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Aug. 23, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
39:50
Ron Paul Rewind: Alternative Views 1988

As we prepare for our yearly Ron Paul Institute Conference in Virginia, we hope that you enjoy this interview from 1988 when Ron Paul ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket.

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Time Text
Libertarian Principles and Power 00:10:38
We'll have some more news later, but now let's have our interview with Ron Paul, who's running for president on the Libertarian ticket.
As a Republican, he was elected to the House of Representatives four times.
Well, what about the Libertarian Party?
Can you tell us a little bit about what it stands for?
Libertarian Party is based on a firm principle of non-aggression.
We all take a pledge when we join the party that we will never initiate force against somebody else.
That is a pretty simple principle that everybody should endorse.
It's a principle of what makes civilization.
That is, you respect other people's life and you respect other people's property.
Thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not murder.
It's that simple, and most everybody agrees to that.
And the next question ought to be is, well, why should you be different than Republican Democrats if they tend to agree with that same principle?
Well, we believe it's such an important moral principle that if we can't take somebody else's property and we can't hurt anybody or we can't intimidate anybody or threaten to use force, we don't think the government can either.
But we see the government as the initiator of force to bring about social and economic changes day in and day out.
I mean, they may not come up to our front door with a gun, and occasionally they do, but we know if we don't deliver our money and our records and do obediently what the government wants in order to give up our portion of our income through the Internal Revenue Service, the gun will be quickly at our door and we will be in prison.
So it's the threat and the intimidation, and therefore they're transferring wealth, something that we can't do as individuals.
So we as libertarians reject this whole idea of forcible redistribution of wealth, which is the welfare state.
Same way in personal liberties.
We apply this principle in the area of personal liberties.
And although I might want you and think you should lead a certain lifestyle, because I think it's good and right and moral, I've no right to tell you what to do.
You know, if you want to live a certain way, and I disagree, that's tough.
You know, that's your choosing.
That's the individual's choice, as long as you don't hurt somebody else.
So the person has the right to his own life and his liberty, his own lifestyle, with one special rule, that your lifestyle, the individual's lifestyle, can't hurt somebody else.
So if you do things that I disapprove of, I as a libertarian am tolerant and I accept that up until the point of no injury to anybody else.
Now, I talk to libertarians or listen to them or view them on TV, and they're talking about government power all the time and abuse of governmental power.
But I also see some libertarians, not a whole lot of them, but a lot of them also talk about corporate power as well.
In other words, they're talking about power in general.
There seem to be two types of libertarians.
Well, I think we have one type of libertarian because we all accept the same principle.
I think it's more easily found that you have several types of Republicans and several types of Democrats because they're interventionists and they can intervene any way they want.
But I think libertarians are pretty consistent in certainly condemning the power of government.
I haven't heard a libertarian saying that we need more government or they're not a libertarian.
But on the corporate power, I think where the confusion might come is corporate size, if it's gained by serving the consumer, is not necessarily evil.
So if you have 90% of the car industry, and for some miraculous reason or for some unknown reason, there's no imports.
If you have 90% of it, that doesn't bother me as a libertarian if you have the best car at the best price and the consumers are very happy.
Now, If you have 90% or 100% of a utility company and you're gouging the customers and the customers have no place else to go, we detest the corporate size.
We detest corporate power when it's gained through government power, you know, government coercion.
If it's a contract, the military-industrial complex is a pretty good example of how large industries benefit by big government.
Of course, in banking, big banks benefit by this monetary system because they're sort of in collusion with the Federal Reserve System.
So we detest that.
We detest bigness and we detest corporate power when it's gained through privilege from government.
If corporations are large and there's always free entry in a free market, if they're large because they serve the consumer, we don't worry too much about that because we know the consumer is benefiting.
If they get to the point if they had 100% of an industry, which is not possible in a free market, but let's say just for instance, if they had 100% and then they started to gouge the people, there would immediately be competition.
You know, there has to be, there always has to be free entry and free competition.
But nobody's ever figured out where there's ever been a true monopoly in a free market system.
All monopolies can be traced to some form of government protectionism.
Well, of course, now we talk about government and corporations, but as you've said up at the top, they're all the same people.
The corporate executives go to and from the government.
They hold positions in the government.
The people from the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers and all, they're all corporate people, and they have their relationships and interlocks with the banks and with universities and foundations and all that.
So to talk about one, you're really talking about one source of power instead of corporation on one side and government on the other, because it's all one pot, as you said.
I think it's become one pot.
Not only that, you don't have any help by, say, voting for a Democrat who may be a little more critical of large corporations.
But we know Democrats are just as much in bed with big government too.
I mean, you take a Michael de Kakis, for instance.
Do you think maybe Boston was somewhat dependent on some military contracts with Tip O'Neill?
I mean, they're just as much, it's all demagoguery when it comes to these political campaigns.
So either side, the same people control it.
And, you know, Ronald Reagan spoke sharply against the Trilateral Commission, but he was the first president to host the Trilateral Commission in the White House.
I mean, that's how blatant it is.
It's the same group of people.
That's why you find no political action committee, no large corporation who supports libertarians.
I voted while in Congress, I think, the strictest free market set of votes ever, but I never got political action committee money.
But small business people who want to compete against big business, they're free market people and they're much more likely to be libertarians and believe in the principles of free enterprise.
But once the corporations get real large, they're more interested in paying a couple hundred thousand dollars for a top lobbyist who knows the system, who can get a regulation that exempts their corporation or gets their contract in place.
And this is the way the system works.
So we reward the lobbyists and the political action committees much more so than we reward a principle of freedom.
What about this banking and currency committee?
And we've had Congressman Gonzalez on, who's one of your colleagues, and he sees the world very clearly and sees the power structures at work.
And I'm sure you have a clear picture of this also.
Is this one of the reasons you became a libertarian instead of a Republican?
Well, it's certainly one of the reasons why I got involved in politics because I was very fascinated with economics and particularly monetary policy.
And if you think about it, money is pretty important.
If you look at all transactions, whether you're buying something or selling your services, one half of all economic transactions is the monetary unit.
So if somebody has control over the value of the monetary unit, they control every transaction.
Therefore, if you have an institution, such as a government-ordained bank, like a central bank, like our Federal Reserve, if they have absolute monopoly control over the value of that currency, they control everything in the economy.
It becomes a form of a government-regulated economy.
It doesn't become socialism, but the money obviously is socialistic in that the government controls it.
So if they increase the supply, the value goes down.
If they tighten the supply, interest rates go up.
So it's tremendous economic power.
And the insiders, those who know what the policy is, literally can benefit.
They don't stuff their pockets and line their pockets with cash.
That's not the way it happens.
But those who are in the inside and knowledgeable will benefit because they know which direction interest rates are going and which way the economy is going.
And if you look at the members of the Federal Reserve, you find out that they don't ask people like me to be on the Federal Reserve, even though I've had experience on studying the issue and been on the banking committee.
They ask only the people who are casually referred to as the insiders, those from Wall Street and the banking industry, the Paul Volckers and the Allen Greenspans of the world, they're on the inside.
They know how to deal with the establishment and they get these positions.
And therefore, it is a tremendous amount of economic power falls into the hands of what we call the open market committee, the Federal Open Market Committee.
They control from day to day the supply of money.
They become the legal counterfeiters.
You know, if you and I had control of the printing press, we could do a lot of things, you know, self-serving.
That's what happens when the politicians create the central bank that control the money.
Now, this control of the central bank and the money goes on regardless of which party is in power, right?
It never changes.
You know, they change a person here and there, but it's always the insiders.
It's always from the same group.
So if you have a Republican as president or the Democrats, they're going to get the same appointments.
Appointments never change.
And this can be said about the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board members.
They all come from the same group.
And even though, I guess naively, I was hopeful that the same group of individuals would not have as much power under Ronald Reagan.
But, you know, I was there, I witnessed it, and of course that led to my disenchantment, my disappointment enough to the point where I just said, I've had enough.
CIA And The FBI 00:03:30
And then I left the Republican Party and joined the Libertarian Party with the idea that you cannot trust Republicans to be independent of the system either, although Ronald Reagan led us to believe that he would be independent.
The record for civil liberties for the libertarians, to my mind, is very good.
And even I think it was the last interview we did with a Libertarian candidate for president said that he would abolish the CIA, the FBI, and the IRS.
Do you hold those same positions?
Yes, I do, because, you know, most of our history we didn't have those institutions.
The FBI came in during the First World War.
And interestingly enough, one thing that Woodrow Wilson did, he used the FBI to spy on American citizens and actually arrest them if they disagreed with his foreign policy about going to war in Europe.
And isn't it interesting how recent they used it in the Vietnam era?
Democrats used it there.
Republicans used the FBI to spy on a hundred different groups in this country, including the churches, who disagree with the policy in Central America.
It almost looks like the FBI was designed to spy on Americans who might be disagreeing with policy, especially the foreign policy.
So the FBI, although I don't think I could condemn everything they've ever done, because I'm sure some of the investigations and investigation of crime has been beneficial, but that could be accomplished through Justice Department within our states.
We wouldn't reject that portion of it.
I think the FBI has kept and continues to keep a lot of records on a lot of individuals.
The CIA has only been here since 1947.
Their record is lousy.
I mean, just think of the CIA used by the Democratic administration to murder Diem and escalate the war in Vietnam.
And here we have a Republican using the CIA to sell weapons to the Ayatollah, to raise funds, deal in drugs, go to Central America, fight wars that have not been approved by the people or the Congress.
So we see the CIA as very, very detrimental, skirting the law.
And here we had Casey proposing a super CIA.
He thought there was too much control over the CIA that existed that congressmen now occasionally ask questions and they don't ask enough.
So they were talking about a super CIA.
The CIA was used in a bad policy in Cuba.
We think that intelligence gathering is permissible to defend this country.
But up until 1947, it was done as a military operation.
If you needed to know whether there were troops massing for an invasion, that the CIA ought to know about, or we ought to know, get that information, have that intelligence.
But now in this age, especially in the modern age, I mean, we don't even need to have somebody over in Europe or in the Soviet Union.
We don't even need to send powers in an airplane over Europe.
We have satellites.
You can practically watch an individual walking around on the street with the technology available.
So I would say even modern technology has absolutely moved us into an age where we ought to become more modern and get away from this CIA operative snooping around, actually causing a lot more trouble than good.
Does that include all these interventions and covert actions and surrogate mercenaries which we're using in Central America?
Absolutely.
We would do away with that.
But that doesn't mean that we would complacently say that we shouldn't have a national defense.
Drug Laws and Education Concerns 00:13:01
If we're concerned about the spread of communism, one of the first things we as libertarians would do would be to stop the funding of the communists.
You know, we're still sending money to the communists.
Increased under the Reagan administration.
It's unbelievable what we've been doing.
But if there is a threat to our national security, rather than using these secretive operatives going around and murdering and picking and choosing our personal dictators that serve our banking and business interests, it should be done through the Congress.
Congress should know about it.
It's the people's money and it's the kids' lives that are being dealt with.
So therefore it should be open.
If our national security is threatened, Congress ought to have a vote on it.
Never secretly with the power of a president to wage war.
That's a very dangerous thing to happen.
Some libertarians are against the public school system.
They would close down the public school system.
Do you think this is a good thing or do you believe in that?
Well, I don't think the public school system has a real good record.
I think the educational quality is very, very low and getting lower all the time.
I think that you can go to some of the big cities and you find out that the schools are drug-infested and crime infested and there's violence and very little education.
More than a million kids drop out a year before they get their high school diploma.
It's an armed fortress.
And so we think the record is very poor.
So we have concern about good education.
And of course, we want to go in the direction of privatizing all schools.
But in the very practical world of politics, I don't think it's wise for me to say that tomorrow we could have private schools.
I don't think it's likely to happen.
So we can do a whole lot, set our ideals, work toward it, and we could change a whole lot.
I think where we really have gone astray has been in this century where we have gotten in probably the last 30 or 40 years when we've got the federal government involved.
And local governments have been involved in schools most of our history.
And I think if we had the federal government out of it and the state governments and schools were controlled locally, although that wouldn't be perfect libertarianism, it would be a far cry better than what we have.
But even short of doing all that, we as libertarians would really promote a little competition.
We don't like monopolies when they're government monopolies because that's really the only monopoly you get.
But a monopoly of our school system is a great danger.
So we would immediately introduce the idea and we think it would help the schools right off.
And that is allow tax credits or vouchers for people who want prayer in the schools.
How can we force people to have prayer in school?
You know, that's a violation of civil liberties.
But what we could do is say, if you don't like the way your kids are being taught, let's allow you to have competition.
Let's give you a tax credit or a voucher.
Go down the street and have the kind of school you want.
So we wouldn't want competition.
That to me would be a practical alternative and moving in the right direction.
I guess the most controversial stand which libertarians have now is on drugs.
You probably get a lot of criticism because you want to legalize drugs, right?
Well, but I think the most controversial thing about the whole drug problem is it's zero tolerance.
I think that's what's controversial, this idea that we have no privacy.
There's no financial privacy or privacy in our home because the drug enforcement agency can break our doors down looking for a cigarette butt.
They confiscate cars and boats and houses are bulldozed down all in the name of teaching people not to have bad habits.
They're spending $10 billion.
I think it's an incredible program of failure.
So the controversy is really in the hands of the government, Democrats and Republicans who are saying the same thing and each party tries to outdo the other and they're absolutely obsessed with this.
At the same time they care not a lit about our civil liberties.
But the drug laws have only been here since 1914.
About that time we had the income tax, the Federal Reserve System, the FBI licensing to protect certain industries and professions.
Then we decided we were going to tell people how to live and what their habits ought to be.
That's when they introduced the ideas of prohibition of alcohol.
Didn't work very well and so that was finally repealed.
Libertarians detest drug dealers and that's one reason why we want to get rid of the laws.
We want to get the drug dealer out of business overnight because he can't exist unless the drug price is very high.
So a lot of good people inadvertently are the allies of the drug dealers if they like the drug laws.
The people who write those laws and like those laws inadvertently promote crime.
Every drug addict because he has to pay these exorbitant amounts for their drugs commit on the average 260 felonies a year to raise the money.
That would be totally unnecessary.
Who raises that kind of money to go buy a six-pack at the drugstore?
They don't have to do that because the alcohol is available and alcohol kills more people than drugs.
Cigarettes, they kill 325,000 people a year.
And what are we required to do?
Subsidize the tobacco industry.
I mean if people want to really do good, let's just quit to subsidizing tobacco, get the government out of the sale of alcohol and go that way.
But the crime rate would go down, the drug dealers would be out of business.
I think the kids wouldn't be as exposed either.
It's pretty hard to tell a kid that's just dropped out of a public school where he was totally bored and he's on the street corner and decides he wants a job and buy a car.
Talk him into working at McDonald's for $4 an hour when he can make $400 a day doing a little work for the local drug merchant.
There's no way.
He's tempted and he yields to the temptation.
So we literally set the stage by these drug laws to get more kids involved.
And I think that's horrible.
I think the kids have to, they certainly deserve some protection.
We deserve at least to create an environment where they're not so likely to be forced into the drug trade.
Now you're a medical doctor and you think that legalizing all these drugs would be good.
Do your medical colleagues and the medical profession, they agree with this?
No, to a minority.
Matter of fact, I think that even drugs for treating oneself should be more readily available to people.
Not that I think people should do it unwisely and use a lot of fancy medication without some advice.
But if drugs were more available, if a nurse could prescribe penicillin, it certainly would be a lot cheaper.
Nurses are capable of telling you whether you have a strep throat or not.
It would drive the cost down.
So doctors have a little protectionism involved.
They like their little monopoly.
So the AMA, matter of fact, the AMA lobbied me in Washington to vote against even allowing doctors to give heroin for dying cancer patients who couldn't have their pain relieved from morphine.
But they did not want this to happen because they wanted to have control and they didn't want to look like they were soft on drugs, but they want control.
So whether it's the drugs necessary right now, the FDA, I think, does a horrible disservice to us all by making it very difficult for AIDS and cancer patients to do alternative treatments.
You know, they're smuggling drugs from Mexico.
You know, we think of Mexico as a socialist state, and yet they can get drugs more readily there.
And we're having dying cancer patients, AID patients, smuggling drugs up into the free United States in order for them to take this medicine.
But the FDA argues, well, we've got to make sure it's safe and effective.
Well, if somebody's dying, don't you think they have the right to take a chance on a drug, on an experimental drug?
But the AMA isn't helpful in here, and the medical profession is very poor.
A lot of doctors would agree with me, but I think they like the idea that they're sort of godlike and they get to write prescriptions, and they certainly think that opening up this whole barrel, so to speak, would be detrimental to their protection and their interest in organized medicine.
What about the police and law enforcement profession?
Would they be for your point of view?
It would put a lot of them out of work.
I think a lot of them would make a lot less money.
You know, their system has been corrupted by it.
Oh, gosh.
You know, another example of how foolish some of these laws are is the prisons are running rampant with drugs.
If we can't keep drugs out of the prison, how are we going to keep drugs off the street?
Which means it's very much a corrupting influence.
I mean, we read stories.
I'm sure the majority of the police are not involved, but you don't need very many to really make a lot of money off it.
So there are going to be some officials who would agree with us, and I've had some.
There was an interesting story of an individual when my staff went to work for a candidate who was running for a governorship in a large city.
And they brought all the district attorneys together because crime was the number one issue in that state.
And they said that the only way you could ever get rid of crime would be, and they all agreed on this, is you'd have to get rid of the drug laws.
So behind closed door without the press, they agreed the drug laws created crime.
And you know what they said?
You can't ever achieve that because there are too many people on the take.
Too many judges and too many policemen like this.
So just forget about it.
We can't deal with it.
It's too much of an emotional issue anyway.
But it is an important issue.
I think the discussion has progressed a whole lot in the last six months.
I think we as libertarians have done a whole lot of good in getting this discussion out.
And I am going to continue to debate this because as a parent of five children and as a physician and as a non-drug user, I think that I have some credibility in making this debate on the idea that drugs ought to be decriminalized.
Let's talk about what could be the most explosive issue of this campaign if the mass media would get a hold of it and do something about it, but they're covering it up.
And that is the, you were talking about the government involvement in drugs.
There have been government investigations, there have been private investigations, and we've interviewed a lot of people, ex-CIA people, who have talked about the CIA involvement in drug operations for many decades.
It's public knowledge, though once again the media are not saying anything about it, that Oliver North and his people involved with the Contras have been running drug operations, cocaine primarily, bringing it back into the United States.
And there are other investigations which show that George Bush's office, Donald Gregg particularly and the people he was working with, have been supervising an enormous drug operation, which once again was sending illegal arms down to the Contras and elsewhere and bringing cocaine and other types of drugs back into the United States.
But neither the Democrats aren't talking about this.
Now, are the libertarians talking about this and did they put this into the framework of the drug law situation that you're talking about?
We talk about it a whole lot.
Of course, we always have the trouble of getting the attention that we think it deserves.
There have been a few Democrats have talked about.
Senator Kerry's office has done some work.
Right, and I think he's on to something.
And I think we've gotten some other information too, of course, that George, or the CIA has given the Oriaga over the years $200,000 a year.
And they kept feeding him money, even when Bush was the head of the CIA.
I think George Bush is deep into it, well over his head.
Somebody asked me once if I thought George Bush knew about as much of what's going on as Ronald Reagan.
I think George Bush knew a lot more about what was happening in the CIA because I think Reagan was probably more removed from it.
I mean, just by his own personality and maybe his age or something.
But I think George Bush, through his office and through the fact that he was a member of this, you know, head of the CIA, I think he was very, very close to it.
He knows exactly what was happening.
And I believe the rule that once a CIA member, always a CIA member, and I think it's awful interesting.
Can you imagine it would alarm a few of us in this country if all of a sudden we knew that the leader in the Soviet Union would be the head KGB agent.
And here we take our head CIA agent and put him potentially the head of our entire country.
Unfortunately, I wish that we could get this information out.
And I continue to talk about it, but I sadly believe that there will be very little said, which means if the Democrats aren't doing it, that means they're involved too.
They're involved also.
And I don't think there's any doubt about it.
I mean, even some of it got reported in the Iran-Contra scandals.
We did know that there were drugs involved and they were selling drugs back and forth.
I think that might be the number one reason for the drug laws.
Government's Role in Healthcare Costs 00:03:58
I mean, they use and play on the good people of America to support them.
But I think the number one reason is not to have high prices for some two-bit drug dealer as much as to raise the funds necessary for governments to do illegal things, whether it's some terrorist government someplace or whether it's our own CIA to fund programs that they can't get Congress to fund.
I think it's tragic.
And the sooner we get rid of the drug laws, the sooner this would end.
There is a great push now for some type of national health service, national health care.
The United States is the only Western capitalist country outside of South Africa, if you consider that an advanced Western capitalist country, which doesn't have some type of comprehensive health care system.
Are the libertarians for this or are they against it?
Well, we're for a comprehensive health care system and we want everybody to have major medical coverage and the best insurance and the best medical care.
That's why medical care has to be delivered by the free market.
If we don't care about medical care and quality, if we like lines and if you like the medical care the Indians get and if you're happy with the Veterans Hospital and if you're happy with how England runs things in the Soviet Union, then I guess we need another move in the direction of socialized medicine.
Government now, even though we don't have a major national program, government now delivers 60% of the health care in this country.
The more we spend, the higher the costs, the lower the quality, less people who get the care.
I mean, it's a lousy delivery system.
Poor people who can buy their TVs and cars and video cassette recorders have no health care.
They buy the VCRs and their television and the cars in the marketplace.
They get their health care through government program.
With all this spending, there are still 38 million people who have no insurance whatsoever.
Just devising another government program which won't work but just further push up costs and controls and more doctors dropping out and I think it is a total disaster.
If it's a national health program run by the government, it's tragic.
It won't work.
It's going to ruin the care in the country.
If we care about people, we will have a national health care program, but it won't be delivered by the free market.
But the free market is what we have now.
We have bad health care.
We have a greater percentage of GMP being spent on health care than those places, than those countries where they have the government sponsors.
See, I don't agree.
I don't think that we have free market medicine.
As I said, 60% is paid by government.
We have coercive rules that force governments into these HMO organizations.
You know, the large companies had to offer these things.
So they've been growing and now going bankrupt.
And when you pump a lot of money in, if government's paying the bills through Medicare or Medicaid, this doesn't spread the money out.
A lot of wealthy people get the benefits.
The poor people don't seem to get through the maze of papers.
But a lot of millionaires receive Medicare benefits, so they get their hospital payments.
But when they go in and pay and have a little insurance, what happens?
The hospitals and the doctors and the labs tend to jack up the prices.
And then the government has to come in and say, well, we're going to put on controls because the prices are too high, and then we're going to ration care.
So one problem leads to the next.
But the problems you see today are a result of 50 years of ever-increasing government intervention in medicine.
The government doesn't pay for 60% of our automobiles, but they pay for 60% of our medical care.
The automobile prices are high, but they're not as high proportionally speaking.
Cost of automobiles is going up at the rate of about 4% or 5% a year.
The cost of medical care is going up about 15 or 20%.
Governments in education, they're in college education, always subsidizing college education.
Government and Life Protection 00:07:53
Always the guy that doesn't get to go to college has to subsidize the guy that gets to go.
Cost of education is going up about 15 to 20 percent.
So as soon as you get government involved, quality does not go up, but the cost goes up, and there's not any fair distribution.
Where do you stand on the right-to-lifers?
Are those folks like you, the anti-abortion people like the libertarians?
It's mixed.
They like me because I'm a right-to-life libertarian.
I believe killing a fetus is an act of aggression.
I've been forced to be in a room, unfortunately, when I saw a three-pound fetus infant taken out, breathing, and crying, and thrown in a bucket.
I mean, I take my pledge seriously.
I mean, that to me looked like an act of aggression.
Besides, if I get the wrong medication as a physician to a mother and I damage the fetus, the fetus when it's born can sue me.
Obviously, it was legally alive and human, or it wouldn't be able to sue me.
I know the fetus determines its inheritance rights at the time of conception.
So I'm in disagreement with our platform.
But there were enough libertarians who agree with my position that I went on the first ballot at our convention.
The truth is it's a difficult issue.
And nobody likes to think about it because the way the law states now under Roe versus Wade, the fetus one second before birth at the weight of nine pounds still has no legal rights.
And nobody enjoys defending that position.
Very difficult because I, as a libertarian, I don't like to interfere with the privacy of a woman either.
But how are we going to deal with this?
I think we have to have respect for human life or we can't have respect for individual liberty and the right to smoke a cigarette.
So you think the government has the right to force a woman to carry a fetus full term then?
Well, I think the government has the right to protect life.
It's sort of like saying if the baby's born and the IQ is 65 and they want it 100, does the government have the right to force that person not to kill their baby?
Yes, I do think so.
I think the government has a right to protect life, but the government doesn't have the right to force anything.
So it is difficult, obviously.
But I think the bottom line is, is killing a fetus an act of aggression?
And the only way the libertarians or others who disagree with me on that, they would have to say that, no, it's obviously an act of aggression.
There's no debate there.
It's that the fetus is not a person.
The fetus is not alive and it's not human.
And I, as a physician, had a lot of trouble with that.
I mean, I know it's alive.
I know it's human.
I know it's legal.
So this is very unique.
And I don't advocate any federal laws.
I don't even, you know, libertarians nor this system that we have advocated federal laws to deal with theft or murder or anything.
You know, it's all handled by the state.
So I think that the states would handle it differently.
I think courts would handle it differently.
I think juries would handle it differently.
But I think under my ideal situation, we wouldn't have people having abortion on demand and using it as birth control and having a callous, careless attitude about life.
And instead of having less illegitimate pregnancies or births, illegitimate or unwanted pregnancies, now it actually was intended to help difficult situations.
But what it has done is that the teenager sometimes can have three abortions in a year, which is sad and a tragedy.
And I've seen tragedies.
I've witnessed them and I have great empathy for them.
But I also have great respect for the principles of freedom and I don't want to infringe or compromise my concept of what liberty is.
What's the libertarian solution to the farm problem?
Just free market?
Free market.
Get the government out of it.
You know, under Ronald Reagan, the subsidies in 1980 were $10 billion a year.
They've gone up to $26 billion a year and there's just as many bankruptcies as ever.
Prices are wildly fluctuating as ever.
I think it'd be much better if we got rid of all the subsidies and gave the farmers steady prices and a sound dollar.
Low interest rates, prices that didn't jump all over the place, which is a reflection of the dollar's value rather than just commodity values.
Obviously, when there's a drought, prices are going to fluctuate more than others.
But this whole idea that when farmers produce too much, we're supposed to subsidize them.
When there's a drought and they produce too little, we're supposed to subsidize them.
And now I hear there's an early frost coming.
And now they're going to have to be bailed out for the early frost.
You know, first it's overproduction, then there's a drought, and then there's an early frost.
I think the idea is wrong.
I think it's bad economics and morally it's wrong.
I mean, I'm having a bad year this year in medicine.
I mean, should I ask you to be taxed so that you can send me some money because I'm having a bad medical year or somebody else has a business that doesn't do well?
Sure, you can have sympathy, and if he's your friend or relative, you can help him if you want.
But to be able to coerce a non-farmer to pay him because he needs something or wants something violates all concept of rights.
Nobody can demand something and call it a right.
Everybody has a right to their life and their liberty, but they don't have a right to somebody else's property and they can't use the government to coerce in order to get it.
If you became president, would you abolish the Federal Reserve or try to, since it's a constitutional question also?
And try to break the power of the banking system in the country?
We'd get rid of the Federal Reserve, but unfortunately it is a constitutional question, but it shouldn't be.
The founders were rather clear.
They authorized no central bank.
They said we could not emit bills of credit, which is paper money.
They said that only gold and silver could be legal tender, and the only monetary function that the Congress had was to mint gold and silver coins.
So if we'd follow the Constitution, we would not have a central bank and we would not have a fiat paper currency.
We would have a gold or silver standard or both.
We believe that we should have honest money, which is a commodity standard.
We don't believe in counterfeiting.
We don't believe the individual can counterfeit paper and give it to people and say this is money of real value, but we don't think the politician and the Federal Reserve can do that either.
We'd get rid of the Federal Reserve and we think it would not only help the economy, what it would do is it would help the people because the people would save their money again.
Prices would be lower, interest rates would be lower, and we'd eliminate the business cycle.
So the sooner we get rid of the Federal Reserve, the better.
What would you do about the deficit, this enormous deficit?
The deficit should be eliminated by one technique, cutting spending.
You can't cut spending until we decide as a people what we want from our government.
If we want welfare and warfare, the budget will never be balanced.
We're going to have an economic calamity and it's going to be very, very major.
If we want some sense to our government, we should balance the budget.
We should do it immediately and it should be done by cutting and it should be cut both domestically and internationally.
We certainly can cut military spending because a lot of the military spending has nothing to do with national defense.
We do not have to sacrifice defense.
I believe if we changed our policy, we could have a better defense, but we would spend a lot less money, especially overseas.
Same way at home.
There's too much welfare.
We'd cut back on welfare.
There's too much interest on the national debt.
A sound currency would lower the interest payment.
So we would balance the budget immediate at a much lower level.
I think it would be the greatest thing in the world for the economy.
You have a last statement you'd like to make for our viewers?
Yes, I would like to suggest to the viewers that you should look at your choices.
I think this year you do have a choice.
Cutting Defense Spending Without Sacrifice 00:00:45
I think it's foolish to waste your vote.
Voting Republican and voting Democrat is a pure waste of your vote.
So if you want to vote for less government, if you want to say you're not satisfied with the status quo, then you have to vote libertarian.
If you stay at home, which many people are doing, they're staying at home these days because they are disgusted like we are.
But they don't think it's much chance of changing things.
But if you vote Republican or Democrat, it makes no difference whatsoever.
If they like what they have, if they're satisfied with the status quo, it doesn't matter.
But if you don't want to waste your vote, if you want to make your vote productive, make your vote count, come join the Libertarians, vote libertarians, send a message because even if we get 5 or 10 or 15% of the vote, we will revolutionize politics in this country for the next 100 years.
And that's what we want to do.
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