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April 30, 2018 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
18:13
Illegal Wars...Gold-Backed Dollar...Trump Re-election --- #AskRonPaul!

You asked...Ron Paul answered! Enjoy another great segment of #AskRonPaul You asked...Ron Paul answered! Enjoy another great segment of #AskRonPaul You asked...Ron Paul answered! Enjoy another great segment of #AskRonPaul

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Time Text
Still Questioning War 00:05:54
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.
I understand our program is a little bit different today that you're going to be asking me some questions.
You're in the hot seat again, Dr. Paul.
It's Ask Ron Paul, which we do occasionally and we put it out on Twitter and a lot of people have questions and oftentimes it's just hard to sort down through all the good questions that people want to ask you.
So if you're ready, if you're ready to go, I hope I have some good answers.
They've got some good ones this time.
The first one is from Brett Basil.
A small number of members of the House speak out against unjust, unconstitutional wars that are being waged.
My question is, why hasn't Congress used its power to stop these wars and attacks from happening?
Why is there no accountability or adherence to our own laws?
Well, I can understand the frustration in that question because I have the same frustrations.
And there's times when I throw out my hand, why aren't they doing this?
I think even on this program, Daniel, you and I have mentioned, why doesn't the Congress speak out?
I guess you have to try to understand the psychology of each and every one of the members why they do it.
But I think here's a few things that you can suggest.
Because guess what?
The people in Washington are politicians.
And they reflect, you know, what they perceive as a prevailing attitude, what the people are thinking.
They are interested in staying in office.
But why do they come down on the side of something that we think is so irrational and dangerous and expensive and is not part of what the American system should be like?
And yet I believe that the pressure is on the members to continue the process because when I was there, we would get a handful, and there is pressure that you feel because you don't want to, I think it's a natural tendency not to be all alone out there standing up against them.
So there's a tendency to want to blend in.
But in a situation like that, there are times when you should stand up against the process.
The process has been for us to be involved in war.
It isn't like it's just this Congress or just the Republicans or just the Democrats.
It started really after World War II.
I know we had a lot of war before that.
World War I and II were disaster for us.
And actually World War I, we got into and we shouldn't have and led to that.
But anyway, after World War II, we really drifted and the people didn't say anything and the Congress didn't say anything.
And that was when people got tired of the war.
We didn't get into the League of Nations.
We got into the United Nations and the United Nations under Truman said, go to war.
And that was a major step, except in the idea that we went to war, which is literally still going on because there's been no peace treaty in Korea.
And the people went along with this.
And I think that's when they let the guard down.
And Robert Taft spoke out against the constitutionality or lack thereof, but it didn't change much.
So we had the Korean War, and the Congress and the people were still supporting it.
We had the disaster of the Vietnam War, and the people were speaking out.
They were sick and tired of that.
So what did they do?
They said, well, we're going to have this war powers resolution passed to restrain the government.
So they were speaking out and trying Congress to speak out.
There's too much war and we shouldn't do this.
But still, their guard was let down.
The people in charge, the politician, the deep state, and others were able to take this motivation of the people saying, How are we going to prevent the next war?
So they wrote the war powers resolution.
Unfortunately, they still live with it and use it to justify war because it didn't do anything.
It really literally justified war for 90 days.
And by that time, you have troops in the field, and if you vote against the troops, and they say you're un-American and whatnot.
So it goes on and on.
If right now, we are living now for what, 17 years with an authority to go into and seek out those individuals who brought about 9-11.
Actually, I supported that, believing that, you know, what do you do when there's an attack like that?
But the authority was given to those individuals who participated in 9-11.
Well, we still use that for everything we've done since then.
And since that time, I don't know if they can even find anybody, you know, that participated in the decision-making, but they still use it.
And then there's an attempt to try to rein it in.
But the question is, why does that happen?
Well, the consensus is they don't want it to happen.
It's the pressure of the lobbyists, the military-industrial complex, the AIPAC lobbyists, the people who work in the deep state, they have their reasons for remaking the world, and they believe in it philosophically.
So their philosophy of intervention and remaking the world.
And then they play on morality too.
They say, well, America is the exceptional nation, especially since we were able to overcome the fascist Germany and the communist Russians, and therefore we have this moral obligation because of our American exceptionalism.
So they built into this moral high ground to do this.
In that combination, the guard is let down, and the people need to awaken.
And of course, all I can say is I feel the frustration, but it's also one of the reasons why Daniel and I are motivated to try to get the truth out to wake up the people because it's unnecessary.
Gold Standard Transition 00:12:06
What we're doing in foreign policy is not only unnecessary, it's unconstitutional, it's very expensive, and very unwise.
All right.
Well, let's go on to number two then after that.
That's a good one.
The second question.
In your opinion, would a transition to a gold bad dollar and the end of the Fed require any hardships on Americans and the value of their estate during the transition?
Well, this is an interesting question because obviously I want that transition.
Yes, if you tomorrow close the Federal Reserve down, the transition would be rough and tumble under today's circumstances.
The reason I want it to be closed down and thinking about the transition is that if we continue to do what we're doing, the Federal Reserve will close down.
It'll essentially become dysfunctional because of the monetary system.
We'll collapse, and that'll be much worse than thinking about, well, if we transition right now, you know, it could be much worse if we don't.
But who will be hurt?
Yes, they'll be hurt.
They'll be hurt.
It depends on how we do it.
We do have one example in U.S. history that we could go by, but the analogy is not perfect.
And that is that one of the things that Lincoln did with the Lincoln greenbacks in the Civil War period was suspend convertibility.
And we had greenbacks, and it wasn't our gold back from 1961 up to 1978.
Between 1975, in 1875 and 1878, there was a transition, and there was the Resumption Act.
They resumed the gold standard.
And what they did was they started to withdraw greenbacks.
They quit spending excessive amount of money.
There was no Federal Reserve to monetize debt.
And the American people were behind all this.
And guess what?
The dollar price was very high, and they had to get the dollar price returned to $20 per ounce.
And that transition worked pretty well.
Nobody suffered.
It was perfectly all right.
But the difference was the people supported it.
There were no going to be outrageous.
deficit spend.
We weren't entering an international war.
Conditions were different.
But it could be done.
Today, unfortunately, the sentiment is not there.
If you decided, well, let's have a resumption act, nobody would know where to resume.
Nobody would believe it because nobody would believe that the government's going to quit spending and balance the budget.
So you couldn't say, well, let's resume the gold standard at $1,500 an ounce.
Well, at the rate we're going, you know, that wouldn't do much good.
So you should have a plan.
And my plan was, and what I offered in Congress was to, you know, just legalize competition with the Federal Reserve and also let the market determine what the resumption price would be.
But we will have an opportunity, unfortunately, under dire circumstances, and that is after the collapse.
But you could do that.
We could do today what they did in the 1870s, but that's not likely to happen because the people want the spending and they think that the risk of having runaway inflation is so minimal, we'll keep doing this.
We're not going to tighten our belts just because we want to have a gold standard and restrain the government.
But this is why the gold standard is important.
It is the restraint on government.
And now the government does not have to be restrained.
So that's why we'll not see a transition into a gold standard.
But we actually should legalize some competition with the dollar standard because we have a fiat dollar standard.
It will fail.
The Federal Reserve will fail.
And we should at least legalize and make sure that people don't have to pay taxes on gold and silver.
And we've, the Campaign for Liberty, has actually worked with Arizona and Wyoming in making it legal once again to use the Constitution because states were forbidden from using anything other than silver and gold as legal tender.
So they've re-legalized this, and that is a move in the right direction.
People are thinking this way.
And there's more thought right now about a resumption because, you know, right now, yesterday or so, I think it was 400,000 ounces of gold that Russia's buying.
And China's interested in gold.
And there's repatriation going on.
There's gold leaving the storage in New York and at the Fed, going to the countries because they think it's going to be more secure.
So there may be an effort here for a transition in a peaceful manner, but the special interests aren't too interested in that happening because there's a lot of people who like this excessive spending because this would curtail the military-industrial complex.
It would curtail our wars.
It would curtail the welfare state.
And as soon as somebody would get hurt, then they would be complaining.
If you did it radically, yes, some people would be hurt.
But a lot of people that would be hurt deserve to be hurt because they're making, they're in that top 1%, making the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars because of the monetary system.
So nothing will be smooth, but the most important thing is for people to understand the issue of monetary policy and why it is good for everybody and why it's worthwhile and why it's a benefit to do this gradually rather than waiting for a calamity under those circumstances.
And you're talking about Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
That makes it more difficult because that's when you have political chaos.
All right.
Moving on now to number three.
You're halfway there, Dr. Paul.
You're halfway there.
This is from Alex Bowman.
Do you think Trump will win re-election after ordering the attacks on Syria?
Well, you know, that's wild speculation on my part.
And I usually don't get into too much of this.
But if I had to say, people are like, no, well, no, say what you think anyway.
I think he'll get re-elected if he doesn't resign, you know, first.
So, yes, but I don't think the Syrian thing will be the most important thing.
Too many people don't even know where Syria is.
And yes, we talk about it, and people who are informed know that Syria is very, very important.
All the Middle East is very important, you know, for the spending and for geopolitical reasons, for oil and all these things.
But I think if he were up for re-election today, my guess is that he'd probably be re-elected.
He would.
But to project this out for two and a half more years and try to say what would happen, you know, I think a lot of people were surprised he was elected in the first place.
But the reason I suggest that he could be re-elected, that on the surface right now, at least the reports come out that they're more positive, that people are employed more so.
But I think that a lot of people like ourselves here at this channel is that we're concerned about real growth and debt, and those are the problems because that will change things just immediately when it's evident that the debt can't be paid.
It can't.
The only way they can finance the debt is printing more money.
And that leads eventually to the loss of confidence in the dollar.
If that happens in the last year of the Trump term, and he's running for reelection, I think under those conditions, he wouldn't be able to get re-elected.
Under today's conditions, I believe he'd probably be able to pull it off again.
Okay, one more to go.
Last one.
Number four.
Will you explain the benefit of auditing the Fed?
Snake in the grass is asking.
Well, obviously, there's a benefit, or I wouldn't have tried to get it audited over a good many years.
Matter of fact, even the first time I was in Congress for shorter periods of time in the 1970s, that I supported that bill.
Interestingly enough, it was supported by populist-type Democrats that would like to audit the Fed.
I think what would happen is we would find out what they're doing.
It's done in secret, and they have a tremendous amount of power.
Just think of the bailout.
Trillions and trillions of dollars passed out to certain countries and to certain banks that were bailed out.
And they continue to do that.
They can prop up markets.
I think one little story I've told before is that knowing what's happening and the relationship of the Fed to gold and other things was revealed when I had an early breakfast with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Volcker.
He came in, and the first thing, it was in the midst of the crisis in 1979.
What's the price of gold?
What's the price of gold?
So they deal with that.
I think they prop it up.
We propped gold up at $35 an ounce from 1945 up until the market overrode it in 1971.
So they prop up markets and they're very much involved in the plunge protection team, which was started in 1987 to take care of the markets, you know, when they're crashing.
I think on days like we've witnessed here in the last few days when you see the market down $400, $500, $600 and it reverses, I think they're very, very much involved.
And that would be revealed.
The one best reason for auditing is when you find out what's going on and the people know about that, it would lead to getting rid of the Federal Reserve because that would tell us what they're really doing and who their special friends are.
And that's the main reason they don't want an audit.
The biggest argument they used, the loudest argument they made, was, oh, then you would know exactly what we're doing internationally speaking.
So they don't want us to know about that.
Besides, how can you be more powerful than being able to control and manipulate the reserve currency of the world, benefiting one particular country over all others?
And because we've been able to do that, we have this artificial benefit.
And it's sort of ironic that we blame other countries for rigging their currencies and having currency controls when we're the biggest manipulator of currencies ever.
But just finding out the truth about what the Fed is doing, we would learn more about who benefits, which bankers they are, which companies are, which countries benefit, what really happened in the downturn, what they would be doing in the next downturn.
It's revelation.
It's knowing what the government is doing that is so important.
And that is one of the reasons why they voted for audit the Fed.
We had two or three votes in the House, and we got all the Republicans and a bunch of Democrats to vote for this, saying that the people have a right to know about this.
But as soon as it got moving along, maybe over to the Senate and different places, that's when the people who really support the Federal Reserve come down hard.
But politically, we have advanced to the point where when there's a vote in the Congress, the majority of the people who are sending messages to the congressmen sent the message that you ought to know at least, you ought to at least vote to let us know what the Fed is doing.
That's very healthy, but we have to continue to do it.
But the most important reason to audit the Fed is it would lead to getting rid of the Fed.
That is one of the goals that we've had for a long time.
Well, Dr. Paul, you survived another grilling.
That's very good.
Yeah, I'm sure the audience enjoyed it.
Thank you, Daniel, and I want to thank our audience for joining us today with the Liberty Report.
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