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Jan. 10, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
18:42
Student Loan Reform? Civil Discourse? Government Shutdown? #AskRonPaul

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National Parks in Peril 00:03:15
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.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
Very good.
What do you have in store for our program today?
Well, this is something that we enjoy doing periodically, and we also appreciate our viewers, and we appreciate their input.
It kind of puts you on the hot seat, as I always say, because it's ask Ron Paul.
That's where you've got to answer the questions, and I just have to be able to read.
So it's easy for me.
But let's just jump right into the first question for Dr. Paul from our valued viewing audience.
This comes from Tommy Brown III.
How do you feel the American people should react to national monuments being closed due to a government shutdown?
Oh, my goodness.
This is like the end of the world now that the government is closing down and you can't go to some of the national parks.
Well, if that's the case, why don't we denationalize them or privatize them or something like that?
And then they couldn't play this game.
It's only a game.
And there's a lot of reasons they do that.
Because they want people to see it.
You go to Washington, you can't go up in the Washington Monument.
So it's just a point that has not much relevancy.
And all this shutdown business is just grandstanding.
It's political.
And they seem to get a lot of people's attention.
But also, though, there's a lot of people who don't really care.
There's a lot of people who say, well, just let it go.
The world hasn't come to an end.
And I imagine there's just a few in government when they hear about the Congress not being able to keep the paychecks coming, they'll say, this is a paid holiday.
I'm looking forward to this.
I hope we stay out for a month because I know I'm going to get paid.
And I have a little bit of savings so I can survive for a month.
So they're not really worried about losing anything.
And I don't think the things that they close down really make a difference.
You know, there was one major national park where the facilities weren't open.
You know, you couldn't buy food or anything like that.
And there were nobody there to assist.
But they left the gates open.
And people still went in.
They said, yeah, come in.
Just take care of it.
And it seems like they weren't too unhappy.
And there was one time when I had a little swimming pool club where people could come.
But one rule was, come, swim.
You have your own lifeguard and take your garbage with you.
And I got to thinking, I wonder if a national park could do that.
But in theory, you know, the original intent wasn't to have a third of the country owned by the federal government and total control.
I know national parks are sort of sacred, but maybe they could just move in the direction of saying, look, take it out of the jurisdiction of the Congress, you know, running up a budget.
Why can't the states run these parks and monuments and pay as you go?
Let them earn enough money to pay for them and get it out of the area of politics.
But the politicians like it because this is a demonstration.
Student Loans and the Constitution 00:10:06
It fits into the argument.
It's all their fault.
No, they're their fault.
And it's a partisan bickering.
But I don't think there's anything wrong with, you know, under today's circumstances and the situation we have for it to be closed down because it might send out a lesson that the world keeps going.
You know, I think it should be broader and show people that we can get along and have other substitutes for it.
But, no, it's a political grandstanding.
It has no real effect.
If government were more the proper size, we wouldn't even have this.
But we will always, I guess, face it as long as the budgeting system works like this and we're always out of money and we're always arguing over some issue and we're trying to get a political advantage of it.
And that's where the problem is.
But as far as saying, well, we ought to have a law that says you can't ever, you know, stop any payment.
We'll just give authority to the government to borrow endlessly.
Well, they do that anyway, you know, the big things.
If it comes to a major crisis like the big recession we just had, they didn't go through Congress for a little bit, but that money came from secret budgets, from the Federal Reserve and everything else.
So this is pittance compared to how much government goes on and is paid for outside of the ordinary budget.
And that includes, you know, the CIA and some of these wars being fought.
So much of that has never been authorized, but this is just a cheap stunt that doesn't mean a whole lot.
And it should mean that we should realize that we could get along with a lot less government and let somebody else worry about it.
I think more local control would be better.
All right.
Well, moving on to question number two for Dr. Paul.
This comes to us from Ryan Welch along the lines of what you were just saying, sir.
If there is to be a state, if there is to be a government, what are the limits of it?
Well, in our case, and I have pointed this out many times in my campaigns and when I was speaking on a House floor, is that there is a problem.
We have a difficulty.
Where do you start?
How do you solve these problems?
And how do you define the state?
And I said, well, you know, for starters, why don't we start with the Constitution?
That would be at least some place where we could start.
And the Constitution is written because it's a thou shalt not.
And anything you don't have direct permission to do, whether you're an individual or a state or a federal government, you can't do it.
So it's explicit.
And this is something that should be very limited.
So the Constitution is a pretty good guide.
But there are other things that could guide us.
You know, John Adams said that the Constitution that they were giving us wouldn't work if you didn't have a moral people.
So there's a little bit of that need too.
But another guide that I've used for a moral limitation on what government should do comes from one of the most interesting books I ever read and a principle that is not hard to understand, and that's Bastiat's The Law.
He defines the principle of the law that governments can't and shall not do anything that you as an individual can't do.
Could you imagine if the government couldn't go to the neighborhood and redistribute wealth or reorganize the world or run an empire or counterfeit the money?
You're not allowed to do it.
I'm not allowed to do it.
We're not allowed to go into our neighbor's house and take what we need, but we can send our congressmen.
We can send the politicians.
We can get around it by printing the money and circumventing all the restraints.
But it is definitely a moral issue for government, for me at least, and that is that most people still believe that you're not supposed to steal from other people and you're not supposed to defraud people.
You're not supposed to hurt and kill people.
That's been around for thousands of years.
And those are just some basic principles.
Now, why should it seem so strange and still is?
Bastiat wrote back in the 1850s and he was very, very clear on this.
That if you can't do it as an individual, the government can't do it.
And this is revolutionary, unfortunately.
But that should go without saying.
Why in the world have we ever allowed this to tear apart our Constitution by saying that the government, that's different.
The government will pay for it.
When you ask these young people, oh, I want total socialized medicine, free education, the whole work.
Well, who's going to pay for it?
The government's going to pay for it.
Well, that's a reflection of an immoral understanding and also total ignorance on economics, and they don't care about bringing disaster to a country.
So I would say two things to look for if you're trying to sort out some limitations.
You know, look to the Constitution, look to Bastiat's principle of law.
And then if there's still too much government for one, they can start thinking about theoretically at least what it would be like if you didn't have any government.
And sometimes when governments fail and people are forced into the underground economy, they sometimes do pretty well, better than we would understand.
But for now, I would say we should do our best for people to know what the Constitution said, follow it, and have a moral principle that you can't use force to redistribute the wealth and tell other people how to live and to police the world.
All right.
Well, moving on to question number three on a topic a lot of people are concerned about.
This is Eric Franklin.
And he's wondering, Dr. Paul, what are your thoughts on student loan reform?
The student loan reform, ultimately, there's only one reform that works, and that is bankruptcy.
But you don't want to ever talk about that.
But it's ongoing.
It's already started.
There's a lot of default, and they're all backed up by the government.
So the government will take care of it.
It's $1.4 trillion.
It's a bubble.
And the worst thing about it is it produced a system of education that diminished the value and the quality of education.
At the same time, it pumped up salaries of the professors, and they built huge buildings and all these things.
It was just a total failure.
But this debt still has to be resolved.
And when debt, whether it's the student loan debt or the government debt, gets to a certain limit, it's never paid for.
Can you imagine, you know, if you're 50 years old, and there are some now 50 years old, and they have huge student loans and there's going to be a lot more.
Say, you've got to pay them out, pay them out.
Oh, okay.
Well, I'll be getting Social Security pretty soon.
So I have to pay more, get them to pay me more in my Social Security so I can pay off my student loan.
Well, it should have never been started.
It has no real benefits whatsoever.
There's ways to get around it.
And when I was in college, college was a lot cheaper.
Jobs were readily available.
And a lot of people worked their way through school.
It wasn't just one or two people.
It was just commonplace.
But the whole thing is, it's like being on a treadmill because the more money you give the student, the more money they spend, the higher the cost of education is.
And the more there's difficulty and distortion in the economy, and the more difficult it is for young people to get jobs.
And then when they do get a job, I remember one time making this point where there would be students and still a lot trying to pay these bills by becoming a waiter or waitress.
And then they get tips when they do a good job.
Then they get taxed.
So I wanted to start off with, here we want them, we pay their own, we pay them, you know, we give them their student loans, and then they try to work their way out, and then we tax them.
So I think taxation is such a horror that you could start off with playing on this student loan.
If you're a student, you shouldn't have to pay taxes and work in that direction.
But unfortunately, that isn't the case because what we want to do is pay for these student loans, send the young people to the universities to learn Keynesian economics, learn to be dependent on the government and just contradict everything the Constitution says and make sure they know that the Constitution is not important.
So it's a system that the student loan, the sooner it goes bust, the better.
It's not going to be paid for.
But that represents all welfare-ism, whether it's the military-industrial complex, whether it's the student loans or just ordinary food stamp type of welfare.
Yeah, it works for a while until the money quits working and then everybody suffers the consequences.
And it always happens.
Exact time and place, we don't know.
It's been evolving and growing for many decades now.
But we're getting close to this point where if they don't work out a system where students can work this out, the payment will occur because they'll run out of money, they'll go bankrupt, or it will be defaulted on.
There will be such inflation that if they owe $100,000, it'd be like, you know, if you have a 90% devaluation, you give them $10,000 and it would pay the bill.
Devaluation and inflation of the money supply pays these debt down, but it's still fraud.
It's still theft.
And it's a program that will be dealt with.
And it's a potential bubble to burst that will affect the financial markets in the near future.
Power Struggle in Discourse 00:05:09
All right.
Well, moving into the last question on a similar topic.
This is certainly apropos for our day.
This is sent in by Eric Miller.
American citizens have a fundamental difference of opinion of what America should be.
How do we as a country get back to polite discourse?
Well, one thing for sure, if you want polite discourse, it will not be achieved by the government having a seminar and teaching people how to talk to and with each other because the discourse is worst in the political system.
So reduce the scope of government because when governments get too big and there's too much power to pass out and there's not enough money, the discourse gets pretty serious.
And when I think of the terrible discourse in Washington, and it is a lot worse than it was, you know, when I first went to Congress, it's not over the issues.
The majority of people in Washington, in the Congress, agree with all the nonsense going on.
And it's not libertarianism that they agree on.
They agree on liberalism, big government wars, and all these kinds of things.
What they don't have is the ability to pay for this.
And the other thing is, is when government gets so big and burdensome, there are problems.
And then it's a power struggle.
So that is what's going on right now.
But, you know, everybody has a responsibility for this.
And I think most people should think of it as a personal responsibility.
And because that's the only individual you really have control over, ourselves.
I had some rules for myself because I just didn't like any of it.
And I don't think anybody could ever find a time when I was on the House floor and ever talked about Republicans or Democrats.
You know, I talked about economic policy.
But this is ongoing, but that's a power struggle.
But the power struggles occur once the governments have grown and grown and become inefficient.
And they wonder what's going, you know, how to finance these things.
This is understandable, but it's also a reflection of the moral culture of the people.
And I think When the people are basically, you know, immoral, impolite, that'll add fuel to the fire.
I don't think it, I think there's always people like that, but I think it gets much worse once the politicians get work.
What is frightening to me right now is the evil, victoryolic conversation going on now among the politicians.
You know, it is so mean and ugly that this is a reflection, I think, of a deterioration in society.
And that's one thing.
Government is a contributing factor, but they're not the cause.
I think that there's something that is, it's a moral challenge.
And, you know, you might say, well, who's responsible?
Well, I'm responsible for myself.
Families are responsible.
Parents are responsible.
And, you know, going to church and other things are responsible for learning these, you know, the correct things.
But unfortunately, if the family, let's just make an assumption that teaching young people to be polite, which isn't done so much anymore, starts probably with a family and parents.
And there's always reasons, no matter how wonderful a society is, there's always reasons with some families having problems for health matters and whatever.
But today, it's a lot worse than that.
And it's not racial.
At one time, they said, oh, it's minorities.
They're the ones who are having illegitimate kids and all this.
But it is multiracial.
It's societal.
And people aren't learning this at home.
But is that a government problem?
No, that basic problem is individual and it's going to have to be solved elsewhere.
Someday people will have to realize, and hopefully it comes about only because people who follow the rules of proper discourse and politeness maybe think, well, that's not too bad.
Why don't they look and see maybe they're more successful than others?
But right now, I hate it when there is a competition between the ones who yell the loudest and scream the loudest and seem to be the most obnoxious.
And sometimes when you look at these talk shows on TV, that seems to be what the competition is.
They should think about the philosophy, have a philosophic discussion, enjoy the discourse.
And when we do have those discourse and debates, do it politely.
But that will not be easily solved.
But one thing for sure, the government's not going to do much to help.
We need to take care of that ourselves.
All right, Dr. Paul.
Well, you survived another round of Ask Ron Paul.
Very good.
And I want to thank our audience for tuning in today.
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