Alex Jones, FDR, Partisanship, And More...#AskRonPaul
Ron Paul again takes viewer questions in this episode of the Liberty Report. What does he think about the "de-platforming" of Alex Jones? Tune in and see!
Ron Paul again takes viewer questions in this episode of the Liberty Report. What does he think about the "de-platforming" of Alex Jones? Tune in and see!
Ron Paul again takes viewer questions in this episode of the Liberty Report. What does he think about the "de-platforming" of Alex Jones? Tune in and see!
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is our co-host, Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you today.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
I understand that we might have a few questions to answer.
That's right, you're back in the hot seat, sir.
You know, we really enjoy our audience participation.
They participate by commenting during the show live.
And then, whenever we want to do a show, we want to bring them in.
We do our Ask Ron Paul show, where they get to ask you questions directly.
This time, every single time, it seems like they're getting better.
And this was a good crop, too.
It was tough to whittle it down.
We both spent some time doing it.
But let's go right to the first question.
This is a good and timely question that people are asking.
Do you think the, this is from Lupi.
Do you think the collective banning of Alex Jones by big tech constitutes a form of election meddling?
Well, that's a good question.
And, you know, right offhand, I don't think that there should be charges made of election meddling and that we need the government to come in with some election law to do some enforcement.
But I think it's an interesting topic, mainly because, you know, it is being performed by people who don't like Alex Jones.
They'd like to close him down.
And it looks like on the surface that they're doing this.
But I would suspect in the last month or two, there's more people that know about Alex Jones.
And a lot of people are defending.
What I like is people say, you know, I don't like this Alex Jones stuff.
He's over the top, but I tell you what, he has a right to say this, and we should defend that.
And they come to his rescue.
The other thing, when you look at the people that go to his sites and people who are looking up Alex Jones, I mean, it's massive.
It's not tens of thousands.
It's a little into the millions.
So maybe this all will backfire if they're trying to punish him and close him down because, of course, on occasion he says controversial things.
It might actually give him a boost.
I often kidded, but I don't know if there's a way of doing it, because we get some attacks, not quite like what Alex get.
But you could say, why couldn't Alex put up something and let us say, this is the program I had today that nobody will publish.
If you're interested in it, this is where you go.
If he could get that message out, you know, and get around the system, believe me, he could use it as an advertisement.
In a way, I think it's worked that way because people have been introduced to him because of this controversy.
What is he saying?
And what do you do with an individual like this?
One thing is, though, I don't think it's the kind of meddling that you have to have government regulations.
It would be nice that we could have social media that's a little bit different.
My main approach for social media is making sure they don't get any government benefits.
And some of them have and continue to do that.
But there's a way to get around that.
The market can handle this.
The Message from Depression00:12:26
They have in the past.
And in time, I think, and I hope this all backfires because though Alex and I are not identical in what we talk about, we're similar.
And there are some people that would like to do that to us.
And I keep asking my staff, what do you do?
What do you do?
How do you have, how do you compensate for this?
And how do you make sure you can reach?
Because some people, it won't matter about, you know, the social media that you can still get there if they'll come to us directly.
That's what I hope we're able to do no matter what they try to do.
Right now, we have to admit that we do get some help from Facebook and Google and these other sources.
And there are some good parts on that.
And public pressure is very good to keep the pressure on these guys because, you know, they can back down and change their ways.
And I think public pressure is the most powerful weapon to use.
Very good.
And let's move on without ado to number two.
What do we have up next for you?
This is from Kelby Boggs, I think you'd say.
What is the counter-argument for the idea that the Great Depression was cured by FDR and World War II?
Very good.
I like this question because it's something I've talked about.
It's something that an issue that influenced me in studying economics.
I remember coming across a book by Murray Rothbard, America's Great Depression, explaining all about the Depression, what the cause was, and how instrumental the Federal Reserve was.
And quite frankly, he never bought into this idea that it was FDR that shortened it or helped us get out of the Depression and that the war was necessary to do with it.
The one issue that comes out in the study of Austrian economics is that the important thing is why did it occur?
It occurred because the Fed interfered with inflation rates and the money supply and interest rates and caused a bubble and the bubble burst.
But the real message that comes from Rothbard's book is the fact that what FDR did and even what Hoover did, they prolonged it.
They did not learn the message that came from the Depression of 1921 after World War I. There was inflation in World War I, and then there had to be a correction.
And back then, there was no idea that, boy, people are so smart they know what to do, how to solve all the mess that the government's responsible for and get the Fed off the hook.
So they had a hands-off position, and there was a sharp, very deep downturn in the recession of 1921, but with hands-off, it was over, and nobody hardly even remembers about it.
Everybody knows the Great Depression, but nobody remembers the depression that cleared itself up rather quickly.
So, no, FDR made it worse and prolonged it, did everything wrong, but yet he still got praised because the universities were at that time starting to teach the new economic policy.
And this one that really bugs me is the one that says, ah, World War II, and I hear this nonsense coming out of you, even though even with our downturn, you know, maybe what we need is a good war, you know, get the economy going again.
It's the most ridiculous argument in the world.
You know what it's good for?
It's good for employment.
Yes, everybody was employed.
And the women had to be employed.
Everybody was employed in World War II, but people were in the military getting shot at and getting killed, and they weren't producing goods and services for consumers.
It was totally negative in an economic sense.
And this idea that the reason that we actually, some people use this argument that the Cold War was ended because we were having a military buildup and we forced the Soviets to build up and they got themselves into trouble.
No, it was the Soviet system that was lousy and it was wrong, it was socialistic and it failed.
So this idea that you use government intervention and wars to justify some of the mistakes instead of dealing with the problem.
What kind of economic errors were made to give us the Great Depression and why it was so prolonged?
That's the real issue.
That answer can be found in the study of Austrian economics, in particular the American Great Depression by Murray Rothbard.
Wow.
Speaking of depression and economic disasters, our third question is on the same topic if we have it over there.
This is from the instructive scholar.
What do you think a post-economics collapse America is going to look like?
And what should we be doing to prepare for it?
This is a tough one because you have to be pretty negative to prepare, but you don't necessarily have to be.
But to have a precise answer that can answer this question, I don't think anybody knows exactly what happened.
What I try to do is try to prevent the crisis from coming because it could be anywhere from the world suffering a collapse like Zimbabwe and Venezuela to a problem getting much worse where you have a lot of inflation, a lot of unemployment,
and a lot of poverty, worse than we have now around the world, and coming to our senses and figuring, yes, something has to be done because there's a lot of downside to the bubble that has been developed with the dollar and the dollar-denominated assets.
And the correction will have to come.
So there's going to be a lot of bankruptcies.
I think it'll be an inflationary depression.
Instead of prices dropping, prices will go up and there'll still be a depression.
The foolish nonsense they teach you now is if you can only have inflation, you can correct your problems.
That's why the Fed's been working hard to get the inflation rate up.
But no, the real danger under this situation will be what's going on in Zimbabwe.
You have a depression and no confidence in the economy, and yet prices are rising.
And matter of fact, to the point where they don't make any sense at all.
So I think that preparing for this is, to me, the ultimate preparation for this is getting as many people as possible to agree with what the answer should be, and that is more freedom in getting rid of the Federal Reserve.
And in the meantime, preparing for massive inflation with metals and other investments and knowing how to take care of somebody in a crisis period.
But you don't know exactly how bad it'll get because we don't know when we'll have somebody in the authority that will come to their senses and have a monetary reform.
I recall in history that there was a major monetary reform after the Civil War and it went smoothly.
And that was the Restoration Act of 1875 that had a three-year period where they restored the gold standard after it having been canceled out for about 15 years.
And it was a non-event, but we didn't have the welfare state.
We didn't have the warfare state.
We didn't have these massive deficits.
But right now, we have these massive deficits.
And one thing I firmly believe is that if an individual lives beyond his or her means, they will have to live beneath their means in order to correct the problem.
A country will have to do the same thing.
We have lived way beyond our means.
We have way too much privilege.
We have an army much bigger than we should have and that we can afford.
We're way overly involved.
And that will be corrected.
The $21 trillion debt, which we talk about, plus the $210 trillion debt and all the pension funds, it has to get liquidated.
So the people in this country will get much poorer.
Survival can be a very important issue.
But then again, I don't lie awake at night saying, well, there's nothing we can do about it.
Actually, what we can do is just come up with some common sense and get people to promote this and say, you know, this makes sense that we shouldn't have these kind of deficits.
It makes sense that you shouldn't be able to print money.
It makes sense to do something like the founders did with the runaway inflation of the continental dollar.
Sit down and devise some rules.
But that won't happen unless the people understand why the rules are being written, because it will look harmful because you would say, well, we have to write some rules by cutting back.
You mean cut back on the military-industrial complex?
How can we be a world power if you do that?
Well, people would have to accept that.
Do you have welfare for everybody, foreign and domestic, and no limits?
No, we have to challenge that whole system.
So it's an ideological war.
You don't know how fast ideas will travel.
We have our challenges today with the social media regulating us, getting our message out.
But believe me, the message is powerful and the message is strong and it can't be stopped.
And it's the answer and understanding of what free markets are all about and sound money and what individual liberty can do.
And then it shouldn't be so bad.
But so the biggest challenge in protection against this catastrophe that may come is the message of liberty because believe me, if people get out of the way, the problems can be solved rather easily.
As the Depression lasted a lot longer than it should have, we remember that there was a depression in 1921.
It was over in a year.
So if we do the right things, we can survive all this.
But it's the principle of liberty that has to be emphasized.
All right.
Now rounding up our top four questions for today is a final one on partisanship.
This is from Sarah Stook.
Is there an increase in partisanship in American politics?
And if so, is that an issue?
You know, a lot of people talk about this the partisan battles that go on and there obviously are a lot of partisan fights.
I mean, how can anybody describe what's going on with the Pelosis of the world and Donald Trump?
You know, I mean, it's getting vicious and mean and nasty, and there seems to be so much corruption in the judicial system.
So there is a great deal of conflict.
But it's not partisan in the sense that people have different ideas.
I think they're different personalities.
I think why there's such a division and hatred expressed is because people are struggling to maintain power, power and influence.
And that is what the struggle is.
I don't think for a minute the two political parties are separate from what they have done.
In all this argument and stuff that's been going on, how often do you say, well, the answer is that we have to address the subject of the Federal Reserve that finances this terrible system that we have, and it finances, you know, our foreign intervention.
It started all those wars in the Middle East, and that's why there's a migration problem around the world.
They're not talking about that.
They're not talking about why deficits are bad.
They're not talking about why welfarism isn't a good idea.
It causes more welfare.
And it ends up like Zimbabwe and Rhodesia and Venezuela.
So this is the thing that is important.
But there's no, I always said that there's too much partisanship when it comes to the issues.
But this skirmish that's going on, this hatred that is being expressed by the various factions, I think represents the fact that the system is rather fragile.
The power structure is different.
And people are really nervous about where the wealth is coming from.
And maybe they know exactly what we know, that this deficit spending is not sustainable, and that the monetary system is not sustainable.
And our empire is not sustainable.
And they're wondering what's going to be, what will happen.
And of course, we hear a lot more noise that what we need is more socialism for the problem.
And others are arguing the other case.
But the partisanship is different than what a lot of people think, that they're arguing over issues.
Now, in the midst of all this, the two parties will get together.
Looking Forward To Change00:01:04
At the end of the year, they will have a comprehensive bill, that continuing a budget bill, thousands of pages long, and nobody will ever, the average person won't know about it.
The citizens won't know much about it.
The lobbyists will know about it.
The leadership and Republican Democrats won't know about it.
That'll be very bipartisan.
So, the partisan bickering and fighting and hatred is going on is very real because they're struggling for power.
Well, Dr. Paul, you didn't even break a sweat.
That's great.
I just want to close by saying this will be our last time together before our big conference on Saturday.
We're both looking forward to it.
I'd like to announce, as I predicted, that we've completely sold out in tickets.
So, if you didn't make it this year, get your tickets early next year.
If we do it next year, don't wait around.
But we're looking forward to seeing so many of you on Saturday, the 18th, in Washington, D.C. Very good.
I'm looking forward to meeting many of you in D.C. and attending our conference.
I want to thank you all for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.