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Feb. 6, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
20:15
'Green New Deal'? Free Trade? Liberty At School? #AskRonPaul

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Persuading for Free Markets 00:03:34
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Doing very well.
Understand we're going to do something slightly different.
We have, but we've done it before, and you put me under the gun here.
That's right.
Different but the same.
Ask Ron Paul.
It's a favorite, and we like the interactive aspect of dealing with our viewers.
I hope it's fun for you.
I enjoy it.
It's easy for me.
I just have to read, which I'm usually okay at.
But if you're ready, Dr. Paul, why don't we jump in and hear what our readers are thinking of?
to go okay let's get number one up on them now this is a good one What are your thoughts on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's new Green Deal?
Well, the easiest answer for that is I don't like it.
I can't believe there's going to be anything in there worthwhile.
But she may well be pointing out some things that are very important.
I think we're facing a crisis today, and it's given some license to these wild-eyed progressive socialists to get their views out.
And that is the discrepancy in wealth distribution, because it's not normal for a free market.
And the free market's getting blamed for all the problems that we have today.
There are too many billionaires, and they're growing by leaps and bounds, and the poor aren't doing well, and there is a discrepancy.
So they have that one point, and she plays on this, but she comes up with the wrong conclusion.
The conclusion is, well, we need more government to distribute that wealth, and therefore we have to raise more taxes.
She doesn't really want to listen to you when you explain to her that the wealthy 1% pay a tax equivalent to the lower 90%.
So how are you going to keep taxing and solve these problems?
But there is a maldistribution on wealth.
And it's not a consequence of too much free markets.
It's a consequence of corporatism, welfarism, of inflationism, and the Federal Reserve system, because this invites these kinds of problems.
And the radical environmentalists will use this for making everything fair.
You know, equality sounds good, but equality should be limited to equality of justice, not economic equality where everybody has the same amount.
It just doesn't work because when you do that, you end up with less for everybody.
You get more equality, but it's always by lowering the welfare of everybody.
So this goal has to be to get people to understand why free markets are the answer, and that you can't just radicalize it by saying, well, just tax the wealthy, and it's the environment that we have to take care of, and we're going to just write more rules and regulations.
Otherwise, the world's going to end in 12 years.
And I think one of the things that people should do when these get outrageous, and even some of the Democrats are going after her as well, because she's so out of it.
Cortez is just saying anything.
So I think a little bit of laughter sometimes can do as much as trying to reason with a person like this.
But she has an audience.
It's going to continue to grow.
And unless we're able to present the cause of liberty and free markets and get people to understand it from a moral viewpoint, she's going to continue to build her audience.
Gold Standard Solutions 00:09:48
But quite frankly, though there are problems out there that she's identified, I think her solutions are just outlandish.
And hopefully we can persuade people to go in a different direction.
Let's hope so.
Well, let's move on to number two now, if we can.
And what is our second question?
Let me think.
This is from non-conforming frog, who asks, if the gold standard was reinstated, what would you expect to happen to our economy in the immediate aftermath?
Well, you know, that question has to be qualified a little bit.
But if you close the Fed down tomorrow, declared that we were on a gold standard, it would be very, very chaotic.
It wouldn't work.
It's bad now, but it would get a lot worse.
If you have an economic collapse and you have to resort to sound money, establishing a gold standard might go more smoothly.
But I like to think about the restoration of the gold standard after the Civil War.
We went off the gold standard for financing the Civil War from 1961 to 1975.
And then they realized that this wasn't a good idea, and they had a restoration act of bringing us back to the gold standard.
So it was a three-year period of quit printing greenbacks and cutting back and living within our means, and we weren't fighting wars overseas, all these things.
And the transition was pretty amazing.
The gold price had been very high.
It just gradually came back down to $20 an ounce, and it became a non-event.
So it depends on the conditions.
Back then, it was assisted by the fact that the government said, we're going to quit printing the money and we're going to live within our means and we're not going to send the troops to Europe.
Today, if you had a government that says, well, okay, we're going to have a gold standard tomorrow under these conditions, and we're going to declare that gold is going to be $1,500 an ounce, and we are going to quit running up a trillion-dollar debt every year.
Well, nobody would believe them, and they shouldn't believe them.
Because if you had a gold standard, the wonderful thing that could come from it, if we followed it, is we'd get rid of the Fed and there'd be no monetizing of debt.
And that would be miraculous as far as realigning the wealth in this country.
It would take it away from the super wealthy and distribute it among the people.
And many people have written in the past that a good friend of the working class people and middle class is the gold standard.
A lot of people don't quite understand that, but sound money really helps distribute wealth.
Mises understood it because he says if you go off the gold standard, if you have fiat money and destroy the value of the money, you will wipe out the middle class.
And think of the middle class in Venezuela or Zimbabwe.
Think of the middle class already in our country.
They're already being diminished.
So the gold should be the gold standard.
And the other thing that I have advocated, because it is not an easy task to turn the switch on and off because it wouldn't be accepted, is to introduce the notion, get people to understand it, and legalize competition.
Today, we're forced to use the fiat dollar because it's a legal tender loan.
So I have to repeal the legal tender laws, allow people to use gold and silver and not have them being taxed, sales taxes or capital gains taxes.
And then if conditions get bad, people can start using them.
If they don't want to, they can just be prepared.
But that would be one way to get people prepared.
Right now in this period of time where we can't just turn a switch but might have to turn a switch on.
We should get people to understand this so that they are prepared.
And that means they should understand the value of protecting oneself withholding gold and silver because ultimately it is the money.
And no matter what Bernanke has told me and others, you know way gold is not money.
Well, there's 6,000 years of history that says gold is money.
So yes, we want to be prepared for it.
But the important thing is that it goes along with a government that is believable and they're willing to live within their means.
They're not dependent on a central bank to monetize the debt.
That is what has to stop.
But you can't do it as long as there's a welfare state and a military-industrial complex that demands that the monetization of debt occurs.
And that, of course, is where the transfer of wealth happens.
But the gold standard would answer a lot of our problems.
It's existed a long time.
There's been good and bad periods of the gold standard throughout history.
It gets bad when we go off it.
And that is what we literally did.
We destroyed any resemblance or relationship to gold since 1971.
So we have been building up a horrendous debt dollar bubble, which will come to an end, and we will all be forced to think about money and think about the gold standard.
All right.
There's a good lesson there.
Felt like a college lecture.
Very, very interesting.
Let's go to number three if we can.
This is from Tommy Vogel, who's talking about tariffs and free trade.
He says, I want there to be no tariffs and free trade.
But how do we stop other countries from putting tariffs on our products without us putting or threatening to put tariffs on them?
This is a good question.
It comes up all the time.
It's not easy to answer because the answer is just totally ignore what the other people do.
And you say, well, it's impossible.
Hong Kong did it.
Why should they put on tariffs?
They weren't making stuff.
They didn't want to put on tariffs because tariffs were taxes.
So if other countries want to tax their people, they should suffer.
And if a person, if a country didn't use tariffs and they did well, people say, hey, why are they doing so well?
They're buying all these cheap products from us and we're subsidizing them and we're charging it to our people.
So practicality would help you win the cause.
But no, it's emotionally one thing.
You've got to have, if they put on taxes for us, we have to retaliate.
But the easiest way to sell this is tariffs are taxes.
Tariffs are taxes.
So if we put tariffs on imports from China, we're taxing our people.
That has to be passed on to the people.
You're destroying, once again, it's an interference in taking care of the middle class and the poor.
I keep thinking about tennis shoes.
What if you can buy tennis shoes for $20 from China and $100 from an American industry?
Are you going to say, well, let's tax those $20 shoes and punish the poor people who really benefit by it and make them pay $100?
It doesn't work.
Freedom works.
And it gets tricky on this trade issue because it seems like you have to retaliate.
But there are countries that have had minimal taxes, import taxes.
We had import taxes and tariffs early on, but they were never meant to be so competitive and protective.
They were just there to raise revenues.
And this is a little bit different.
That if you put on, if it's a competitive tax, if it's to protect, then all the special interests get involved.
But the other thing that we don't remember is the Constitution says if we're going to get involved in this, some of these tricky questions, it's the Congress that does this.
But we have delivered this authority.
The Congress has delivered this authority to the executive branch, and they do all the trading.
Just think the president.
Just think of every day there's an announcement, I'm going to put a tariff on here, per tariff here.
Actually, that is being done by not following the Constitution because the Constitution says the Congress has to do it, and they can't transfer that power without changing the Constitution.
But that's been, you know, people have been accepting that.
The industries and the banks like this, you can have rapid retaliation.
And if there are problems, oh, okay, there are problems in these trade issues.
What we need is a regulatory body.
What we need is the WTO, and they'll sort all this out.
So they give you permission when you want to have to put your tariffs on.
But it's a mess.
Freedom works, and free trade works.
Free trade creates prosperity, and besides, there's an important element of free trade on foreign policy.
It has been well said by our founders and others that the more you trade and relate to other countries and get along with other countries, the less likely you are to fight with them.
And I kept hoping since the Cold War ended that our trade with China and Russia and these other countries would get rid of all that animosity.
But because we do things that weaken some of our own businesses, say, oh, we're getting weak.
We have to, it's all, you know, China's fault.
But what they don't look at is how the value of our currency plays a part on this.
We have the reserve currency.
We think printing money creates wealth, which it doesn't.
But since they have to take our dollars, what it does is we create them.
The dollar is still okay.
They take it and we buy all those goods and services.
They end up with the money.
They save the money.
Then they start investing in our stuff.
And we literally, you know, export our inflation.
We print the money and we get goods and services.
But to say that it's their fault because we buy too much stuff from these countries, it's our fault because we print the money and then we get other people to take it and then they send it back to us.
But the other benefit that comes from all that is they buy our debt too.
So this is sort of a perpetual motion machine that always ends badly because it leads to massive debt.
The balance of payments, international debt, as well as domestic debt.
Young People's Perspective on Liberty 00:06:41
And that is the culprit that we should be concerned about, the overall debt system that we have.
And if you look at this, this adds to the problem because there's a lot of debt out there when you look at student debt.
But then if you look at those 20 or 30 billionaires, they have billions of dollars in the bank.
And that just adds fuel to this social conflict of what's going on here.
But it is understandable if you look at the monetary issue and look at trade in a fair and open manner because it is the free market and free trade and sound money that could solve a lot of our problems.
All right.
And for the last question, I know this is near and dear to your heart, Dr. Paul, because you spend a lot of time talking to young people.
We have our friends at the Americans for Liberty that do a lot of work with young people promoting the cause of liberty.
We've got kind of a double header here, two similar questions, and we'll read them both, and you can put forth your ideas on them.
So we have the first one up.
This is Brett Besson, who writes, How do we sell my generation, Generation Z, on the concept of liberty when all that is taught in schools and universities are anti-liberty and faux liberty ideas?
And the second one comes from Casey Ikeonu, and he says, What's the best way to convert people at my left-wing university to the ideas of liberty?
You can take it already that they don't know anything about economics.
Well, this, of course, isn't easy because it's ingrained in our system.
And sometimes I think if you think you're going to convert your professors to sound economic policy, it's sort of like beating your head against a wall.
I think that one thing that I discovered early on is that I was getting a lot of garbage from my universities and from the establishment and from the government, and I had to go elsewhere.
And you can't wave a wand and have everybody else deciding, well, let's do the same thing.
But you have to identify bad policy, and it sounds like the callers, the writers here, that these questions understand that it is bad policy.
But you have to go someplace.
My efforts were made to go to outside sources, and that at the time I started, it was the Foundation for Economic Education to get the right information.
Today, you have the internet to get the information.
Today, there are many private schools, there are many homeschooling groups.
I have a homeschooling group that it's going to be ingrained.
You don't change a whole system.
So, if you think you're going to change the educational system and the professors, you can't have it.
But if you can discover what is right, which means you have to be introduced to the principles of Austrian economics in order to understand the economic issue.
But the principles of liberty are so important too, and it has to be understood that liberty is a moral issue.
It's the moral principle of our right to our life, our natural right to our life, not coming from our government, and we have a right to live our life as we choose.
I approached the liberal progressive by saying, Well, you never want to use regulations to regulate personal lifestyles and religious and sexual lifestyles.
But why do you want perfect liberty in that area, but all of a sudden you turn around and want to tell people what to do economically?
So, it's the inconsistency.
One thing that I found in campaigning on a university is young people like consistency.
If you say, I'm going to apply the principle of non-intervention, not only to your personal lifestyle, but also to those foolishness overseas, non-intervention overseas, and young people generally aren't for the war because they don't generally want to fight the wars or pay for them.
But once it comes into the economics, oh, there's unfairness there.
Instead of saying unfairness comes from the stupid economic system that we have, they say that we have to correct it.
We need more regulations, we need to control it.
But it's the principles of liberty, it's principles of non-intervention, and it's something that comes to us in a natural way, natural rights.
And that the founders understood this: the right to our life also means you have a right to liberty.
You have a right to your life to do what you want.
You even have a right to make mistakes.
And when you make mistakes and do dumb things in liberty, you have to understand that you suffer the consequences.
But if you do the right things, you're rewarded in a way that governments can't take it from you.
So, you shouldn't have to, if you work hard and save a lot of money.
The government couldn't come and confiscate it.
They're not supposed to come into your house and tell you what kind of personal lifestyle you have.
But no, they will do this and they should allow us to have economic liberty as well.
So, you can't chop it up into pieces.
And I think young people are very likely to look in this direction, that it's a moral principle.
And Bastia nails it when it comes to how to sort this out.
If you, most people know what you and I can't do illegally, we can't hurt people, we can't steal from people, and we should mind our own business and not take their property.
All we want to do to solve this problem and make freedom work and get people to understand is why in the world would you let the government do this?
Now, everybody detests the government, and they're sick and tired of us.
70% are unhappy with the government.
Yet, we turn all these viewpoints over to the government to regulate our lives.
Look at how the political correct atmosphere is.
They're regulating everything and the wars overseas and all these economic mistakes that literally have led to this discrepancy in wealth.
So, it is something that can be solved by the understanding what personal liberty is all about, and that the governments can't do what you're not allowed to do.
And just think: has the government ever lied to you?
Have they ever stolen from you?
Have they ever committed counterfeit by counterfeiting the money?
So, the government is really the culprit, and the people are apathetic.
They say, Oh, it's the government, but less so than they used to.
People are waking up, but they need to see that the government has to live under the same moral standards that we as individuals do.
You can't lie, cheat, steal, or kill.
And believe me, most governments are involved in those activities.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today.
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