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Aug. 5, 2022 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
23:36
The Empire & The Fed -- Born Together, Dying Together

America was never meant to be an empire. After all, empires go broke! Why would any nation ever want that? Human life is much (much) too complex for one nation, or one government, to rule them all. Sadly, in the early 1900's, Americans ditched sound money, with the creation of the Fed, and ditched the belief of non-intervention in the affairs of other nations. It's been all downhill ever since.

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Chris Rossini on Strings and Recession 00:04:00
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, good to have you with us.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Well good.
We have always lots of things to talk about, obviously.
There were some financial reports today that are mishmash, but my general review and looking at what was reported today on employment and inflation is it's a mess.
And there's a lot of predictions and they sort of change about every hour or so on exactly what this means because they don't know what it means because all they're doing is worrying about what should the interest rates be tomorrow and what should it be next week.
They can't even, it used to be they'd agree when there's a recession going on because it was one of those mathematical things.
But nobody even knows now.
It's sort of like, I don't even know what a woman is.
So now I don't even know what a recession is.
It's whatever we want to do.
So that news is around.
But we've also been, Daniel and I have been talking a bit about the foreign policy, especially Pelosi's trip.
And there's still some heat coming out over there.
I think her trip diplomatically was a bomb, if you ask me.
And it's ratcheted things up.
It's just as provoking.
And I say, can they be stupid?
No, but they might have a goal in provoking problems like this.
Maybe the people who pulled the strings, and I would never be paranoid about that, they're pulling strings.
And they may belong to the military-industrial complex.
They might think this is good for business, but that would be so strange that that would happen.
People making money off weapons for war.
Well, anyway, but today I want to talk a little bit about that and the finances.
But before I do that, I want to mention the company that we do partner with, and that's Birch Gold.
They've been very generous in helping us with our program.
And they know something about gold.
That's why it's Birch Gold.
And they have information.
And if you want to contact them, there's a number, a text number on the screen that you can tap into and get some free information.
Because as I explained, from my viewpoint, things change rapidly.
And in the ordinary sense of trying to figure out when you buy AT ⁇ T and when you sell and that's kind of stuff, which is a huge job, well, the gold markets are like you too.
I think another factor that you have to work into, and even though I've been involved in gold and silver for long, I always recognize that it will not be a clean market.
There will be people, especially governments, who have motivations.
And that's why I think protecting oneself with gold, which is something we believe in, is not simple.
But there's ways of doing it.
There's ways to understand the tax codes and a lot of these other things.
So if you want to follow up, you can text that number on the screen and get some more free information.
But Chris, I want to start off with talking about a senator that's proposing a legislation, Robert Menendez.
And I guess to implant a little bit of suspicion, he's introducing a bill dealing with getting tough on Tehran and China.
And he has a partner.
He has a partner.
His name is Lindsey Graham.
So here we have Menendez, who's not a libertarian, and then we have Lindsey Graham, who on occasion comes up with some pretty good positions because I consider him pretty darn smart.
End of an Era? 00:15:06
But in this case, on the foreign policy, I don't have that same concern.
So, Chris, I want to welcome you again to the program today because I want to talk a little bit more.
And I know you have some good ideas about what kind of a foreign policy you would advise.
Right, Dr. Paul.
And as our title suggests, the Fed and empire are two sides of the same coin.
And in many respects, our nation's history, we've had two Americas in many respects, and they're both polar opposites.
In the beginning, there was individual liberty, sound money, non-intervention in foreign affairs.
And that lasted all the way up until the late 1800s, early 1900s.
And then everything changed once the Federal Reserve was created, which was in 1913.
And if any, you know, our history buffs know when World War I started.
That was 1914.
And then in 1917, the U.S. made a fateful decision to cross over the ocean and get involved in World War I.
And the world has never been the same since.
You know, that was when our empire really started to bloom.
A better tip-off would occur later.
Americans probably should have noticed once that Pentagon went up that, hmm, this doesn't look like a nation that's going to mind its own business.
And it has not.
Our nation has not ever since.
And today, we are in a precarious situation where we're dealing with Ukraine, which is on Russia's border, and Taiwan, which is on China's border.
These are major, major nuclear powers.
And getting involved in wars with them would not be something that we would just watch on TV.
We're not just going to lay on the beach, check social media, and see, oh, how's the war with China going?
It would be cataclysmic, and our lives would be in danger.
So the mentality has to change from this dangerous empire funded by the Fed, and we need to go back to sensible American foreign policy of non-intervention coupled with sound money.
Very good.
And most of our viewers, I think, are very much aware of that history.
And the one thing that it's always portrayed is they represented the progressive era.
And that always, of course, annoys me because I sort of think progressive should be a good word.
But they managed to destroy it.
The progressives are regressive.
You know, they're back going toward authoritarianism.
But they're the progressives as it was introduced, but people are catching on.
So that may change.
I sort of like the word liberal.
The classical liberals were libertarians.
But you can't even say, oh, I'm a liberal now.
I did that one time in one of my first campaigns.
And one of the more experienced politicians came over and he whispered, don't say liberal.
They have no idea what you're talking about.
So liberal's been ruined.
But they try to take the word libertarian too, and they're working on that.
And that's sort of a mixed bag.
I think when I was in Washington, I thought that libertarian was not a nasty word.
But they'll work on that too.
Depending on the circumstances, they'd like to badmouth all libertarians.
But on the foreign policy in general, dating that you've made is very important because before and even now we have this division that if they want to criticize a politician, and I've been on the receiving end of this, and that is they call you an isolationist.
You don't want to have anything to do with the world.
You're going to lock yourself off.
You don't believe in trade.
You don't believe in sound money.
You don't believe in voluntary global trade, which is a lot different than globalism of the Soros's type.
Totally different.
But people will criticize it, and they think, all I have to do is call you an isolationist, and you are a very bad person.
Yeah, we would like to maybe isolate our young people and our military from unnecessary, undeclared, immoral wars that are never won.
That's the kind of thing we want to isolate from.
But that means the opposite.
If you have a more free society with more trade and more coordination with people voluntarily, it's exactly the opposite.
You don't have this mess that we have now because it's very interventionist now.
And that is something that was started.
And Chris, you dated it because, you know, we should have somewhere along the way just canceled 1913.
Because think of it, you know, the income tax.
Think about it.
It was a change in foreign policy.
Think of that.
That was about the time they were changing the way we elect our senators.
And now it's automatically criticized that if a senator represents the state, sometimes I like less of that and let the people be very independent.
But the Constitution has written that the senators originally were supposed to come from the state legislature and represent the state's positions.
And even though with some shortcomings of that, I still like the idea because that emphasizes the sovereignty of the states and having the states assume the rights.
And I think our current Supreme Court leans in that direction, which I think is good.
Chris?
Yeah, very good, Dr. Paul.
And this shift that took place in the late 1800s, early 1900s to the Fed and empire, it was accompanied by what you just described, a major ideological shift took place in the minds of the American people.
Now, when we talk about the early American nation, it was not perfect.
Nothing in humanity is or can be perfect.
We could poke holes in everything.
But in general, there was a general respect for another person's life, their property, and that dominated our history.
And the citizens were a microcosm of that.
And the government was a macrocosm.
The government, if you look at the speeches of the politicians, they would not bother with going overseas to get involved in all these entangling wars of Europe.
They reflected what the people were thinking, which was take care of your domain, leave others alone to take care of their domain because you're not going to be able to run their lives.
So that was the dominant thought.
But then in 1913, 1900s, the pendulum swung in the other direction.
And today we're experiencing the extremism of it, which is the woke culture.
The prime focus is no longer take care of your domain.
It's ignore your domain completely and just go use force, use government force against everyone else.
You don't want a shot?
How would you like to lose your job?
How would you like that?
That's the mentality shift that took place.
And the citizens are a microcosm, and our nation is just a big version of it.
We just stamp around the world.
You're going to do what we say, and we're going to destroy you if you don't like it.
So that's the ideological part of it, and that has to change.
We have to go back to focusing on what we do control, which is our own domains, and we have to accept that we cannot control others.
Very good.
You know, empires have been around for a long, long time.
As long as you can back read history, it emphasizes, you know, the desire by certain people to have empires for all sorts of reasons.
But they never last forever.
They always end, and they end for a couple reasons.
Sometimes it's deterioration of the moral standards of their own community or overstepping their bounds, and it's a local matter.
Something like, say, the excesses of a COVID crisis.
You know, things like that can help undermine the whole system.
But the other thing that is generally present when an empire comes down is when the empire overreaches.
They just are too bold and they think that they can run the world, the bigger the better.
And certainly I think that the United States has been following that course.
We do have an empire where we keep troops in about 150 countries.
We have a military expenditure greater than the next nine countries, and all big countries.
So we have all the weaponry, and yet we preach and yell and scream about, you know, the Chinese are going to do this and that, and the Russians, there's Russia gay and blaming, and it's politicized, and all these things going on.
But I would say maybe the good news is we've overstepped our bounds and it's not like we're going to undermine liberty.
What happens is what we have today is undermining our liberty.
So the empire may well come to an end because one thing that happened with this empire, our empire, is that we have been able to maintain a reserve currency of the world.
And that's been true throughout history.
There have been special currencies, but the global economy and the number of people involved has never been bigger.
So this is something a lot different.
And most people know that the dollar is being challenged because, you know, they talk about, you know, if we let those Marxists take over, and we have a few of them into Congress, if they take over, they're going to go into excessive monetary policy and promotion of, you know, inflationism of the currency.
Well, that's what's been going on.
If you look at QE, I think we had modern monetary theory.
When I heard, you know, when COVID hit that they were literally sending billions and billions of dollars just handed out, nobody now knows exactly where it went.
And it went to people who weren't deserving.
Theoretically, it was supposed to be for the people who deserve some help, but of course they didn't.
So those things have all been here already.
And so the changes are coming.
And internally, a strong argument could be made that our foreign policy is overreaching.
But domestically, the moral climate here, especially associated with the attack on our civil liberties, with COVID.
So the conditions are ripe for ending the empire.
And people get nervous because most people, unfortunately, still like the empire.
They're proud of our power.
And we hear the warmongers on certain stations, and they're not all liberal, just bragging about and complaining about we're not tough enough.
We need to be a lot tougher with those Ukrainians.
We have to be a lot tougher with those Chinese.
And that's exactly what this Menendez and Lindsey Graham bill is doing.
Get tough.
And at the same time, promise them more money and all.
It just makes no sense whatever.
So I think the news here is it is the sign of the end is coming.
The empire will end, whether it ends quickly or gracefully or soon or later.
It's not exactly not long.
You know, there was an ending to the Roman Empire, but it didn't collapse overnight.
It was a gradual erosion of all the things that I'm talking about, overexpansion and too much immorality and spending at home.
But the empire will end.
And guess what?
With the ending of the empire, it might be the end of the Federal Reserve, you know, and that might be one of our extra benefits from it.
And so I don't expect that my involvement is going to change things in the next year or two or anything like that.
Hopefully there's a few suggestions that I make that will hang around and encourage people to make the effort to say, yes, it does look like it's bad.
What are we going to do now?
If we don't think we can wave a wand and have the good part of our republic all of a sudden return to us, then what do we have to do?
We have to plan philosophically and spiritually to get people to understand how we should rebuild.
And we have a guide, guideline, of course, it's been our founders and our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, always some shortcomings, but nevertheless, we have some guides and we can update things.
I've always argued, they say, you want to go back to the gold standard.
I said, no, I want to develop a monetary system with competition that could be a lot better than the gold standard we had.
So there's a lot of things that we can think about, but I think our job is to inform people, to understand what's going on and why we're in this crisis, financial, and for especially, especially, you know, we talk and criticize a lot of the progressives and the liberals, but I like, and I want to work with them and I want to have working arrangement with them.
But I also want to talk to the people in the conservative circles who are the war hawks that are so hawkish that they're participants.
And they're working now with the domestic hawks who are driving our domestic programs and have promoted all that nonsense with COVID locked out.
So, but information is important, education is important, planning is important, and being realistic to say that it's not going to come tomorrow with just waving a wand and all of a sudden having a different Congress, a different executive branch, a different court system.
No, we can't have that.
We have to do it.
Realists And Optimism 00:04:18
And there's lessons to be learned about people learning about the philosophy of liberty.
I believe when we research that, that we have made good progress in that area.
Chris.
Excellent, Dr. Paul.
And that's why this show is so focused on ideas.
I will make my closing statement by starting by saying, you know, it's obvious, or it should be obvious to everyone, that the ruling classes do not like the people.
And that's not to say that every congressman is bad and has bad intentions.
The people that wield the actual power, there's a lot of good congressmen, but they don't have much power at all.
The people that wield the power obviously do not like regular people.
And that became very evident during the COVID.
They were trying to get us to use passports, show our papers, to prove that we got a certain injection in order to go buy a hot dog somewhere, go to a game, a movie, you name it.
I mean, that's Nazi Germany stuff, and they were trying to do it.
Now, they didn't get away with it at the time, you know, at least up to this point, thank God.
But they only get away with what they think they can get away with, and they care, even though they don't like us, they care very much about what we believe.
And they couldn't get away with the passports.
But do you think that if the people went for it, they would do it again?
In a second, they would have us showing our papers if the people went for it.
So what the people believe matters big time, and they pay attention to it.
And that's why when you look left, you see stand with Ukraine.
When you look right, you see stand with Ukraine.
Everywhere you look, stand with Ukraine.
They're trying to, this is the idea you're supposed to believe, period.
And anybody else that has any other suggestions, cancel them.
So, you know, they care about what people think, which is why this show is about ideas and why it's so important to know the history, know where we are today, know that we have to get rid of the Fed and the empire.
And the more people that believe this, then you'll have more politicians that believe it, that will get into some power and perhaps do the right thing.
But until then, you know, it's a very big uphill climb to just convince the right regular people, hey, there's a better way of doing things.
Tyranny is not our only option.
Very good, Chris.
You know, I imagine our viewers might be hearing some noise coming from our studio, but we're not complaining.
Someday we're going to have a different studio and a little bit more modern, but we're in a building with a tin roof up, and it's coming down pretty hard.
But we happen to be in need of the rain, so we're thankful for the rain, but I hope our program doesn't get disrupted.
You know, overall, most people realize, or at least they give me credit for being optimistic in spite of all the problem that we have.
And I do it, you know, for self-preservation because why waste a lot of energy being pessimistic when it's more exciting meeting people who want to think about and try to improve things in a similar manner.
You know, in some ways, I call myself a realist.
I have to be realistic that tomorrow, you know, I'm not going to save the world.
I never even expected to go to Congress when all this started.
So I think realism is good.
You know, it's interesting that that term is used politically speaking because you have the hawks and the non-interventionists.
Then you have a group that's a little bit of each and they call themselves realists.
And they're sometimes good and sometimes not so good.
But so realism under those circumstances, I'm not real excited about because I like non-intervention.
But I think being realistic about our approach and not expecting or making rash promises that we can do this tomorrow and there'll be peace and prosperity forever.
That's not being realistic.
So being realistic can make and help one be optimistic and sit back, meet people who agree and enjoy oneself.
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