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Oct. 25, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
09:37
Flashback 1988: Ron Paul on The Proper Role of Government

The Liberty Report will be back LIVE on Thursday. Please enjoy this flashback from 1988.

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Time Text
Different View on Government 00:09:34
We have an opportunity to present a different view on the role of government.
At least we get to ask the question.
It only comes rarely in history.
I think the founders of the country, our founding fathers and forefathers, certainly asked the question, or they wouldn't have done what they did.
They said, well, is the proper role of government what the British thinks is the proper role of government?
And they come down and they said no.
They didn't like the British.
So they said, we will declare our independence and we will be willing to fight for it.
And they did it.
And they wrote a guideline for us called the Constitution, a relatively good document, but something that is totally unobserved, I believe, in this century, especially here in the last several decades, and has gotten a lot worse.
This means it has to be done through persuasion if you want changes.
It cannot be done with coercion and violence.
It means we have a free market system of money, but it means that we define very clearly whose life it really is.
It is our life.
Our life comes to us in a very natural way.
It doesn't come to us from government.
Since it is our life, it's our liberty.
And it's also our obligation to take care of our lives and our liberty.
And we should have the right and the obligation, and we should have the obligation to work.
We ought to have the right to keep what we want.
Nobody has a right to take from us.
Your neighbor can't take it from us through coercion, but they should not have the right to go to their politician and have the politician send the IRS agent to your doorstep with a gun and point it to you and take what they think is theirs.
Needs are not rights.
Entitlements, people who think they're entitled to something because they demand something and they've been told that the society owes it to them, those aren't rights.
So we reject that entire notion that people who need something.
Yes, we can be sympathetic if we want to, but they cannot use any coercion to come and take it from it.
So in this situation, of course, it means we don't even believe in the income tax.
I mean, that's no income tax.
Most of our history, we did not have an income tax.
A lot of people say, oh, well, first reaction from a liberal reporter will be, well, who's going to take care of the government?
I said, well, libertarians aren't really worried about the government.
We're worried about the people.
So therefore, we want you to keep your freedom, and we want to keep the fruits of your labor, and we want you to have the incentive.
Because today there's less incentive than there used to be, a lot less incentive to work and keep all the records and send them off to the government.
So there's a more incentive to get in the underground economy.
Over a third of the people in this country are involved in the underground economy.
Now that's a mixed bag.
I hate to see the breakdown of law and order, but you know what I need to see is I need to see rigging get off the hook.
Just think the underground economy is probably bailing out this system.
It's really very beneficial to the economy because it's the real economy.
The other thing that we have to think about, those who are fully in the underground economy are fully employed too.
There's no unemployment in the underground economy.
And we'd like to legalize it.
We'd like to make sure this is available to everybody.
And since we existed most of our history without it, and there are still some states that have either sales taxes or income taxes, and their unemployment rate is lower than the states that have high income tax and high sales taxes.
So there's every reason for practical reasons as well to argue that we don't need it.
Under this system of government, money would be different.
Money would not be fraud.
Today, you know, if government has some limited roles, which they would in a libertarian society, it would mean that if one individual defrauded somebody else, this would be a reason for government to intervene.
Therefore, if there was a private money system and they said this is a gold certificate and you didn't have the gold, you were then lying and you were fraudulent, so this would involve the government to come in and settle the dispute.
But what have we done under our system of government?
What we have done is we now have permitted the politicians to become the legalized counterfeiters.
So it's turned upside down.
Instead of preventing counterfeiting, they become the counterfeiters.
And how do they get elected and stay in office?
By promising the people whatever they want.
And the lobbyists grow in numbers.
The PACs are growing.
The PACs give money to both sides, which is only one party.
And the process continues.
The politicians vote for everything.
They run up the deficits.
They undermine the gold system.
And of course, that's what happened in 1971.
Total undermining of the gold system.
And therefore, they could print and create as much money as possible.
And all you have to do is study the economic statistics since 1971.
And everything is on an exponential curve.
Deficits and spending and interest rates, the whole work.
It's on a very dangerous slope the way I see it.
Under a free market, you'd have honest money, which means it wouldn't be counterfeit, it wouldn't be paper, it would have to be a commodity, it would have to be something of real value.
If we apply this principle of non-coercion to civil liberties, to social problems, it means if your life is your own, your lifestyle is your own.
Nobody tells you what to do.
You know, a lot of the media will immediately want to come up to me and they say, and they've done this to libertarians for a long time.
And they'll say, and they'll want to put it on the headlines.
They're not doing it so much anymore because the debate is changing.
We're winning this debate.
And I think in a few years you're going to see some change in the law in spite of the rhetoric of the other two candidates.
But they'll immediately want to say, ah, you're the people who want to legalize heroin.
And that's the summation of the libertarian philosophy.
So I stopped them right there.
I said, no, I said, slow on my agenda about worrying about legalization of drugs.
But what I'm interested in is legalizing freedom of choice.
That's what it's like.
I personally am not all that interested in drugs, but I'm very interested in freedom of choice.
Because the freedom of choice for people to pick their lifestyles and what they take into their bodies also protects my rights to live my life the way I want, even though it may be different from others.
Freedom of choice means that we protect your right for consumption, intellectual consumption, and this country is not too bad about that.
Even though there's challenges there in the public school system, there's always challenges on the books that are available, and I think there's going to be more censorship as time goes on.
But basically, nobody challenged the ideas that we're allowed to read books.
Intellectually, our consumption is permitted religious-wise.
People have the right to follow cults, be very serious religious people, atheists.
These are things that we have accepted.
And yet, when they come to this very, very narrow area of one particular drug, they say, we're going to make the people better.
And of course, historically, we only started doing these things in this century when we have lost the confidence in ourselves, lost the confidence that we can be secure and knowing that free choices are something that we can live with.
1913, we had income tax because we were introducing the idea of big government overseas and here at home.
We introduced the idea of the central bank, which is a tenant of the Communist Manifesto.
So we had our Federal Reserve System in 1913, drug laws in 1914.
What else came about during the Wilson era?
The FBI.
Check on us to find out what we're doing.
Do you know one of the first tasks of the FBI was to spy on American citizens who disagree with Woodrow Wilson on going to war in Europe?
I think they did that in the 1960s.
And wasn't it just recently that our great American president, Ronald Reagan, who wanted to get government off our back, used the FBI to spy on 100 American groups because they disagreed with his policy in Central America?
And just recently, of course, it's been revealed, and it's very clear that the CIA has been very much involved in all that activity.
And, of course, Ronald Reagan hides behind the flag and said, I would never break security.
I'm not going to tell you really what went on.
I'll tell you what libertarians would do.
We don't think there's much use for the FBI.
If there's use for intelligence, it can be done differently.
And we certainly don't have any use for the Central Intelligence Agency, and we'd abolish it.
The whole idea of protecting civil liberties is something that I think we're coming dangerously close to losing.
Because they can develop this hysteria over drugs, the drug issue is not the top issue.
The drug laws in the Constitution is the top issue.
But in the name of drug regulation, they introduced the ideas of controls on us financially, keeping more records.
At the same time, what they do is they want to tell us what to do with our lives.
They come in and they throw out the Constitution because there are no restraints now as far as search and seizure laws go.
This bill that was just passed implies that if somebody has their house invaded because they're suspected of dealing in drugs, this evidence is admissible in court even though the police did it without a search warrant, as long as the policeman used procedures that he thought were compatible with constitutional restraint.
That's pretty bad.
And yet that's what we're getting.
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