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June 13, 2018 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
17:41
Discrimination?...Non-Aggression?...Money In Politics?...#AskRonPaul

You asked...Ron Paul answered! Please enjoy this edition of #AskRonPaul You asked...Ron Paul answered! Please enjoy this edition of #AskRonPaul You asked...Ron Paul answered! Please enjoy this edition of #AskRonPaul

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Discrimination and Voluntary Choices 00:06:11
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
I'm doing fine.
Radio and Raring to Go.
I understand our program will vary a little bit.
There were a few questions sent in that they'd like me to try to answer.
Yeah, we're doing another Ask Run poll.
Every time we do it, we get better questions, more questions.
So it's great.
It's great to do.
Are we going to get better answers?
That's what we have to work on.
I'm sure we will.
And I'm going to take the privilege of the chair and ask the first question today.
So, you know, we did the show on discrimination on the Supreme Court decision on baking the cake a few days ago, and we had a lot of comments.
We had a lot of debate on our sites, on YouTube.
So I thought it would be a good opportunity to clarify some of the things.
You know, we talk about the difference between government discrimination and our personal discrimination.
A lot of people, I think, were confused about that.
Yeah, and it's interesting because most people don't think of this.
They see government prohibits discrimination, and people have to be regulated because they might discriminate.
Well, I've always worked on the theory that to be discriminate is a pretty good idea in picking and choosing friends.
You know, as a parent, my wife and I were discriminate.
We didn't want our kids running out and doing things with the people that might get them into trouble.
So we were discriminating in that sense.
But it's lost its meaning.
To discriminate is all of a sudden a racial thing and deciding who you associate with and who you must associate with, what your habits have to be.
And the government wants to regulate habits, and they want to dictate your discrimination.
And I thought that was completely off track.
And then when I thought about it, you know, it's the government that discriminates, you know, in a negative way.
I mean, we were born with discrimination and with this obsession with democracy.
The democratic opinion at the time of our founders was that we have to accept slavery, you know, because the majority wants it.
Otherwise, we can't have this United Nations.
So we started off badly with slavery, and that led to a lot of problems.
And even after the Civil War, we had a lot of discrimination, and the military continued with this.
And then there were Jim Crow laws.
And even up until World War II, you know, in the military, the whites and blacks weren't put together in the same unit.
So it was the government that was discriminating.
But the government continues to discriminate in everything that it does.
It discriminates when they write a tax code.
They can't say everybody plays the equal mind.
Is it an equal percentage or an equal dollar amount?
Or what is it?
So some people get more pain than others, and some people get punished.
Matter of fact, they manipulate a tax code to punish one business over another.
So they're always manipulating.
They do the same thing with regulations.
They discriminate against some smaller business groups who are competing against large influential business groups.
And that's the way they regulate the economy.
But the discrimination also flows over into something that a lot of people don't think about either.
And that is how we enforce our laws.
Right now, fortunately, the corruption in the Department of Justice and also the FBI dealing with Russia Gay is starting to reveal that there's been a lot of problems.
I think they've been there for a long time because our political organization has been victim of this.
And so therefore they're always discriminating.
But on the drugs, just think of the enforcement of the drugs.
I mean, when you look at the numbers, they are astounding about how biased it is against poor people and minorities.
And they get mistreated.
There's more violence involved.
And it's difficult because, you know, all races have violence in it.
So if you happen to deal with a violent person who's a minority, you can't say, well, we can't do it because we're afraid to.
But believe me, the statistics verify the fact that there's not a justice in the system, especially when the drug laws are so biased anyway and so prejudicial because it says that even if you haven't committed a violent crime, you can go to prison for life.
You know, this sort of thing.
So I think that we should look more at it.
Who settles the dispute on discrimination?
On that cake case, it was saying that, well, the courts had to deal with how to define religious liberty and how to define the proper amount of discretion that a person in a store has.
Well, most people, if they think about it, the owner of the store should have discretion.
He should be able to discriminate against bums, people who come in and make too much noise, people who come in and are undressed, people who come in and start having a bullhorn.
I mean, it's your property.
And if you do something which seems to offend some people, they claim now the law can't allow anybody to be offended.
So if you're offended, then you call the cops.
But no, free markets and voluntary choices.
The whole thing is, if you have voluntary choices, both sides agree.
If one side is offended, they leave.
And society is big enough now that if somebody is obnoxious in their business, they just lose business.
I mean, this whole idea that they're intimidated and terrified of having free people make these decisions, I think is a real problem.
In some words, it's hard to accept the idea that you can be a bit of a bird brain in a free society.
But believe me, the system will punish those people who are so obnoxious.
And I would just like to decrease the amount of discrimination by our government on all of us.
There you go.
Well, now we're going to reach out to our viewers and to our Twitter friends.
Money in Politics 00:11:17
And we have a few good questions.
First one is Sarah Stook.
And she's asking, what's the best way to explain to young people that big government is a hindrance, not a help?
Well, I think that young people seem to be more receptive to the ideas that I've been talking about a long time.
And that's always encouraging to me because in the presidential campaigns, I just knew that there was a better reception on college campuses, even on the liberal campuses, than I would ever get at the Chamber of Commerce.
And I thought that was just great because the philosophy says that it's your life and you should own your own life.
You can do what you want.
You can work hard and you should be able to keep your money.
You have a right to what you earn.
And I was always pleased because when I said that if you mess up and you don't do well with your freedom, you can't go cry into the government and demand somebody else take care of you.
And I got loud applause for that if they knew they had their liberty.
So most people understood this.
But a good example of the fallacy of the government's going to take care of us, medicine is one, but the other one that I like to use for young people are these student loans.
How could they ever be?
You know, created this thing, over a trillion dollars of debt.
And it subsidized teachers, it subsidized cultural Marxism and all these professors that do everything except teach.
And what do the students end up with?
They end up with non-education and not many good jobs out there.
And so I think that the big government is not their friend.
If you want government, it has to be very limited for the protection of your right and your obligation to take care of yourself.
And that you will do a lot better because all you have are do-gooders, planners, and say, and sadly, a lot of them are very well-motivated.
I met them.
And it isn't like, oh, I want to hurt the kids.
That's why I'm giving them student loans.
No, they say, this is the only way a poor person is going to get educated.
They don't look back just a couple decades ago when we all, you know, education costs were low, and you could work and get a job and work your way through school.
So that brings up the subject.
One of the least friendly things for young people is what they're facing with the Federal Reserve, who has the business cycle, no savings occurs, and you can't plan for the future.
And the business cycle is caused by the Federal Reserve.
So all these issues, I think, are big government, big government spending.
The debt, the debt burden is so great, and it's poured over to the next generation, and they suffer the consequences.
But the thing that the young people liked the most was it's your life, you're free to run it, you're free to make money, you're free to keep it, and if you suffer the consequences, you have to, you know, take care of it yourself or get your friends or neighbors or your family.
But you can't go and tell the government to steal from somebody else.
And they were very, very open to the idea of Basia.
You know, if you and I can't do it on an individual basis and steal from our neighbor, you can't send the government to the neighbor to have them take something to redistribute wealth.
That sense of morality was very appealing to young people.
And governments are special interests and they don't appeal to the sensitivities of a moral society because it invites the politician and the authoritarian to run things.
And that's, of course, where we are today.
Yeah.
Well, second question now.
We can pull that up and see what's next on the agenda.
This is from Commentator.
What are the chances for a new political force in the USA?
One that's not entangled in corruption of Washington and Wall Street and the crimes of the Pentagon?
Good question.
It is a good one.
And believe it or not, I'm an optimist about this, but not next week, not next month, or even next year, because I look at it differently.
I don't look at it as draining the swamp, getting more members of Congress, even though I was in Congress.
People want to run, they should do it, but it should be realistic.
That we're not all of a sudden going to send some people over there in a new party or an old party or whatever and have things change.
People are always hopeful there will be a third party.
And I would always kid and say, well, we need a second party and we need a second party because I talk more about the bipartisanship.
It's always one party.
They all support the bad stuff, the spending, the debt, the wars, the Federal Reserve, and all.
So we only have one party.
But I don't think in terms of a political force, still I'm technically a member of the Libertarian Party and try to move that along and still would.
But it still is not the answer.
The answer really goes back to education in the corruption in education.
And when the money got involved in education and the educational system deteriorated, we who now understand Austria economics, most of us didn't get taught that in college.
We had to go look elsewhere.
So I think that the change isn't a political force that all of a sudden marches into Washington and changes it.
It's ideological.
A hundred years ago or so, the progressive movement knew this and they changed it.
They introduced the income tax, central banking, foreign policy interventionism, and all these things which we have lived with.
And those ideas have changed and infiltrated all the parties, everybody's thinking.
And I remember so clearly Nixon's speech when he got us off the gold standard totally in 1971.
He says, We're all Keynesians now because we're following the Keynesian model of economic policy because that's what's been taught and has continued to be taught.
So Washington doesn't change until somebody can get up and say, We're all lovers of liberty now.
And you don't have to, it won't be the Republican Party.
They've already proven their failure.
And it won't even be the coalition unless they are brought together by non-intervention, stay out of foreign entanglements, have honest money, stay out of the regulation of the economy and subsidizing the corporations and big business and money.
That's the only thing that will do it.
When the majority of people, you know, who are the thought leaders, the people who are in the newspaper business and writing books and doing movies, sort of portray this rather than this liberal culture of Marxism, then it will change in Washington.
But the political force is secondary.
The first thing is for everybody to do their best to try to understand how freedom works and not be intimidated because if you care about people, you care about prosperity, you would care about liberty.
Because what they do is they turn it on our heads.
They put us on a guilt trip and say, oh, you're not giving everybody free medical care.
You don't like people.
You hate people.
Oh, you don't want to send more money to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Oh, you don't like our military.
You're not defending our Constitution.
You're not defending our liberties.
No, we have to change those ideas.
Then Washington will change.
Yeah, that sounds good.
That's why we do what we do.
And we're going to do our third and final question now because we are running short.
This is another good one from Superminer 1280.
Do you believe that money in politics poses the greatest threat to liberty and justice?
If so, what do you think should be the solution to this problem?
Well, money in politics is a big, big problem.
And it may be a participant in the climactic end of this because they are so powerful.
And the more money gravitates into the hands of the few, the worse things will get.
But that is a symptom.
That is not the cause.
And the symptom is that big government exists, philosophically, I just mentioned, endorses all this management, you know, economic management, social management, international management.
We endorse on that, endorse it.
We endorse the military-industrial complex.
So it's set up so that if you raise money and you lobby, then you can change it.
You say, well, let's just regulate the lobbyists.
No, the money will still get there.
If it's not on top of the table, it's under the table.
If it's not direct contributions, you know, for campaigns and direct lobbying, then it'll get there some way.
As long as government has the power to pass out these favors, money is going to be involved in politics.
And the money in politics, of course, makes the problem much, much worse.
And then they have to eventually participate in the collapse of the whole system.
But what is the real problem is the government is too big to begin with, and it's a good investment.
Just think of the amount of money business spends on this.
What if they were spending that in improving salaries and our research and development, things like this, instead of these billions of dollars that are spent to buy favoritism?
And what happens to that?
That adds to the distortion of wealth distribution the same way that the monetary system does it.
The wealthy get wealthier and the poor get poorer.
So, but when this happens and government can distribute this, you know, it goes to the people who have the most money.
So it's a snowball thing.
But I think it has to be a change in the philosophy of government, not a curtailment of your right to spend money.
If I'm running for Congress and you say, Ron, I liked what you were doing, Congress.
I'm a rich person now, you know, and somebody wants to give me a million dollars to run for Congress.
I think you should be allowed to, because that's not the problem.
And you should never curtail lobbying because petitioning the Congress is protected.
So it's petitioning isn't wrong.
It's petitioning for the wrong thing.
And it's to subsidize and perpetuate this big government that we have.
So the simple answer is study and strive to understand what liberty is all about, what our Constitution was all about, was limiting government.
The whole purpose of the Constitution was to limit the power and the scope of the government.
But now we have a government that intervenes in everything, everything in our personal lives, our educational lives, our medical lives, all things around the world.
And we're going broke.
It's going to end.
It offers us a tremendous opportunity because I believe there's a growing number of people.
And as I said, so many young people are open to this that are willing to look at this and substitute what we have with something based on personal liberty.
Good answer.
Well, you survived the hot seat once again, Dr. Paul.
Well done.
Thank you.
And I want to thank our audience today for tuning in.
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