Over the last 100+ years, the U.S. has waged endless wars that have all been wrapped in extravagant lies. The lies were not only to get into the wars, but during the wars as well. How many times did the U.S. "turn the corner" in Vietnam? How many times, over the last 17 years in Afghanistan have we heard "we've turned the corner"? Do you think it's possible for the government to lie about the economy too?
Over the last 100+ years, the U.S. has waged endless wars that have all been wrapped in extravagant lies. The lies were not only to get into the wars, but during the wars as well. How many times did the U.S. "turn the corner" in Vietnam? How many times, over the last 17 years in Afghanistan have we heard "we've turned the corner"? Do you think it's possible for the government to lie about the economy too?
Over the last 100+ years, the U.S. has waged endless wars that have all been wrapped in extravagant lies. The lies were not only to get into the wars, but during the wars as well. How many times did the U.S. "turn the corner" in Vietnam? How many times, over the last 17 years in Afghanistan have we heard "we've turned the corner"? Do you think it's possible for the government to lie about the economy too?
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is co-host is Chris Rossini.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
You know, what I'd like to sort out a little bit is trying to figure out when the government tells us the truth and when they don't tell us the truth.
And this is something that the American people are anxious to know about.
And I think most people basically, especially in my early years, I thought the government always told me the truth and I want to believe them.
And I think the intended is that you want to have a government you can trust.
But that's a different story.
I think a lot of questions are raised about when they are telling us the truth and when they're not.
Yes, and we're going to compare how they lie us into war into believing them about the economy.
And government's track record and anything is not too good.
I mean, we all know that they lie to get into office.
It's called campaign rhetoric.
And the inauguration speeches, State of the Union speeches, they're for entertainment purposes only.
Government school books, they're loaded with fairy tales about American history.
And, you know, we know that they lie to get us into war.
And during the wars, how many times did we hear during Vietnam or now in Afghanistan that we're turning the corner now after 17 years?
And it's not true.
So, Dr. Paul, is it logical and rational to throw all that away and believe them when they talk about the economy?
Well, it'd be nice if we could, but I think that would be very dangerous.
But, you know, I'm always looking to give them a slight out.
It's very difficult to give them an out on this.
But, you know, politicians do something that is called demagoguery.
And it literally is lying in this distortion.
It's for political purposes.
But sometimes they do it out of a convenience.
And I don't think they go to bed at night feeling guilty.
Oh, I told that lie.
You know, I shouldn't have told that lie.
I don't think that happens from the people that I knew.
But also, there are people who tell a lot of stories in some of the statistics that we have and the reason going to war, you know, there's a few people who start the lie.
I think they're the real culprit.
But the ones who perpetuate the lie are sometimes just gullible and they go along with it.
And sometimes it's for purely political purposes.
It has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
So if somebody wants us to go to war and they tell us lies and they tell us that Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons, he was part of 9-11 and he wants to destroy us.
You know, that's scary stuff.
But that's typical.
That's been around a long time because we always have to have a Hitler to attack.
We have to have a monster to destroy.
So it is done deliberately, but there are many innocent bystanders who go along with it and they fall into the trap.
And I've been put in this situation where if you don't go along, they're going to call you un-American.
You don't care about the troops because what we want is we want to handle this and we want peace, but we can't have peace by surrender.
And they go on and on, and there's a lot of pseudo-logic behind this.
But I think your point about just flat out lying, they do that.
And when it comes to the economy, there's obviously a lot of distortions there that it just doesn't make any sense.
And today, probably as much of ever because there's two stories out there.
It looks like there's two economies out there, too.
If you want to talk about the lower 40, 50 percent, that's one story.
Some claim they're in depression.
And if you want to talk about Wall Street and the people who have stocks and they're doing well and their jobs are available, that's another story and they don't have to deal with the labor participation rate even if it's going down.
So it's a distortion.
But I think you alluded to it, Chris.
There's an ulterior motive for this, and that is probably power and money.
That probably is the ultimate driving force.
And the one thing I know is there's no remorse for it.
Anybody who voted to go into war in Iraq, the people that I knew, there were a few, I can't say nobody, but there were a few that they did it, and the results are bad.
Just think if you were in the Bush administration, look at the tragic outcomes for based on a lie.
But there's no remorse, really.
I very, very rarely ever saw that.
And that in itself is a problem because what they're doing is denying truth and listening to fiction and believing these stories to the point where they deceive themselves.
And they do it.
It's very predictable in how they do it.
They want everyone looking at certain things like the Dow Jones or the GDP, things that are easy for government to manipulate.
And they do not want people to use their own eyes and ears and minds to look around them and make their own judgments on how the economy is.
So if you look around, you see seven out of ten people are out of a job or living on government transfers, you know, or in debt.
And if they get a flat tire, it's a major catastrophe financially for them.
They just want you to say, yeah, but look at that Dow Jones industrial average, man.
Everything is going great.
And they just do not want you to use your own senses to make your own judgments.
Well, the two statistics that bug me the most, because they're very deliberate and they do it for purpose.
One is the GDP, and the other one is the CPI.
And the one individual who studied this extensively to try to get the truth out is Walter Williams, John Walter Williams, the economist, who has shadow stat, government statistics.
And he dissects this all out and shows how deceptive it is.
And the GDP is something that the Austrian economists have lamented about for a long time because they consider it just totally false.
And yet that's what everything is measured on.
But the interesting thing is if government spends more money, and some people say, well, it depends on how you calculate it.
They're involved in 60% of the spending, one way or the other.
Others think it's a lot less.
But anyway, it's a significant amount.
But how do they spend money?
Is that real wealth?
Have they produced something and then spent it?
And it adds to the standards of living?
Or has it just been shoveling papers around based on debt and based on inflating the currency?
And this is really what happens.
If government comes, if government decides to build a weapon system like the F-35, trillions of dollars being spent and they're going to continue to spend it and they end up with a plane that doesn't work.
And if it did work, we have no use for it because that type of airplane is not necessary for our defense in this modern age.
But they spend that money and that all goes into saying the GDP went up.
Well, that's wonderful.
The GDP is very high.
But where did they get the money?
Did they take it out of the economy?
Yes, either through taxation or through inflation.
So instead of adding that to the GDP, I think they should subtract it because they've took it away from the real economy.
And you say, well, some of that helped the arms manufacturer, which is true, and there are some labor unions that could make a lot of money, but that's a transfer at the expense of somebody else.
And it's a malinvestment because it wasn't invested.
But this whole idea that government spending, so why shouldn't P, because most people think this way, why shouldn't people be very happy now?
Because our spending on military is going up rapidly.
Our debt is going up rapidly.
Infrastructure expenditures are supposed to go way up.
So people feel euphoric about this.
But the truth is, it's not a real increase in the standard of a living for the average person.
Quite, frankly, I believe it's the opposite.
Instead, you know, a certain group are benefiting from that.
Then there's another group that aren't even measured.
They're not measured in the unemployment rate, which is another statistic that John Williams really goes after because he claims real unemployment, when you look at the labor participation rate and the people who drift out and go on different programs, he thinks the unemployment rate is 20%.
And for a segment of the economy, it probably is.
And you alluded to the fact there's a lot of people who can't pay their bills.
And if you look at the statistics, how long will an average family go if they don't have a paycheck for two months or have an unsurprising medical bill or an automobile bill?
That is a problem.
But there is this great distortion that is perpetuated because it justifies government.
And I've said it before that I think the greatest danger we face right now is the distortion of wealth distribution that comes from crony capitalism and interventionism.
And that is, the wealthy do have a lot of money and they get a lot more, a lot of billionaires.
At the same time, you have other people who are struggling and actually get eliminated from the roles.
They're not kind of in the unemployment.
So if you've drifted off, you're not looking for work, you're not unemployed, you're just a non-worker and you do not show up in the unemployment statistic.
And a great point about GDP.
That is a terrible statistic because it counts government spending as a positive, which it most certainly is not, because government spending is political spending.
It's not based on profits and losses.
That's what we have in the marketplace.
Profits signal that consumers want something more, and losses signal that they do not want this.
Use this capital for something else.
But with government spending, it's all political.
Like you mentioned with the military spending, it's waste.
It's money for votes.
When I'm in the marketplace spending my own money on what I want, I'm demonstrating by my actions, not talk, but with my actions that I'm benefiting from this.
But once the government takes it from me, it immediately becomes waste.
It goes off to Saudi Arabia, to Boeing, to Raytheon, and that's a net negative, no matter what the GDP says.
And you know, if in that group of people who benefit from government, they will become the very rich people.
And one gross distortion is when you look at GDP per capita.
Gold's Real Benefit00:07:32
That is the worst distortion ever.
Because if you have 1,000 people making $100 worth of production a year and you compare that to and add in one billionaire, believe me, there is so distortion.
All of a sudden, the GDP per capita is huge.
It's into the millions of dollars by one billionaire in a group of 1,000 individuals.
So that, of course, is used for deception.
Oh, everybody's doing quite well.
But another, this is deception.
It's lying to us in the sense that they do not admit that they actually prop up.
But I am convinced that their government is very interested in propping up the price of gold, the dollar price of gold.
Because no matter what they say, no matter how hostile they are to gold, gold is still very important.
They can't repeal gold as money.
And the central banks still hold gold.
It may shift around a bit.
And there's more shifting around now because people are getting worried.
But during the Bretton Woods era, from 1945 all the way up to 1971, they had gold was fixed.
It was a price fixing.
Even though we were printing money like crazy, the price of gold, the exchange between gold and dollar, was $35 an ounce.
Well, everybody knew it was a lie.
Yet it was rigged because that conveyed confidence.
And the Bretton Woods lasted until the market overrode us.
But I think it still exists.
I believe that technically they believe they have the authority to do it.
And they won't be able to do it forever.
And that's why I still think gold is a hedge against a catastrophe that's coming.
But in the meantime, I think they're going to do a whole lot to try to discourage people from thinking that you can get protection from gold against paper devaluation.
But the system tells us that the paper devaluation is going to continue, get a lot worse, and now that we see how socialism is failing around the world, in those countries, the few people who have gold and silver are doing better.
They can survive a lot better.
But I'd like to prevent that from happening here.
And that's why the truth is going to help make us free.
So that's why we should challenge it when we hear government statistics or government lies us into war and think about the political system that really encourages this and you do well.
The people who can demagogue the best.
But Chris, don't you think there's a little bit of encouragement?
We have to look for it.
I understand there's a couple polls out that shows there's a lot of American people right now that are joining us and are skeptical of what the government tells us.
I would think that might be good news for us.
That is very good news.
And hopefully they watch the Ron Paul Liberty Report because we'll keep giving them some ammo.
But I'll finish, Dr. Paul, by saying, you know, our beliefs align with America's founders.
The government is there to protect our liberty, and that's it.
And with that being the case, my opinion is no government statistics.
Why should I care how many goods are going from the United States to Canada to China?
I don't care what my neighbors are spending their money on.
I'm supposed to care about 300 million Americans, where their money goes.
It means nothing to me.
Now, that doesn't mean that statistics are irrelevant and not useful, but let them be paid for by private companies.
If they want somebody, hire somebody with your own money that has no incentive to lie to you and use the statistics how you want.
Don't take my money from me and then use it to lie to me about how great everything is in the economy.
That's what a free society would look like.
Yeah, and I think your point as well, taking Chris, about statistics are okay, but we'd be better off if we looked at the economists like John Williams, who's going to tell us the truth.
He won't be perfect.
There's going to be people that will challenge the way he calculates the thing.
But compared to government, no, what we need are more private economists that are trustworthy and give us honest information.
But still, we go back to this whole issue of the economic understanding, where they literally lie to themselves and to ourselves.
Our educational system, this is perpetuated.
You know, it's okay to have deficits.
It's okay to debase the currency and all these things.
And they think it's good and that money does not have to have a convertibility to something.
But that's taught in the school.
One of the silliest things that I ever heard of in government has been this last several years of measuring the recovery of the economy by achieving 2% devaluation of the purchasing power of your money every year.
And of course it was much more than that all along, but they kept lecturing in order to keep printing the money and passing it out to their friends.
Because the value of the dollar, especially for the lower 50%, is going down much faster than 2%.
Government now is getting so much out of hand, they're starting to admit, well, maybe it is 3%.
The truth is, is they can't turn it off.
They can play these games.
But because it was an explicit goal and policy, it just blew my mind on thinking like, this is what they teach them, that it's on purpose.
You know, if you were a counterfeiter, you'd go to jail for this, you know, because you're stealing from it.
And yet it's acceptable.
And the people who like it and benefit, yes, they know exactly what they're doing.
And they are going to benefit from power and wealth.
At the same time, other people are going to buy into the education that they receive and buy into the propaganda that they hear or play along to get along because so many people, and they figure a lot of people have told me in Washington, oh yeah, I have to do this, but how can I do any good if I have to, if I can't get there?
I got to get there first, and then I'm going to do good.
Then they get there and I say, well, I have to be on the right committee, so I'll do this.
Yeah, then I can be on the committee.
Oh, well, I'll wait until I'm a chairman.
Then I can really do good.
So they always rationalize even the ones that should be a lot smarter.
But the one thing that's on our side is their system always fails.
Mises said, don't worry.
Well, he didn't say don't worry, but the long term of socialism is it fails.
And he essentially predicted the failure of communism because there's no pricing structure.
And that is the case, and what we have is going to be going to fail.
But the challenge we have and why we have this program is to try to get an understanding out there on why peace and prosperity can be achieved in a different manner than lying to the people.
And of course, that means that we have to have a lot less government.
We can't get rid of all the lying.
We should never permit fraud and lying.
But believe me, when the government tells lies, it's much, much more damaging.
They start wars and they destroy currencies.
Those are the kind of lies that we have to curtail.
And of course, we can't do that unless we curtail government.
That should be our goal.
And then that means that our responsibility will be for the promotion of liberty.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.