In today's Liberty Report we return to YOUR question in another edition of "Ask Ron Paul." Questions include - name one thing you've changed your mind about over the years. Hope you enjoy the episode!
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Invisible Coup and Republic Loss
00:09:12
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| Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. | |
| With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host, Daniel. | |
| I understand we have a special type of program today. | |
| That's right, you get put in the hot seat. | |
| This is a very popular thing that we've done here, and it's where we let our viewers ask some questions and get your take on some things. | |
| Ask Ron Paul, we call it, as our viewers know. | |
| So, let's go right to the questions. | |
| Let's hit it hard. | |
| The first one comes in from Jay. | |
| His handle is Jay's Tweets on Twitter, and he asked this question: Which historical event do you think was most significant in our drift from more freedom to more fascism? | |
| From our COVID response all the way back to the forming of the Union and everything in between? | |
| It's a big question because there have been so many events. | |
| There's been a lot of gradualism, and the founders expected that to happen and warned us against it. | |
| Because the document of the Constitution was there to prevent this from happening, but they also knew about the imperfection of man, where people, you know, bend the rules, and soon after they get their liberties, they undermine them. | |
| But I would say the first century or so, things did pretty well. | |
| But a lot of people now think about the very current events going on, and that would be, you know, the violation of our civil liberties with COVID, and also the things going on, you know, with this insanity about globalism and also the idea of weather and the problems that we have there. | |
| But I would say that even in the first hundred years, we had problems. | |
| Certainly, there was a challenge to the Republic during the Civil War period, and there are some people who believe we never fully recovered from that. | |
| But the whole country was torn apart, but we did survive that, and we went back to a decent system up until the 20th century. | |
| But during that time, I would say it was that period of time that the real erosion of the Republic occurred, and it really opened up the door to a more fascist system. | |
| And that was with the progressive era, because I think most things are a result of bad ideas and education. | |
| But the educational system in this country changed in the progressive era, and then also the taking over during the 20th century of our government school system has led to the ideology that actually tolerates a system that challenges a republic. | |
| And that has been going on for a long time. | |
| The Department of Education is a good symbolism for what it gets established to challenge the republic that we had. | |
| But more recently, I've done some thinking on this and a little bit of writing about a sort of an invisible coup that has gone on where the Republic has just been taken from us. | |
| And there's been certain events that have been bad, but there's been some that are bigger than others. | |
| And I think the coup that I'm talking about is something that I remember the beginning of, and that is the 1960s. | |
| I think it was a big event in the 1960s to have the assassinations of RFK and JFK and also Martin Luther King. | |
| And this involved, no, not just miscellaneous, isolated individuals who do a shooting for various reasons, but it was a strategic destruction of the government. | |
| I am convinced our government was involved, that the FBI was involved, and the evidence seems to me to be overwhelming. | |
| So that, to me, I think introduced a new era of the disintegration of our republic. | |
| But this has been climaxed with the disintegration of the Department of Justice with what went on with the COVID epidemic, pseudo-epidemic, as well as the things that go on in the period of war and what happens with undermining the liberties of individuals that happens throughout our history. | |
| That to me, I think, is a careless attitude by the people, not being taught what it is. | |
| I think it's a philosophic problem that we have. | |
| And I believe that the original intent of the founders have been deeply disturbing. | |
| Certainly on the money issue, the money issue is something that I got fascinated with all the way back into the 1960s and 1970s. | |
| And that is one of the keys to countries' ending is the destruction of money or the taking over of the money by a dictatorship. | |
| And there's always that tendency on all countries is for the king to have the control of the currency. | |
| And that has happened too. | |
| So I think that we're in bad trouble, but I'll also encourage that there's a lot of people thinking about this now. | |
| They know that changes have to be made to correct this problem. | |
| The opportunity will be there and is here now for every one of us to participate in understanding what a free society is all about. | |
| We had the introduction by our founders. | |
| We should search that type of history because I think the American people will join if there's enough people to know that they stand for it. | |
| I think the cracks in all this lockdown business and some of the demonstrations that we see to challenge the wokeism, that has been a terrible situation in challenging our liberties and promoting a fascist system. | |
| But the answers are out there. | |
| All we have to do is become active in promoting the cause of liberty. | |
| All right, well, let's move ahead to number two. | |
| And this is sent in by Pete Moyer, Pete on Twitter. | |
| And he asked a question. | |
| This is an interesting one. | |
| I was actually really curious as to what your answer might be on this. | |
| He said, what is a political position or worldview that you have changed your opinion on in your lifetime? | |
| Well, gradually I've changed my opinion on foreign policy, but I really didn't change it. | |
| I was naturally favorable to non-intervention. | |
| Even as somebody that was very young during World War II, it made no sense to me because during World War II, we had relatives, several in the military. | |
| And also the family, our families were German families, and we still had relatives. | |
| I was taught to pray as a child for our relatives because they were being bombed by Americans. | |
| It made no sense whatsoever to me to see that happening. | |
| And so therefore, I thought this war stuff doesn't make any sense whatsoever about what's going on. | |
| But so I was very early on, as long as I can remember, thinking that war was really ridiculous in the most part, and most part could be changed. | |
| But I didn't have a change of attitude, but it does evolve a bit. | |
| But where I really had a significant change in the government's role as an enforcer of violent crimes. | |
| And I've seen the government since I first got into politics dealing with the death penalty. | |
| And I was naturally, in a way I thought it was natural, be favorable for the death penalty. | |
| These are bad people. | |
| They kill people. | |
| They deserve the death penalty. | |
| And then as time went on, I found out that governments are so imperfect. | |
| You find out that people have been in prison for 50 years, DNA samples come out, and they were really innocent and all these things. | |
| I said, well, you know, that's overboard, you know, to have the death penalty by the government because they're, you know, liable to make some mistakes. | |
| So I changed my position to virtually oppose to the death penalty, especially when the federal government is involved. | |
| But that doesn't make me opposed to defending our family and our relatives and our household. | |
| So if somebody comes in one's house, I believe in the death penalty that is done in self-defense. | |
| That's different than this organized death penalty that goes on and on for months. | |
| And then overlooking the possibility of how many mistakes have they made. | |
| I mean, just think of now in this day and age where we have a corrupt Department of Justice and FBI agents doing things they shouldn't be doing is more reason to think that we should be very, very cautious. | |
| And for that reason, I did have a significant change, but I did not give up the idea that you have a right to self-defense. | |
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Restore Trust in Government
00:07:28
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| All right, let's go to our third and last one. | |
| Now, this is from someone we know. | |
| This is from James Cabral. | |
| He's gone to a lot of our conferences. | |
| He's been a friend of the Institute, so it's great to see him participating in this. | |
| And I think he's got a doggone good question. | |
| We didn't just choose him because we like him. | |
| He said, if the Federal Reserve and the country as we know it collapsed tomorrow, how would you go about rebuilding it to a functional place where both sides of the country could agree to disagree? | |
| So when the collapse comes, how can we rebuild in the best way? | |
| Well, in many ways, I would say for myself, I will continue to do the things that I've done ever since I became aware of the problems that we face even before I ever went to Congress. | |
| And that is ideas have to be changed. | |
| I mean, as long as we see these problems coming up, the Federal Reserve created by the Federal Reserve and deficit financing, tinkering on the edges and saying, well, we've got to reduce the budget by 5% here, and we have to have better monitoring of the Fed. | |
| I don't believe in any of that because that's not going to work. | |
| I think what I started to do early on, being exposed to the freedom movement by Leonard Reed at the Foundation for Economic Education, it's that understanding. | |
| Because you can't do what you have to do if the people have no idea and they think you're doing it, making everything worse. | |
| If you come up and say, the solution to this problem today is not spending more money and bailing out people on welfare and all these problems, bankruptcies going on, all these problems caused by government. | |
| They have to understand what you're doing. | |
| And then what you want to do is there's quite a few things you can do. | |
| And that is start reducing the size and scope of government. | |
| And that's where you run into the political problems because you face the resistance. | |
| Under today conditions, it'd be very difficult for you to take one day and say, all right, no more Fed, no more of this, no more of this, and just go on. | |
| I mean, there would be a pretty violent reaction to that. | |
| But you could say, look, the first thing we're going to do is get rid of the income tax and reduce this. | |
| Another thing is, is where we ought to cut is get rid of all the corporate welfarism. | |
| I went to Congress thinking welfarism was those people who wouldn't work and got their food stamps for free. | |
| Well, I changed my attitude about that because the real welfare benefits were the banks and big governments and the pharmaceutical industries, the military industrial complex. | |
| I would say, cut it off, and you could save a lot of money. | |
| Cut off the foreign policy of marching around the world and maintaining this empire. | |
| If you want to help the people at home quit wasting so much money overseas, that could be essentially immediate. | |
| And the biggest thing is restore confidence in the government. | |
| If people believe you're going to do it and you do it, all of a sudden the commons say, well, things are bad and it's going to be tough. | |
| But if we do this, he convinced me things will get better. | |
| Just getting the confidence factor. | |
| But where is the confidence factor today? | |
| Okay, you're having a break-in in your house or your store. | |
| This call the FBI and this call the police and all this stuff. | |
| People who don't do that because right now, sometimes if somebody breaks in a store and you try to resist, if you resist, you might have a greater punishment than the people who rob the store. | |
| Even if you capture or hurt the person doing the robbing, the whole thing is turned on that. | |
| So people need to know the confidence that the government has returned to sanity. | |
| And that would go a long way. | |
| But there would be a lot of things you do. | |
| But there should be a merit system, an incentive system, like what we had when people were settling in this country. | |
| They didn't have all this nonsense going on. | |
| They didn't say, you know what, this is a big nation. | |
| We need a lot of bureaucrats to help tell us what to do. | |
| And how are we going to do all these things? | |
| No, you want to get rid of the bureaucrats. | |
| As a matter of fact, what you want to do is make sure people understand the issue of the Constitution about privacy, property rights, and also the Second Amendment, you being responsible for your safety. | |
| But I would say education about how economics works and also having a government that you can trust. | |
| Every once in a while, you see a candidate get up and start talking, telling the truth, and it's all not pie in the sky stuff. | |
| It's the truth. | |
| The pie in the sky can come. | |
| If you do this, things can get better. | |
| People need to know and understand and believe that the philosophy you're following is worth standing up for. | |
| But they'll say, oh, no, my prices are too high. | |
| And we don't need to deal with the Fed. | |
| We need the Fed to print more money and pass it out so we can buy bread. | |
| You know, that's where the insanity is. | |
| So education is the big, big issue. | |
| And trustworthiness in government is a big issue too. | |
| And trust and having a moral group of people who will support those in government that will do these things that seems to be tough love. | |
| But I'll tell you what, if we don't, we're going to have real bad chaos. | |
| But where I'm optimistic is there's a lot more education going on talking about sound economic policies. | |
| I even see signs that people are saying, why are we spending so much money in Ukraine? | |
| Why don't we protect our borders? | |
| That's healthy. | |
| And why do we see these big demonstrations? | |
| Are they violent? | |
| No, they say, we don't like our companies supporting the woke movement. | |
| So therefore, we're not going to use their product anymore. | |
| I think that's great. | |
| So that kind of stuff is moving in the right direction. | |
| But can you imagine if you had a few people in leadership in Washington talking about this, helping to convince people that they can't trust in the government? | |
| One reason we couldn't go back on the gold standard today, like we did in 1875. | |
| People, what they did in 1875, they got rid of the greenbacks and they balanced the budget and they didn't have any wars overseas and the people believed the government and it. | |
| It was a non-event. | |
| They went back on the gold standard after three, three years. | |
| But now what would you say some of the things i'm suggesting, if you said that and you didn't understand that. | |
| The people have to know why you're saying this and what it's going to do. | |
| It's it's, it's not going to work because people won't believe the government. | |
| You know I can't. | |
| The people kept saying, well, run you, you bet you save some gold. | |
| What if the government said tomorrow they're going to back the dollar up at twenty five hundred dollars an ounce, which is above what the market says. | |
| It is now twenty five hundred dollars an ounce. | |
| Uh, would you turn in your gold to get twenty five hundred dollars? | |
| No, and I don't think anybody else would either, because twenty five hundred is going to be a lot more, because we're still printing money faster and faster. | |
| So uh, there's a lot we can do, but it's in education and the restoration of trust In people and a moral trust by the people. | |
| Thank you very much for this little program today, Daniel. | |
| Yeah, I bet you had fun. | |
| Yeah, well, there we go. | |
| And I thank our viewers for tuning in today. | |