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June 9, 2022 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
52:53
'New World Order or Nuclear Armageddon?' - Ron Paul at the RPI Houston Conference

RPI Founder Ron Paul addresses the 4 June 2022 conference: The Biden Doctrine: New World Order or Nuclear Armageddon? Don't forget to mark your calendars! Sept. 3rd in Dulles, VA: 'Anatomy of a Police State' - Ron Paul Institute's Summer Washington Conference!

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I Get a Little Bit 00:04:57
Thank you very much.
It's great to be here.
Great to see everybody.
And I guess I better start off first by congratulating Daniel McAdams for putting this together.
Daniel.
You know, when we were still in Congress and Daniel knew I was leaving, everybody knew I was leaving, he came and suggested an organization called the Ron Paul Institute.
And so he deserves the credit.
I get a little bit, but he deserves the real credit because he's an organizer.
And anytime I needed something or had a question, I always go to him.
So he really does deserve a lot of credit.
But if somebody else in this audience deserves a lot of credit, for a lot longer time than I've known Daniel, and that's my wife, Carol, sitting right down here.
She always claims she knew nothing about politics, but she was my secret weapon when I was in ordinary politics running for Congress.
So I remember one time she wanted to, and some of you even mentioned it to me since we've been here, because one of her secret weapons was, you know, they're saying terrible things about you.
They say you're for drugs and give it away to the kids and Republicans and Democrats.
And she didn't like that.
So she says, you know what I need to do?
I need to do a little cult book of the family recipes and take pictures of all the kids.
Oh, that's not politics.
They want me to talk about the Federal Reserve System.
So she went ahead and did it anyway and passed him out.
But after a while, I had to confess that it turned out to be the most popular political literature that I ever had.
So even those kind of things helps you get votes.
So getting votes is one thing, and it's a lot better than buying votes, let me tell you that.
So that's been very good.
On Lou, I really appreciate Lou coming out today.
And he had to put up with a commercial airline, and it's just great that he's here.
And Lou, we've known each other for a long time because when I was in office for less than a year one time, I had three terms in the office in congressional office.
So early on, I won a special election.
I was there about a year.
And then I ran again.
Oh, by the way, the time I lost after that special election, we lost by 100 votes.
And did you know that we had absolute proof they stole election from us?
But we won some court ballots.
But anyway, I ran in 1978.
And I had a call from Leonard Reed.
Anybody know who Leonard Reed was?
Not too many.
But Leonard Reed organized, and he did what I consider an operation called the Economic Remnant.
He really believed in preserving the truth about economic policy and moral policy as well.
So he started the Foundation for Economic Education.
And I got to know him in a short period of time, in the 70s.
And I think he gave me a lot of insight.
He talked about economic policies, but he was correct on the policy.
His insight for me was tone, you know, how you talk to people and how you win converts.
And in some ways, I've never asked Lou if this was the case, but in some ways, Lou follows some of the rules of Leonard Reed on how you reach out to people and talk to them.
And it makes a difference because an aggressive approach to spreading our message generally doesn't work very well.
But Leonard called me and said, you know, I want you to, I was getting ready to go back into Congress.
That would have been in January 79.
And he said, I want you to talk to Lou Rockwell.
And he might come on your staff for you.
And lo and behold, Lou came on the staff, was chief of staff for quite a few years, there, three or four years.
But then Lou had another idea.
You know, he wasn't going to live with a government job the rest of his life.
And so Lou says he had this idea of starting something called the Mises Institute.
I know, it sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
And, you know, we talked a little bit.
And I have to confess, Lou, that I steal credit a little bit from you.
Because when I go out and talk about the Mises Institute, I always say, and I helped start it.
Bretton Woods Legacy 00:15:51
But that's a stretch.
He is it.
He started the Mises Institute.
And if education and the spreading of message and have the right literature, influencing new teachers and professors, I tell you what, I think Lou is the individual that I've known in my life to have excelled in that.
And he has a legacy there because a lot of people know about the Mises Institute.
He deserves a lot of credit.
Lou, I want to tell one story, and I know you'll remember this story because the breakdown of the Bretton Woods in 1971, that was a big event for me because it was all predicted.
And Lou was sort of working for publishing companies back then that predicted the breakdown of the Bretton Woods and gold prices were going to go up and we'd have trouble in the 70s.
And all that came true, and the Austrian economists were correct on this.
So, you know, a lot of people write now.
I shouldn't be talking about economic stuff like this because we have to talk about foreign policy too.
But anyway, the economic policies then were that, and beliefs were it was stagflation.
The economist was unfunded.
What is it?
Stagflation.
How can prices go up and the economy is weak?
Prices going up is a sign of strength.
Just think of the last 10 years, the Federal Reserve has been working very hard to solve the problem of a weak economy by saying what we need is inflation.
If we could only get the prices to rise at 2% a year, we would have a wonderful time.
Guess what they're saying now?
If we can only get the interest rates down to 2% a year, we will save the economy.
But anyway, interest rates went up to 21%, and they always said if interest rates go out, it'll destroy gold.
Well, it messes around with the gold price and causes a little bit of havoc, but that's understandable.
So through the 70s, and I remember him well because I was following the economic policies, especially with the wage and price controls and all the monstrosities and prices soaring.
And they were bad then.
But bad news from me today is it's worse today as far as I'm concerned.
And we have a big job ahead on what we have to do.
So it was probably in 1979.
I was at a banking conference, and it was at the height of that.
I don't know the day and what the price was, but the price of gold was either in the 700s or low 800s.
And there was a lot of worry about it.
And we were working on a bill called the Monetary Control Act, which was a vicious increase in the power of the Federal Reserve.
So I had explained on the banking committee why I was going to vote against this.
And Volcker, I know the way most people feel about bankers, and generally I do too.
But if I had to pick of all the Federal Reserve Board people over the years, he was a more decent person.
You know, he wasn't an aggressive person.
And he actually, you know, when I was talking down his Monetary Control Act, he exerted an invitation for me to go to breakfast with them.
Well, that sounds like a good idea.
So we scheduled it, and they said, well, you can't bring your whole staff, but you can bring a staffer.
And Lou was on the staff at the time.
So we agreed to go over.
Lou and I went over and we arrived at the Federal Reserve Board and we went into the room and there was one individual there and that was Volcker's personal staffer.
And we were on time and a couple minutes early.
So we were gabbing a little bit to Volcker's staffer.
Then all of a sudden Volcker bolts in, six foot six or something like that.
He came over and I thought, well, I'm his guest.
He's going to come over and say, well, Congressman Paul, I'm glad to see you.
You know what he did?
He immediately put his eyes on his staffer and he ran over and he says, What's the price of gold?
And I thought, you know, that is interesting.
They know what's happening with gold, know all this negative stuff about gold.
And some people, you know, have this debate on whether the government would be willing to rig and get involved in the gold price.
And libertarians even split on this idea.
Oh, yeah, they get involved.
They probably don't get involved every single day in rigging prices.
But long term, they're capable of messing around.
I mean, if they don't like what's happened, they just take the gold from the American people.
And then they rig the price at $35 an ounce for 40 years and make it illegal for people to own gold in the market.
So they're willing to do it.
My point is, I think they think more about gold than they would ever pretend.
So a short time before I was ready to leave Congress, Bernanke was before the committee.
So I thought, well, I'll see.
I never pestered them about gold.
They knew where I stood.
I knew where they stood.
But that particular day, my approach in the committee was, and some people criticized me for this because I didn't do it by interrogation.
Ask him a question and go back and forth.
Because if I'd asked them a question, I only had five minutes.
They would answer the minute and take all my five minutes.
So I usually gave it my spiel.
But this one particular day, I was in this attitude.
I was seeing if I could get an answer from him.
So I said, Chairman Bernanke, is gold money?
And he, now, I don't know if I can describe this right because it wasn't what he said that was so interesting.
It was his look on his face.
And all of a sudden, he went.
And you know, that was two seconds or three seconds, and you notice there was a pause.
And the pause, even if it were only 15 seconds, that is a long pause.
But he waited there.
No, that was his answer.
It's not gold.
I said, well, why do the central bankers all hold gold?
Oh, he says, tradition.
It's a tradition.
I said, why don't they?
Why don't they hold diamonds?
They're valuable.
Can't you do that?
But he didn't quite, I didn't convert him.
I have to confess.
It wasn't.
But some people who saw that remember it.
But they know everything we know.
We think we know about gold and gold markets and all, but they watch it.
They watch everything.
And they think they have control, but they really don't.
And that is why Bretton Woods broke down.
With all the power and all, the market finally overwhelmed, and it had been overwhelmed for several years when they had two gold prices and it would creep up to $38.
And finally, they had to throw in a towel.
And there's been chaos ever since.
And they always say, well, you have to have government so everything is orderly.
If you don't have the government, it'll be chaotic.
I think they have that twisted.
I think the market sorts things out and the governments can delay things and interfere and pretend and lie to us.
Oh, I didn't say that.
They will try to mislead you tremendously and try to fool the people.
And a lot of times, their words are powerful of the Federal Reserve, and what they do and say has an effect on the markets.
We know that.
And so even though most, or a lot of people in the marketplace know that it doesn't really have an effect, but they also know that everybody's going to think it's going to have an effect.
So there's a snowball effect.
And some days things go up quickly on the first reaction to this week it happened.
They react to an employment report and you look at the first three numbers and things go down and everybody says, well, we have, what are the investors going to do?
They don't look at the big picture is what it is.
It's not a daily thing.
It's an instantaneous thing.
And those of you who are in the investment business and that can do the trading, I'll tell you what, find a dandy, do your best, get rich and help our organizations do whatever you want.
But I'll tell you what, I wouldn't be the kind.
So I took this old-fashioned idea that before Bretton Woods broke down, I believe that Henry Hazlitt was absolutely right.
In 1945, when they were putting this together, he says, it's not going to work.
Bretton Woods is not going to work.
So it finally did fail.
But it's one of those things that people realize it can happen and it does.
And it usually leads on to the next thing.
We're at, right now, at a crucial point, I believe, in our economy.
And that we're going to have another revamping in the system, just as the revamping occurred with the breakdown of Bretton Woods.
And it will be necessary.
But I think because the debt is so high and the government is so out of control and the welfare state has gone crazy and the reaction to all these things and all those conspiracies that are true are coming to an end.
And people said there's a lot of mess out there.
But I'm not going to spend my time completely on that because I want to go to another subject.
I think what's happening now Is against the American people.
It's a war against the American people.
And no matter what they tell you about, I mean, we've heard some great lectures, informed people trying to sort this out, the Russians versus the Ukrainians and the Europeans versus NATO and on and on.
But it is something where the war is really going on and is causing this crisis, crisis after crisis.
But always the crisis is being used to expand more government.
And just remember, if you wonder what's happening to Liberty, you don't have to go and check and take a poll, find out what people think about the loss of the First Amendment.
What they say, the only thing they have to remember is look and say, is the government growing?
Are there more pages in the Federal Reserve, a Federal Register, or what's going on?
And of course, government's getting bigger and more reactions.
The government always does this.
So the bigger the government, the less freedom we have.
And that's why we're at a crisis point.
We've gotten by a lot and we recover.
You know, it's amazing that we function as well as we did after they literally destroyed, finally, put the nail in the coffin of our unit of account.
See, in economics, you need a unit of account.
And of course, they got rid of the monetary unit, which was a weight in silver and gold.
But I think the problem, though, is bigger than the unit of account on money.
And that is the unit of account of our social order.
You know, nobody knows what right and wrong is.
They may know, but they can condition themselves.
We don't even believe in it.
You know, we have a nihilistic society today that actually their philosophy is that you can't know what truth is.
So we don't even try.
And then you wonder why we have the Nancy Pelosis of the world running our government.
But it's a disease that they get.
Once they go to Washington, they become that way.
They lose their soul.
They have no shame.
They never feel guilt.
Just think of the couple of quotes we've heard from that famous Texas president that was there for the East, all those Far Eastern wars.
Oh, you know, we can change the wars every day.
Don't you know that all our treaties that we sign, we can change them anytime we want, but it's a secret.
You know, that is known.
So it's a system.
Now, is this brand new?
Has this ever been happening before?
See, it's bad right now.
And because the bubble is bigger, because there's more debt and more problems, I think we face a lot worse crisis.
But this has been a wrong, I think that sort of came up in Genesis.
They talked about evil and good and bad.
And that's been around for a long time.
And so, and it's been up and down for many, many years.
And a lot of people have died over it.
So they'll say, Ron, what do you worry about?
It's been there.
You just said, why mess around with it?
You can't solve the problem.
If they've been doing this even prior to Genesis existence, they had this activity.
There was always somebody there trying to sort out what the truth is.
And right now, we don't have a unit of account.
And I think there's times in our history.
I think the time, I think Christianity has worked hard at trying to give us a unit of account.
I think the founders knew a little bit about it.
They knew about it in money.
And they were a little bit more honorable than what we have today.
And so I don't think it's going to work very well unless we go try to get to the bottom of it all.
And does that mean that we need to be smarter, smarter militarily, smarter on economic policy, and make it work better?
No, you can't make it work better.
One reason why, if there was a bill out and 98, 95% of it sounded like it was tolerable, but they were only interfering in your liberties by 5% of the bill.
And my thoughts were, well, if you do 5% for 20 years, you don't have any left, anything left.
So one of the things that just amazed me, the first week or two I was in Congress, you'd go down and it'd be a desk where their staff would be there to give you an idea what's going on.
But then they'd have a paper done.
What is the bill number and whose women it is?
But then underneath it, they would have a list of lobbyist groups here and a list over here.
This lobbying list were for the bill and this group was against it.
So the job was to figure out which ones are in the district.
And that's why the other staffers go.
First Week in Congress 00:05:07
Oh, I have to do how am I going to satisfy everybody?
And so their unit of account was power and satisfying and staying in office and getting promoted and raising money.
Very complicated.
And I wasn't, I didn't like that complication.
I just liked this idea that if you're going to take away one, two, three, or four percent of my liberty with a bill and pretend that you're going to solve my problem, it was very easy for all of us to agree that's a no vote.
But that sometimes annoyed people because I don't know if you remember, there were a few occasions where I had to vote by myself.
Anybody remember that?
You know, so we'd vote no.
And one time we had a vote, and it was for Cardinal O'Connor, a gold medal.
He needed a gold medal.
I don't know.
A very decent person because, you know, I was hit hard.
I was the only one that was voting, I guess, this gold medal.
So I remember I was on my way back to the office, and the staff was all excited.
They said, The New York Times is on the phone.
They want to know why you voted no.
And I said, well, what did you tell him?
He says, well, he votes no on all this stuff.
And they said, oh, we thought he might be anti-Catholic or something.
They hung up.
The story was dead.
They didn't want to talk to me at all about it.
So I think people go to Washington and they do have a pretty good understanding of what they believe in, but it doesn't last long.
And I would help people get in there.
Now, there have been a few that have done very well, like our son Ram.
He's doing pretty well.
And Thomas Massey.
He's done excellent.
And both of us campaigned for him.
But then there are others.
They're more numerous.
They would tell us, you know, what they believe in.
And at times we'd support them, always hoping.
But as I sat on the floor and a new member came in, I said, I'll tell you within a week where he'll end up.
Because the first week is tough.
There'll be some votes.
And you can tell once they give away, but the leadership comes and they'll say, well, if you want to stay in this office, you've got to do this.
You've got to cooperate.
You've got to be part of the team.
Aren't you a team player?
And they would go on and on.
And they say, well, you, you can't even get on the committee that you want on if you don't, you know, toe the line.
And very quickly, you know, they go over and they're part of if they're part of the team.
Well, you know, and then us, and also they have to raise money.
They would always say, well, the lobbyists will pester you too.
Somebody said, well, why didn't you yield to the, why didn't you yield?
Did the lobbyists keep coming to you and say, won't you do this?
Won't you do this?
I said, no, they never bothered me because they always knew what I was going to do.
So I felt freedom.
It didn't bother.
I guess some people, a lot of times, they ask, well, how was it that you were able to stay in office this way?
And the truth is, I didn't think I'd go and I didn't think I'd be able to stay.
But when I first told Carol that I was going to run for office, she said, what you're going to do, this is dangerous.
And it was right after Bratton Woods broke down.
It was in the 70s.
I said, I don't, I said, why is it dangerous?
She says, you're probably going to get elected.
I told her, no way, no way I'm going to be elected because they're not interested in that.
You don't get elected by saying that you don't even believe in Santa Claus.
Things come up magically.
But it's something that worked out well.
There was a time when it was very hard to, and Daniel has solved our personal problem because when I got out of, when I first got into Congress or even before, I was interested in talking about, in particular, the monetary issue, and as it expanded, the military industrial complex, the war issue, and then just talking about freedom as a whole.
And when we did that, I could go to the college campuses.
I knew that was where the action was.
Talk to young people.
And so I'm always delighted.
I was very pleased with what happened in the campaign.
And the campaigns, the young people responded, and they kept saying, well, why are you coming like this?
I said, well, who knows?
Speak Out 00:09:53
I don't know.
I'm just speaking out.
That was what Leonard Reed said.
Get knowledgeable and speak out.
If anybody wants to use you, they will.
And I was really surprised that, you know, those 15, and out of those groups where we were with me with 15, 20 or 30 in the early 70s when libertarianism was just coming about, you know, guess what?
A bunch of them have worked for me ever since.
You know, in the campaigns of the libertarian, and they would get involved in the Mises Institute and learning about Austrian economics.
And I am convinced that the work that Daniel's doing now, with a little bit of help from me, is teaching people that non-intervention in foreign policy is a big issue, and we really have to keep working at it.
You know, the issue of inflation is the big issue today.
Just as it was in the 70s.
And this stagflation is back and all these things.
But right now, the game they're playing is whom are we going to blame?
You know, who's at fault?
And there's, you know, the issue is inflation.
When I say inflation, most everybody, including myself, if I read about it, what they're talking about is a CPI, the CPI.
It was price inflation.
And then as I studied, I found out, well, it's monetary inflation, the real source of our problem.
And I thought, well, that's important.
I think we should make an effort to separate the two: monetary inflation, price inflation.
And I came across something in Human Action I found fascinating.
It sort of answered my question.
Mises argued that you don't want to do that.
He says they do that on purpose.
What they want to do is they want to separate it, but you don't want to put them together and think monetary inflation has something to do with price inflation because you would not be understanding and working on the Federal Reserve.
His argument, the source was the Federal Reserve, so you can talk about both, but he wanted to include the inflation coming from you know where.
So that I think was an eye-opener for me.
You know, we live in an age right now that, you know, Nixon coined the word about Keynesian, the date he closed the gold window, put on the wage and price controls and evil stuff.
He said, I guess we're all Keynesians now.
And it's a famous statement.
And Keynes, and I use it a lot at the time too, but I think we use that name a little bit more than we should because Keynesianism has varied its terms and we don't exactly follow everything Keynes has said.
So we look at that and I thought, well, who's at fault then?
Because I think ideas are important.
And I think the name that we should be talking about is Paul Samuelson.
I think Paul Samuelson probably has created more evil because I see this as a philosophic fight.
I see, you know, an education.
I see the need for the Memes Institute.
And I can see the need that we need a real revolutionary change in our government-run school system.
So the name that I think we could start with, how this came about, this fight's been going on for a long time.
And I would say it started with Hamilton and Jefferson.
You know, Jefferson had a different attitude and Hamilton had one, and it's been going on ever since.
And there's been a lot of ups and downs.
Although we say we had a gold standard of Up until 1971.
We really didn't.
If you want to date the downturn and the spinning down of the dollar system, it has to be in 1913, you know, 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was passed.
And of course, the other act was passed, that little income tax.
I don't know why everybody worried about that.
It was just a little bit, but then it controls our lives now.
I guess when I go home and pick it up and look at my mail, probably an envelope, if it looks like, you know, it looks like it officially has come from the IRS, that makes me about as nervous as anything, you know, because who knows what it means, you know, because they have this strange attitude.
It's this little twist on the Constitution.
Their attitude is, buddy, you're guilty until you prove yourself innocent.
And that's the way it works.
We all just go along with it, don't say much, except for people in a group like this, because I know you're sick and tired of it.
And we have to keep plugging away.
So we have the writing on laws now.
But Samuelson said one thing I thought was very important.
He said he doesn't care who writes the laws.
He cares about who wrote the textbooks on economics.
And I think there's a lot of truth to that.
Because Samuelson's books, not tens of thousands, probably millions, and they were in grade schools and high schools.
He captured the universities, and they were all trained to work congenially with the Federal Reserve.
I mean, there's a lot of well-known professors of the university, and they make a lot of money writing papers that don't make any sense, and they send them over to the Federal Reserve.
Yet it's a collusion of how you can continue to distort history and economic policy.
But that I thought was an interesting statement, and I think it really is true.
So that raises a question on how one must use their energies.
And I think I probably accidentally fell into this idea that the political part, legislative part, is minor.
And over the years, I would have some people work for me, and they were more energetic.
So if the bill was down a couple percentage points from what I want, they'd want to write up detailed amendments to the Constitution to change it.
And it was complicated.
You had to sell your soul.
You had to beg and plead for them to bring it up.
It was not my kind of thing.
So I can remember at times when somebody said, yeah, but we've got to do it.
We've got to do this.
I said, I am not a legislator.
I didn't go to legislate under that system, but I was very much interested in education.
I was on the education committee, which meant I absolutely had no authority or influence on trying to do something about our education system.
But that's a big deal right now.
And I see signs of hope with it, you know, because of, you know, right now, the good part of what we see is that there's quite a few parents that woke up and said, maybe we as parents have a responsibility.
Yes, they do, and they are, and they're expressing themselves.
One of the things that I'm most happy about, or very happy about it, is the help that I've gotten from people in here for the Ron Paul curriculum.
And that is expanded with all that silly stuff with COVID.
And I hope it continues.
But I just love those stories where the parents finally got disgusted.
They started reading those books.
Do you remember the one time the one lady got up and started reading the book that was in the library and it was pornography, pure demography.
And it so embarrassed the school board.
They say, shut up, shut up.
You can't do that.
We don't want to hear that stuff.
And then another time, one group of parents got together.
They fired the whole school board in one night.
And that is power in a positive sense, very positive, influence.
And that's why, and I see that.
And I know about the bad side, the nihilists that can't acknowledge that seeking truth is worthwhile, a worthwhile goal.
So I think it's out there.
I think there's a natural tendency for people to have a bit of decency in their souls.
And there's ups and downs throughout the centuries.
And there's good literature out there.
There's bad literatures.
There's been times when people were more peaceful and times that they're not so peaceful.
Middle Class Nonsense 00:05:42
But I see the transition being equivalent to the size of government.
The bigger the government and the bigger intervention that we have, entangling alliances.
Isn't that a great term?
Stay out of entangling alliances.
Guess what?
We wouldn't have been in the Middle East.
We wouldn't have been in Ukraine right now.
And it's to me like it's entangled.
And we best just get out.
And they say, yeah, but who would bring peace to the world?
Who would provide peace?
And of course, that's a bunch of nonsense.
And one thing that really annoyed some of my colleagues, and they were presidential candidates too, that I took this position that you shouldn't do anything that you yourself can't do.
If you're not allowed to steal, why do you let the government steal from you?
And that's what the government is.
They're counterfeiters and it's fraud.
And they can steal from your bank account.
Not only today they're talking about just taking your bank account.
They don't even play the game sometimes.
They can take your bank accounts.
But the stealing that I think is so sinister, because it's a tax.
They spend all this money.
They run up these huge deficits.
And there's never any hesitation.
Republicans, not too good, not too good on stopping the spending.
And the Democrats, they spend, and it continues.
But if they can inflate, just theoretically, if you could double the money supply and raise the prices 50%, the people have lost half of their income.
You know, it's worth 50 cents on the dollar.
And the debt is being liquidated.
And that is their goal.
That was why 2%, the principle of inflating and this non-total nonsense that they have, that prices going up are good.
Prices going down is bad.
Which is nuts.
If you have a sound currency, the purchasing power of your dollar might go up.
What's so evil about that?
But they think if we could only get interest rates down because low interest rates is good for the economy, and they don't talk about the unit of account and the unit of account, you need the unit of account to find out what the price is, what the interest rate should be.
So I admire the businessman who can go out there, not accepting government help, and still make business decisions on this.
And what good is it to know about savings and all these other things?
It's all artificial and distorted.
So we've literally destroyed the market economy due to the currency system.
In the same way, today, the regulation, if somebody just had to write one story about one commodity, of course, a monetary commodity would be interesting.
But how about the oil industry?
What have they done with the oil?
All these prices where we regulate it, destroy our oil production.
At the same time, we have to beg the Saudis to pump more oil.
It makes no sense.
And I don't know.
Maybe that, you know, believe it or not, I'm the optimist.
So if they see this coming, maybe there'll be some change that will be really super good, you know, in the fall with an election.
But that is not the answer.
To me, the answer is the prevailing attitude of the people.
If they say we want wealthierism because the markets can't take care of poor people, they won't listen to this nonsense that the freer a country is, the more prosperity there is, the richer the middle classes.
Mises talks about the middle class.
He says, if you do what we're doing to our currency, you'll destroy the middle class.
And all you have to do is look at it.
But you know, the middle class I saw the other day, they're including people making $150,000.
They're middle class now.
And because the ability, one number that I find interesting is how long would a family last if they lost their job?
And it used to be when people were more frugal and the money maintained value, they might be able to last a year, you know, they would have it.
But now, you know, the devaluations go so quickly.
I was talking to a group of businessmen the other day, and they were in international business, buying and selling products overseas.
And what they were buying and selling, I don't know, but it was industrial type of thing.
I said, well, how do you make the contracts on what you're going to pay?
I said, it used to be that it didn't matter that much.
You just said a date in six months you pay it, and you didn't have to calculate.
I remember in the 70s where you had to have it in your contracts, you know, what you do with cost of living.
I said, how long, if you draw up a contract now for some money, products you want to buy, how long is that price good for?
Optimistic Insights on Contracts 00:07:37
And he told me, one day.
I just still can't quite figure that.
How do you do it as business people to how to figure this out?
They've taken away the measuring rod.
I keep using the example that when they take away the measuring rod in engineering, what if you had a yardstick that changed every day?
You'd have a terrible looking building, and it would be unstable, and it would crash.
It might look good for a while.
And I think the Bible talked a little bit about building a house on sand and a solid foundation.
Well, it looks to me like we're on a lot of sand.
And the sand is starting to erode.
So that means, well, Ron, you still haven't convinced me.
You told me all these things that you heard about all the scary stuff.
How can you be optimistic?
Well, homeschooling, the Mises Institute, the PTA, and the natural instincts that we can wake people up.
And I think on our program, what Daniel and I try to do is sometimes the worst reporting is, I said, don't worry, Daniel, this is just going to wake up another million people.
They don't like it, they want to do about it.
And the answer is liberty.
There's no doubt about it.
And during my campaign, I kept telling the young people, I said, actually, freedom is popular.
People like to be free.
And I was very pleased.
Now, Daniel, he never talks much about his college education.
But I want to tell you, he's a survivor.
And I knew it, too.
I knew he went to this school.
He went to Berkeley.
And look, he turned out pretty good.
So be optimistic, Berkeley.
So, and, well, really the best part of that story, it was my biggest rally ever.
You know, thousands and thousands of people came out.
So it's out there.
The remnant is there.
You don't have to worry about waiting for 51%.
You wait for a group like this.
How many people do you represent?
10, 20, 30 per family?
No, more than that.
You don't even know.
So if you convert one person today, they might convert 10 people the next year.
And I think we're at that point.
I think there's some good stuff out there.
And we try to pass that message along.
And it's ideological and it's contagious.
And that is what is important.
Ideas have consequences.
And that's good.
And I think, well, I'm convinced if this is a bad statement, truth is the right side to be on.
And I recall people, when I'd campaign in the district, I had a lot of people vote for me that were dedicated Democrats.
And I would say, well, they come up and they'd say, well, there's some things I just don't agree with you on.
But I'm voting for you.
I said, why?
He says, because you're telling us the truth.
And how many of us in here could agree on every single thing?
It would be a pretty boring world.
People want to hear the truth.
A couple young people came up to me after a campaign event, and they were interested in talking about the Constitution.
And we had just had a brief discussion of that in the debate.
And I took my position, but a couple other ones, candidates, said essentially the same thing in words.
You know, yes, we should follow the Constitution.
I believe in a second amount of, you know, this sort of thing.
I said, but they were interested in what I was saying.
And they were asking me questions.
I said, I pointed to him.
I said, they said the same thing, didn't they?
He said, yeah, because they weren't telling the truth.
We didn't believe them.
And this is why the remnant is so important.
The remnant has generally been associated with a religious remnant, and I believe in that.
But there's also the remnant of philosophy of freedom and liberty, and they come together.
You know, they come together.
It's maintaining the truth.
This is why the crisis of bankruptcy, financial, is a little bit easier to explain than the moral bankruptcy.
But I tell you what, if you feel like you're not well informed about moral bankruptcy, come visit Washington, D.C. for a day or two.
You might figure out what's going on.
No, it is.
It's an issue like that that is so important.
But I think we're on the side of freedom.
I think freedom should be fun.
And already I believe I've sensed that people in this room have met other people and you enjoy it because we don't know exactly what the future will bring.
But we do know that if nobody participates in something they strongly believe in and believe they're on the right track and follows some of the basic rules, like do your best to understand it.
And I really think the big difference, and this is something that I gave credit to Leonard Reed, was the tone that you use makes a big difference.
And I've seen a lot of aggressiveness in people saying, you don't know what you're talking about, especially if you hear stuff on the television or something like that.
That is not the way to do it.
One of the techniques that I've tried to use over the years has been instead of presenting my case, and this is the reason you ought to believe in it, is ask a question like, Mr. Bernanke, is gold money?
You might get more attention that way.
But no, long term, I am very optimistic and cautious.
But I do believe that we have to have personal goals, and the personal goals mean to seek those things that you believe are right and true.
And I think that a personal goal of mine, this has to be mine, I can't export it, and that is we all should use our abilities.
We all should seek excellence.
And this sort of irons out the problems.
Well, we don't want any, we have to, you know, have diversity, bring everybody together and be an army of bureaucrats or something.
But seeking excellence and being personal and individual is what life is all about.
But this whole idea, you know, these people who preach diversity is very annoying to me because if you want a truly diverse society and a productive society and a happy society, we all should be very diverse, assuming this responsibility is seeking excellence and making a definition and seeking virtue.
I think then we can have a free society that will generate a lot of support.
There's no reason in the world that with the number of people here participating, and they say, yeah, but I don't even give speeches.
Seeking Excellence Individually 00:03:19
Somebody, everybody has something that they can do.
And so many times you say, well, I'm only going to talk to one person.
Well, talking to those 10 or 15 30 years ago or so, and many of them ending up in my congressional office, many of them have become students and writers and teachers and all these things.
You don't know.
And the Bible teaches you can't even count the remnant.
You don't know who's out there.
And that's sort of the neat part about it, because every once in a while I bump into people and they'll say, you know when I got, matter of fact, I think a couple have already mentioned that to me today, that you helped me, you woke me up.
And actually, I'm sort of amazed and a little embarrassed.
What did I do?
I didn't do that much.
And yet, people had, and the other thing that always fascinated me, and I still don't understand that, because I talk economics and budgets and deficits and inflation and all.
And they say, well, you changed the way I look at life.
Some people say, well, you know, I didn't even want to go to school.
And then they end up, by the time I talk to them, they say, I'm in the third year of medical school.
So I don't know how that works, but sometimes it seems like it's unusual.
But I thank people for that, and I thank you for all the support so many of you have given us and so much that you've helped us at the RON PAUL Institute, because we really do believe that peace and prosperity is achievable to the best method possible of anything in human history, by just accepting the importance of the individual and accepting the important issue that you can understand and you can strive for the truth and you don't.
have to accept any of the lying and innuendos of the nihilists because they don't believe in it.
So they don't believe it's possible.
That it's physically and intellectually impossible to comprehend something being good and right.
And that, of course, I think that's where the action is.
And instead of saying, well, Ron, why didn't you do a better job?
Why didn't you become buddies with Nancy Pelosi?
And why didn't you do that?
And you could have been banking chairman and gotten rid of the Fed.
No way, no, no way.
Wouldn't have worked.
I would have been miserable.
It would have lasted about one day.
But I'll tell you what, we did have a little inroad.
I feel like we have introduced the notion of, and the Fed, and looking at the Fed as well as anybody has.
And the whole thing was, I essentially avoided Washington.
I went to people like you and many that were responding to that message and they went to their congressman.
It was sort of like the PTA, the parents going to the school board.
That is the real revolution.
I want to, you know, thank you all for coming today, and I thank you all for all the support you have given us.
And I hope we see you soon on the Liberty Report.
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