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June 5, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
42:55
The Rise of Nihilism' - Ron Paul at the RPI Houston Conference

Dr. Ron Paul's keynote speech at the Ron Paul Institute's 2023 Houston Conference!

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Time Text
Daniel's Family Support 00:02:10
The only real president of the United States, Dr. Ron Paul.
Thank you very much.
That's very nice.
And I want to first start off by mentioning Daniel.
You know, that guy has been up here all day long.
And I have to put up with him every day, keep the program going.
See, I don't need an encyclopedia or the website.
Just ask him, what's the answer, Daniel?
But it has been great with Daniel.
His family's here.
His wife is here, and he puts them all to work.
So I also have some family here with me today.
My son here, Ronnie, is sitting right here.
And his oldest, his middle daughter arrived today, a little while ago, and her husband is with her.
And they brought a newborn here, a sort of newborn, three months, and that's Wes and Lisa.
And, oh, oh, by the way, I brought my first wife with me.
Somebody told me it was more than 25 years.
Somebody told me it was more than 50 years.
But when they said 60, I was like, are you sure you're counting right?
So it turned out this year.
It was 66.
And she survived.
But most of all, the support of a conference like this is you have to have some people come and special people, people who care.
And this is a fine group because I always need encouragement.
I, you know, I get despondent and done at times too.
Not very much, but some.
But I come to meetings like this and I get a boost.
Money Machine's Grip 00:05:28
So I want to thank you for coming and giving me that boost.
You know, the program has something to do with telling the truth.
You know, in the old days, they had ways of dealing with this.
I don't know, maybe we should revive it.
I've heard of it happening.
We didn't use it in our family, but you always have to teach kids not to lie.
And I don't know if anybody in this room remembers that some parents use soap.
Just think if we use soap on the politicians, we'd run out of soap bill so fast.
Wash your mouth out.
You know, the one thing that I look at to sort of explain the whole picture is what's going on.
That's what people ask so often.
What's going on and what is the reason?
And one thing I start with when we're talking about truth, it's a statement I think says a whole lot.
Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
This, I think, says a whole lot.
And I think we've heard a lot today about the explanation of the empire.
The empire is out there, especially on the foreign policy and all the activity.
But there is an empire.
And to gain an empire, you have to use force, whether it's economic force and lying and wars and all these kind of things.
But to maintain an empire, it is never static.
It's either worry about it shrinking or they need to make it bigger.
And guess who's been the world history's expert in expanding an empire when there's a little note that it might be shrinking?
And that unfortunately is a government of ours that needs reigned in quickly, as far as I'm concerned.
They need to have a discontinuation of the interventionist foreign policy we have because so many people suffer from this consequence.
And of course, Jordan mentioned the fact that there's a money machine out there that helps stimulate this and finance it.
And there is no doubt about that.
You know, that's the reason one of the things that I worked on a little bit when I was in Congress was to make the point of how important, you know, the monetary issue was and is.
And this to me is so important because if you have a money machine, you can always pay the bills.
And the money machine is that organization.
It's very secret, but I'll probably tell you which one it is in a minute.
But there's one that deserves a lot of investigation.
They deserve a lot of audit.
And then it deserves getting rid of the Fed.
That's what we need.
I remember when I wrote a little pamphlet on that, abolish the Fed, but I can remember the first time I heard it.
I didn't invent that out of here and try to talk people into using it.
It happened to be on a liberal college campus.
There were young people, which really gave me encouragement because this is a liberal campus.
You better be careful.
They were the one that started, abolished the Fed, and they pulled out some Federal Reserve notes and started burning Federal Reserve.
I thought I was in big trouble.
But no, the money issue is a big issue.
And a few lies are told about our money constantly.
And if you want to understand the whole process of the welfare state, the fighting of the wars, the whole process, they can't do it without control of money.
And that's what they, from the very beginning, didn't they have a little debate and little argument about a central bank between Jefferson and what's his name again?
Jefferson.
And they argued about the central bank, and Jefferson won that argument.
Oh, no, he lost that argument.
They had to set up a bank.
It lasted for 20 years.
They had another one and that lasted.
And finally, they had that victory in 1913.
Victory for them, but not for the American people.
That has been a disaster.
And not only did it become a manipulation of the finances, it also reassured that there would be intervention into the economy.
So this, I think, is one of the most dangerous things that we've had.
And doing all this thing, guess what happened?
There's a tremendous intrusion of our personal liberties.
So if you're looking for liberty and you need to sort it all out, it's not all that complicated because there should be the federal government, the governments should never be able to do anything that you or I can't do.
So if you can't steal from your neighbor, why did it ever happen that they sent their congressmen to steal from their neighbor?
That is not complicated.
Tremendous Intrusion of Liberty 00:15:17
Bastiat explained this so well in the law.
Just that thing, I think, would go a long way if people would understand that a long way to restoring the principles of liberty.
I think the whole principle of what's going on today is a contest between telling the truth and nihilism.
And nihilism has gained its strength.
It's been around for a long time, but more so now than ever before, because nihilists Nihilists aren't just careless with their definition.
They believe very sincerely that you cannot, there's no objective method, no scientific method of deciding what truth is.
You say, well, maybe that is in, it's sort of Seb Hummin.
i was okay are you able to hear me now Okay.
There, that doesn't, I don't hear that, and that's good.
No, the objective, no, there's no, they claim there's no objective way of knowing what truth is.
And that means there's a void there.
Something has to fill it.
And of course, I think what has filled it, if you can't have truth, you have to have something else.
And that is somebody comes in with a substitute.
And that is what we're witnessing today, the consequence of many, many decades and years of people always challenging the truth.
And the truth is, it's treasonous.
That's all there is to it.
Especially if the empires have to be saved.
You have to keep telling lie after lie after lie.
And you either capitulate and accept, or you get shunned, or you get canceled.
And it's a big, big issue.
And I think this is the reason why so many people, you know, too often the pressure, the economic pressure is put on them.
It was once said that the Soviets didn't have to have a lot of policemen badgering and shooting and putting you in prison.
It was always an economic punishment.
They cancel you.
They took away your job.
They took away your apartment and they took away your food.
That is what's doing.
And now just look at what you don't, if you don't follow it, there's all kinds of all kinds of ways, schemes to punish people who don't obey the law.
And that is their law.
And that is where the real problem comes, because nobody knows exactly what the rules and the laws are in an age of nihilism, to deny everything.
And that's really what we're facing today.
And, you know, a consequence of what we're trying to save, in many ways, some people describe it as, you know, an attack on Western civilization.
When you think of the development of civilization all the way back to day one, it's been gradual and steady, but it really exploded civilization in the Enlightenment in that period.
You know, with John Locke and Jefferson and others.
This has been a tremendous boost.
But something happened here probably more than 100 years ago.
And it was almost like the people who knew and understood what civilization and freedom was all about.
There was an exhaustion.
The exhaustion was in the midst of plenty.
I think in a way, prosperity can backfire on it.
You know, we have so much great productivity.
Our living standards in spite of the government are sensational, although it's all based on lies and fake money, pretense, debt, loss of liberty, but there's a lot of prosperity that people are content with.
And even when you have something like COVID, they can instantaneously, in a bipartisan way, oh, okay.
We need to send people money.
How much do you need?
Oh, about $1,500 for everybody.
You know, on and on.
They just do that.
And the thing is, they get away with it just by building a bigger bubble than ever before.
And that's what we're doing.
And it's always at the expense of some personal liberty.
And that's what we have to realize.
But it's been going on.
I think the crisis in our country in particular and probably worldwide has been the arrival of the progressive movement at the beginning of the last century.
And 150, 20, 30 years now, it's been going on.
And it's this progressivism.
I think the problems we face today are really philosophic.
And it isn't just because we need a couple more members of Congress.
Yeah, we should try.
We should work as hard as we can for the point of what we really need.
But that is not the solution as much as we need to deal with the philosophy.
We're facing a philosophic crisis.
This is one of the reasons that I have a home school program, because I cannot believe that government schools can do anything for us to save our republic.
Especially when we think they probably are the ones that did the most to destroy it.
And so we can't expect too much on that.
And that to me, of course, is a real tragedy.
You know, one of the people in that early history in the Enlightenment period was an individual that Jefferson admired.
Jefferson was not alive when John Locke was alive.
But John Locke offered an awful lot to building up civilization, understanding what personal liberty was all about.
And that sort of era ended as we moved into the 21st century.
And the 20th century, of course, was the 20th century was pretty darn bad.
When you think of the carnage, the people who died, and we heard today about how many died in recent years.
What about the whole century?
It's just horrible.
I don't know how we survive all this.
And yet the philosophy hasn't changed.
Matter of fact, there's still all this going on.
I mean, I think it's a shame, and it's a challenge for me and others because to do this, to complain about what's happening, we have to challenge our government.
Of course, I think that's what the First Amendment is all about.
It's to challenge our government.
It isn't to talk about the weather reports.
You should have the right to challenge our government.
But just thinking with this with the social media movement and this idea of government working together with social media to be able to punish people for saying the wrong things.
That is a disaster, and that has to be curtailed.
You know, the COVID epidemic was obviously a disaster for us.
And you talk about truth.
Yes, there's a lot of lying and cheating and scaring and spending and all those things.
But the one that hurt me personally the most was the medical lies that they told.
That to me was the principle that was violated that government bureaucrats could define medical terms and then enforce them.
And the doctors that didn't go along got punished.
Well, you lose their jobs.
But what about this whole nonsense?
Why did the people put up with it?
What about this idea there is no such thing as natural immunity?
That to me is so bizarre.
And I was looking for an answer on that.
And I think Charles McKay, who wrote Delusions was a book on there.
It was popular delusion and the madness of cries, crowds.
People get together and they act like a mob.
And it's, you know, a gang of people ganging up and people acting mad.
He said, McKay said, they go mad and they go crazy.
You go not in herds.
People get together, just a whole herd, and it's a mob.
And sometimes I think that's what pure democracy is all about, too, when they are able to take over and finally manipulate the interest.
But the key to his McKay's complaint was that when people get upset and they are excitable, they'll act in herds, but they only recover one at a time.
That's why you're very important.
We're all recovering.
We're all trying to understand that everybody has a job.
So it is not a numbers game.
You can't wait and say, well, I need a little more support before I run for Congress because, you know, that's not going to work.
No, they have to.
You have to do it one at a time.
Because, and Daniel mentioned, I'm enthusiastic about the principle of the remnant.
I think the remnant is out there.
It's usually more of a biblical argument, but I see it in a broader sense.
There's always a remnant of people who want to know the truth.
That's why I welcome you here, and you give me a lot of encouragement of people seeking to just simply know the truth.
That shouldn't be so bad.
But what we're up against is a religion.
Nihilism is a religion.
And it's something that is more difficult to attack.
And it has invaded ingrained.
It's in our universities.
It's in all the organizations.
How can one individual become so able to control so much?
A very rich person, George Soros.
He deserves a lot of credit for being successful, but we don't deserve a lot of credit for not recognizing it and stopping it.
But that is, just think of how much infiltration he's had in all the organization, the judicial system, the colleges, the whole works, education, medicine.
It totally infiltrated.
So, yes, we can complain about our government.
I've done that a few times.
And we can offer our solution.
But ultimately, I have had trouble with this point, but I think I've come around to accepting it.
Ultimately, the kind of government we have is a result of the consensus of the people.
I thought, well, that can't be.
Can't be.
There's not a consensus because right now I don't think I imagine what's going on right now.
I'll bet you, matter of fact, there are some statistics: 70 or 80% of the people don't like what's going on.
But the consensus of the people means that we allow, you know, those people who grab hold of power and what they did in COVID, you know, all kinds of motivations that they had to do COVID.
But the people did not stand up.
They have become awakened.
That excites me.
Daniel and I get excited.
This is good news.
No, he'll say, oh, this isn't good news at all.
I said, Daniel, it is good news because this is so bad.
We're going to wake up 20,000 people tonight.
So we have to be realistic.
But I think the truth is the prevailing attitude of the people is very important.
And I bet you we could come together on some agreements on some resolution in a group like this, what the prevailing attitude ought to be about government.
And I think most of you would agree, much more limited, along with having a foreign policy where we minded our own business.
We allowed the people to mind their own business, and we allowed the people to just be left alone with one rule: no violence committed against another individual.
That's not complicated, but I don't think the majority here might do it.
But that is what they have to be introduced into and accepted.
And it's a tremendous job because I think a lot of people are pretty discouraged and very pessimistic.
And I have my ups and downs, but really, I get excited about it because I can come and talk with you.
That gives me encouragement because you're there.
It gave me a lot of encouragement when I went to Berkeley campus, where I thought I'd be railroaded out of there.
It was one of our best meetings we ever had.
So, no, they're out there.
So, the numbers don't matter.
It's the numbers of people in leadership positions who will talk.
And the other thing is, there's so many people, even in this room, that have their little projects and influence people.
And you don't even know how many people.
You know, I've been on so many radio shows and talk shows of individuals that might have been introduced to this liberty movement, you know, 10, 15 years ago during some of the campaigns.
And I didn't know they were out there.
And they have big followings, little followings.
So my personal obligation to myself and suggested for others is to, you know, participate in trying to change people's minds because that is the most important thing we do.
The nihilists will use any tool whatsoever.
The nihilists have no restraints.
They can use guns and bullets and poverty and all this nonsense.
And guess what?
They have no guilt, no guilt from this.
I was talking to somebody once, and he was a friendly atheist.
He would just talk about things.
And one time I thought he was so diehard that he didn't have a heart.
But one day we were overhearing some news, and the news was talking about Hillary.
We heard about Hillary just a while ago.
And he was annoyed, and he summarized it, which made me question his full beliefs of atheism.
He says, Hillary has no shame.
And that's what a nihilist like.
They have no shame.
They have no guilt.
Boy Without Guilt 00:04:01
And even though deep down inside, I think they do.
I don't think you can stamp it out.
But it's up to us to stimulate them.
So if you're not involved, stay involved.
You're here.
And that helps me.
It helps everybody to encourage us to continue.
Should you go into politics?
Whatever you want.
What are your goals?
Because I think if your goals are to spread a message, that's a lot different than if my goal had been, oh boy, I'm going to do a good job.
I'm going to raise a lot of money.
You only need $3 million.
No, back then it was three.
Now, $10 million to get a chairmanship of the committees.
And then when you have the chairmanship of the committees, then you can have power and then you can change things.
Then you would get an audit of the Fed.
Well, both are true.
You couldn't do the money, and they're not going to overstep the bounds of auditing the Fed.
They're not going to allow that to happen.
So it's that wasn't appealing to me.
I had something else in mind.
It was a secret.
I was going to promote liberty, and that was it.
So that has, I think, served the interests of many people that know what we have to do.
We should all feel very fortunate in spite of all our problems that we have.
And for some argue, the case is they're getting much worse.
And we have a time bomb out there.
And I think that that is the case.
But that doesn't mean what we have had and what is still available to us.
You know, somebody would say, well, if this is true, how did they ever let Ron Paul into Congress?
I snuck in the back door.
They didn't know.
If we'd have known this, we wouldn't have allowed him to come.
No, I think we have still a lot of opportunities.
And I've so often have mentioned that the most important thing is that we can express ourselves.
And that's one of the places where they attack us the most.
And even today, when some of that stuff is supposed to have been settled, we keep saying, when are they going to close us down?
You know, this sort of thing.
So, no, the ongoing fight.
I'm an optimist on long-term, on short-term.
I think we ought to all be alert and working like dogs, you know, to get this reversed, spreading a message.
Because to me, it's such a wonderful message.
It's not complex.
It's a moral message.
It's a Christian message.
It's a belief that people can take care of themselves and get satisfied.
It's a message of prosperity.
It's a message of peace.
And we work on that.
Now, how are we losing this?
How could we lose this argument?
And, well, they don't want to go to work.
I saw a statistic that made me a little pessimistic yesterday.
They were giving the people who were losing jobs and gaining jobs.
They had this huge increase of jobs.
And they were all non-American born.
Not that it automatically eliminates anybody, but what it means is maybe those who are illegal or not born here weren't legal citizens.
But it just seems so strange.
But there's a lot of concern.
People are very, very worried.
I think they want to hear the truth.
And I often would have questions from college students and others.
And after one of the debates, somebody came up to me and they said, you know, you talked about the Constitution.
And they were excited.
And they said, boy, that's really, really good.
And I said, that night, the next person that spoke after me after I said something favorable about the Constitution, he said about the same thing, you know, how valuable it was and, you know, save our souls and all that.
I said, he said the same thing.
He says, yeah, I didn't believe him.
Believable And Practical 00:06:21
So, no, it has to be believable and it has to be practical.
And the philosophy is practical.
What is impractical is what we're doing.
How can anything be less practical?
And I've said, and I believe this, but it's unnecessary.
I said, if we could have our liberty back, if we could have our personal liberty, our economic liberty, and we would bring our troops home and our incomes and my income would go down.
Who knows what?
Well, I have an idea what would happen.
But if my income was cut in half, I would choose liberty.
But guess what?
If we had those conditions of getting rid of the type of system that we have, interventionism that is totally morally and financially bankrupt, I'll tell you what, if we've had one test of that in our history, and that was in 1921, they had a depression come on.
It was a bad depression.
I think the GDP went down more than 15%.
But they weren't smart back then.
They hadn't even hardly studied Keynes.
I don't even know he was born, you know.
So they just, they just hands off.
Hoover never gets any credit for this.
So they were hands off, and there was a tremendous growth.
The depression, they call it the depression.
It was over in one year, and it boomed back.
But then we went back to inflating during the 20s and brought on all these things.
But there is evidence that you can do it.
A lot of people ask me, well, what about gold?
Can we get back on the gold standard?
Well, one step that we have made that really helps is the fact you at least have the right, your right as an American citizen to own some gold.
Can you imagine that, I guess I was born in the 30s.
They made gold illegal a couple years before I was born, and then they made it re-legal, the right of an American citizen to own gold in 1975.
And that's in the free America, and we were surviving and doing well.
But it did.
In the 70s, I was involved.
A lot of people were involved in getting gold re-legalized.
And the mending, the mending of American coin may have some shortcomings, but it's still a good step.
So there's been a step in the right direction.
So indirectly, we're on a gold standard because anybody who has any money that knows what's going on might be helping define the ratio of gold to Federal Reserve notes.
And so there's a little, there's some freedom there.
There's some freedom.
We're fortunate enough that we can still get together and talk like this.
This to me is just wonderful because I think it's when they put everybody in the jail for saying anything and things get closed down.
That would be very, very bad.
So we're not there, but it could definitely get much worse because, see, I work on the assumption that the debt has to be liquidated.
The debt and the malinvestment has to be liquidated.
We've been doing this.
We've did it by telling a lie about the value of the currency.
The unit of account was always defined.
They wanted the unit of account at the time of our founding.
And they defined an imperfect system, but they defined the dollar as a waiting silver.
And then they had a ratio to gold, which was not the smartest thing to do.
But gold and silver was meant to be legal tender.
And I think it's exciting on what they're doing at the state level.
So, and maybe what has happened with the lockdown over COVID has both negative and positively has given more emphasis on what the cities can do.
And, you know, the fact that some people, some people, do you know how this is new news?
Some people are leaving California because it's so bad.
Who would have ever guessed?
And they're coming to states that are doing a little bit better.
But in the states now, I don't know the exact number, but there are several numbers of states now that have passed resolutions that said that no taxes, no income, no sales taxes on money, on gold, gold and silver.
And that's fantastic.
Because that, I think, where the real fight might have to be, because the Constitution is so explicit that the states can't use anything other than the silver and gold as a legal tender.
And, of course, what they had in mind was the paper that they were using before the revolution, but it's explicit, and they've used this, and they've been winning some of these cases, and they're winning over.
That's the groundwork that's being done.
Of course, that has to be done in everything.
I think of what we do, and I imagine there's a lot of people in this room that have looked forward to homeschooling.
We try to participate in that and the homeschooling.
And also, the whole idea that people should be responsible for themselves, I think is a big issue that people don't understand.
But I still believe there's a natural tendency to believe in a higher law and a higher law that would suggest that if people do bad things, they might even have a tinge of shame that they might have for doing something wrong or not doing things the way they want.
But that issue's been around for a long time.
But I think if you look at the whole scope of the history going from the beginning of time, even back to Adam and Eve and prior to Adam and Eve, that things have developed and I think continued.
Restoration Act Controversy 00:05:51
I think we live in very, very historic times.
Big time.
When you look at the entire time of thousands of years now that we have known that there's been social reactions and now we're seeing the con, I think the consequence, I think there's always had to be some liquidation of the debt.
And if you're an individual, there's liquidation by declaring bankruptcy or working harder, getting another job and get back on your feet if you had to deal with sound money.
But now liquidation will come because all the mistakes have to be ironed out and all the debt has to be eliminated.
And the one thing in the argument this past week, month, year that they talk about, did they try to scare you about the default?
The default's coming.
The end of the world's coming.
If we default, I said, what are you guys talking about?
We could default every single minute of the day.
And they do it by, they could pay off all the debt.
All they have to do is print up the money.
We don't even know what the Fed's doing.
And they're dealing in trillions of dollars.
This idea that they're not going to be able to pay somebody.
You know, I was in Washington and I went through some lockdown or some where they had to close down the government and you weren't even allowed to go up on the Washington Monument and a few other things.
You couldn't go to the park.
But that's all nonsense.
It was all devised fear.
That's how they operate.
They create fear about the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.
And, you know, the media usually refers the Russian, the Russian war against Ukraine.
How often have you seen or heard on regular television, how about the war, The NATO war against Russia, that would tell you more of what's going on.
And who's NATO?
But most people say, oh, well, we have to make them pay their bills.
No, we own NATO.
We own the whole thing because we own the weaponry and we control this thing.
So that is such a shame.
But we put up with it.
But it will come to an end.
I believe in the liquidation.
I believe that it will be liquidated.
A lot of innocent people will suffer.
A few rich people will, but a bunch of rich ones will get away because they've already probably protected themselves by getting out of town.
But to me, the only answer to all of this is not to take up arms.
Jefferson probably would have argued for taking up arms.
I wasn't so much, I'm not in favor of that.
But what we should do, though, is we need to be prepared.
We have to take up the armaments to promote ideas.
That's why I've been strongly supportive in what so many other organizations you have supported, like the Mises Institute.
I think it's ideological.
I think this whole thing is ideological, the whole fight.
And I think this whole thing of nihilism versus a higher law, they've totally rejected the higher law.
They mock it.
And I don't laugh at the fact that I think there's a systemic attack on Christianity.
But the libertarian position is so clear on that.
It's just, it's up to the individual as long as you can't commit violence.
You know, what's so hard for that to understand?
They say, oh, well, what about my food stamps?
Well, what is going to happen to your food stamps next month when the food prices triple or something like that?
No, what we're facing by doing nothing is 10 times worse than the pain that would come if you did something.
After the Civil War, we had printed greenbacks.
Lincoln did the greenbacks.
And I think it was from 61 up to 75.
There were a lot of greenbacks circulating, but they were not worth as much as a real note.
And so in 1875, they passed the Restoration Act.
And because I talk about this because people want to know, can we go back to a gold standard?
And this is an example was when we did.
So in 1875, they passed the Restoration Act, and it was going to take three years.
So by 1778, the banks and the government would refund if you had, if you were going to withdraw the greenbacks.
If you had Federal Reserve notes or dollars, you could turn them in for gold.
And people won't work, won't work.
We didn't have an empire.
We didn't have runaway welfare.
We weren't by that time.
They had to do something with the deaf, because we probably had a deficit from the war and all.
But when they did that, it was a non-event.
That actually ushered in a period of time that a lot of people represent or recognize it as being one of the most free market-oriented times from the late 1870s all the way up to World War I, when you had economic growth and sounder economic monetary policies.
So you can go back, but people say, oh, that means that we just need more people to pass a Restoration Act.
We've lost our opportunity for that.
It's not going to happen that way because the spending is just huge.
It's so big.
Put In A Pitch 00:03:44
Everybody has an interest in it.
And unfortunately, nihilism is in charge.
And they will pester and they will do it.
But I still think it's absolutely important that we lay the groundwork, prepare ourselves, personally, families, spiritually, everything for bad times coming.
But at the same time, working to be available and recognize that every once in a while you're going to bump into somebody who belongs to the remnant.
And they say, what we do is we homeschool our kids and we do this and all these things and prepared because the other option is just not good.
It's sort of, you know, take up the guns.
And, you know, even though that argument was fought wholeheartedly with Hamilton and Jefferson, it was one that is ongoing.
It's as strong as ever before.
But the bubble is so big that we better be prepared.
And I would say that being prepared starts with knowledge.
And I was a fan of Leonard Reed, who had the Foundation for Economic Education, and he was very interested in education.
And his whole thing was educate ourselves.
And then he said, don't worry about how you're going to use it.
If you become knowledgeable in a subject and you're telling the truth, they'll come.
People will come and seek you out and use you one way or the other.
And I'm sure people, I bet you, because you've been involved and you're a political student, I bet you have people come up and ask questions, and they're honest questions.
They just want more help.
But that to me is most important.
And then if you're at a point like that and you find a position that you're comfortable with and the people are comfortable with, then pursue it.
Pursue it.
It may be a much bigger issue than you ever dreamed.
And I have to admit, and I don't say this to puff myself up, but I was shocked, matter of fact, how many people would come to a rally.
I remember walking, I was, where did these people come from?
What are they doing here?
Because I could remember very, very well that when I first got involved in the 70s, I was in Congress for a short period of time, and I was interested in exactly the same thing.
I'm interested now.
So I would get an invitation.
They say, oh, we have a small libertarian group over at College ABC.
Would you come out?
Sure, I'll come out.
You have a group?
Oh, yeah, we have a group there.
So I got, and, you know, we felt good if we could get 15 people.
But you know what?
A lot of those individuals ended up working in our campaigns later on.
And they themselves were very instrumental.
So the numbers were important.
But then eventually you have to influence a whole society.
And I would say the college campuses, I know I'll get shot down for this.
The college campuses aren't quite as bad, or the people on the campuses aren't universally bad, like maybe the administration.
That might be the way I put it.
So I put in a pitch for something you already believe in.
And my pitch is for liberty.
And assuming the responsibility all of us have is to pursue liberty.
And I guarantee you, you'll move closer to peace and prosperity.
Thank you very much.
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