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Sept. 25, 2018 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
17:47
China Tariff, Military Spending, Worst President - #AskRonPaul

Dr. Paul returns to the hot seat to answer viewer questions on topics of the day. Who was the worst president? Watch today's Liberty Report! Dr. Paul returns to the hot seat to answer viewer questions on topics of the day. Who was the worst president? Watch today's Liberty Report! Dr. Paul returns to the hot seat to answer viewer questions on topics of the day. Who was the worst president? Watch today's Liberty Report!

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Tariffs and Trade Tensions 00:05:27
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host, Daniel.
Good to see you today.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
I'm doing very well, and I understand we have a slightly different program, even though we've done this before.
We get questions from our audience, our viewers.
So, did you get a few today for me?
Yeah, this is my easy day.
I just have to be the reader.
You have to be in the hot seat.
We do have a few questions from our readers.
We had a lot of good ones, as usual, so we're really grateful to our readers for being participating.
The first question, we'll go ahead and pull it right up.
This is Takia Carlin, and she is asking, with the tariffs Trump has been imposing on China, and he's planning to do even more, how hard will this hit the American people?
What do you think we can expect from the Chinese in this matter?
My suspicion is the Chinese aren't going to be too happy.
And the imposing of tariffs makes no sense whatsoever.
The practice makes no sense either, because why should a president have this much authority?
You know, the Congress gives it to him, which they do incorrectly because, you know, foreign trade and commerce is supposed to be controlled by the Congress.
Nobody remembers that.
But right now, everybody assumes the president, you know, can do whatever he wants on trade.
So he uses, he does tariffs.
And we have to remember, a tariff is a tax.
And the president keeps saying, boy, we're going to punish the Chinese and they're going to pay us.
It's not the way it works because you put a tariff on China.
They don't send us a check because they sell us product.
What they do is to have an import, the customers have to pay.
So guess who pays?
The people.
So it's a tax on the American people when we buy stuff from China.
And right now, it does push prices up for other reasons too.
And I think Walmart has already promised prices are going to go up because of this tariff war and this trade war.
So it doesn't make any sense.
And just recently, the Chinese accused the United States, you know, the United States accused China of getting weapons from Russia.
Oh, my goodness, that's breaking the rules.
He can't do that.
So they're going to hear from it.
So it's building up.
I think the most impressive thing about the last month or two, or even longer, has been how little the tariff war has affected the economy because the euphoria is still out there in the stock market.
It's 100% different than what happened when they talked about tariffs during the Depression, although at that time the tariffs were heavier.
But right now, they're a threat and they're a problem.
And you're going to hear more and more.
Some haven't actually been imposed, but in the next few months, everybody's going to hear more about tariffs.
They're not good.
But you know, there's a lot of talk about the economics of being for tariffs and against them and punishing people and raising revenues and all.
But actually, I look at it as a freedom issue more than anything else because that can solve the problem.
You don't even get into all that debate.
Because as far as I'm concerned, if you're an American citizen, any citizen of the world should have this right, that you have a right to work hard, earn your money, and keep your money, and spend it any way you want.
And if you want to buy tennis shoes from China, you ought to be allowed to.
You shouldn't be asking somebody's permission or be taxed with a tariff on there.
So it should be your right to spend money.
And that certainly would simplify things.
But right now, I don't think there's any benefit from this.
And The argument over tariffs had been going on for a long time.
Prior to this recent debate going on with tariffs, it was generally ignored, although there were a lot of penalties and charges and things like this.
But most economists pretended, at least to say, no tariffs, we don't believe in it.
We believe in free trade.
But then in later years, because the trading market gets messed up because of our dollar and our Federal Reserve, there are imbalances.
So they say, well, we have to have tariffs for a problem that's probably related to the Federal Reserve, and they want to come in and try to make it fair.
And then they talk about fair trade.
Yeah, we want free trade, but it has to be fair.
And once you hear that word fair, you can believe there's going to be special privileges.
Matter of fact, just recently, the tariffs put on China, guess what?
Apple got exempt.
They must know the precedent.
And that doesn't go over big.
That isn't the way it should be.
The Constitution does permit tariffs.
But I think if you had them and you made use of them, it should never be a protective tariff.
It should be a tariff, you know, maybe of 1% on all products and raising revenues or something.
But I don't even like that.
But I certainly don't like it when it's protective tariffs for certain industry and you're manipulating and maneuvering the economy.
That's bad.
So my position is that I don't believe in tariffs.
I don't like tariffs.
And these are not going to bid well for us.
The American consumer ultimately will suffer from this tariff war.
All right, let's move on to number two now.
Sound Money Transition 00:03:40
If you're getting warmed up, here we go.
Here's a good one.
This is from Ryan Welch.
Dr. Paul, how would the return to sound money be achieved?
And how long would it take?
This is a good question because I think about it all the time.
I've been working on it for a long time.
And it's unknown because it has happened under other circumstances.
And you can look to that for a hint.
You know, we got off sudden money with Lincoln in the Civil War from 1961 to 1978.
There was no gold backing to our currency.
And that meant the greenbackers came out and the price of gold went way up.
But in 1875, they decided this isn't good.
We don't like it.
The economy isn't doing well.
So we want to go back to sound money.
So they had a resumption act, and it was going to be in a period of three years, a transition.
And they would quit printing greenbacks.
They would reduce the supply of greenbacks.
And they would promise to balance the budget.
And they would resume guaranteeing the dollar in gold by 1878.
And it was a non-event.
They thought it was going to be a huge event.
How would they ever do it?
But at that time, it was really old-fashioned times because they actually believed the government that they wouldn't keep spending billions of dollars of deficits every year and sending it to a central bank and monetizing it.
So the transition was rather simple.
We don't have that today.
First thing is most people don't believe what the government says.
If they said, we're going to have a gold standard next week, and we'll make it at $1,500 and we'll guarantee it.
Nobody's going to believe it.
And nobody's going to believe we're going to live within our means.
So we're facing a different set of circumstances.
Now, when it's happened in other countries and they went way off base and had to resume, the only way they restored, you know, when you had runaway inflation and destroy a currency completely, you had to convince the people that you would have convertibility.
We did that during the Revolutionary War.
We destroyed the continental dollar, but finally they introduced through the Constitution that the dollar would be a weight of silver at that time, and the transition wasn't that difficult.
The dollar lasted for a long time, and the convertibility lasted impartially all the way up until 1971.
But today, we face something no, we've never faced before.
The world has never faced it.
Individual countries have faced it where they destroy a currency, and we know what happens in Zimbabwe and Venezuela and Argentina and different countries.
But this is huge.
This is gigantic, and it's going to be very painful.
If we started doing something right now, we might soften the blow.
And that's why I always introduced a bill in Congress to have competing currency.
Let the transition occur right now.
The people who want to use either a cryptocurrency now is something big or gold and silver.
And then you'd be allowed to use it.
It could be legal tender, repeal the legal tender laws, and get rid of the laws that tax money.
You know, if you're having money, you shouldn't have to be taxed to go buy, go and convert Federal Reserve notes into a gold coin.
But they charge you a sales tax, then they charge you a capital gains tax if the value of the gold goes up.
So, yeah, you'd have to do some things like that.
I think that would be better because it's going to be hectic.
Optimism In Crisis 00:05:51
And the other thing is, is what's something I work for, is bring sanity to government.
Why don't we just work in the direction of working toward the direction of the conditions that existed after the Civil War, where governments lived within their means?
So it's a mess, but the best we can do right now is allow people to protect themselves, have a transition, have competing currencies, and then try to convince the American people before a total collapse that we could do this wisely.
Unfortunately, I don't even believe that's going to happen.
I think we're going to have a serious, serious monetary crisis, and then it's going to be a contest between the people who want total authoritarianism or they want to go toward free market economics and sound money.
That, of course, is what I keep working for.
Dr. Paul, for question number three, we've got a double header for you.
I'm afraid you're going to have to do double duty.
We took two questions that are related and we combined them.
So if we can go ahead and queue up the first one here.
This is from Outer Limits Radio.
With the latest military spending bill passing with overwhelming Democratic support, capital D Democratic support, it now seems that both parties have been co-opted by the neocons.
Aside from an economic collapse or mass civil disobedience, do you see the current future of liberty as bleak?
And now the second related one, are you more optimistic, this is plague of nations, are you more optimistic under this presidency than you were under Clinton, Bush, and Obama when it comes to the economy?
If so, what do you believe to be the biggest mistake as far as domestic policy?
That's very, very good.
You know, and I like that first half of that question because it dealt with the whole idea of bipartisanship, pointing out this horrendous military bill.
I don't call it a defense bill.
It has nothing to do with national defense.
It has to do with subsidizing the military-industrial complex.
And I think the questioner asked about are the Republicans and Democrats a bipartisan group there supporting both.
It's true.
It's the deep state that's in control, even though there's a lot of fussing and fuming, especially on foreign policy.
The Democrats are every bit as militant as the Republicans.
So how do we solve this?
Do we have to wait for a crisis for it to end?
Well, no, we shouldn't have to wait for it, but we have to change people's minds.
And that's the reason that we spend a lot of time here, Daniel and I do, to try to convince people about the foreign policy because that's been wasteful and the politics of it is just horrible because both sides support it and they distract with all kinds of inter or bipartisan fighting.
The fighting between parties goes on, pretending and ignore the other things that are important.
But no, I think, unfortunately, I want to continue to do my part in trying to convince people that we can change policy and just follow the Constitution, bring our troops home.
I don't expect it to happen.
I think there's going to be a much more major problem.
I think that the Soviet system came down because they couldn't afford it anymore.
They had to change their ways.
That's what's going to happen to us.
The amount of effort that we have overseas has to change, and we'll make some of these corrections.
But I think the other question was about the presidency.
Are you more optimistic now than on the previous presidency?
What's the worst thing he's done so far?
Well, no, I'm not more optimistic.
I think a lot of people in the country are, and superficially they have reason to be because it looks like the economy is doing better.
But that's sort of like saying Daniel and I are doing much better because we were just granted a loan for $20 million and we're flying high and we're feeling good, but you know, it doesn't last forever.
You know, at the end of the week, we'll have lost our 20 million.
No, it can't be built on borrowed money and all this thing.
And that's what's happening.
The benefits come from the inflation and debt that exists.
The debt is going up so much faster than economic growth.
So it can't last.
So I'm not optimistic.
I think this president economics policy is a little bit better.
And this also helped.
And he deserves credit for this.
He did lower taxes and he also lessened regulations, which helped build the sense of optimism in the marketplace.
So that's something.
But what if it's a bit illusionary?
What if it's based on the fundamentals not being changed and living within our hands?
That's the reason I'm not optimistic.
In a way, you say, more deception, more deception, and we can spend more money and we don't have to worry about it.
So it's this deception that I don't like.
That you spend more and more money and you have the Democrats on your side of all the military spending and deficits don't matter.
I think that is dangerous.
That's the acceptance of a major tenant of Keynesianism.
And now it's not only the economic Keynesianism of the Democrats being combined with the military Keynesianism of the Republicans.
So no, I'm not more optimistic now than I point out and try to give credit where there's been some improvement, but we still have a long way to go because it's not a viable system.
It'll come to an end.
And then we will have to start talking about this threat to liberty in order to promote a free market.
That should be our goal, and it's doable, but it's not going to happen without a lot more people understanding what freedom is all about and what the marketplace is all about, and a lot more optimism about what we can do with freedom and a lot less government.
Worst Presidents Analysis 00:02:35
That's a good doubleheader.
We always like to end Dr. Paul with something maybe a little light-hearted, a little bit less heavy lifting.
And our final question here is something I'm interested in hearing what you have to answer.
This is from David, and he says, Who do you think are the best and worst presidents in U.S. history?
He says, my least favorite is Woodrow Wilson, and I suspect you may agree.
Well, I'm close to it.
He's on my list of bad presidents, that's for sure.
And I think one way I can list the bad presidents are the ones that I was told were the greatest when I was in grade school.
That's a good way to start.
But does that mean you should put Washington in on that?
No, Washington had one where it was before he was president.
It wasn't during the time he was president.
He had a war.
And you know, we've heard the more recent president, one of the Bushes, says, Well, you need to have a war to really have a legacy.
And there's a lot of attitude about that.
But the bad presidents have been the ones Woodrow Wilson was horrible.
He was horrible because of his foreign policy, make the world safe for democracy.
He was a terrible protector of civil liberties.
And generally speaking, these wartime presidents are very bad on civil liberties.
Roosevelt was the same way.
Roosevelt, there's no reason for people to be confident.
He was lousy on economics.
He perpetuated the depression and institutionalized welfareism.
And another thing, I do believe, it took me a long time to come to this conviction.
I do believe that Roosevelt maneuvered us into war.
And he needed a Pearl Harbor, just like the neocons in recent days talked about, well, we need a Pearl Harbor event like 9-11 to really go after what we want.
And the neocons came alive in 9-11.
And just look at what's happened to our civil liberties and look at what happened to the tragedies of the last 17 years, the wars that we've been involved.
So, no, there's not many I can find that who is the worst.
All wartime, I'd like to summarize and say all wartime presidents, generally speaking, for us have not been very beneficial to and not very helpful.
And maybe next time we will sort it out and go over who have been the best presidents we ever have.
So that'll be a goal.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today.
And Daniel, thank you for helping us out here.
It's a lot of fun, Dr. Paul.
And I wanted to let the viewers know how much we appreciate you tuning in.
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