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Sept. 4, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:21
#AskRonPaul - Banking Crisis, Lockdowns, Trump 2024, Lies from the Left

You asked. Ron Paul answered! Enjoy a special Labor Day edition of Ask Ron Paul!

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The Right to Secede? 00:09:04
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Sircon, Dr. Paul.
Hey, how are you?
Sircon, very good.
Sircon is our broadcast engineer, and we're doing this program today, and we're going to engage some of our listeners.
And we're looking forward to that.
And, Sircon, how do we start on this program?
When am I going to get a question?
Well, we're going to put you in the hot seat today, Dr. Paul.
We're doing another edition of Ask Ron Paul, and we'll just get straight to it to our first question here, which comes from Eric.
And he asks, how might the Constitution have been written to make it harder to unwind by those wanting to corrupt or emasculate it?
Dr. Paul, what's your take on this?
Well, the Constitution is still heroic in the sense that it's probably the best document ever written to try to, you know, guide a country and a civilization, but it still comes up short.
And they knew about this.
And yet the founders understood the limitations of what they could put into a constitution.
Because even when it was finished, they explained to the people who were inquiring that, well, what did you give us after the convention?
And they said, they did not say, oh, we have this perfect democracy for you.
Go out there and start rounding up the majorities and things like that.
Matter of fact, they definitely avoided the word democracy.
It's not in the Constitution.
And their answer was, we have given you a republic.
And then they also added, if you can keep it.
So it was known back then by the founders that liberty and protecting of liberty and constitutions.
And these laws are very, very delicate.
And it depends on something other than just how well they're written.
And there's no doubt some of the things in the Constitution could be better written and more demanding of the people to understand what's going on.
One of the things I would have liked to have seen in the Constitution was it being explicit that states could secede if they wanted to.
They came together voluntarily.
They should have been allowed to leave voluntarily.
Just think we could have avoided maybe a civil war and something else developing the country.
But no, it depends on the character of the people that makes all the difference on how things work.
But the Constitution has done a good job on what it was supposed to do.
But right now, we're certainly known to be very, very fragile.
Constitutional law has been thrown aside.
And when we talk about the morality of the people, the people are immoral, you know, that's when law and order breaks down.
Because you could probably have one page of laws.
And if you had a group of people who was nearly or unanimously agreeable to understand what the higher law was, the natural instincts of mankind for as long as history has existed, that you don't lie, cheat, steal, and murder.
And those are pretty good rules.
And that goes all the way back to Sumeria.
And Hammurabi slightly later on believed that, the Ten Commandments.
And if you followed that thing, think how peaceful the society would be.
And in modern times, we put that down as nonviolence, can't commit aggression.
And so therefore, the Constitution was written with the knowledge that that existed, but the founders also knew The shortcomings of individuals, and that's why they warned us that this could happen.
But right now, we're living in an age where the crisis has hit and major decisions are being made on which way we're going to go.
Can we revive the spirit of liberty and be responsible for the following the Constitution?
And it's up for grabs.
I think it's possible.
Matter of fact, I think the majority of American people would be for it.
But there's a large number, and this is more than a majority of the people who have gone in and taken the power, the political power, both political parties, all the politics, the judicial system, the whole works has undermined the system.
So that would be very, very difficult.
And people ask, well, what's going to happen?
When can we make sure that the Constitution is secured once again?
And it's unknown.
And some people say, well, it's the end of Western civilization.
It's all over.
The American Republic is gone.
And I'm very sympathetic to what they're saying.
I have a great deal of empathy with their position is.
But it's been through problems before and the Constitution survived.
But our last hundred years has been so devastating, devastating to the principles of liberty.
And one thing, in studying this from a financial viewpoint and a monetary viewpoint, there are some things locked in place that will not go away easily.
And that is not only the moral bankruptcy, which I already alluded to, but the financial bankruptcy, the $32 trillion of debt growing exponentially.
The trouble there is not only the past spending, which has caused all so many mistakes, a lot of malinvestment, a lot of debt that has to be handled, that has to be liquidated.
And in the process, a lot of people have been conditioned to be 100% dependent, you know, on the largesse of government, stealing from one group and giving to another.
That is a major hurdle.
And therefore, the transition is going to be rough.
But we have to accept the fact that when people are sensible and they listen to and listen to, you know, the argument for liberty versus authoritarianism, they come down on the side of it.
But the trouble is that they don't get exposed to it.
They don't get it in our grade schools, our high schools, our government schools, our colleges, our media, and whatever.
They don't get to hear it.
But from my experience of doing some national campaigns, I think young people are especially open-minded to liberty and even the acceptance of the responsibility that goes along with that.
But there's so many people that have grown accustomed dependent.
Leonard Reed used to say that everybody will say, okay, I'm for this and this.
Yeah, cut here, cut here, cut here.
But then he always said everybody had a but and the but was don't mess around with my social security check.
Don't mess around with this.
Oh, yes, you can keep the troops at home unless it's country ABC because I have friends and neighbors and I've been there and you have to treat them differently.
And besides, they're going to bomb us if we don't, you know, that spirit is there.
So I think that we haven't protected against that.
We could add to it, I think, the right to secede and also much firmer penalties for counterfeiting the money.
The founders did their best to put it in there and said that the only thing you could have as legal tender was gold and silver.
But that's ignored.
There should be punishments for that.
The founders suggested the punishment for counterfeiting money, and they even said in 1792, it probably should be the death penalty, the death penalty.
So there should have been more emphasis on the fact that you better and you have to.
But the whole concept of sorting out the difficult problems by having individual small countries called states, they handle this, deal with it, and put the government closer to home.
That has vanished.
And that's why the Constitution came up short.
The intention was there, but it really came up short as the carelessness of the people accepting this principle of authoritarian democracy.
Get the majority and you can do anything you want.
51%, you can take the rights away from anybody.
Today, we're living in conditions where if you have 1% of the people wanting certain special privileges in a government organization or in a school or something, they can undermine the civil liberties of 99%.
The Perils Of Authoritarian Democracy 00:08:28
That kind of stuff has to stop.
So the Constitution may have been very good, still could be, but we still have a long way to go in educating this.
We will have that opportunity because this system isn't going to just smolder and sit there and we're going to live off all the benefits.
But there's no reason to think that we cannot educate enough people where the people say we want liberty and we will put in a few more restraints on what happens when people start counterfeiting money and a few other things.
SirCon.
SirCon.
Hey, well said, Dr. Paul.
Well said.
Our next question is a person after my own heart, and she writes, Hi, Ron Paul.
You are my hero, sir.
So here it goes.
What could the U.S. do now to de-escalate tensions with China and Russia?
What do you think about that, Dr. Paul?
Well, you know, we just talked a lot about the Constitution and the restrictions and how it failed, but the subject of foreign policy didn't come up.
But that area, you know, is pretty clear about the founders trying to keep us out of war.
And that, of course, is a big issue for really just about everybody.
But too often they said that you have to have a war to prevent a war and that sort of thing.
And that's where they really get mixed up.
But the tensions between China and Russia is so unnecessary.
And the stupid policy that we have now has we've created and manufactured some of the animosities and the conflict with Russia and China by putting on sanctions and interfering.
And yet, one thing that we have done is we have strengthened, if you live in that world where there's enemies out there and we got to deal with them, that we have helped create those enemies.
And we certainly have helped boost the association of Russia and China together, making the enemy much bigger.
So this is a real problem.
And what we should do is take the advice of the founders, have a policy of non-interventionism, that we shouldn't go around the world looking for monsters to destroy and telling the world we shouldn't have an empire.
We have 120 places where we have military personnel.
We do have an empire.
And that's, you only can maintain an empire by the undermining of personal liberty.
And we have done that.
And right now, we're out.
We're still provoking.
So if we wanted to decrease these that, how about bringing the troops home?
Why do we have military vessels floating all around China and Iran and Russia and all these places?
Yes, be be defending, but you don't.
You don't have build your defense by provoking people who would like to kill you or destroy your currency, something like this.
So yeah, the one thing a president could do and most of the things it's very frustrating on what people would ask me, if you're a president, what are you going to do?
Are you going to solve, get rid of the FED in one day and some of those things?
You just don't happen.
But in being in charge of the military, you do have the authority of saying, look uh, we don't need to be provoking people, we don't need to be put detentions on people, we don't need to put put on the financial controls and and freeze their assets.
Billions of dollars we freeze and then, if we go to give it back and get back to a more normal situation, the people say oh, we're bailing off the communists, bailing out the community.
Well, why did we take the money in the first place?
Trade, the founders really believe strongly in trade with as many people as possible, and I think that that is so important.
I was so pleased with, with the breaking out of trade with Russia and China after the Cold War ended.
But here it is, a few years later, we're back there stirring up trouble, stirring up a cold war, because some people, you know, think it's good for business and it's good for their business.
Uh, the people who have to perpetually build bombs and make huge profits and go into countries like uh, like Ukraine, and maintain our presence there.
Uh yes, that is that.
That is a great incentive, and a lot of times, that incentive overrides anything to do with national security, because so much of what we do, people say, oh, you guys referring to people that might agree with me, like you guys, you guys would let us vulnerable, you don't want any national defense.
But I tell you what, I tell you what, in a more libertarian society, one where trade was honored and where civil liberties were honored, and you had all this money i'll tell you what it would be a lot better chance of getting along with the rest of the world.
There was a time in our history, our early history, where there was a desire to emulate United States, the principles of liberty.
But who wants to emulate our Department OF Justice now or our FBI.
They, they don't want to anymore.
And that's just not two or three percent of Americans who decided they wanted a truly constitutional government.
That means that a large majority of the American people, you know would uh would, would be would, welcome this whole idea of a more open society where you can trade, trade with people, talk to people and travel.
What are we dealing with with lockdown for mysterious viruses that don't exist and the distortion where we lose our liberties because, once again, not the enemy, it's that virus, it's this virus out there and therefore we'll undermine civil liberties because well, the pharmaceutical industry financially supported it.
You know, even if you, that whole lockdown business got to the point where the lockdown was uh, you know something that that they did in order to say, to protect you.
Governments can't protect us now, they can just harm us and they can protect us if they have, if we have an invasion or something, but they don't even do that.
They do all this other mischief and then they open up the doors and let the invaders march right in and we and they don't even have there it's it's, oh yeah, it's real peaceful.
We just turn everything over to them and we kick veterans out of hospitals and getting medical care and housing to give, to give the benefits to the people who invaded us, and I would say that one that problem in particular could be solved because the founders were strong believers in uh, in property rights and privacy.
And uh, right now if uh, we know, we still know and we understand your house is your castle and you don't have to let people in your house if you don't want to.
And if somebody knocked on the door or opened the door and say well, we're here because we're, we're staying with you, now we're going to live here, sounds like communism.
We, we don't have that.
They, they.
But what about if if, what they want to come to our country?
Who owns the country?
Well we I, I wish that more individual own deliberate, you know directly, owned more than just the government, because the government is nothing more than a bunch of special interests.
So if it were private property uh if, if it, if every, everybody who owned property can regulate it.
So we have drifted away from everything being collective, owned by a group of peer people.
And then they get together and they get 51 and they want to say something, so they dictate to the people, the people who aren't working dictate the rules to the, the other ones.
So liberty is stolen from individuals because they don't understand uh, property rights.
So this, this could be solved in a way, you know, of course, with with the uh, with the constitution, and uh, it would reduce the odds of us getting into another war with China.
I was in high school when the Korean War was going on.
It was a disaster.
Anachronistic Taxation 00:10:45
You know for what?
What we did there?
I can't.
I always remember about one of my teachers being redrafted after the World War Ii and going back and he didn't come home.
He never came back to teaching again and uh, that that's so unnecessary.
And, of course, what we could do is only go to wars that are declared.
When I brought that up in a committee hearing, when they wanted to go to war in the Middle East, I said, all right, if you guys want to go to war in the Middle East, we're going to have to.
You know you have to vote for it.
So I introduced an amendment, said, declare war or not, and don't go.
Of course, I said, but i'm not voting for this, but you're the ones that want to go to war and they got hysterical And they wrong, Paul, you're crazy.
They say that part of the Constitution is anachronistic.
We don't follow it anymore.
That's where some of our real tragedy is.
And they're running our country.
They're running our country.
But the message is there.
And it's based, I think, in morality and a clear understanding of the higher law.
Right now, today, nihilism is prevailing and it's prevalent because more people say, you don't know what the truth is.
No, nobody knows what the perfect truth is.
But ever since the beginning of time, the first thing ever written in Sumeria, they recognized and understood that there was a higher law that people naturally should follow.
And yet right now, that's the battle, the higher law versus nihilism.
And if we could understand that, we wouldn't have to worry about when the nuclear war is going to break out and when will we have to have a battle with either China or Russia.
Totally unnecessary and quite frankly, pretty stupid.
Sir Khan.
Yes, sir.
Well said.
Once again, I got one last question for you.
This one's a hard one, so we saved it for last.
And this one comes from Ken Evans, and he writes, What do you think the Supreme Court meant by the 16th Amendment?
Was obviously intended to simplify situations and make clear the limitations on taxing power of Congress and not to create radical and destructive changes in our constitutional system.
The Bercha Hubbert.
Bursch Habert.
I'm butchering that word.
I apologize.
Yeah.
You know, that explanation by the Supreme Court, I would say it'll be easy to interpret that because it did exactly the opposite of what they're pretending they're saying they're doing.
The whole purpose was to make it a national tax on income.
What do you think?
The 16th Amendment was obviously intended to do that.
It's very clear that you can tax all income.
And as bad as that was, and people argue over the technicalities of what it really says, and that would have been something that should be in the Constitution.
It's about prohibition.
Technically, it's there.
The authority, if it isn't given, they don't have the authority to do it.
But they tinkered with the Constitution and said they didn't have to do that.
But that is a big problem because I look at two things in our society and our government that identifies that there's still slavery in this country.
The principle of slavery is there.
And one is the military draft.
Now, I was drafted and technically I was a slave, you know, for the time I had to serve for the draft.
Oh, but it was for patriotic duty.
You're a great guy.
And people say, thank you for your service.
And I keep thinking, well, why didn't I stand up against some of that nonsense?
And this was in the 60s.
But the whole thing about that, if you're drafted and they can haul you off and thousands and thousands, and this was especially bad in the 60s, you know, with Vietnam, no declared war, but thousands died.
The Korean war the same way.
And the wars weren't declared.
They were declared.
Otherwise, that makes it a little bit different, but not enough.
Not enough to go along with it.
So you are enslaved to serve.
It's still in the books, even though they know where everybody is these days who's 18 years old and in an age where they would draft you if they need to.
There's talk about it again because the world is getting more dangerous.
And yet, when I was there, after they got rid of the draft registration for a while, they were reinstituting the draft.
And I said, Well, why are we doing this?
So it's preparation.
No, the draft, that was in the late 70s.
The draft wasn't used.
They, you know, just beefed up the benefits and more people joined.
But why would they put it on the books?
They want you to know they own you, that people, they own you.
And now it'll be women and men, everybody will get drafted.
So it'll be worse than ever.
So this to me is very, very bad.
Now, what's the other thing that is a sign of slavery?
That is the income tax.
The income tax is very clear-cut.
What they do is they say, we own you.
No, you don't have right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
We own you.
And now we can tax your income, all of it.
Oh, we didn't define it precisely what it was.
And it's a little bit confusing.
And even if he gave them an inch, you could say, well, it's the process on how they collect it.
Certainly, because it wouldn't be very easy to collect it.
But what they do is they collect it by, you know, sending you, you know, they don't send you a bill.
You're supposed to figure it out.
And if they think you didn't pay enough, then they come back and they charge you, charge you with a crime.
Serious stuff.
And they charge you with this crime, but you're guilty until you're proven innocent.
So I would say that was a big crack in the seams of protecting liberties, just like, you know, the lockdown was a big crack in the seams.
And it's been erosion.
And so the tax is the other tax, which is very close to it because it does tax the income of people, especially the poor people in the middle class.
And that is the regressive tax of inflation.
And that's why people are so foolish from the far left.
They say, we got to give them, people are hungry.
They can't buy a house.
They can't pay their bills and all this.
Send them more money.
They don't realize that they're just creating more problems because they haven't worked out in the financial system that all the penalty is going to go to the middle class because their prices are going to go up.
But they don't know that.
They say, oh, no, it's just because I don't have enough money.
No, you have too much money that's losing its value.
And therefore, the difference is called inflation.
The inflation is the printing of dollars, not just prices going up.
That is the consequence of printing too much money.
So this is something that says that the income tax plus the inflation tax, very, very destructive and is, you know, philosophically equivalent to slavery because the government owns you and you don't mess around with that.
And just think of, just think of all the taxes we pay to things that were unnecessary, like the welfare warfare state, you know, and to think of how much do you think our taxpayers had to pay for the vaccines that either didn't work or did and caused more harm and all this sort of thing.
And that's unbelievable what was taken away from them.
In the same way now, you can get away with it for a while.
We were very, very rich after World War II.
We had the gold and we had the, and we still are very, very rich, and we're still living off that borrowing money.
But it's going to end because the reserve currency of the world is being diminished, and our dollar is getting weaker.
Our military is weaker.
Respect around the world is getting weaker.
So, and the debt will be liquidated.
So, we are going to go through a rough period.
And during that period of time, it's up for grabs on what's going to happen.
So, it's going to take a dedication of a lot of people to stand up and resist all this nonsense.
It was wonderful to watch some of the times when people finally got sick and tired of lockdown.
And one individual would stand up at a meeting and saying, This is nonsense.
This is wrong.
It's ugly and terrible.
And the whole crowd changed their tune because they were just looking for somebody to say it and stand up for the right thing to do.
So, that's why I'm an optimist.
I believe the message is great.
How can we miss the delivery of this message?
Because if anybody is seeking peace and prosperity, the best way to go is maximizing personal liberty.
And that is not complicated.
But right now, we've conditioned a lot of people to depend on government stealing from one group and giving it to another and making everybody poor ultimately.
So, the one goal that we have to keep our eye on the ball, and that is the ball of liberty, because if free people are much better at taking care of ourselves than the government taking care of us, that is not the purpose of government.
They can provide some safety force and national defense.
They should participate in a sound currency, this sort of thing, but it should be very limited.
Then, the odds of having peace and prosperity in a much happier world would be enhanced greatly.
I want to thank everybody today for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
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