Utopians never run out of pipe dreams. Whether it be "vaccine passports," or "carbon zero" or "you will own nothing, and be happy," the tyrannical ideas are always being broadcast. This is why those who cherish freedom must always be vigilant. The schemes just keep on coming. Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC's) are another dystopian idea that, fortunately, many people already strongly reject. It's not hard to see why CBDC's would not only be unworkable, but would be a total disaster to humanity.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Happy Friday.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And we're ready and rare to go to address all the problems of the world and give them a simple answer to it.
Of course, the problem is due to tyranny.
The answer to it is liberty.
And there's a lot in between that we have to work out in the details.
But that's basically it.
I think that's the way the world's worked for a long time.
People who want to use tyrannical approaches and force to have it their way and believing they have the right answers to everything.
And others are saying, well, you can't, so we'll just steal as much as we can get.
We have a few of those in Washington right now.
They've decided the stealing part is easy unless you get caught.
And a few people are getting caught, and I think that has to be seen as a positive.
But, you know, watching the markets has always fascinated me.
I've never was one, and I've mentioned that many times on the air.
I'm not one that buys and sells a lot, even though I watch gold markets and I've watched gold for many, many years since it was unhinged from the dollar back in 1971.
I don't buy and sell and go back and forth.
It's to me a long time, long-term purchase and protection.
Back in 1971, it was $35 an ounce.
And now, even though it's backed off a little bit from 2000, it has a steady movement.
So I don't do that.
I don't buy and sell.
People do.
Sometimes they make a lot of money, and sometimes they lose a lot of money.
But right now, the real excitement in the business news today is talking about Apple.
Apple sounds like a very good company.
They made a lot of money.
A lot of people use it.
I don't know how much they're in bed with the government, but how can you have any business these days without it being in bed to a degree with the government?
But today it was historic because Apple's stock value went up over $3 trillion.
There are some countries in the world that doesn't have that much money.
But anyway, who cares if they earn the money honestly and they get rich by providing an item or a service that the people want and they voluntarily buy it?
That's okay.
And people get a little jealous of people who are very wealthy.
I keep thinking, why be jealous of somebody that started Apple and has a lot of money?
What are they going to do with it?
Whether they have $1 trillion, $2 trillion, or $3 trillion, that's a burden.
What are they going to do with their money?
They just can't buy and keep buying yachts.
So their obligation is to put it where it might help somebody, and that is invest and get jobs.
Well, that's how the market should work.
But Apple is fascinating because, you know, the traditional way of looking at some of these stocks would be to look at a PE ratio.
And I sort of was attuned to that for a long time.
People still do.
But sometimes it doesn't mean anything because the PE ratio for Apple is over 30 to 1.
So that, I think, is sort of high.
But there's a lot of promises in Apple.
You know, they have things coming down the line.
As long as the credit markets work and there's no real crash in the economy, they'll probably do fine.
But there are dividends.
Sometime you buy it to have cash flow and have dividends.
Well, in the last quarter, they paid 0.25%.
So you wouldn't buy that now, you know, for dividend.
But for the future, that's people have to evaluate it and make a decision.
But for some reason, that seems to be, there's a lot of questions left about Apple.
Where will it be?
Well, it depends a lot on what happens to the government and what the government does.
And they can make rules and regulations and taxing policy.
So ultimately, there's conditions that you can't foresee completely.
But the market right now says that Apple's a good company and maybe it's this artificial intelligence that's such a wonderful thing.
So that is important.
But we rely on this program a lot to try to sort it out and play it a little safer and look long term.
And that is have to give consideration to gold.
Because even though I never speculated in a sense, buying it, holding it, and trying to protect against what I saw coming way back was too much spending, too much debt, too much government, that gold would raise its head and be beneficial.
And it did.
It is sort of, you know, meandering right now.
But I still feel exactly the way I did in 1971.
You know, if in a few years from now, if gold has doubled, that won't surprise me.
But I don't predict that will happen.
But this is one of the reasons I partner with Birch Gold Group is because they're in the gold business.
They know more of the details about what's coming and going and how to do it and how to maybe shift some of your investments to gold.
And that is, you know, beneficial to think in those terms.
So this is the reason I do partner with them and they have offered some advice and some material that you can get.
Because if you text Ron at 989898, they'll send you some of this material, material that may well be helpful to you and give you more information, helping make decisions.
So this is what we do in partnership with them is to try to get people to at least look at it and study it.
Because I think long term, even though I say gold served me well in preserving a base of my wealth and energy, that it's not going to quit.
This is going to continue.
I mean, the deficits, everything are exploding, and the world's involved is so much more dangerous now than it was in 1971.
So this is the reason that we work with Birch Gold.
So once again, if you're interested in getting some free information from Birch Gold, text Ron 98989A, and they'll send you materials.
It's free and they will explain many, many things for you.
And this you can do anytime, and they'll send it to you.
I'm sure it'll be of some benefit to you.
And now, Chris, I want to go into talking a little bit more about some of the other economic things going on.
One thing that's always fascinated me is subjective, the subjective belief of value, the theory about value.
For tradition, and even Adam Smith accepted the idea, well, it was the work.
How much work went into an item determined the value of it.
Well, it turns out that, you know, when people argue or ask me what that means, I say, well, you know, I could work for 20 years on a drawing and a picture and I could put in 10,000 hours.
It'd still be worth less than a dollar.
I wouldn't be as good as Biden, you know, Hunter or Biden.
He made a lot of money on his picture.
So, but anyway, the whole thing is, there's a lot of unpredictable events.
There are unintended consequences.
There's too much mischief.
And the main reason is that governments and Federal Reserve Boards and regulators don't know the answers to try to substitute it for the marketplace.
That's what they're trying to do.
They're pretending, I think I heard the announcement today: well, instead of going 0.5 or 0.75, we're going to go 0.25.
You know, we have to just sort of address concerns.
And so it's up and done and over and back as if they're really doing something important.
But everybody has to watch it because the psychological effect of that is very important.
And that's why we have to look at all these items.
And we'll talk about a couple of them that are just, you know, making a point that governments cause more problems than they solve.
And unfortunately, as they figure out some of the unintended consequences and some of the well-expected consequences of inflating the currency, it is something that people respond to it and make it when the government responds to the noise that the people are making, the government makes things worse because the special interests start to speak louder and louder.
Why Sound Money Matters00:09:48
And that's why the system of interventionism, whether it's interventionism in our lives, the government tells how we should live, or interventionism in the affairs of foreign nations, and that hasn't worked out so well for us.
Or intervention in the economy is especially bad because the marketplace is pretty smart.
It's rough.
It's rough and tumble, but usually the market wins out after a lot of pain and suffering occurs and usually wipes out a lot of people.
Say, hey, we better think, what do we want?
Maybe we ought to consider those crazy ideas of sound money once again.
Chris?
Very good, Dr. Paul.
Yes, today we're focusing on CBDCs, which are central bank digital currencies, yet another utopian scheme.
But, you know, as our founders warned at the very beginning, you must be vigilant if you cherish your freedom because authoritarians will always have a new scheme coming at you one after another.
You know, some are bigger than others.
We just went through a big one that failed, those vaccine passports, where the idea was that we were all going to be constantly jabbed every so few months and then have to prove with our phones that we were jabbed in order to participate in society.
And they were trying this in New York City and Philadelphia.
I remember all the propaganda that it was as if you were recharging your phone battery, you know, every time you got jabbed.
And, you know, that was a bad deal, even those for those people who believed in the vaccines, you know, because maybe the fifth one would get you real hard where you were like Elon Musk and you thought you were going to die.
But, you know, it wouldn't matter.
You'd still have to get the sixth, the seventh, no matter, you know, how many.
Fortunately, that whole thing fell apart.
And CBDCs fall into that category because it's very similar.
It's just with our money.
You would have a centralized account with a central bank, no cash.
And, you know, you could already imagine, and I'm sure the tyrants have already imagined what they would love to do.
You know, if you're not into the latest social fad, perhaps they would freeze your account.
Or let's say they wanted to bail out a crony corporation.
Let's say a Bud Light or a Target.
They do something stupid and they lose tons of money.
Well, they could bail them out and you log into your digital account and find out you have less money.
You know, the money went to bail out the crony corporations.
They could also set time limits and say you have to spend this amount of money by a certain date.
You know, they could to get you to spend money and prohibit you from saving money.
The tyrannical things that could be done are endless.
These are just a few.
So you could see why they would want this.
But like vaccine passports, I don't believe the A, that it's doable, and I don't believe that it's going to happen because black markets would form immediately.
People would start to use their own currencies, barter, they would get around it in many, many ways.
Very good.
I'm going to talk a little bit about one incident that just has been written up recently.
It has to do with the wine and alcoholic beverage issue.
And this is really written in looking at what's happening in Europe where they do make a lot of wine.
And they're having a lot of trouble.
The headline on this on Hedge was Europe drowns in wine as EU adopts crisis measures to rescue producers.
See, they're drowning in it.
And then the decision must be, oh, they don't have enough regulations.
That's the reason they're doing this.
You know, they won't say, well, maybe the craziness of COVID changed people's patterns and habits, and maybe that contributed to it.
Maybe it's the monetary system that contributes to it.
It may be, you know, the market is not working smoothly because all commodities go up and down, you know, supply and demand.
And the people and the consumers decide what should be done.
The consumers are king in a market like that, but not when you have government interference.
So this market got into trouble and in trouble.
So once again, they say what we need to do is we need to smooth these markets out and take care of it.
And unfortunately, that doesn't work.
Usually it makes it worse.
Mises argued that when you go in to try to fix the problem the government caused, they'll create two new ones.
But that keeps the bureaucrats happy.
Oh, we still have a job to Mars.
Hire more bureaucrats, spend more money, have more debt.
Oh, but I thought that was the problem.
Oh, no, that's not the problem.
We just need a lot more people in the government that are smarter to know how to iron these problems out.
But the European Union are the ones that are promoting these regulations.
And the Commission has adopted temporary market measures to avoid that the unsold wine weighs on the whole internal market and prevents producers to find sufficient storage capacity.
All this mischief, and they do this so seriously.
But this is just very minor compared to, of course, if you're in the wine business, it's major.
But it's minor compared to the very, very big picture that goes on when economies collapse.
Because if we continue at this rate, people laugh, and I don't want to believe it.
But could we ever get to the point anything close to what happens in runaway inflation, like in Venezuela and Zimbabwe?
Germany did at one time, but we're on the road to it.
And the reason why I fear it is it's different than ever before.
There's never been so much control for a significant long period of time where the whole world was distorted by a reserve currency that was totally fiat and printed by the government and the country that has the biggest empire, the biggest army, the most wealth, and they feel like there's no limit, even though the voices are getting louder and louder trying to warn.
But still, I mean, even since the debt resolution, just recently in Congress, we'll take to it, we'll raise the debt limit, and we'll cut down some spending.
I think the debt has gone up $700 billion just since they had that resolution.
So it really is a joke.
And it's not going to be a joke, though, when the consequence comes.
So that's why people have to consider it.
Ultimately, I look at the big picture and it doesn't result because even the United States has gone through periods like this.
They have to resort to some type of soundness returning to the monetary system.
Of course, the best thing is advancing a little bit further than we've ever been to a free market system where people make the decisions.
You know, people at the left and the big government people preach and say everything is democracy, democracy, democracy.
The Constitution doesn't teach that democracy.
The true democracy I like is everybody has a vote every day.
Every time they spend money, they have a vote on where the money is going to be spent.
And even in this craziness with both lockdown and also the people, the things like Budweiser, people are voting.
They're voting with their money.
That's probably what represents true democracy compared to the managed democracy that they talk about, where they just get enough people, enough special interests together to become a king of the mob, and then they take over the government.
I'm afraid that's where we are today.
Yes, and people that have a lust for power, they want it all.
And going back to the global CBDC scheme, I don't know if many people realize this, but the goal of that, for the globalists, would be to abolish commercial banking, like J.P. Morgan, Bank of America.
I mean, after all, it's each individual would have an account at the central bank.
It's a central bank digital currency, not a commercial bank digital currency.
So that's this drive to have only central banks led by a global central bank.
And, you know, people with power, like a JP Morgan, may not be on board with something like this.
Even the Fed, the Fed has the global reserve currency.
Do they just want to be another central bank, you know, that's controlled by a bigger one?
You know, not everyone, we're told, and George Carlin, I think, had it wrong, that it's one big club and we're not in it.
And that's just not true.
That's not how power works.
Power, there are power centers, people with power here, people with power there.
They like their own territories, but they don't want anybody else having their power.
So that's why they clash.
And that's why we see these wars.
They tell us what they're about.
They're not about whatever they tell us.
It's these big power centers that clash with one another.
It's not one big club and we're not in it.
The key is to get, you know, whittle down that power.
That's what our founders tried to do.
But, you know, that drive for more and more power is very strong.
And, you know, you could see that their constitution didn't work out so well.
So, you know, so the global CBDCs are by far not a given because there are a lot of people that just will not be on board with it.
Asking Questions About Wages And Class00:03:06
You know, I brought up the subject of the debt that keeps going up and it has to be resolved.
They claim that they can do this and help people out just by debasing the currency and then you pay off with cheaper money.
And that is true.
The real debt goes down if they double the money supply, the value of the dollar goes down.
But there's a price to pay, and that's what they don't want to listen to.
And they try to keep up.
People know that when you inflate the currency and prices go up, middle-class people and the working class people, you know, really are hurt from this.
So what do they do?
They, you know, they get together, they go on strike, and they fight, and they say, well, we have to be taken care of too, because in a way, they're not responsible.
It's the big beneficiaries that are really responsible for inflating the currency.
But when they do that, and they say that there's inflation, and they raise, then they go ahead and raise minimum wage laws, and wages go up.
But there are statistics now out for the last two years, and they don't keep up.
You know, if there's an inflation rate of 10% and you get a 5% raise in your wages, and those numbers sound wild, but nobody really reports the real numbers because it's much lower and doesn't sound so bad.
But the principle was there.
If the costs are going up 10% and your wages go up 5%, you can't let the politicians get away.
Well, we live in a healthy economy.
Your wages are up 5% this year.
This is wonderful.
Yeah, but my costs are up 10%.
And that is why you can't trust government's numbers, the statistic.
If it has to do with employment statistics, everything, you know, I'll bet I could go through the record here of the last several months, and I'll bet you I could find a lot, especially if it comes from mainstream media and the administration.
Wow, this sounds pretty good.
Things aren't that bad.
Maybe we're overreacting.
But that's their job.
And some people believe it.
Other people are now at a point where they're questioning it more.
And that is why it's very healthy when you read a report and said, well, 68% of the American people are asking questions about what the government just told us.
And they're asking questions more so now than they used to be.
They're asking more questions now.
Why are we worrying about the borders of Ukraine and not our southern borders?
They're talking more about that now than the monstrous foreign policy of the first decade of this century, where we were in the Middle East destroying property lines and doing all this mess and millions of people dying over it.
So that is so tragic.
But here, you know, people have to realize that there are answers to this.
Why ESG Matters00:08:04
There is this big spending, and it seems like it's unlimited.
But the best thing to do is question.
You have a right to question, even if they argue.
You don't even have a right to say that.
Just think of what they did to many people in the churches and the economists and the doctors who sometimes all they said, I want to debate the issue.
I want to debate which drug is best for COVID.
And, oh, cancel him.
He's not allowed to talk anymore.
Fire him.
Doctors losing jobs and professors getting kicked out.
But it's starting to shift because I think the most important thing that we maintain if we ever expect to move the goalposts toward our position is that we have to have the right to speak out because you have to be able to discuss what we have and challenge them.
But when they lock down and say, you can't even talk, and you'll be hearing about this, you wait and see if there's any candidates that won't be allowed to talk at all, or they'll exclude them, or they will avoid them, because truth really hurts when there's an empire that is totally dependent on lies.
Chris.
Excellent, Dr. Paul.
I'll finish off with my closing thoughts.
Yeah.
Authoritarians do not want debate.
Whatever they say is settled.
You know, I saw yesterday the big Supreme Court, you know, Saying that universities no longer have to judge people by the color of their skin.
You'd think that the left would be happy with that, but of course not.
And I saw Elizabeth Warren.
She said that this is outrageous.
They're going back against settled law.
And I thought, settled law?
You know, these are man-made laws.
It reminded me of what they said about settled science.
Science is never settled.
And man-made laws are never settled for sure.
They're man-made.
You know, the only settled laws are the truth, natural law.
And for those of us who are religious, we believe in higher laws.
Those are settled.
But anything that are made by governments, they're never settled.
They're man-made.
Another man will come in and overturn it, just like they just did yesterday.
So, you know, but the authoritarian mindset is what they say is what it is, and that's how it's going to be forever.
It just doesn't turn out that way.
You know, just because you can imagine some kind of utopian scheme does not mean that you can make it reality.
Just because you could imagine vaccine passports or zero carbon or world government or CBDCs, what we're talking about today, you know, life is very complex.
Everyone reacts in their own way when government does something.
You could picture it like a billiards game, you know, at the very beginning where you break the rack of balls.
They all scatter.
You can't control how each ball is going to go, whether it's going to go into the pocket or not.
Well, that's how it is with government laws.
They imagine things in their mind, they make a law, and then all of humanity scatters in their own way to adjust to it, to adapt to it, to get around it.
And the whole scheme falls apart.
And we just keep repeating this over and over.
And, you know, we could avoid a lot of this if we just embrace the ideas of liberty and voluntarism and not have to go through all these schemes one after another.
But, you know, it takes a lot of work, a lot of education, a lot of speaking, like what Dr. Paul said, to get these ideas out so that we could at least nudge humanity in the right direction.
Very, very good, Chris.
I'm going to close with a comment about an organization and a company that is not one of my favorites, but it's very, very wealthy and controls a lot of wealth.
And that's BlackRock, run by Larry Fink.
And at times, and he may still be the top holder and management of funds, over $10 trillion has been reported.
But that was one thing to have a management company of wealth if it was a little bit in the directions of freedom and market economy.
But he notoriously has been strongly associated with the radical left and environmentalism.
So he was a champion of ESG, you know, that investment should be based on the environment.
It should be based on social order and social benefits and fairness.
And it has to be regulating governmental needs.
So it's ESG.
And this was a way of putting pressure on some companies that if you want to invest and get in here and be on the side who has access to credit, you have to support these radical environmental issues.
So he did quite well, except recently, people have caught on.
Now, when I first heard of this two or three years ago, I thought it can't work.
It's going to fail because they're investing money for the wrong reason.
Yeah.
And you say, well, don't you care about the environment?
Don't you care about social order?
And don't you care.
Well, they want you to say, well, if you don't go with us, you don't.
You're a bunch of hoodlums.
You don't care about that.
But you know what?
If you come up with these groups and say, well, this is what we do.
We look at our investment.
This is a little Larry Fink program.
We look at these investors to make sure they follow these wars, these rules, ABCD.
And then they'll be safe.
And that's how we can control the world.
But people caught on to it and they disliked it and they're fighting back.
And some people are withdrawing their funds.
And now, I doubt very much if Larry Fink has changed his tune.
But he has changed his words.
He does not like the term ESG anymore.
So he's going to pretend, oh, I'm more moderate now and I'm more reasonable.
Well, I tell you what, he is a strong believer in that nonsense, but he's also a strong believer in making a lot of money, but not in the free enterprise system and the hard money system at all.
It's in a managed system, and he's in a good place to be part of that.
But that won't last because things change, and that system will fail.
You know, when the calamity comes and the market crashes, these companies are going to fade away.
And the weakest companies are going to be the ones that have to follow some of these crazy rules before they can invest in a company and get punished otherwise.
So this is the market working.
So I imagine a lot of people say, who cares whether he uses the word ESG and puts a little pressure on these companies to straighten up their act and be concerned about the environment.
But some of the things that they suggest should be done in the environment, in the social order and how government should act.
There's some of those things that say, well, that sounds reasonable.
And they may be a goal for somebody.
But why can't it be a goal in a free market?
Why can't it be individual?
But to set it up as an authoritarian group and rule the world this way, you follow these rules, you follow all the rules of COVID, or you're going to be banned, that sort of thing.
But the goals, they should be distinguished from how they're trying to be achieved.
Because quite frankly, if you have two groups, one that's government authority wants to do the right thing about the environment versus another group that's in the free market and they happen to believe in private property and they believe that the environment should be protected.
And there's quite a bit difference.
And that's the reason a little bit of success here.
So Larry Fink, if you care about what we're talking about, we say not only should you change your not using the word ESG, change your policies as well.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.