All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 15, 2021 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
51:49
Property Ownership: The Ultimate Civil Liberty

Last week, Ron Paul joined the Restoring Our Civil Liberties webinar put on by the Future of Freedom Foundation. He presented an examination of how efforts to bring about equality and safety via government dictate threaten liberty and property rights.

|

Time Text
Welcome To Restoring Civil Liberties 00:02:28
All right, we're set to go.
I'm Jacob Hornberger, president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
I want to welcome you all to this evening's broadcast for as part of our conference, Restoring Civil Liberties.
If you haven't seen the earlier broadcast, I highly recommend it.
This has turned out to be one of the best conferences we've ever held at FFF.
And what's fascinating is that each of the speakers were given carte blanche to talk about any aspect of civil liberties they wanted, and there's been virtually no overlap.
And those videos are on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
As most of you know, our mission at FF has long been to present the principal case for liberty.
We have an active website, 32 years of articles and conferences and videos and other presentations presenting this principal case for the libertarian philosophy.
Tonight, if you have a question for our guest, please use the QA button.
You type it out, it'll come to me.
I'll ask Ron what the questions are later on.
Now, we're going to wrap everything up by around 10 till 7.
That's when Ron's last question or last comment is going to be made.
And then I'll say a bit of die to the crowd.
We got one more presentation in this series, and that's me next Tuesday night, same time, same station.
We're really honored and pleased tonight to have Ron Paul.
Ron's actually one of my real life heroes in this libertarian movement.
I think if there's anybody in the libertarian movement that doesn't need an introduction, it's Ron Paul.
But he served in Congress for many years, as y'all know, and he was the presidential candidate in 2008, 2012, both very exciting races.
I don't think there's anyone in the libertarian movement who has exposed or inspired more people to explore libertarianism or to join the libertarian movement than Ron Paul.
And if you're not familiar, which I'm sure you are, but if you're not with the work of the Ron Paul Institute, Dan McAdams and Ron Paul are just doing unbelievably fantastic work to bring us a society based on peace, prosperity, and liberty.
Ron, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to share your perspectives with us tonight.
It's a great honor for us.
Please take it away.
Very good.
And thank you very much for the introduction and the invitation.
This is just great, but I don't know.
End of the Korean War? 00:03:42
You've been off a big job here.
And the job is restoring civil liberties.
I'll tell you, we need a lot of that.
And you've been in that battle for a long time and having an impact.
But this is going to continue for a bit because I see, you know, establishing the principles of civil liberties.
That's been ongoing for a long time.
I think as long as we can find record a history that we find that that is talked about, you know, even before biblical times, before the Old Testament, they did talk about this.
Hammurabi had a code, and there was a hint that they understood a little bit about civil liberties.
I was fascinated by understanding a little bit more about Hammurabi is because he had, I think it was 282 laws he passed and more than half of them had to do with contracts.
You say, well, is that a civil liberties?
It certainly is.
Living up to your promises and identify it and letting people understand it is certainly important.
That's a long time ago.
And that was 300 years before the 10 commandments were written.
So I think that people have thought about it and it comes and goes.
And certainly my lifetime was the majority of that life was spent in the 20th century.
That was not a good century for protecting freedoms and individual liberty and peace because, you know, I was born in 35.
The Depression was roaring.
I do remember the beginning of the World War II and the end of World War II and the Korean War and on and on.
And the one thing I do remember, I've heard later on in life when we were studying economics, they would say, you know, the war got us out of the war got us out of the Depression, which I later on found out that's just not true.
You don't kill millions of people.
And yeah, but the unemployment rate went down.
Yeah, they were all overseas getting killed.
So this whole thing about, you know, the conditions that we had, whether it's the Depression or the wars, it's always a challenge, but it didn't just end with World War II.
It sort of thought to be ended.
But then we entered the Cold War and we had to be very cautious about that.
We had Korean War, wage and price control.
So there was always abuse of liberty.
Then we had Vietnam.
The 60s was a terrible decade.
And it more or less has continued because when you think of this century, so far we're not doing a whole lot better, except when I look at what's happening behind the scenes.
And Barbara, I think the work you do is behind the scenes in the sense that you reach a lot of people and getting people to join the remnant.
I love the story about the remnant.
No matter what you do, there's going to be a remnant in society protecting the principles of liberty.
And that's what we need to do.
We need to build that.
Leonard Reid often spoke about this idea.
And he, of course, had the Foundation for Economics Education.
And he says, our job is to present the case for liberty and freedom and make it available, understand it ourselves, and be available to people to see what happened.
And I took that to heart.
So I did my very best, you know, to understand the message.
I tell people, you know, what I did was probably during the 60s when I was in college and medical school, I started reading Austrian economics and freedom literature.
And I said, it took me a long time to unlearn the things that my government and my government schools have been teaching me.
Building Liberty's Case 00:15:46
And that is sort of silly, but that really is the case.
And it's going on now.
Just think of what's going on in our school, our government school system.
You know, the people are rebelling because they don't think the children are learning the right thing and they're rebelling against their complacency with what was happening.
So I don't think the system of schools that we've had have been protecting our freedoms or even understanding our liberties.
And they have done that.
And now there's a lot of chaos and a lot of challenge.
And now we're talking about how do you define science?
If you don't define, if you don't accept my definition of science, I'm going to cancel you and put you in jail.
Well, I don't think it takes a brilliant person to realize that's a challenge of basic liberty, you know, and it's happening all the time.
It's an attitude that has gotten out of hand.
But fortunately, I think I see some signs of it breaking up.
People are sick and tired of being told another mandate, another mandate.
It seems like the people who like mandates, and it doesn't just start with the president.
It doesn't, some of it comes from the United Nations and all the international organizations, but it comes from everybody now who has authority.
So the temptation to run roughshod over the people and violate their civil liberties.
That's a problem we have.
And of course, that's what we have to confront.
You know, I thought, well, we're going to be talking about civil liberties.
So I thought, I wonder what Wikipedia says civil liberties are.
So I'm going to read this half a sentence because it gives you an idea of maybe where the problem is.
It says the civil liberties is the state of being subject only to laws established for the good of the community.
Well, for good libertarians, they know exactly that that is not the kind of thing we talk about because as far as I'm concerned, liberty is individual.
And I get very annoyed when they talk about groups of people that you have minority rights and children's rights and women's rights and all these things, because I want people to say rights are individual.
And that makes a big difference.
But everything is collective.
I'm annoyed on election night, and they do it incessantly.
I don't think it's done intentionally to as a sinister move.
But when the votes are counted, they say, well, the blacks voted this way, the white people voted this way, the Hispanics voted this way.
Well, why can't we get to the point where we talk about individuals?
But it's very natural and there's some practical reasons for that.
I understand that.
But I just don't like that that everybody's divided up into groups.
And of course, the elimination and the harm done was a violation of groups, certainly in the bad part of our history with slavery and the laws against minorities.
Yeah, that was done by groups.
But the reversal is that is what we want if we want to have the protection of civil liberties.
The one thing that's going on right now is this cultural Marxism.
And Marxism, I believe, is what we're experiencing.
It may be different than what Marx was talking about, but there's a lot of similarities about what's going on because the word communism really came about with Marxism.
But I think there's still a lot.
Now, I have a quote here.
I don't usually use quotes, but I think this is so fascinating to me about what Dostoevsky said, you know, at the time the DOS Capital was written back in the 1860s.
And 1871 is when it was actually released.
And he had a novel called Possessed.
And he was a great civil libertarian, I'll tell you, but he was a very anti-communist, which was logical because Marxism is a vicious attack on individual liberty.
But, you know, Dostoevsky, when he wrote The Possessed, it was like three years after Karl Marx released Das Capital.
So he was right.
He was born and raised and intellectually was involved in the birth of Marxism.
And in his novel, I find interesting because he has a character in the novel named Shigelov.
And Shigalov was the spokesman for Dostoevsky.
And the quote I'm reading from comes from Shigalov, who is explaining Dostoevsky's position on why we should be concerned about the collectivism of Marxism.
So it says, Shigelov has discovered equality.
He suggests a system of spying.
And, you know, as I read this, think about, could any of this be true today?
Is it still alive and well?
Is this, well, are they describing the problems we have and we have to deal with them?
I just believe we have to understand the issue if we're to confront it, you know, intellectually.
And on, I'm going to read a little bit on more further on this.
Every member of the society spies on the other.
That's the wonderful society that Marx is creating.
And it is his duty to inform against him.
We have a lot of that going on these days.
Everyone belongs to all and all to everyone.
All are slaves and equal in their slavery.
In extreme cases, Shigalavov advocates slander and murder.
Maybe our government's been involved in a little bit of that now and then.
And but the great things about it is equality.
And my whole point is going to be in this little message I have is that this seeking equality is only done with the destruction of liberty.
Further quoting, to begin with, the level of education in science is only possible for great intellects, and they are not wanted.
They will be banished or put to death.
Cicero has his tongue cut out.
Copernicus will have his eyes put out.
Shakespeare will be stoned.
And that's Shigalovism.
Slaves are bound to be equal.
That's a little strong, but the message there is the people who are likely to challenge Marxism are in for trouble.
In the herd, there is bound to be equality, and that's Shigalovism.
Now, this further is a quote.
I hope it's not too long.
To level the mountains, this is the goal of Marxism, according to Dostoevsky.
To level the mountains is a fine idea.
Down with culture.
Wow, that sounds pretty up to date.
We have had enough science.
Yeah, science is to be thrown out.
And the people who promote science currently can lose their jobs.
It's not good.
Without science, we have material enough to go on for a thousand years.
We don't need science.
That's terrible.
That's so anti-freedom.
But we must have discipline.
The thirst for culture is an aristocratic thirst.
We've heard that.
We hear it on the house floor these days.
The moment you have family ties or love or love, you get the desire for property.
Oh, how sinful.
And of course, the basis, you can't talk, you can't ignore property if you're interested in civil liberties.
And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute because I think property is one of the big keys for protecting civil liberties.
And on further with the quote, we will destroy that desire.
We'll make use of slander, spying.
We'll make use of incredible corruption.
We'll stifle every genius in its infancy.
Complete equality.
Equality is the goal.
And that, I think, tells you that if equality is the goal, which is expressed that way all the time, equality and safety is expressed by all those people who want authoritarianism, whether it's the old-fashioned Marxism or the more modern Marxism or communism or fascism or extreme interventionism.
It's always helping and distributing the wealth.
And it's never emphasized on an individual having a right to his or her life and a right to keep whatever they earn.
And no, you belong to a group.
And that statement that I just read, if you happen to be intelligent enough to go to college, we're going to kill you.
But just think of what happening now.
I know of episodes going on right now where getting into medical school, I fear for the fact that when I got into medical school in 1968, I didn't hear any of this.
Some of them might say, well, it's always biased to you, white people.
But right now, it's biased in a much different way because I know of individuals who had the best grades and also didn't get into medical school.
And this is troublesome.
That is why the answer to this is not easy.
You can't get a perfect manager to go out there in any of these things I talk about and have a perfect distribution of priorities and wealth and equality.
You can't do that.
The thing of it is, it has to go into the hands of private, private individuals who then will distribute it in a voluntary manner, how you would if you had a libertarian society, because then the decision is made by two people agreeing to it.
And, you know, in 1910, there was a report made, an investigation of the medical community called the Flexner Report.
And at that time, this is even back in 1910.
This was a time when they said there were medical schools that were for women and minorities.
And they were, you know, graduating doctors.
But organized medicine, which included, you know, the pharmaceutical companies, believe it or not, they said too many medical schools.
And they slashed the number.
I don't remember, but it could have been like gotten rid of 70% of the medical schools.
You say, well, they weren't teaching good medicine.
Well, maybe they would have improved, but closing them down.
And then later on, the schools were not balanced right.
So then they had to have affirmative action.
You know, if the market was attempting to solve that problems, there was not a scarcity.
The goal should have been to improve things.
In a voluntary manner, things do improve.
And just think our great universities in this country all started as private universities and our hospitals.
How many hospitals have the name of a church on them?
And that's the way it was at one time.
But right now, it's not that way.
And we're working, living in a system where there's a confusion of what civil liberties really mean.
And a government's responsibility is for safety as well as equality.
Now, they talk about equality and perfect safety.
And it can't be done.
If you want perfect safety, they can provide it for you.
You know, they can lock you up and feed you every day and you're perfectly safe.
Nobody's going to touch you.
But I think this whole principle that I'm talking about is well known in the libertarian circles.
And that has to do with a principle of self-ownership and the principle of taking a position where individuals can't initiate force against other people.
And, you know, I think it's been neat in these last couple of months where there's a racial argument going on.
And they're quoting Martin Luther King, where he makes this emphatic point that we don't want to be, you know, taken care of by the color of our skin.
And yet that's all that seems to be happening.
We have reversed it because we've gotten really confused on what civil liberties are all about.
And they're so important.
Now, of the many liberties that we mentioned and talk in the Constitution and our Bill of Rights, I think the principle of property is very, very important.
Because if you had, you know, the volunteerism that I'm talking about, where nothing happens unless two people have agreements, and at the same time, the right to ownership would be part of that.
And then the people who own the property, you know, can deal with it.
And you would say, oh, well, then only a couple of people are going to own the property.
Well, take a look at what we have now.
Every day we get another trillionaire.
Of course, what we really should be concerned about is a very immoral system of monetary policy that's going to not only destroy the middle class here, but it will probably undermine those very, very rich people, but many of them will survive too.
So it's a system of government that we have existed to allow the government to do too much and infringe upon our civil liberties.
And they're worrying more about the community.
We're worried more about the village.
And when Hillary talks, she's speaking that language.
It takes a village to raise a child.
Well, you know, it takes a parent to raise a child would be a better answer for that.
But this principle of self-ownership and property ownership, you say, well, no, that won't take care.
How does that take care of a freedom of speech?
Well, you could own a newspaper and you could publish what you want and you would be controlled by fraud and libel and you would be restrained to not lie.
And you say, well, that's fine, but don't we have newspapers now?
Don't we have the internet?
We don't have freedom in those areas as far as my opinion is, because I think what we have is government-managed system of communications, because I think the big guys on the internet have been created and subsidized and continue to be subsidized because they all work closely with the government.
What about this walkdown stuff and punishing people who don't go along with the mandates?
Does the government come in and say, oh, you broke the mandates, we're going to put you in jail?
No, they send the enforcers, which is the businessman who becomes an ally of those who are working with the government.
So they enforce this.
So they go and say, you can't do it.
How come the businessmen are doing this?
It's not because of good business.
Government Enforcers Concern 00:05:08
They do it because they're beholden to the government.
That is what our problem is, because they have to do it or they will be punished.
So right now, people are very concerned.
As some of us, even on the internet, I wonder, Daniel and I talk sometimes, we'll say, do you think they're going to hit us for this?
We're saying this.
And how many people have been canceled for this?
How many people have lost their jobs?
And the mandate principle is a violation of property rights and personal liberties.
And it is a big danger as far as I'm concerned.
It's very dangerous on what is happening with these runaway mandates because that is a clear violation of people's liberty.
And it has nothing to do with the government becomes the violent party here, not the individuals.
So that is a different story because they are the ones that suffer the consequences.
And unfortunately, most people in this country are good people.
They're decent.
They're taught to obey the law and follow the government.
Sometimes even religion is thrown in there.
That's your job.
You have to be obedient and do exactly what the government tells.
But eventually the people have to wake up, and that's what's happening now.
Because I think the violation of our civil liberties here in the last several months, a couple years now, has gone way too far.
And unfortunately, you can look at what we're doing today and they might come closer to that quote I read because it looks like these ideas were born a long time ago.
And they certainly were put into a writing form that created the monster of Marxism that killed a lot of people.
No, not 10,000, not a million.
Hundreds of millions of people died of this because of authoritarianism and the lack of respect for civil liberties, lack of understanding what property is all about, lack of confidence that people can take care of better care of themselves than any government can ever take care of.
So that is something that people need more confidence in.
But, you know, as I traveled around the country, Bumper, you know, people asked me what was the best part of the campaigning and mine was going to the college campuses because they were surprisingly supportive.
Because, you know, some people might reflect and comment on what I've just said in the last 30 minutes and say, boy, that's radical stuff and all.
Well, it's firm, but it's based on some beliefs.
And you'd think in the very liberal universities, they'd be booing and hissing and throwing me out like they're doing these days since this wokeism has started.
No, that's a big problem if you want to deal with it.
So if that is the case, I'll tell you what, the people on the campuses were wonderful.
The young people were wonderful.
And I still go out to talk to them because their minds are open.
You know, when people get a little bit older, they get locked in their place.
I call them the Chamber of Commerce people.
They get locked into it, locked into the relationship they have to have with the local community, with the government, financing that goes on.
And before you know it, they're the enforcers of the mandates by the presidents and our governor.
They go and say to these people who aren't following the mandate, how many people have masks in your studio there?
Because we're going to save your life.
We're going to make you safe and secure.
Okay, you don't want to follow the rules.
You're out of here.
We don't want you anymore.
And that's like what the quote I have there, get rid of them.
People, we don't want them.
And because we can't stand to see people telling the truth to the people who are wondering, what in the world is going on?
And Bumper, I think picking the subject that you have is very good because I've wandered around a little bit on this, but I'll tell you what, I think it was keyed in on the title of your program, Restoring Civil Liberties, Restoring Liberty.
Of course, my organization is Ron Paul, you know, our project is for peace and prosperity, a project for peace and prosperity with no complications.
You know, the recognition is that an individual has a right to their life and they have the right to keep the fruits of their labor.
And that means that people are going to benefit.
And, you know, the college kids responded quite well with this.
They like the idea of not being told what to do.
I said, yes, but you have one rule you have to follow for this to work.
Confrontation With Marxists 00:11:09
And the one rule, of course, is non-aggression.
Yes, you can go about your business, run your life, take all your risks, assume responsibility for yourself, assume responsibility for the mistakes you make, assume that you can keep what you earn, but you can't use force.
And that's the only real rule you have.
And that's been around for a long, long time prior to the 10 commandments.
And that is no lying, cheating, stealing, and killing.
Just think, if the majority of people I imagine they would endorse that and say, oh, no, we don't lie and all this stuff, but they really go along with it because our governments do a lot of it.
The one book that I thought was very helpful to me and I recommend to a lot of the young people when they're looking for things to read is Bastiat's The Law, because it's dealing with a moral principle.
And the moral principle is trying to separate government and individuals.
And he simply makes the case for saying that if you and I can't steal from our neighbor, and most people, I can't imagine very many Americans saying, oh, no, you have to be able to steal from your neighbor, you know.
No, people say, no, we agree we can't steal from our neighbor.
But what percentage of the people think it's okay to send your congressman and lobby for them, get them elected to steal from the neighbor to give it to somebody else that doesn't deserve it?
And that's a large number of people.
That has to be challenged.
You just can't send the congressman to redistribute the wealth when you're not allowed to do it yourself.
And that is the big problem that we now have turned our government into a system of redistribution of wealth.
And when you think about redistribution of wealth, that is immoral.
That is not civil.
It's not a liberty.
You don't have the right to do this.
And that is the main thing that we have to remember is that you don't have a right to do this.
And yet it happens all the time.
It doesn't work.
The freer a society is, the more prosperous it is.
So freedom is liberty.
And the more rights that you have for yourself, the better off you are.
And the better off everybody is.
The bigger the middle class is, the greater the prosperity.
Why in the world do we lose this argument?
What's the matter with this argument?
What's the matter with us?
Why can't we convince more people?
Well, things are getting a little touchy because they're getting a little shaky.
And I consider the economy and our whole society a little shaky.
And we could have some sudden things happen that there would be major problems and more violence.
And our goals as people who love liberty should be to work hard to spread a message that will prevent that.
There's no reason why it has to happen.
It's all preventable.
The insanities that have emitted from this fear-mongering over a virus to get people really excited.
And also how we go to war.
How many times did I argue the case on the house floor on a civil liberty issue?
Why are we going to the Middle East?
We're going to kill innocent people.
And also, we're going to kill a lot of innocent Americans too.
And there's going to be blowback if you're not careful.
So it's not that complicated to figure out what is best.
It's just people motivated.
One reason why I think what happens is if you have freedom, if you have a relative amount of freedom, you have more prosperity.
And then when you have the prosperity, people get complacent.
They think about how do I accumulate more stuff?
And people are doing that until they depend on one source, that the machinery that makes the markets work artificially is, of course, a counterfeit.
You know, it's very easy for people to accept the idea.
If you go into a town and you tell them, look, what we have here is I have a counterfeit machine.
It's perfect.
Nobody can tell the difference from the government money.
And I'm going to start passing this off and make you all wealthy.
Well, it doesn't work that way because eventually so much money is printed.
And guess what?
If you print too much of that money, create more money, monetary credit, it's theft because it takes away the value of your good currency.
So that is a civil liberties.
I think monetary policy should be considered a civil liberty because it's honesty and it's property.
And inflation is a horror.
And right now it's breathing down our neck.
And a lot of people say, oh, this is just going to pass.
This is temporary.
Well, I'll tell you what.
It's not temporary.
And I'll tell you when it's going to stop.
It's when the people rise up and say, okay, folks, we have lived beyond our means.
We're going to balance our budget.
And we want you to balance our budget.
So cut everybody's budget.
And of course, we've spent a lot of money overseas, billions of dollars maintaining our empire, that we're going to give up our empire.
We don't really need an empire.
We get into a lot of trouble with that.
So we're going to give up our empire.
What's the chances of that happening and us moving, you know, quickly out of this mess that we're in?
The odds are that much.
It's not going to happen because it's epidemic.
It's epidemic like the mandates are epidemic and it's not going to change, but it will change in that it's going to run out of steam.
And then there's going to be an intellectual battle, which is already going on.
The Marxists are out there.
The Marxists never, you know, over the years have been Marxists in college, in Congress.
There's been Marxists and socialists in the Congress, but they need to have a caucus and get the most, they get the most information.
I was wondering, how do people who are really falling in the category of Marxists get so much attention by the media and they're so well known?
So it's there.
The confrontation is going to be there.
And it has to be an intellectual confrontation.
It has to be ideological.
And that's why I cite Doshievsky, because he has written so much on philosophy and especially the principle of civil liberties and the evils of Marxism.
And that has to be countered.
So it involves the monetary system, taxes.
When I talked to the college kids and they loved it, no taxes, no income tax.
When you work, it's yours.
It's part of your life.
And they sort of like this.
But guess what?
The dilution of money, the printing of money is a tax.
If the spending isn't going to quit, and we're continuing to do that, and we continue to print money, that'll bring a climactic end to what's happening.
But they're not going to do that.
They're going to keep playing these games.
I'm surprised that, you know, they preached for probably between five and 10 years that the goal of the Federal Reserve was to destroy the value of the dollar by 2% every year because we want prices to go up.
When prices go up, there's a healthy economy.
So much nonsense based on just lies and innuendos and special interests, but based also on the reflection of the economics that have been taught in our universities.
And that is that, you know, deficits don't matter.
The total spending doesn't matter.
We're a modern monetary theory, which is just an exaggeration of what we've been putting up with over the many years.
And that's going to continue.
But the whole system is going to conclude.
I would say that if we could get a lot more people interested in the subject that Bumper has been talking about for a long time and narrow it down to the liberty of an individual and make it so that everybody has that liberty.
And that's the only way I see us coming out of this.
I'm really surprised how long it's lasted, but the relative and partially free economy did produce a lot, and they were fooled into believing, well, we got away with inflation and deficits for a long time.
We've been doing that ever since the Depression, and it works fine.
Well, it hasn't worked fine because if you look at the people who suffer, if you look at the inequality, probably one of the worst things, which you would never believe when you listen to all the rhetoric of the racial stuff going on now, is that the whole idea of the racial thing is that the system that we have today makes these things much worse.
And that is going to lead to not only an economic conflict, but also a racial conflict if we allow the demagogues to get away with what they're doing.
They turn it into a racial war.
There's more racism going on now.
We need Martin Luther King back.
He said, it's only the character of the individual that counts, not the color of a person's skin.
People shouldn't be managed by the color of their skin, and yet it's worse now than probably ever before.
It doesn't work.
And that is going to be part of the conflict we have because, along with this, now is the building inequity.
And it's going to be both racial and it's also going to be class because productivity is going down.
The country is going to get poorer.
And I am convinced that a country has to do what we as individuals have to do.
If we borrowed too much money, lived beyond our means, bought cars we didn't really couldn't afford, and we had a house that was too big.
And finally, either you lose your job or your bills get too big and you can't pay the bills and you have to quit.
So you can declare bankruptcy and probably survive in a messy way.
Debt and Voluntary Choices 00:09:25
Or you can act like some people think is the moral answer.
Well, if I've overdone it, what my job is, is to quit spending, live within my means, work harder, get another job, and pay off the debt because I can't pay this debt.
The country really needs to do that, but they're not going to make a decision that way.
It is going to be much easier for people to come to understand what personal liberty and property ownership really means and why voluntary contracts are so good.
And then they could end up eventually seeing that that type of protection of those rights will lead to the prosperity I think everybody wants.
And besides, the inequality of the spreading of wealth right now is not a consequence of capitalism and freedom and laissez-faire.
They'll always tell you that.
That's what the socialists will always say.
That's why there's inequality.
No.
And when you look at the corporations being friends with the big government and getting their licenses from big government, getting all their contracts from big government and social media dealing with the big government, all these things.
So we know where the real problems are.
And so it's up to the people to come around.
And that's why we need more Bumpel Hernbergers out there teaching this and reaching more people to find out that it's personal liberty, it's civil liberties of all individuals that have to be emphasized and have to be accepted if we want to get out of this mess.
Bumper, thank you for the invitation.
I'm finishing up.
All right, Ron, thank you very much for those excellent, an excellent, excellent presentation and sharing your perspectives with us.
We've got about 10 minutes for questions and answers.
I don't know how you do it, Ron, but you always, whenever I hear you talk, my heart starts thumping a little bit faster.
So let me go to the first question here.
Is liberty, I think I know the answer to this one, is liberty more likely to be obtained through lobbying elected officials or through educating the public?
If we had liberty, who would be the most annoyed by it?
State that again, please.
Well, is liberty more likely to be obtained through lobbying elected officials or through educating the public?
It should be for educating the public, but it couldn't be both.
You know, you could say that I should have only started and had an organization like my Free Foundation to spread the message and be more didactic.
Or should I work in politics?
Lobbying, it depends on what you're lobbying for.
If you're lobbying for liberty, that's okay.
But if you're a typical lobbyist, you can forget about it.
You bring up the subject of lobbying.
I had to deal with a lobbyist, but they were far off because I never had them come to see me because lobbyists go to the people.
They think they can twist their arm.
So, no, I think lobbying, and it depends.
If it's good lobbying, I think you should lobby and try to do it.
I would make a statement with my staff at times, just sort of making the point.
Some of them like to do more details.
Let's change this word and do this and try to sneak this in.
And I would say, just to get the point, I'm not a legislator.
I don't want to tinker with a bill, but I tinkered with one big bill out of the Fed because I didn't even, well, I worked with the Congress because we did get it passed in the House, but I wanted to be involved in education and lobbying, but I went to the people outside of Washington, and they're the ones who put pressure on the congressmen.
So my approach was a little bit different, but I think there's the one thing is you want, you don't want, as bad as lobbying is, you don't want laws restricting lobbyists.
That to me is petitioning the Congress, and you should be allowed to do that.
If they're petitioning for money that they shouldn't have, then the issue should be: how do we get people to petition and say, quit, have stop that program?
It needs to be stopped.
Okay.
Does the government say, does private property rights extend beyond physical things to one's actual physical person?
That is, does the government or the private sector enforcers?
Well, let's just leave it to the government.
Does the government have the authority to force you to take a drug or they will take your right to make a living or to move away freely?
The answer is absolutely not.
And that's where a line should be drawn.
They don't have a right to tell you to get a needle stuck in your body.
The big problem is how what the contrast is, these people are in tremendous pressure.
You know, if you don't do it and you don't become one individual that, you know, they have all the vaccines, then you're going to lose your job.
And, you know, there's a lot of alternatives to saying, oh, no, if you didn't do that, you'd have a lot of spread of the diseases.
But there's so much information to show, you know, just this week, we had a statement come out that they finally counted the deaths in Italy.
And 97% of them that were recorded as dying from COVID did not die from COVID.
They were admitted to the hospital for strokes, heart attacks, and all cancer.
And then they got COVID positive.
So they said they died of COVID.
The statistics are worth zero and there's zero attention paid to natural immunity.
And people who would like to avoid the demagoguing, they want to take the vaccine should be voluntary.
Two things.
Both sides have to be voluntary.
So this whole thing that government bureaucrat, guys like Fauci, he's never seen a patient.
And he's done more to, I think he's done more harm to medical care than any one single person could ever do.
Okay, next question.
Do you think there will be a return of conscription or the draft?
You know, they just, that's caught up, that's come up again.
And I use conscription in a lot of my speeches to say that this is an example of who owns your body.
You know, government owns your body.
They own your income too, because they allow you to keep a certain percentage of it.
And if we roll over for every mandate, that's another sign that they own that own our body.
Do I think it's coming?
I think it's possible.
I don't think it's on the horizon, but it bothered me a little bit.
You know, isn't it the craziest thing?
They want to make sure that women are treated equal.
So what we're going to do is we're going to draft up women and give them guns to go over to who knows where and start shooting people and getting shot at because of the name of liberty.
If you want to talk about a bizarre understanding of what liberty is all about, but the answer isn't, you know, don't draft the women.
Get rid of the daft.
Get rid of conscription.
It is totally unnecessary.
There's no proof that they're better fighters.
Besides, right now, that type of war, I think, is past us.
We're not going to have a war like World War II.
Sometimes I'm concerned about biological wars and a few things like that.
But I think conscription is that should be an easy one for everybody.
They don't own you.
They can't conscript you.
They can't send you into some jungle someplace and start shooting people.
Become a sharpshooter and see how many people you can shoot for the name of patriotism.
One thing that bothers me about this whole thing is we don't declare war.
We send the troops over and then we say, and we hear incessantly, oh, we're over here protecting the Constitution.
We're protecting American freedom.
Well, how's going over and invading Iraq and Afghanistan?
How did that help our Constitution?
At the same time, they have the Patriot Act, you know, and people buy into this.
And it's sad that they make, you know, how you have to be so sympathetic to the victims of this.
But it's so sad because so many people have died from this and have suffered.
It just breaks my heart to think because it's not necessary.
It does not, it has nothing to do with going to war for the Constitution when we didn't even declare the war like the Constitution says.
Closest Thing to School Ownership 00:03:21
It's crazy.
Yeah, your point about conscription made me think that if there's a certain segment that are slaves in society, that we need equality by enslaving everybody.
Maybe that's working on they're working on that.
Yeah, now we only have a couple minutes, and this guy's asked an interesting question.
I don't know if you can do it in a short period of time, but do your best.
What do you think about the bill recently signed a law by Ron DeSantis that will require high schools to cover the evils of communism and totalitarian ideologies and classes teaching about forms of government?
This is not easy because you would say, well, we shouldn't dictate what he's teaching, or that's a great idea.
We should subsidize it.
That's the argument for no government schools.
Come to my homeschooling program and you won't have to worry about it.
If you don't like it, you just leave.
And so government schools, and I've thought about that a whole lot.
How do you deal with personal civil liberties in a government-run school?
And I thought about it in terms much less controversial.
Okay, what about a kid that has his hair too long and the decorum, you know, and it's a government school?
And common sense would say, well, you shouldn't come here looking like a bum.
You ought to have at least have your shoes on, you know.
And I thought, well, we don't have a right to tell them what they have to wear.
So the solution is private school, but that's not there.
Now, the only thing I do is I come a little bit over and say, well, the owner isn't there.
We have no owner.
We've created this thing where everybody's the owner, you know, and when people get enough upset, they can go to a school board meeting and get things changed.
But no, they do this and they think that that's the best thing to do.
But I think that the kids, you can't regulate that stuff.
You shouldn't have to.
But I would say the closest thing you can come to an owner of a local government school is not have the UN involved or any international body or US government or the state government.
And you have, I was in a community school when I was in for 12 years and you had school boards and they did have a reflection.
I would say that's the closest thing you can come for a possible substitute for the owner.
Because if it's smaller like that and they make a mistake and say that you have to wear something stupid or make it so honored, they ought to be able to change that group.
It's available now because we've seen people resign from the school board, which pleases me when they do that.
So you'd have to have a substitute or you'd have to say, you got to go elsewhere, private school.
In private school, they can tell you whatever you want, whatever they want on wearing it because the volunteerism is the student and the school.
They've come together in a volunteer.
That's why volunteerism is such a great answer to many of our problems, to many of our problems.
Volunteerism Solutions 00:00:35
On that note, excellent note, we'll wrap things up, Ron.
I can't thank you enough for taking the time to share these fantastic perspectives with us on Liberty and for getting everybody excited about Liberty.
Every time I hear you, I get excited about Liberty again.
Thank you so much.
And thank you all for tuning in.
Thank you for your great support of FFF.
We couldn't do these kind of programs without your support.
If you haven't yet donated to the Future of Freedom Foundation, this would be a great time to start.
So thank you very much.
Next week, the final lecture in this program, that'll be by me.
Look forward to seeing you all then.
Thank you again, Ron, and good evening to all y'all.
Great.
Export Selection