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Sept. 7, 2020 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:43
What Does Ron Paul Think About The Trump Administration?...Covid Vaccines?...Let's #AskRonPaul!

You asked and Ron Paul answered. We hope you enjoy another edition of #AskRonPaul!

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Time Text
Why Trump Got Elected 00:08:04
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Dr. Paul, it's great to be with you.
Well, good.
I understand our program for today is a little bit different.
I'm a little bit more relaxed.
What do you have in store?
Well, we asked our many Twitter followers to send in some questions for another edition of Ask Ron Paul.
And we had many of them.
Unfortunately, we can't highlight all of them, but we chose a few to highlight today.
So I'll get started with the first tweet is from N. Fuller 721.
And he asks, what is your opinion on the Trump administration?
Boy, that's an open-ended question.
I have a lot of opinions about it.
But I'd start off by saying that if you want to talk about the administration, you have to say compared to what?
You know, when the election was going on in 2016, it was always this back and forth, the quality of each candidate.
And I made the statement back then that it was a contest between just who is the most hated person in the country.
And of course, that was a little bit of hyperbole.
But anyway, there's a person who wants to know.
And the truth is, I don't think anybody's positive about it.
See, since I see things and libertarians see things mostly through philosophy, that it's hard to sort out.
Because, see, even though the president is sympathetic sometimes to a libertarian idea, and sometimes he's not sympathetic to a libertarian idea, I don't think he's worrying about that.
I think that the biggest job he had in 2016 was pointing out some shortcomings of Hillary.
And he did a pretty good job.
I often thought that what he did in the campaign, the most important thing that he did was, you know, challenge the whole system, including his opposition, with political correctness.
I think that's one of the reasons that Trump got elected, because he was willing to just say things that people were thinking, you know, about all the nonsense going on.
Others would say, well, he goes a little bit too far and yet he won the election.
Today, I think there's a lot of that going on now, too.
The political correctness when it comes to especially how we're supposed to manage the coronavirus and what are you supposed to do with Black Lives Matter and on and on.
So those are challenges.
But if I looked at it in general, I would say that one place where he may well be more than a smidgen better than even Obama on foreign policy.
And I say even Obama because most people claim or would like to think that Democrats are better on foreign policy from a libertarian viewpoint, that they're progressive Democrats that are honest and they argue the case for less interventionism over there.
And after having been in Washington, I found out that there are some good Democrats and bad ones and there's some good Democrats, progressive Democrats that come down with a more anti-war position.
But since Trump's been in, he has said a lot of good things, moving troops around, ending wars here and there.
He has not introduced a major conflict.
The number of bodybacks coming back in this country have been greatly reduced.
His rhetoric is probably better than his actual policies, because if he was really coming in our direction, he probably would have a different Secretary of State.
And it seems like a lot of times the neocons get appointed regardless of what Trump says.
But I would say that there's a little bit of benefits, but I still don't like the aggressiveness, why we seem to be wanting to stir up trouble in the South China Sea and just look for things to go wrong.
But a little bit of credit there.
I think he has done very poorly on being a conservative, fiscal conservative person.
In the money, you say, well, it's probably better than the Democrats.
I don't know.
I think it's horrible.
Of course, there's been more problems.
And everybody said, what can you do?
What else can we do but spend more money?
So he doesn't come from a position of saying the type of economy we want is one that the libertarians would be happy with.
A lot less spending, you know, the balance of budget and all these kind of things.
I don't think that really enters his mind.
It's a day-to-day operation.
How do you deal with the daily emergency going on?
So the fiscal affair is just atrocious.
And therefore, that raises the question of how does he get away with it?
Because he did lower taxes.
I think taxes were improved and I supported that.
But what happens when all the spending goes and the deficits exploding due to the multiple problems that we have?
It means that he has to be a strong supporter of the Federal Reserve.
And people say, how could you say that?
He's challenging them all the time.
Yeah, but he's challenging, has challenged them all the time to lower the interest rates and print more money faster because of all the needs that we have.
So that hasn't been good.
And that's because both the Democrats and Republicans endorse a policy of fiscal spending.
Spend what you need for both the welfare and the warfare state.
And they do it.
And there are no controls.
They've all been educated with the same people from the same colleges on Keynesian economics.
So he hasn't done very well there.
But if you went strictly, you know, just is the country going to be better if Trump wins or loses in the fall?
I have all these shortcomings and beliefs, but I would say that the immediate reaction with an election of Biden, the country is going to be much, much worse, and markets will get even shakier.
But long term, basic policy is what I've been talking about, doesn't really change.
You know, we have the same military policy, fiscal policy, spending, and all these things.
So long term, not much is going to change with the election.
And over the years, I've always said that there isn't going to be much change election.
We don't have two parties.
We have one party.
They get along too well because they agree on the issues.
They basically agree with foreign intervention.
They agree on the Federal Reserve.
They agree on deficits.
And they believe in a managed economy and rigging of interest rates and all these things.
So it's sad to report, but the election long term probably is not going to make a lot of difference.
Short term, the country will probably do better if it's not so much if we have Trump as much as if we don't get Biden, because he's scary, but Hillary was scary.
But Republicans can do scary things too.
And that's because they lack a principle to follow.
And that's why I think people should pay more attention to what libertarians believe and try to promote a libertarian philosophy rather than an interventionist policy.
Okay, our next tweet is from Rad Ramon Jr.
And he asks, What got you into politics and why did you become a libertarian?
Well, I was born a libertarian.
I think everybody is basically born a libertarian and we beat it out of them.
You know, the conventions, you have to conform.
Why Libertarians Reject Vaccine Mandates 00:14:35
You go to government schools, you go to government education programs.
But I think basically, I think a two-year-old shows libertarianism.
You know, they're on their own, and four-year-olds and teenagers are very independent.
And they believe that they would like to run their own life.
But of course, maturing and growing up means that you have to have guidance.
And there's a big difference between no guidance or having guidance by parents and a community and a church or somebody to guide you.
So it's a thing that I came around to believe in this.
I got introduced really into politics through economics.
Even though I was in medical school in different places, I also became fascinated with economic policies.
Came across the school of thought that's called the Austrian School of Economics, found it very intriguing and answered so many questions.
Although it's a minor school compared to the others, it's a major school when it comes to ideas and correctness.
And that is why most people who watch these programs know very much about what Austrian economics is all about and free markets.
And I think that's beneficial.
But I got involved, especially with the monetary policy.
And I wrote, I read a lot about what would happen eventually with the Bretton Woods, which was the pseudo-gold standard, that it would collapse.
So when it did collapse, as by that time, many libertarians were the only ones who were saying the collapse is coming, it's going to be bad.
So I happened to be listening and watching television August 15th of 1971, and Richard Nixon comes on with an emergency announcement.
He's closing the gold window, raising taxes.
There'll be import taxes and they'll close the gold when they're going to get off the gold standard for good and have tariffs.
And I thought, that's horrible, horrible.
And the next day, I was at a Chamber of Commerce meeting.
I was a member there, just trying to keep up with what the community was doing.
And they strongly supported this.
I said, what are you guys doing?
This is bad.
This has nothing to do with free enterprise.
But anyway, they were excited about it.
And I thought it was a disaster.
And interestingly enough, that next day, the stock markets went up a record level in one day.
And it was like 38 points.
That was a record back then.
And so the business community was all for it and thought it would solve the problem of the inflation that we have and put the wage and price controls on.
So, but then, you know, as time went on, it only took six months or so later, the wage and price controls were a failure and people were knowing there was a major problem.
The inflation got much worse.
And I thought, but you know, they're not even talking about what I think they ought to talk about.
They ought to talk about monetary policy.
But, you know, I went out door outside my house.
I waved a fly.
I said, I want to talk to you.
Come here, talk.
Nobody came.
Nobody wanted to listen to my stuff.
So I decided, and that was in 1974, and that was during the Watergate year.
And nobody wanted to run as a Republican.
There were only three Republicans in all of the Texas delegation.
So I said, I'll do it.
I'll do it.
So they encourage you, yeah, just put anybody we can get on there.
And he's foolish enough to do it.
So, you know, I went and got on the ballot and did, You know, did speak out and didn't do much, but there was an unusual thing happened.
And the unusual thing was the person I ran against shortly after retired.
So there was a special election, and special elections are different.
And even though it was a small little turnout, they always assumed, well, it's a Republican district.
I mean, a Democratic district has always been.
And we don't know this guy, so what?
But things came together.
There were more people that agreed with what I was saying.
And we won that special election.
So that's how I got involved.
But I kept telling Carol, my wife, I said, she was seemed to be worried about this because she said, if you might win.
And she says, this will disrupt the whole thing.
You're in your medical practice.
You're doing this.
I said, I just want to talk a little bit because I think they're going in the wrong direction.
I think they're going to run up a lot of spending and all this.
So anyway, I got shorter.
I said, don't worry about it, Caroline.
They're not going to pay any attention.
I said, they're not going to vote for somebody who wants to get rid of Santa Claus.
And she says they're going to vote because they're sick and tired of hearing the nonsense and they'll know you're giving them a straight scoop.
She actually turned out to be right.
And I was shocked and ended up winning that election.
And I've been involved since in different ways.
I've been in and out of Congress, but I still had the basic thought that the principles are important.
The principles of liberty are important.
Libertarians knew that.
They actually had a principle and they call it the non-aggression principle.
And that is the reason that, you know, I kept talking.
I figured, well, then I got elected and I thought, well, what I can do is nobody's going to pay any attention now.
But what I need to do is set a standard on how you should vote if you happen to fall upon that document called the Constitution.
And of course, it was a lonely thing.
Some taste, you know, I just voted all by myself.
I think I'd set up a record.
But that all changed in 08 and 0 and 2012 when a few people talked me into running as a Republican.
And that to me was a shocker on how well we did and how many people had come around to looking at government the way I and my friends and the libertarians have had looked at it.
And even people who didn't even know much about libertarianism, conservative constitutionalists, limited government people, which included many progressive Democrats too, because of good progressive Democrats will protect civil liberties and they will have a much closer viewpoint about non-interventionist foreign policy.
So I found this to a surprise and stayed there a while, maybe too long or so.
But this is still my interest.
This is why I do programs like this.
This is why I have the Liberty Report, trying to reach people.
And in this day and age, they need information and try to understand, not only understanding what the mess is out there, is what should a libertarian do with a free market, libertarian principles do to try to solve these problems.
And that's not complex either, because all we have to do is quit doing what we're doing because the government's creating all this mess.
So if people understand that, the solutions aren't that difficult.
So I got into the basic answer is I got involved because of economic policy, but it eventually changed into realizing that the issue of liberty is the issue and that incorporates sound money and balanced budget.
But the real issue is liberty and that is self-reliance and responsibility.
And of course, occasionally paying attention to the Constitution, but I didn't get too much help on that.
Those great stories, Dr. Paul.
And we're all happy that Carol was right that you would win and you did.
Okay, our next tweet comes from Lena Giaconda.
And she asks, and this is perfect question for a doctor, what is your opinion on vaccines for COVID-19?
I'm very pessimistic about it.
I don't think they're going to find one.
Boy, that shakes up the troops because a lot of money has been invested, a lot of our money, taxpayers' money, because probably 10 or 15 people are working on it.
They're racing on it and how they're going to fool somebody.
Oh, this is safe and this is effective.
And you're never going to see another case of coronavirus.
But this was tried, you know, on other viruses and they never got a vaccine.
The family of viruses, the coronavirus, you don't have vaccines for this.
So you don't even have a good vaccine for cold.
And that's the reason is it's very difficult.
So, no, they're going to spend a lot of money.
And the thing why it's threatening is a threat to our liberties because they're talking about mandates.
Look at how many mandates we've had already.
Quarantines and not getting close to somebody.
And you have to change the way you shake hands.
You got to do this.
Shake hands with people.
This is total insanity.
And now the numbers are coming out to support the position that this was all overhyped.
And it was deliberately overhyped in order to get the Fauci and the Bill Gates of the world to march in with their authoritarianism.
And they're looking for mandates.
They're mandating where you can eat and how many people can, except for the politician.
They get special treatment.
They get around this.
But they don't hesitate to use mandates.
And I'll tell you what, when this vaccine comes out, there's a lot of people foolishly lining up.
Just give me the vaccine.
And one motivation is because they have been conditioned.
And this is a logical fear, is that, well, if I don't do it, they're not going to let me go to get a job.
And I can't do this.
And I can't do that.
And then they're talking about with the vaccine, you're going to get a digital passport.
You won't be able to go or do anything.
So there's a great deal of danger.
The mandates are just horrible.
Mandates are sort of something libertarians don't like.
The mandate, the only mandate that we would think about is don't hurt people, don't steal from people, don't kill people.
And yet the mandates now for this mask use, so much of it is intimidation.
It's this political correctness.
And the Congress doesn't pass these laws and the president signs it.
No, it's executive orders, not just by the executive branch, but by the governors and the mayors and everybody else who just love this stuff.
So mandates are anathema to a libertarian.
And that is what's coming.
And I think even if you took all that money they're wasting right now and did look for one, just from my experience, and I wouldn't be the last word on this, but my opinion from looking at this, they're not going to get one.
And that the force is going to be worse than the problem.
And right now, the program, our program, the Liberty Report, especially with Daniel's help, we go show the statistics how things are better, you know, and how they fudge the figures.
The data is lying.
And yet it's scaring people a whole lot.
And it's justifying the spending.
And you would say, well, how can they be so dumb?
I used to ask that question.
And I decided, yes, there are some.
There are some that are dumb and they just go along with this, but there are some who think they can benefit the type of philosophy they believe in by having chaos.
So sometimes some of these people who are promoting all this nonsense, you know, go after their so-called friends because it'll cause conflict.
And that's what we're having in the streets.
And that's why, you know, it's so bad.
If there was a vaccine that could, you know, be, you know, helpful and safe, we should use it.
I remembered in the 50s, I was in high school and college when, you know, polio was still a detriment.
But I think I took the polio vaccine.
And some people would argue, well, there's a little natural immunity even with that.
But something like that, some people are totally against every single vaccine.
I'm not like that.
But I'm against the cocktails, the cocktails.
I've seen people, I've seen some babies I've delivered eventually have a lot of problems because they had cocktails given to them and they still get them.
So that's why I'm sort of anxious to continue my association with Robert Kennedy because he's so good on the vaccinations and also the natural immunity.
And that's what we should be dealing with.
But so I'm a pessimist on the vaccine, on the coronavirus vaccine, and I'm very pessimistic on the fact that this is going to be used to the detriment of a lot of people.
The 1976 vaccine was rushed through for political purposes.
More people died from the vaccine than they did from the virus.
They didn't have no deaths from the virus.
People died from the vaccine.
So I think this rushing through, the virologists that I respect say, you know, it really takes two or three years to really know what is safe and effective.
But the sad part is people are really ready to line up right now.
The only advice I would give, if anybody asked me, go cautiously check it out first and take a look at the statistics.
And you can find them on our webpage pretty well.
Take a look at them.
You know, it's not like we're all going to die from coronavirus in six months.
And that most people, you know, it's less than one quarter of 1% of people that die from coronavirus after they get it.
And kids under 25 or so essentially never get it.
So people need more information.
Don't wait for the vaccine.
And if they have it, wait a little longer.
That's great advice, Dr. Paul.
We'll finish up now with a topic that may surprise some people because when you think Ron Paul, you think Texas, but Ron Paul did not start out in Texas.
So we'll go to our last tweet from Paul Tells All.
Pittsburgh's Cleanup 00:06:01
And he asks, you have fond memories of living in Pittsburgh?
Yes and no.
I could find some things that weren't all that perfect in Pittsburgh.
And I can find many things that I was very happy with and fond with.
Fonda, Carol and I both are from Pittsburgh.
We went to high school together and I would have to maybe put that in the fond side of events.
But the one that I would say was, you know, overall, I didn't realize that was going on, but Pittsburgh was a filthy city.
It was the steel city.
And I was raised in the Depression and World War II.
And we pumped out a lot of steel, very effective at that.
But they pumped out a lot of smoke, I'll tell you.
And There were times when I lived about five miles from downtown Pittsburgh, but there were times when you might not see, if you were downtown, you might not see the sun until noontime because of the black cloud.
So that was very detrimental.
The one positive side of this was, you know, Pittsburgh got cleaned up.
Part of it was the steel business was diminishing, but that wasn't the reason it really got cleaned up.
They finally changed rules locally to be more libertarian.
At that time, there were no restrictions on how much sewage you pumped into the air, and there was no restriction on the sewage you put into the rivers, both environment, you know, home of sewage as well as business sewage, the steel, the steel mills.
That was all, you know, done and it was filthy, but it got cleaned up and say, oh, yeah, it probably got cleaned up because of the EPA came along.
BPA cleaned up.
No, it got cleaned up before the APA came.
PAPA, of course, has done some things, accidentally got it right.
But locally, they had regulations that enforced the idea that you, as an individual, don't have a right to pollute your neighbor's air or water.
And that's the basic principle.
And until you had every single thing privately owned, and like in a libertarian society, you deal with this with local people, you know, the local community, the people who have responsibility for that.
And that happened, and it got cleaned up.
So I basically, you know, didn't have a thought.
I think of Pittsburgh as being a time when I do remember the tail end of the Depression and it wasn't a bother.
I mean, people didn't have much and we didn't have much, but nobody was worried about it.
And then also World War II.
I remember that very, very clearly, and learned some economic lessons there because there were wage and price controls and the markets for wheat and there was a lot of that going on.
So later on, I was able to apply some of the libertarian philosophy to the wage, the use of wage and price controls.
And I got to thinking later on.
They did that to make sure there was equal distribution because there'd be shortages.
Yeah, maybe.
But there were shortages.
But when you put wage and price controls on and keep prices down low, you really increase the shortage.
But if you have a crisis like a weather crisis or a government crisis or war crisis, and you do have a shrinkage of the commodities and food and all, you want to have the best distribution method possible.
And it should be the free market, not the government bureaucrats.
They make everything worse.
I think we can apply that to the well-intentioned people who said that we have to have the government take care of us and prevent us from getting coronavirus.
Good intention.
But look at the monster they gave us on lockdown.
So it's one of those things that things got worse with those kind of things.
But basically, Pittsburgh still stays in your mind as home.
And we left Pittsburgh when I first was drafted into the military.
And I was stationed in Texas in San Antonio back in during the Cuban crisis in 1962.
And then I hadn't, they took me out of my residency.
Then I went back to Pittsburgh and finished up my residency.
So that took me up to 1968.
With a visit with my wife and us visiting and talking, we decided for different reasons we're going back to Texas.
And one of her arguments was, I like warmer weather, and I like raising kids where it's a little bit warmer when they all want to go out and get into the snow.
But anyway, we decided we came back to Texas and then we found and we found Lake Jackson at that time.
But I don't know whether I'm going to give the government any credit for this because they dragged me to Texas, but it was the influence.
We had been to North Carolina for medical school, part of a residency up in Henry Ford Hospital, then the military in Texas and back to Pittsburgh, moving all the time.
And we really had enough experience to know that we thought we'd like to live in Texas and we've been very happy living here.
We think about Pittsburgh.
We used to go back regularly.
My parents and Carol's parents no longer living, but we still go back and stay in communication with some people from Pittsburgh.
And we still think of it a special place, especially since it's a lot cleaner now than it was when I was a kid.
And I want to thank our viewing audience today for tuning into this different type of program.
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