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Nov. 2, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
15:30
End The Fed? ... Libertarian Republicans? ... #AskRonPaul

You ask...Ron Paul answers. Thanks for participating in another great edition of #AskRonPaul

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Time Text
Gold Standard Debate 00:10:41
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host, as usual.
But Daniel, I understand we have something a little bit different today.
Yeah, we do indeed.
Occasionally, we like to do a show we call Ask Ron Paul.
We appreciate our viewers.
You know, our viewers help make the show, our subscribers.
And so occasionally we'll do something where we'll have them ask you questions.
And we put out a tweet earlier today, Ask Ron Paul, and we got some pretty good questions.
So I'm afraid today you're going to be in the hot seat.
Uh-oh, I'll try to do my best.
Easy for me today.
You'll be in the hot seat.
First question comes from Adam Rothstein.
Do you think the Republican Party will eventually evolve to become more libertarian?
Well, let's hope so, but I'm not going to make any bold predictions.
If this country is to change for the better, that's what has to happen.
But people shouldn't think about changing the Republican Party, and I mentioned this a lot in the presidential campaign.
If we have a true revolution and change for the better, it won't involve just the Republican Party.
The downside of what happened to us in the last hundred years, the progressive influence, from the beginning of the last century, we developed an affinity for income taxes and Federal Reserve system and intervention in our personal lives and certainly intervention in the economic lives.
And Nixon stated it clearly.
We're all Keynesians now.
And it involved Republicans and Democrats because that was a prevailing attitude.
So I never looked at it that, boy, if we could just make the Republican Party more libertarian, because I see things in terms of ideas.
And if a country accepts certain principles and ideas, and at one time we accepted the basic principle of individual liberty in our early history.
So if that occurs, then those ideas will infiltrate and influence everybody.
It will influence the Republican Party, the Democrat Party.
It would influence the professors in the universities.
Every place would have a different attitude.
Today, we're seeing the consequence of the encroachment of an authoritarian system that's been around for over 100 years.
And it needs to be changed, will be changed.
The question is, is can we win and move everybody in the directions of libertarianism and less government?
I happen to work on the assumption that we certainly have a chance, and we certainly don't have a chance if we don't try.
And right now, quite frankly, I'm more optimistic about that than saying, oh, you know what?
If we just elect a few more good people and put them in the Republican Party, the Republican Party will be libertarian.
They'll be able to stand up to the statism that they have to fight.
I think that's the wrong approach.
Ultimately, though, I was in politics for a long time.
I think the answer is changing the country to become more libertarian.
Then the Republican Party will be more libertarian as well as the Democrats.
Good.
All right.
Let's move on to number two.
If we can have the second one, this is from Pat Ryan.
Pat asks, what is the best process to end the Fed?
Should it be gradual or sudden?
This is a good question, and it can vary.
We have a little experience in our history of ending central banks.
We had a first national bank and a second national bank, each lasting 20 years in our early history, and they were ended suddenly, but they weren't as intrusive.
They didn't run the economy.
They didn't fix day-to-day interest rates.
But Jefferson ended the first central, the first national bank, and Jackson ended the second one.
And then, of course, we had the abuse of the system with the Civil War, with Lincoln Getting off the gold standard and allowing the greenbacks to be printed.
And with the chaos of the Civil War and the bad economy following this, they decided there still was a belief, a prevailing attitude still existed, that you had to have gold backing the money.
So in 1875, they passed a bill which was called the Resumption Act.
And it was very smooth.
For three years, they gradually quit printing greenbacks.
They spent less money.
They balanced the budget more so.
And there was confidence placed in believing what governments would say.
And when in 1878, when the actual conversion from paper money to gold was there, which reintroduced the gold standard, it came pretty smoothly and it was not a big event.
Those conditions don't exist today because the Federal Reserve has become the main engine of economic planning, the engine of inflationism, and sets the condition for all the problems that we face because the system is so dependent on the Fed, whether it's the welfare state or whether it's the warfare state, and all the financial markets are very dependent on the Federal Reserve.
So I would say that it's very unlikely, and I do not advise it saying, if I had the keys, just take it and close the doors and it's over and done with, like they did in the past.
It would not be acceptable.
The person that did that would probably have a shorter life than otherwise.
But it's always going to be difficult.
So I would say that you can't close it down until you get rid of some of the dependency on the Federal Reserve.
And my argument here was instead of saying that we will end the Federal Reserve on day certain, is that to say that what we do, we should have a transition period where we phase out the spending.
But what we could have are the legalization of competing currencies.
And that notion has been growing.
Matter of fact, it has introduced the notion: could it be possible that the cryptocurrencies may facilitate this?
And there's still a lot of questions out.
I still have questions about it, whether that will work because I have spent a lifetime thinking about sun money being something that cannot be created out of thin air, and that means the precious metals.
And the only thing I have going for me on that is 6,000 years of history.
But that doesn't mean that you should be locked into saying that nothing else could facilitate.
So the cryptocurrencies may help, but I do believe in competing currencies.
And if there is a competition between private fiat and gold and silver backing, you know, I let it happen.
The main rule is that you cannot have permit fraud.
Our government has brought us to the doorstep of bankruptcy with the fiat currency and debt and fraud because they promise things and they defraud the money and they debase the currency, and that is all based on fraud.
So I would argue the case that you should work for a gradual transition.
But I also work on the assumption it probably is not going to work that way.
Yeah, what I spoke about was, in a way, theoretical and hoping that we could come to our senses.
But the odds of us gradually reducing spending and doing what we did in 1875, very, very slim chance of that happening.
So I think the Fed will end dramatically.
And what will happen is they will lose whether the doors are totally closed, but they will have to change their opinion and their power to regulate the supply of money and regulate from minute to minute the currency exchange rates as well as interest rates.
That will have to end.
You could do that with a remnant of the central bank existing, but you certainly would have to get the intellectual support for this, and the financial community would have to agree to it.
Now, if nothing like that is done and it ends badly and it just collapses, that would be the collapse of the dollar.
That would be the most dangerous thing to do.
So, the sudden ending with a financial crisis and the collapse of the dollar is the thing that we should try our best to avoid.
But quite frankly, it's a potential that I sort of dread.
We're not on the doorstep of that happening, but it could come up under the conditions that we exist today.
Because what holds the conditions together are so often our subjective thinking about, oh, yeah, we can trust it.
We're rich, we're the powerhouse of the world, and we have the military, so nothing is going to destroy the great empire of America.
Well, empires come to an end, and when they do, their currency usually goes with it.
So, I spend my time trying to avoid the catastrophic end of a system like this.
Although I want it to end, it could be done more smoothly.
And, of course, I think the odds of that happening are pretty slim.
All right, that was a good history lesson, too.
Let's look at number three and see what we have here.
This is from David Vescuso.
Is the return to the gold standard inevitable after the next financial panic?
It's pretty similar to the last one, but it's kind of builds on what the previous one was.
I work on the assumption that yes, gold will return only because that is what has happened throughout history.
When you want to restore confidence, whether it was at the time of the Roman Empire on up, when confidence was lost by debasing the currency, back then they didn't have computers, but they diluted the metal and they clipped coins and did all these things.
But the only way you could restore confidence was to go to the metals and say the currency is redeemable in the metals.
So, I think it will be.
I don't think that even the participation in cryptocurrencies, if that exists, I do not believe that it will eliminate the need for something of real value to serve as the ultimate money.
The more chaotic it is, the more the metals will be required.
So, but it's not inevitable that our government will come to its senses and all of a sudden have a new gold standard.
But if the market's allowed to make this decision, they will make use of something of real value.
And of course, throughout history, other things have been used too.
Even in our country, they've used tobacco and other things as money as a form of medium of exchange.
But ultimately, though, I believe there will be the restoration and the emphasis put on the use of gold.
The Gold Standard Debate 00:03:21
Just think, gold was outlawed in 1933, and up until 1975, we weren't even allowed to own gold.
So, as bad as things are, we've made some progress, you know.
Yeah, and there's an identification that the feds are out of control because when they took over, gold was $20 an ounce, and now it's, of course, near $1,300 a month, $1,300 an ounce, and therefore, you know, gold will return.
How it's going to happen, I don't think anybody can tell us exactly how that's going to happen.
All right, we're moving on to number four now.
If we can have a look at it, fourth question comes from the Verg podcast.
Back to politics with instant access to facts via the internet.
Why do people still tend to re-elect crony politicians to office?
Well, you know, the system is cronyism.
The system is interventionism.
And for people to manage or participate or benefit or satisfy their customers, the voters, they have to be a crony.
And it is the system that is bad.
Some people think that we have to just modify our elections and change our elections and keep these bad people out.
It's not quite so simple.
The elections are rigged in many ways, but the whole problem is the system that we have.
It's too big.
You have to change the role for government if you don't want any cronyism involved.
And this is the whole trouble.
Now, under today's circumstances, as bad as it is, if you had individuals that were only elected with character and honesty and want to do the right thing, you know, you could have a transition workout, but it's not going to happen.
You can get a few of us to go up there and sound the alarms, but no, I don't think the battle was in Washington, D.C. Cronyism is going to exist because that's the way it operates.
And the lobbyists are in charge, and they're foreign lobbyists, people who lobby for foreign governments.
They're financial lobbyists.
They're military industrialist complex lobbyists.
There's so few lobbying for liberty.
And that's where the problem is.
So, yes, cronyism exists.
It's going to continue to exist until the people decide and understand.
You know, there is a different option.
And this debate went on with the founders.
And the founders were, I'm amazed at how well informed they were about history and what liberty was all about and what individual rights meant and what natural rights meant.
And we need a restoration of interest that I think is happening.
And a lot of young people I may are fascinated with this.
And this system is going to come down.
So there's going to be an opportunity for us to refresh ourselves and look toward a system designed to protect liberty and just throw all the cronyism will end when the people no longer demand it.
But just think how many people depend on the welfare warfare state, the majority of the American people.
That's where the problem is, the dependency on the cronyism.
And that's why cronyism is a symptom rather than the cause.
Restoration of Interest 00:01:16
All right.
Well, that was a pretty good four rounds.
We have a bonus round for you.
And this is a little more lighthearted, but it's a good question anyway.
People wonder this.
If we have the final one, what's your favorite band musician?
Just some libertarian is asking.
What music do you like?
Well, I'm so old-fashioned, they might not be interested.
But when I'm in my car and I have my satellite radio, I keep a station on where I listen to Frank Sinatra.
And I find it fascinating, you know, to listen to him.
But I haven't adapted to some of the more things that for me comes across as more noise than singing.
I like the real singing and the era with Frank Sinatra and Ben Crosby.
They were good songs.
And one thing that proves my point is they last a long time.
They're still singing.
And I predict that some of those songs will be sung 10, 20, 30 years from now.
But that is my brief take on my favorite singer.
All right.
Well, that was a lot of fun.
We always enjoyed it.
Enjoy doing the show.
And ask Ron Paul, and we'll do it again.
I'd like to thank our viewers for watching the show, for sending in your questions, for interacting, for your comments.
Dr. Paul and I both appreciate it.
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