Welcome to another episode of #AskRonPaul, where Liberty Report Host Ron Paul answers viewer questions.... Welcome to another episode of #AskRonPaul, where Liberty Report Host Ron Paul answers viewer questions.... Welcome to another episode of #AskRonPaul, where Liberty Report Host Ron Paul answers viewer questions....
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Why Free Trade Isn't Frightening
00:11:35
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| Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. | |
| With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host Daniel. | |
| Good to see you. | |
| How are you this morning Dr. Paul? | |
| I'm doing very well and looking forward to our program. | |
| What is in store today? | |
| Well you're back on the hot seat today, Dr. Paul. | |
| And you know, we really appreciate our viewers. | |
| We enjoy our viewers and our viewers are actually during the live show very active in commenting, some of them more active than maybe they should be. | |
| Challenging at times. | |
| Challenging at times. | |
| So we also, we like to occasionally do Ask Ron Paul. | |
| And this is where our audience can ask you questions, put you in the hot seat. | |
| It's an easy day for me. | |
| I don't have to think, just read. | |
| But it's kind of a fun thing, and I think our viewers appreciate it. | |
| So why don't we just go ahead and go to the first question? | |
| This is from Principled Libertarian Conservative. | |
| Which is the immediate first step we should take? | |
| Reduce the national debt or reduce government income from taxation? | |
| Well, the simple answer is that is reduce the income. | |
| But that entails the bigger picture, and that is to solve the problem that he's alluding to, is we have to reduce the size and scope of government. | |
| Because if you reduce the income, which some people can do or will do, and I probably would always vote to reduce the income, that it doesn't solve the problem unless you talk about how much government is spending. | |
| So spending is the tax that I deal with, because once the government spends, they're revealing to the representatives in Washington what they want. | |
| And majority of Americans still want stuff because they've come to believe that they have a right to it. | |
| And everybody's supposed to, other people are supposed to take care of their needs, whether it's education, medical care, policing the world, you know, on and on. | |
| So they do this. | |
| So in order to solve the problem, the dilemma that he describes in this memo, this request, is what should the role of government be? | |
| If the role of government is to provide the welfare system to all the people that need it, because then what happens? | |
| You have more and more people need it because it undermines the system and it keeps snowballing. | |
| And if we continue to believe, as so many, after listening to the speech the other night, the members of Congress love militarism. | |
| And that means the policy that we are involved with and the spending and militarism and the big operation and building weapons. | |
| So if that's not repealed, we can't deal with that problem. | |
| But he was asking, he was pointing what you do immediately. | |
| I would say cut the revenues, which means the debt may go up. | |
| But then you say, well, wouldn't that be worse? | |
| And I say, no, maybe they will wise up and cut the spending. | |
| But the problem isn't not enough taxes. | |
| The problem is too much spending. | |
| So if you say, well, let's cut the deficit or do something else, that doesn't solve the problem. | |
| You have to think, what should the role of government be in a free society? | |
| It should be very, very limited, as local as possible. | |
| It should be there to protect our freedoms and our properties and our civil liberties and not to be involved in the police state and not to be involved in the drug war and foreign wars and all the welfarism. | |
| Under those conditions, you could deal with it. | |
| But the debt, to solve the total problem, you'd want to get rid of the debt. | |
| But they're not going to reduce the debt. | |
| It's not in the cards. | |
| But the debt will be reduced. | |
| And when countries spend way beyond their main, the debt eventually gets liquidated. | |
| It's constantly being liquidated to a degree, and that comes from inflation. | |
| Decrease the real debt by devaluing the dollar. | |
| And that goes along pretty well for a long time. | |
| And if you have the reserve currency, it lasts longer than it really deserved. | |
| But eventually, you know, the debt is liquidated because they could, you know, if the dollar is worth 50 cents on the dollar, you just reduce the deficit or the debt by 50%. | |
| So it's always back to this whole thing: spending, spending, spending. | |
| What should the role of government be? | |
| A good start, like I like to say, is why don't we have only people in Washington that actually believe and understand what the Constitution says. | |
| But so far, the Constitution has come up short. | |
| And it has some flaws in and has had flaws in the Constitution, but the real flaws are in the people. | |
| And the founders described that it only works if you have a moral people. | |
| And I think we've drifted a long way from that because depending on other people and forcing the government to take care of oneself, that is not the proper function of government and it's not proper, it's not a moral system that we have. | |
| So I hope this answered his question: decrease the size of government. | |
| I don't think he'll argue with that. | |
| Yeah, I don't think so either. | |
| Now we're going on to number two, and this is from our friends south of the border. | |
| I cannot, native, nativo Mexicano. | |
| Do you support NAFTA? | |
| Do you think NAFTA is part of the free market? | |
| And then there's some nice things, greetings from a United Mexican state citizen. | |
| So NAFTA, is it free market? | |
| NAFTA is not free market. | |
| I wasn't in Congress when they voted on it, but in my little bit of way outside of Congress, it was in between the times I was in Washington, that it was promoting managed trade, managed trade, but it was so-called designed to lower tariffs. | |
| So we have some libertarian conservatives say, oh, NAFTA is there to lower tariffs and regulate world trade by lowering tariffs, and they go along with that. | |
| But there's a little bit of that, but it's also done for specific people. | |
| The larger the company is, the more they can participate in this managed trade. | |
| So NAFTA and WTO is managing trade. | |
| And usually the very wealthy countries are the one that benefits from managed trade. | |
| And it's not free trade. | |
| But what happens so often is people who oppose NAFTA and WTO, you know, they won't say they're for free trade. | |
| They'll come against free trade, but then they'll come up for a populist approach of protectionism. | |
| And although NAFTA is involved in protectionism, because that's where you go, if somebody puts a tariff on you, you go back and you argue the case at NAFTA or WTO to get you permission to put on your own tariff. | |
| So it's NAFTA is managed trade. | |
| It doesn't, you know, it could allow free trade if you didn't have NAFTA. | |
| But unfortunately, too often what is filled in this is just sort of protectionism by Congress, you know, designed to protect certain companies. | |
| And once again, it becomes a special legislation for individuals. | |
| So what we want is free trade, and people cringe at that, but it's a moral issue for me. | |
| People ought to have a right to spend their money where they want. | |
| And trade wars break out, which could happen, and populism isn't the same as free trade. | |
| You have to deal with monetary issues on this too, because if you have the reserve currency, you export the money and buy stuff cheap. | |
| Your businesses go overseas. | |
| So with all this effort recently with the tax code, it isn't the final solution As long as we can print cheap money and buy it overseas, you know, we have a larger foreign debt. | |
| But eventually, and I think we're getting closer to that, the value of the dollar and the foreign debt will sort of curtail all this. | |
| And that's why it would be very important for us and others to continue to try to explain to people they shouldn't be frightened about free trade. | |
| You shouldn't be frightened of liberty. | |
| You shouldn't be frightened about liberty anymore about your personal habits and your religious habits than you should on economic matters. | |
| But for some reason, they get all mixed up. | |
| Yeah, you have to regulate your personal habits, but not the market, not regulate the market, but not your personal habit. | |
| Liberty is liberty. | |
| People should have a right to their own life, and they should have the right to pursue whatever they want to pursue in making their life enjoyable. | |
| All right. | |
| And now, the third one is a political question, actually. | |
| It's kind of an interesting one. | |
| The question is, it's from Ty, and if we can have it up, there we go. | |
| Do liberty-minded candidates in state and local elections still need to run as Republicans to get elected? | |
| If so, how far are we from a party break? | |
| Third party coming up soon? | |
| Well, not likely. | |
| It's so biased against third parties, and for good reason. | |
| There's a monopoly, single party in Washington. | |
| Too often, the rules and the debates and the media is always endorsing the principle of a pretend two parties, the Republican and Democrats. | |
| But neither party really wants any competition, so they exclude you from debates, make it difficult to get on balance. | |
| So far, I think he's implying, and he's probably correct, some of our libertarian-minded friends are Republicans. | |
| And he's saying, is that what you have to do? | |
| And I've always argued the case that when you're thinking about promoting the cause of liberty, it's irrelevant to the party system. | |
| I make the point that Keynesianism is an economic philosophy, but it has invaded both parties. | |
| So you want freedom to invade both parties, and it should not matter that much. | |
| But it does work on the Libertarian Party, and I think it's good. | |
| I'm still a member of the Libertarian Party. | |
| I wish them well, but it hasn't done the job yet that we have. | |
| And for various reasons, if you're a progressive, you know, the Green Party is not going to be any more successful because of the system. | |
| But the one thing I've often suggested to individuals is there's no logical reason for a true believer in liberty that they can't run as a Democrat. | |
| Because the Republican Party, they're probably no more protective of liberty than the Democrats when it comes to the war on drugs and foreign policy and privacy and all these issues. | |
| So if you get into a district that is a liberal Democrat district and they at least pretend that they're for personal liberty and civil liberties and they're against foreign wars, play on that and then try to explain the way I've approached a liberal audience is to talk about the Federal Reserve because the Federal Reserve runs the economy and it doesn't help the poor people and the middle class. | |
| That's what's hurting them. | |
| So you can even talk about economic policies. | |
| And at one time I brought a coalition together of the various party factions and they agreed with me on deficits were bad and also the Federal Reserve was not helping the poor people. | |
| So I believe you can design the freedom philosophy so that you could run and should run if it's a Democrat district because you're not going to convert them to be Republicans. | |
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Drafted Into Service
00:03:26
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| I would find it fascinating to do that. | |
| I wish somebody would try it. | |
| That's an interesting point. | |
| Now the final one we try to often have a little bit more of a light-hearted question, and I think we have one this time. | |
| What was it that made you want to become a physician? | |
| Well, there never was one single thing, you know. | |
| I think early on I respected physicians, thought it would be good, but I was very reticent about saying I'm going to be a doctor. | |
| Always worried about, you know, not reaching my goal. | |
| So I wanted to be, I was guarded in that. | |
| But I was going through college and I was a biology major and I liked sciences and I was doing well. | |
| I thought I would be a teacher. | |
| And then I did get a little bit more confident and thought about the different options. | |
| So it crossed my mind, but I was a little bit behind on my credits. | |
| So I had to do some summer school to get caught up on my chemistry. | |
| But it was still there that I might do this. | |
| So I prolonged the decision. | |
| But there was one political event or political idea that helped motivate me because I've written about this in some of my books about how I was influenced by so much war. | |
| You know, remembering World War II and Korea War and Vietnam and all this. | |
| And I did come to the conclusion that I would never be able to pick up a rifle and go into some battle and start aiming at people that I didn't know and start shooting them because it made no sense whatsoever. | |
| And I always assumed that I would be drafted, which happened. | |
| I left medical school in 1961 and 62, I was drafted due to the Cuban crisis. | |
| So the draft was there. | |
| So that helped me push it over. | |
| So that was my liking of science, my need to have a job, and it was fascinating, but really put it together a big event was this whole knowledge that I would not participate in a war. | |
| And I was going to say, well, if they draft me, I'm going to be as brave as Muhammad Ali. | |
| I didn't foresee that happening, but I just knew that in the military, I'd much rather have been a physician trying to help people. | |
| And that's what happened. | |
| I ended up going to a course which gave me the credits for being a flight surgeon, and that's to take care of pilots and be involved in flying, which I was interested in. | |
| So I made the best of being drafted, but never endorsed the principle of the draft and found out that it did help me because I did much better than if I had not had, you know, wasn't able to get an officer's and be drafted. | |
| That's what I dreaded. | |
| And I was ensuring myself that that would not happen. | |
| Very interesting. | |
| Well, you survived another stint on the hot seat. | |
| And we want to thank our viewers for participating, for watching the show and participating in the show. | |
| And I too want to thank our viewers for tuning in today. | |