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Aug. 22, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
37:16
Ron Paul Rewind: Freedom Doesn't Come From Government

As we prepare for our yearly Ron Paul Institute Conference in Virginia, we hope that you enjoy this classic speech given at a Mises Institute conference in Costa Mesa, California, back in 2014. Ron Paul explains how state intervention destroys civil society, and how free markets offer a better solution.

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Dr. Ron Paul: A Longtime Friend 00:02:00
Our final speaker this afternoon likely needs a little introduction to most of you.
Hopefully, during the course of his two presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, many of you got to know, at least at a distance, Ron and Carol Paul.
And he's with us here today, a longtime supporter of the Mises Institute, Dr. Ron Paul.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jeff.
Thank you very much.
And thank you for that nice welcome.
You know, when Lou called and asked me about coming over and visiting with this nice group, I told him there'd be only one condition.
I said, you know, I like to go and talk to the young people.
And I said, as long as you get a group where everybody's under 35, I'll come.
And it looks like he's fulfilled his promise.
So thank you.
You know, over the years, I've been introduced different ways, but sometimes I get introduced that I am the husband of Carol Paul.
So that is what I am today.
Husband, Carol Paul.
Well, also, we have some special friends with us today.
And that's what this program depends on.
The Mises Institute depends on friends, and the things that I've done politically or educationally, it's been friends like you who have supported us in many, many different ways.
But we came over from Houston on Thursday with very close friends who have been friends of ours for 40 years.
I'm sorry I had to mention all those years, but it's about 40, about 40 years they've been helping and supporting me and the Mises Institute.
And that's Carl and Lois Davis.
I'm delighted that you were with us today.
Republicans Take Senate 00:03:35
You know, frequently in the last week, people have been asking me about the election.
What did you think about the election?
Was there an election?
Did anything change?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
We have Republicans in charge now of the Senate, and that's wonderful.
Everything is going to be okay now.
I said, well, how many, did they elect any more neocons in the Senate?
Oh, yeah, a few, but that's not too bad because someday we'll change all that.
So I guess there was an election.
I guess there was a turnover.
And one neat thing is that one group of power mongers out and a new group move in.
But at least we can find some encouragement there because if you disrupt power, I think there is definitely a benefit from this.
But overall, elections aren't all that exciting, you know, in the sense of have we seen the changes?
It's so often over the years, I've heard the saying goes, this is the most important election in our lifetime.
And I used to think, well, boy, this is going to be a big thing all the way back to 1964 and earlier on, you know, what was going to happen.
But it never seems quite that dramatic.
But I think because there hasn't been too much competition.
And they keep asking, well, what can we do to allow a third party in and get in competition?
I said, I've been waiting for a second party.
But then again, people say, well, you heard it incessantly before the election that I ignored.
And they would say, we have to get the vote out.
Everybody has to vote.
Why?
Well, because the best examples for everybody voting is in the Soviet system.
98% of the people voted.
And there was a monopoly control over those votes.
But they're always saying, but it's irrelevant how many people vote.
It's what you're voting for.
You know, if you're voting to endorse the status quo, what difference does it really make?
And actually, in a practical sense, I thought, you know, the number of people voting is very interesting.
So if you're involved in active politics, this plays a role in it.
The first election I was involved in was in 1976.
I had to get, it was a special election.
I had to get into the runoff in order to have a chance.
And I remember getting into the runoff in a district that had 550,000 people.
I needed 13,000 votes.
So it was very good that a few people came out.
We got our people and got into the runoff.
And quite frankly, if that had not happened, I doubt very much if I'd be here today talking to you because that's the way events go.
But it is something that people have to make a choice about.
I get a lot of questions from young people about being involved in politics.
And I think it's very important to be involved, but also to realize that it's the ideas that really count.
And on my farewell speech to Congress, which I'm sure this copy is around here, I try to make the point of the difference of being involved in politics and being involved in political activities for special reasons.
Choices About Liberty 00:03:53
And that makes all the difference in the world.
But we do face, you know, a lot of problems.
There is no doubt about it.
And like I mentioned in my opening statement, I do like to talk to young people.
As far as I'm concerned, everybody is a young person because you have to have a young idea to think about liberty in this sense.
Liberty is a young idea.
I think it's only starting.
Of course, some people say, what do you mean?
It started back there in 1215, didn't it?
And yeah, it's very interesting.
But that's only a short time ago when you look at the history of man's conditions on the earth.
We're talking about millions of years of history, and yet just a such short period of time.
And really, the most important changes occurred probably over the last 240 years.
Sure, we had the Magna Carta, and there were some gradual improvements and interest in the cause of liberty.
And also, it was something that comes, you know, goes back and forth.
You get some and you lose some.
But certainly the founding of this country and the Constitution, in spite of its many shortcomings, there was a serious attempt to try to advance the cause of liberty.
And unfortunately, though, there were some of those improvements made.
It seemed like since 1913, they've been rather undermined wholesale.
So I'd like to repeal 1913 and everything that was passed in that year.
Now, the title of my talk that I was giving is to talk about why freedom doesn't come from our government.
But the judge has handled that subject so well, and I couldn't improve on this.
This is a disadvantage to follow somebody as great as the judge in both his ability and his understanding of the law.
So I will talk a little bit about that, but he certainly understands what natural rights are about.
And I talk about that frequently.
And I usually have a phrase something, well, where do rights come from?
In order to include people, I believe in natural rights and I believe in God-given rights.
And some people just call it natural rights and they don't want to invoke, as Jefferson did, the Creator, but it is something natural to us in their individual.
I've so often talked about one of the problems we face today in this country is there's too much thinking of rights as a collective.
And it always annoys me that it's so casual, it's all the time.
And the pundits on TV do it endlessly.
You know, how did one group vote?
I think it's really a very bigoted way to treat recovery.
Oh, how do black people vote?
How do white people vote?
How do Hispanics vote?
How did women vote?
How did the gay people vote?
And go on and on and look at all this stuff.
And I think that just undermines steadily this whole concept that our rights are individual.
We're important because we have those rights and, of course, have to protect it.
So it's very easy to decide what the role of government ought to be.
The government's role is not to provide safety and security.
The role of government is there to protect our liberties.
No more than that.
And that's a pretty clear-cut responsibility.
Too often, they want perfect safety and they want perfect security and perfect economic security.
And how do they do that?
They do that by taking away liberty.
Government's True Role 00:14:53
And that, of course, is what they've been doing constantly.
So where are we today in this effort?
It doesn't look good, but it's looked so much better since I left Washington because I spent a lot of time up there and I gave a speech or two, but nobody came to listen.
So when I come to a group like this, then I get encouraged.
And if I go to a college campus and see so many young people coming out, I really get encouraged.
And I think that's where it's all about.
And I think the work of the Mises Institute has just been fantastic.
And I think what's going on today is not a national thing.
I always claim that if we're going to make progress, it's not a Republican thing.
It has to be much broader.
Ideas have consequences, and we have to infiltrate all the parties and the thought processes.
And I keep remembering Nixon's statement in 1971: we're all Keynesians now.
He was right.
We were all Keynesians, and we've been living with that.
And believe me, about 99% are still Keynesians in Washington, D.C.
But things are changing, and that makes all the difference in the world.
And we are certainly in this transition.
So there's much, I think, to be optimistic about.
Not only has the Mises Institute been around, I would say, 30-some years now, in early 1980s, that I think Lou and I talked about the organization, but today there's been an explosion of interest.
There's been a lot of interest all along, and I sensed that during the presidential campaigns, that all of a sudden in a college crowd, they would say, spontaneously, before I even got to the line about the Federal Reserve, say, and the Fed and the Fed.
And I said, hey, wait, I haven't gotten to that line yet.
So that came about because of the educational effort.
And I do know that this is not something going on in the United States.
It's going on around the world, and it has to be.
The world is engulfed with fiat money, interventionism, economic planning, central banking, militarism, corporatism.
Communism has been defeated.
I mean, who wants to get up and say, I'm a communist now?
The very vicious entities of the 20th century have been demolished.
Just think, it tragically took hundreds of millions of deaths to prove the total failure of those authoritarian regimes.
But today, we have a tremendous opportunity because in the area of ideas, these ideas are spreading.
Quite frankly, I get emails and phone calls all the time from around the world.
And not too long ago, I went to Brazil and I was talking to the individual down there that wanted to have me down there.
And I said, well, you know, I want to find out what he was all about.
And he was a well-to-do businessman.
And he explained to me, he said, well, I said, you know, so often we ask, when did you get interested in liberty and who influenced you?
So I was asking him a few of these questions.
He said, well, he was a well-to-do businessman and doing very well until the crash came and he lost everything.
And then he came across the Mises Institute and Austrian economics.
And he was influenced by that.
Not only did he start his own Austrian school down there and a Mises Institute down there, he recovered financially.
So it was a wonderful thing that happened.
And I've been to Chile, but there's numerous invitations throughout Europe, Eastern Bloc nations that used to belong to the Soviet system.
So I wished I could make all the visits, but it tells you that these ideas are alive in a well and they're spreading and they can't stop them.
You know, as Victor Hugo said, you know, if we see an army coming in, armies can stop another army.
Physically, it's possible to do this.
But on ideas, if an idea whose time has come, they cannot be stopped by an army and they will invade the entire world.
I think what is wonderful now and why there's so much opportunity is we now live at a point in time in history where it's the end of an era.
Yes, maybe the early stages of liberty were talked about the very first time.
You know, some citizens of England were able to make King John sign the Magna Carta.
But we now have a period of time which is, I think, so different.
We had a type of an advancement with the revolution and our Constitution.
We've had a setback, though, for 100 years.
But I think that's more on the surface and not intellectually speaking, because I think the last 30 years, there has been a tremendous growth on the ideas of liberty, which was opposite of what was happening in the 1930s.
In the 1930s, you know, Roosevelt, you could look at his platform.
It wasn't all that bad.
He was still on the gold standards and balanced budget and limited government and stay out of wars and all these things.
But guess what?
The intellectual community was exactly the opposite.
And once the predictable depression hit and the problems that we had, of course, they came to light and Keynes won out in that argument.
Today, it is different.
I believe the undercurrent is freedom and Austrian economics and free markets and property rights, and it's spreading like a wildfire.
And this is the reason why an institution like the Mises Institute and others like this, that they deserve the support and people like you make all the difference.
Because a lot of people come up and thank me for doing this and that.
But the truth is, is I can't do anything without support and without help.
And that's the way it is with an organization like this.
So we should be very glad that our numbers are growing.
And some people get discouraged and they say, yeah, but we're still so small and we can't take over the government.
We can't do this.
But you know what?
You only need about 7% of the population to turn it around.
Very few people, percentage-wise, endorse the American Revolution.
And I think we're getting to those numbers where there's a great number of the people who are influencing the ideas.
But then again, you still have to have an endorsement or at least an acceptance of these ideas by 51%.
7% or 8% won't carry the day.
You have to finally get a majority of people saying it's in their best interest to go along with a new system.
And they did that for a long time.
They did that with socialism and welfarism.
And they've accepted that, believing it was in their best interest.
But the opportunity today is so tremendous because the 20th century gave us such a revelation of the failure of so many of these systems.
For instance, I think fiat currencies are on their last legs.
we're eventually going to get rid of the Federal Reserve System.
I think the militarism of big government is coming to an end.
Just think right now, we have nuclear missiles all over the Middle East and armies and tanks and all the military power.
And of course, we're the largest power and we throw our weight around and we intimidate people and we say, you do it our way and we'll give you a lot of money.
If you don't, we're going to bomb you.
And guess what?
With all that power and might, right now, what is the greatest concern in the whole world for peace?
There are like 20, 25,000 individuals.
They joined a group called ISIS, and we're supposed to hide under our beds because they're about to invade us.
So I would think if you put it into a proper perspective, that doesn't mean I'm belittling it.
It's not dangerous.
It's very, very dangerous.
But it also means that the numbers are smaller.
And even a government that has all these nuclear weapons, all these powers, they don't even know what to do.
You know, what do we do now?
Who's going to fight?
Not us.
Let somebody else fight.
And, you know, they go on and on.
And then when they do do it, they don't have any moral support for what they're doing.
They have no constitutional support from our side, from our government.
We don't declare the wars.
We don't have a moral standard for it.
We have the Bush doctrine, which says, well, it's important that we start wars now before they come and hit us.
It's the preemptive doctrine.
I would say one easy way to get started on correcting this is, why don't we just pay attention to the Constitution and don't let our government go to war unless it's a declared war.
But we have this opportunity.
I think the Keynesian economics will fail and central banking is going to fail.
This foreign policy of interventionism and big armies, it will fail.
But the big question is out there is what's it going to replace?
Will the world succumb to accepting total dictatorial powers?
That's always a threat.
There's always going to be a threat of violence.
But I think big government's going to shrink.
Isn't it wonderful now that we have introduced the notion that's being practiced, this whole idea of nullification and secession?
are great ideas.
So independence, you know, people have been critical of me because I sort of take a stand that emphasizes those points.
And what they want to do is say, oh, you're an American, or that means you wouldn't have freed the slaves, you know, a few things like that.
So, but what about the secession of the colonies from the British Empire?
I would think that would have been a pretty good declaration of independence.
And what about the breaking up of the Soviet system?
That's not a bad idea.
And it isn't like we don't still in this world have an example that we could look at and maybe give a little study to it.
You know, the more I look at it, the more I admire at least the intent and really the way it's working.
Switzerland.
Why don't we have a national defense policy like Switzerland?
But how many people in this room know the name of the president of Switzerland?
Nobody knows who it is.
And I was talking to a Swiss citizen the other day, and he says, I said, I'm fascinated that nobody knows the name of your president.
He says, well, there's actually seven presidents.
You know, there are seven elected to the commission, and they vote on somebody who's a president for one year, and there's no State Department.
They have no executive branch.
And guess what?
They have no wars.
And I am convinced the people don't want the war.
The governments want the war for various reasons.
And they control the media and they build up the war propaganda.
We've been living with that for so long.
Early on, whenever there's a talk of war, the people are against it.
That was the way it was with Iraq.
And then the propagandists come out and talk people into it.
And they're lied to, and they're convinced Saddam Hussein is about to drop a nuclear weapon on us.
And then a year or so ago, our president said, you know, that guy that won the Nobel Peace Prize.
He said, now that the Iraq war has gone so well, we can leave there.
And the good war, though, that we really have to fight is in Afghanistan, and that's been going real well, too.
So he says, where should we go now?
Oh, Syria is a neat place.
Why don't we just go into Syria?
We never liked Assad.
He's a bad guy, and he doesn't have a good reputation.
We go to help the people of Syria.
So, of course, we march in there and drop bombs.
And that didn't get due to so well.
And it's got out of control.
And this group of ISIS, they end up with all the weapons.
So now that we're going back into bombing, I just think this is so dramatic.
It makes the point so dramatically.
And that is, we decide to go back in and start bombing.
And the instruction to our bomb, our pilots, is first go and destroy all the American weapons because they were all in the hands of the enemy.
So we did that.
And guess what?
This week they're going to vote for another $6 billion for more weapons.
When I saw that the instructions were to destroy American weapons, I thought, bet the military industrial complex are very pleased today.
So they can keep building weapons.
So what do we do with this?
Perpetual war and all these problems.
And it's not easy.
I think the state, the powerful states, will be diminished in power and the people have to speak out.
And this whole idea of secession and nullification, I think that's coming along fine.
I think it's worth the attempt to have a piece of paper that tries to restrain the government.
That's what the Constitution tried to do.
But in a way, it didn't work.
You know, it has failed.
Should you give up then there and totally?
Well, no.
What if you had individuals who went into the government with the idea that they had some moral principles, that the thrust of the Constitution, that you shouldn't practice aggression and you should follow the rules.
So if you had moral principle individuals, didn't believe in the Bush doctrine and that you would try your best not to get involved, that would help a whole lot.
But that hasn't worked yet.
Promoting Liberty Through Technology 00:12:19
There has not been a spontaneous effort.
It seems like it's the people who love power and love war are the ones who position themselves in this area of influence.
But then what is the other thing to do?
And that is to have, you know, eventually get rid of these governments that do these things.
And of course, that won't be hard.
But what else can you do?
And I think eventually there is no reason why people shouldn't think about being a conscientious objector in a massive sort of way.
Because the refusal to serve in the military right now is a pretty reasonable thing.
People say, no, you have to be patriotic.
And they say, besides, didn't you serve?
Yeah, I was drafted and I went.
And the real tragedy is, is that the 18-year-old or 22-year-old is hardly a movement to resist the power of the state or being thrown in prison for the rest of your life for doing this.
But I think that in time, this movement can move in that direction where less people will refuse to serve in these aggressive wars and people should be more attuned to not paying for them.
It's about time that we go straight on strike against the militancy of the U.S. government.
The other reason why I lean toward optimism is technology.
Just think of all the technology of the last two, 300 years, especially, which from the Industrial Revolution on, which is probably 80 or 90% of the advancement of science and all, just a short period of time.
Inevitably, all this advancement of technology has gone into the hands of the government to fight more wars and kill more people.
So we should get the government's hands out of this business.
And I think there's an opportunity for us to take technology now and use it for the cause of liberty.
For instance, like the internet.
Do we have to depend on the government stations?
Do we have to depend on government TV?
Oh, you know, you say they're private.
Yeah, sure.
They're private.
But it's the same news no matter where you get it.
So are we going to do that?
Or should we be able to get around it?
Yes, we can.
The internet is something unbelievably massive.
And of course, you say, yeah, but the government's watching us.
They know where we're going and what we're going to do.
But what about encryption?
There has to be people out there a lot smarter than I am about technology.
And I can read the stories of how private industry is trying to use encryption to defy the government.
And what we want is a contest now between private Encryption versus government surveillance.
And there's no reason why we can't be optimistic enough to think that technology can be used for the cause of peace.
And I think this is one of the reasons why our movement is succeeding.
It's technology.
And how can we talk to people around the world?
You know, instantaneously.
The other night I did a couple of tweets dealing with the election.
I had to confess I did watch the election return.
And somewhere I was suggesting a few things here at home.
I got a few criticisms, but I got a lot of results from around the world.
They were interested, you know.
So it's instantaneously instantaneous.
And that's what I think is so marvelous.
So I really believe there's a lot of room for progress.
We have to accept a couple basic principles, a libertarian principle.
And it fits my personal religious Christian beliefs.
And that is the principle of non-aggression.
Well, why should we ever accept the idea that you can initiate force against somebody else?
Oh, because he might hurt himself.
We're going to force you to wear your helmet.
You might fall down and hit your head, and I'll have to pay for your hospital bill.
So I'm going to force you to do this.
And you don't eat right.
I'm going to force you to do that.
And besides, you might gamble your money, and they have all these things that they have to do.
So I think that now we have this tremendous opportunity to reverse that trend, and it's available to us.
So I believe that the whole idea of freedom can be even advanced to the point where it can be achieved, not even without government, especially without government, because I think that's where it'll come from.
But the other important thing about the two basic principles that I try to follow, one of non-aggression, and of course the Bastiat principle is fantastic.
And I think I've gotten a few people to read that book over the years.
And that is, most people understand that we're not supposed to steal from our neighbor, and we're not supposed to hurt our neighbor.
And fortunately, that's still basically understood.
But they don't understand that if you and I can't steal from our neighbor, we should never let the government do the stealing for us.
But the other basic principle is that of tolerance.
And this is the toughest one for a lot of conservatives because tolerance for many people means that you endorse it.
So if, but that makes no sense because most Americans, you know, endorse the principle, accept the principle of freedom of religion and principles.
So does that mean that the extremists have certain beliefs that you can't stand and you don't tolerate and you think they're bizarre?
No, if you don't hurt anybody, you can have any belief that you want.
But you just tolerate that and put up with it.
And yet, so often people say, well, yeah, that's true, but what if they do things we don't like?
You know, what if they gamble?
What if they have personal habits and practices that we don't accept?
We have to make them better people, and it's the responsibility of the government.
Well, anytime the government gets in the business of trying to mold behavior, anytime that they want to get involved in developing excellence and virtue, which would be a personal goal, when the government does that, they only do it with the tearing up and the usurpation of liberty.
And that's what they do constantly, the do-gooders.
One, you have the economic do-gooders, and they play on emotions and say, oh, you don't care.
You're not a humanitarian.
You're going to let the people starve.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just look at the world.
How many people starved under true liberty versus how many people starved under communism and socialism and fascism, and how many people suffer now today because of totalitarianism?
I believe in a sense that if you are concerned about your fellow man and you have these humanitarian instincts that you care about the maximum help for the maximum number of people, you have to believe in a free society.
You can't have any other option.
For me, I think the wonderful thing about liberty is that it brings people together.
Because if there's one group that wants liberty for one thing that I don't want to have any part of, and another group wants it for somebody else, they might have a religious belief or something else, it should bring us together.
If you're going to use liberty, you want to get everybody together to defend and promote liberty and then not argue and fight over how a person uses their liberty because it's individual.
And even if liberty hurts oneself, they have to be allowed to do it.
The worst thing you can do is have a government that wants to protect you against yourself.
There's nothing left once the do-gooders get involved in that.
And we have way too much of that right now.
So we have, I think, a wonderful opportunity.
I see there's the era, an era is ending, how fast it's going to go and how well, how successful we are.
Nobody knows this, but I do know that if we don't propagate and promote and expand these ideas, not just in the Mises Institute or not just in Texas or not just in the Republican Party or not just in the United States, it has to be universal because it's been universal for too long about tyranny of government.
And people talk to me and they'll say, well, you're a radical.
You want to go back to the dark ages.
No, I would say tyrannies in the dark ages.
We want to advance the cause of liberty.
So it's very modern, it's very new, and it's delightful.
There's no reason why we should lose the intellectual fight.
How can we lose the fight when we talk about allowing people to run their own lives as they see fit, have more prosperity and more peace?
How can we lose this argument?
And basically, it's because people want a free lunch.
Now, the free lunch was a strong argument, and the free lunch or the prosperity came because we did have a fairly free society.
And therefore, we took advantage of it.
The people concentrated on just forced redistribution, and they thought it was in their best interest.
But that's all behind us.
There's no more free lunches because this country is totally bankrupt.
It's all a facade.
It's a myth, and someday it's going to come crashing down our head.
And there should be one goal, and that is the restoration of liberty.
If they take all our wealth from us away tomorrow and gave us our liberty, believe me, we would all recover rather quickly.
Mises had great advice for us.
He says it takes two kinds of people to promote a society.
He says there has to be individuals, and I'm sure he included himself because he was, people who think in theoretical terms and write theory and write about economics and these principles, they have to put them down.
But then he said there's another group that has to be able to take that.
And I like the word that he used.
He said, there's another group that has to take them and make these views palatable to the masses of people.
And then when they accept that, then they move on.
And this is what we're in the process of doing.
We will continue to have individuals write the intellectual papers and explain economics.
I was so excited in my younger days when I had natural instincts.
I think we're all naturally libertarians and they beat it out of us, but I was so excited.
I was so excited to discover the Austrian economist because, hey, they agree with me.
The whole thing is that they give you intellectual support for these views.
And we're way ahead on this.
So this to me is: we're looking for people who will help make these views palatable.
Everybody has a responsibility.
And I believe so sincerely that a group like this, and I know you're all below 35, so you have a lot of time to do this.
And that is that you have a greater responsibility.
If you know what's wrong and you're capable and you've read and you're convinced, I believe you have a greater moral responsibility to do something about it.
And so often people will come up, okay?
You convinced me.
Greater Moral Responsibility 00:00:32
Tell me what I have to do.
And I have a very simple answer.
Do whatever you want.
Do whatever you think you can do.
And everybody has another angle.
They can do things.
And people that have gotten involved in the last several years have been very creative.
So I'm excited about what's happening, but I'm not naive.
There's still going to be a lot of violence and a lot of trouble, but I just want to keep it logo.
I want to take the power away from the government and let us, the people, solve the problems.
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