's favorable toward one country versus the other.
And therefore, we've interfered because neutrality was a benefit to somebody.
If we're invading a country and we take the position that we shouldn't be invading that country, then we've helped that country.
So therefore, we're a patsy for them.
In our case, what they're saying is, because and it's similar to what Trump takes too, you know, is that we should treat Russia a little bit differently, and we shouldn't look for a war with Russia.
But there are some of these people in the Senate who want to crack down on us.
This is where this bill, I think, originated.
They want to crack down on us and punish us for it.
And that to me is a vicious attack on the First Amendment.
It means that they're going to permit prior restraint.
And I think that this NDAA and the other things, the type of arrests that were legalized a few years ago, and people recognize this without any charges made and even assassinations.
We're moving in the wrong direction.
This is very, very serious.
And the best we can do is fight for the freedom of the internet.
I'm just hoping that the people who are smarter than the people in government can come up with an internet service that is, you know, secretive enough where they can't intrude and we can compensate for it.
But now, with the government being in collusion with some of the social networks, it's going to get pretty hard because they do watch not every paragraph or every story or every headline.
They look at every word.
And if this particular word pops up, they have to check on us and find out what's going on.
So, and this was done at midnight, just the way they passed the Federal Reserve Act.
Quietly pass it through.
Nobody there, stuck in a major bill like this, stuck on the defense budget, over $600 billion.
It's typically the way things work.
And if you look at the title of this, oh, we're going to stop disinformation and we're going to counter the propaganda, the false propaganda.
And they're doing exactly the opposite.
They're stopping the truth in the pretense that they're going to stop fake news.
This is what they're talking about is fake news themselves.
And the people need to wake up and really curtail the power of our government, the intrusion of our government in our privacy, whether it's our internet services or whether we write.
But this piece of legislation is going to prove to be a disaster.
Let's hope that our new administration will have the guts to get it repealed.
Okay, well, we're going to do one more, and hopefully, we'll end on a happier note.
But we've got to get the medicine with the sugars.
So, the last one I like a lot.
This is from David Robinson.
What gives you hope for America in 2017?
Well, you know, my immediate reaction right now is: I hope I can find something here.
But I am an optimist, and I work hard at it.
Sometimes it's easier than others, as bad as things are.
You know, if you go back to the Civil War and World War I and World War II, there was a tremendous amount of restraint on our freedom of speech.
People were put in prison for speaking out.
You couldn't speak out against the war.
So, yes, things are bad.
The one thing that is worse right now is that we weren't in a war that was, we're not in a war that back then they expected to end.
There was a period of time, World War I, and then they were able to back off a little bit.
World War II, they were able to back off a little bit.
But now, we're in perpetual war.
And it wasn't even declared, so they don't know who the enemy is exactly.
It changes all the time, and we know it's going to last for a long time.
So this is why it's more difficult.
But I do believe that things have been very bad in the past, and we've overcome them.
I do believe that the internet, as much as we're threatened by putting information out, I think that we are reaching a lot of people.
Even with our little report now, we have over 60,000 people who go to YouTube to watch our program.
And they haven't knocked on our doors.
The Washington Post threatens us, and the New York Times doesn't like us.
But sometimes that news helps us.
You know, that news gets out that the right people are attacking us to get people to say, well, maybe we're going to get the real truth, the Ron Paul Liberty Report, and therefore it's a benefit.
So there are others who do even a much bigger job than we do.
So the more, the merrier.
But the thing that I try to concentrate on is telling the truth, putting the truth out there, and truth wins out in the end.
Ideas are powerful.
They can't stop ideas.
Even if you didn't have the internet, in the old days without internet, ideas were very, very powerful.
And even when they had dictators throughout the world, dictators eventually fell if they didn't have the consent, some type of consent by the people.
So there's always room for that.
And I think today, especially with young people, in spite of the supporters that flock to Bernie Sanders, there are still a lot of individuals.
Maybe the numbers are smaller, but they are very intent on studying about liberty.
They're intent on understanding what the non-aggression principle is all about.
And their numbers are greater.
There's more in the universities now than there has been in a long time.
And this is in spite of the problems of the university.
So the internet is still available, but we still have to work real hard to protect that.
But the main thing is for all of us to understand that there's a powerful message in liberty.
It's a new message.
It hasn't been along for thousands of years.
It's been developed over the last thousand years.
And it's a concrete idea.
And it has its ups and downs.
I think the idea of liberty in this last hundred years has been diminished.
But there's no reason in the world that the chaos that we're facing and the problems we're going to face in the next few years won't elicit even more interest and a desire to understand what liberty is all about and why America was great and why now we need something.
And it's based really, for my understanding, it's based on the principle of liberty, the idea of liberty.
You can't stop it.
And it's alive and well.
So when there's a day of, when we get discouraged about it and we see some of this legislation, we just have to work harder and try to introduce somebody else to these principles so that they will go and study and spread the message.
And it's an idea whose time has come.
So for that reason, I am optimistic for 2017.
I'm also optimistic for the future of liberty as long as we do our job.
I do want to thank everybody for tuning into the Liberty Report.
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