Unpayable Debts, Unwinnable Wars -- Is America Heading For A Crack-Up Boom?
History is filled with examples of failed attempts to 'conquer the world.' Americans seceded from the greatest military power that the world had ever seen, in the British Empire. America would be different. It would be the 'land of the free.' And for a while, it was different. Never have so many individuals had so much freedom, and never was so much prosperity created by a single nation.
But alas, the ideas of 'conquering the world,' took over and the downward slide began. As the dustbin of failed empires waits for its newest member, the American people must re-learn and re-implement the ideas of Liberty.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today is Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, good to have you on the program today.
It is great to be back with you, Dr. Paul.
We need you because we got to talk about why the government's spending too much money, and we want the solution.
Of course, if they listen to my solution, and you probably agree, just quit spending, you know, and acting within our constitutional rights and privileges, I think things would be improved tremendously.
But anyway, we're getting a little bit concerned about it like we have been, but things aren't going that well in the economy, even though we have bits and spurts.
You know, some things look good.
You know, stock markets up, that's pretty good.
People are happy about that.
A lot of people have their houses paid for, which is surprised to everybody because when interest rates were very low, they were able to buy their houses.
But for some reason, there's a lot of people unhappy in society today.
They're unhappy with the economics.
They're unhappy with the political system.
We're unhappy with the judicial system.
So people are complaining a whole lot.
But you know, the big one that we've talked about a lot and what we want to emphasize today is what they call a crack of boom.
And Misha's talked about that.
That means things just go crazy.
People give up on the currency and they want to get it, if it's a fiat currency, give up on a fiat and they look around and they want to get hold of something of real value, some real substance.
So they will do that.
And that means then there's a panic.
It's massive.
It isn't just 5% or 10% or the rich people doing it.
The whole society realized, you know, things are totally out of control.
So they will start buying and prices go up sharply.
For instance, this morning, Chris, I saw an article that showed that there's the rents in LA, which they have all kinds of economic and social problems out there.
But they still, you think, well, there's a depression out there.
Wouldn't all the things start to go down in value?
A lot of things have.
But house, rent for a house, one of the fancy ones in LA, $150,000, not a year, a month that you have to pay to live there.
So that's the kind of distortion that occurred.
So in an isolated area like LA and rents shows you what people do when they panic and they have a lot of money.
So they start pumping it into it.
So this is the reason we talk a lot about the value of the currency and what the government is doing with spending and how big is the debt, because ultimately there's going to be a lot more chaos.
I sort of look at it right now that there's cracks in the system.
The crack of boom is not here.
But if you have all the events in society doing what the rents are doing currently in LA, then the crack-up boom is there and people will panic and the panic itself continues.
This is also the reason that we partner with Birch Gold Company because they have talked about gold for a long time and we've worked with them and their expertise is in gold.
Try to help people because I believe the more people that are protected when this crack of boom comes and conditions get much worse, the more people that are protected, that means they'll be more friends.
But if only 1% are protected, they'll just be taken care of, you know, by the by the masses.
But I think that what we need is a lot of people invested, and it's happening.
There's a lot of people right now looking at opportunities.
And a lot of our friends have, you know, look to Birch Gold for information.
Now, what I'm going to offer now, as I have in the past, is a text number that you can text and get information from Birch Golden and get more information to help you make decisions.
And the text is Ron 989898.
And they'll send you a packet or information to help you get started if you haven't done it and help you keep up and help you make a decision.
Because every single investment by every single person is never the same.
You know, I think psychologically and economically, the difference between what I think about gold in 1971, when the gold window was closed, versus how I look at it now, in both times,
I thought gold is a big deal because at that in 1971, what I saw, gold was then at that, well, we weren't even allowed to own it, but the market price of gold was $35 in an ushered in an age as has been really horrendous.
And that is something that we have to deal with.
So my attitude back in 71 was, you know, this is going to destroy the value of the dollar.
And it has slowly and steadily.
I think it's going to get worse, not better, even though I also believe there are answers to this that could correct our problem.
But I think that people have different priorities.
So I might do something different now.
And that's why I don't look and depend on one bits and pieces of information.
I want to get different information.
And that's one thing why I think it's worthwhile working with Birch Gold to get as much information you get in making the decision.
If you decide you think you too should be protected, I think the big challenge there is nothing goes straight up.
Over those years that I've watched gold, there were a lot of years that gold just sat there and they kept printing the money.
But that's explainable by Austrian economic because there's a subjectivity on what prices are.
But long term, if you have runaway spending, runaway welfare, runaway warfare, and monetizing all the debt, believe me, the value of the dollar goes down and the prices of commodities, especially the precious metals, go up.
That is a rule, but you can't write it and say three months from now, it's going to be this and whatever.
Anyway, once again, if you're interested in more information, what you do is text Ron 989898.
And Chris, I'd like to go to you now to get us started on talking about the big bust that we think may well come.
Empires Always Fail00:03:42
Yeah, unfortunately, it's inevitable because of the policies and ideas that dominate.
It's the same old story.
You know, anybody familiar with history is that empires always fail.
You know, you can go all the way back to the beginning and nothing has changed, probably because human nature does not change.
And, you know, and people are very stubborn.
They think that they'll be the one.
But, you know, empires always fail.
And the prime reason, if you want to just break it down, is, you know, we as human beings, we never see the whole picture.
We can't.
We only see fragments, every single one of us.
And we're all, you know, governments are made up of people.
So that's why empires and countries that, you know, world governments, they always fail because they could never see the whole picture.
Always, always, always, there are things that they can't possibly anticipate that wrecks their schemes, that throws monkey wrenches in their schemes, and everything falls apart.
Now, I don't know how many people, the younger generations, what they know about the Soviet Union, but that was set up to be a world government.
You know, they had the Comintern and all that.
And that was their goal, to be the world, the government of the world, the Soviet Union.
Of course, it was a total economic basket case.
They went bust.
And after they fell, America, our country, had the golden opportunity to be the beacon of the free world, the bastion of freedom.
And they blew it.
Instead, the Soviets fell and America, or our politicians said, will be the world government.
We're going to go out and go, you know, with all these endless wars.
Now, it's not going to be communist where the state owns everything.
It's going to be corporatists, where you have the state married to the big corporations.
That's what we've been living through.
And like the Soviets, we too are reaching the end of our rope and heading for bankruptcy with debts that will never be paid.
And now the interest is starting to creep up to up to $1 trillion per year, as Dr. Paul and I covered last week.
You know, ultimately, we all know everybody who has credit cards.
Once you can't service your debt, forget about paying it off.
Once you can't even service it, it's game over for you.
And unfortunately, our country took this turn, and it's inevitable that they're going to go the way of the Soviets and everyone else.
Very good, Chris.
I have a few headlines clipped from this morning and yesterday.
I want to go over them because I believe they make our point that there should be concern, gives us a hint of what's happening and what caused it.
But it probably is not all new news for our viewers.
But it's good to look at exactly what's going on and what is the evidence.
Because sometimes we heard 10, 15 years ago that deficits out of control and bad things are going to happen.
Bad things did happen.
But sometimes the recovery and the trust was restored to the fiat money.
And yet, inevitably, the policies that we have and the monetary system we have, we can expect that continuation.
But I'm going to quickly go over a couple of these headlines that I think helps us make our point, Chris.
The first one I have here, and I don't have them in the order of the significance and the importance.
So the first one I have is house votes to avoid government shutdown, but no Ukraine, Israel, aid.
Well, no aid, that's good.
But I tell you what, there's going to be aid and it's going to happen.
It'll come later.
Excessive Debt Signals Crisis00:15:29
The problems are still there.
And it's just that politically, it was very necessary to make sure that there was no lockdown, shutdown of the government.
So that has been taken care of.
You know, and another one here is on the Pentagon.
You know, we really don't audit the Pentagon.
They're like the Fed.
They get away with it, but they go through pretense of it.
So they've done it now six in a row, and every one of them has failed.
No surprise here.
Pentagon fails six audits in a row.
That means nobody knows.
Everybody knows about the money that was wasted on all the wars essentially that we go to.
Just think of Afghanistan and what's going on still in Iraq and what's going on in Ukraine and all the evidence of this because it's not well spent.
Now, here's a couple more that I think are significant to tell you where we stand on what's happening here.
But, you know, there's a lot of people suffering from the conditions already.
You see more street people, more poor people, middle class is shrinking, the cost of living is up, and people are getting very unhappy.
And one of the things to worry about the most is the maldistribution of wealth.
The wealthy get wealthy and the poor get poorer.
Corporations seem to grab hold of a lot of a lot of the wealth in the country.
But here is one that indicates that this is true.
There's more wealthy people as there's more poor people.
Here's how many billionaires and millionaires live in the United States.
There are now 735 billionaires.
That doesn't sound like many people, but a billion dollars still sounds like a lot of money to me.
But there are 735 billionaires, 22 million millionaires.
Of course, a million dollars doesn't mean that much anymore.
But yes, there are more billionaires, and that's what gets reported.
Real wealth and real control and control of the judicial system and the control of the political system.
That's where probably the real wealth is.
Okay, here's another one.
You know, oil right now has been pretty low in price temporarily.
But this, I think, I mentioned in my opening statement, everybody in a panic mode, LA, mentioned the big fancy mansion, $150,000 per month for rent.
That's just another symbol of it.
It's so outlandish, it was worth mentioning it twice.
Okay, now here, we're going to finish up with this and get back to Chris.
Give us some more information.
This is interesting.
The share, you say, well, this is great news.
The share of Americans who are mortgage free is at an all-time high.
Well, that's good.
And probably in a free society, in a rich society, a hard-working society, that probably would be the case.
But it happened because they artificially, they panicked over the housing bubble bursting, which wiped out a lot of people.
And then they took interest rates down to near zero.
So a lot of people switched to a low interest rate, which was, you know, in their interest.
And they did that.
And that helped them pay this off.
But that's not the end of it because, you know, as things progress, it means that probably some people did it because there was an artificial number and that is lower interest rates.
But eventually, though, something's going to happen in their life and they're going to have a downturn and they might have to sell their house and get a mortgage and all kinds of things because there was overinvestment on that, which on the short run is beneficial.
And also the reason why people are so tempted to have government programs.
But we just went through the housing bubble that caused the crash in 2008.
So yes, it is good, but it also might be an illusion there.
But it's great that right now, the smart thing to do, if you were smart enough to get a low interest rate and you don't have it, that's not to let somebody talk you into taking out another mortgage.
But the problem is a lot of people that got their house and got a lower mortgage might well, you know, have other expenses and have to do that because it hasn't solved the problem.
But that's exactly what could happen in a legitimate manner with a free market is that most people, I remember my parents buying a house, they paid cash for it.
And it was in the middle of the depression, you know, and I am amazed that what my parents told me that they were able to pay it off.
But that's the way they did it.
And believe me, they never added to that mortgage.
And Here's another one I want to finish with is the CT CTAs is a commodity trading advisors.
They invest for other people in stocks.
CIA bought record amount of stocks this week or no, in the last 10 days.
$70 billion worth.
So, you know, that is part of what happens when it's concluded.
People will go out and buy thinking anything's better than the depreciating money.
We're not there.
Hopefully we wise up and it will switch, but it's going to be very hard turning off the spending machine and talking to politicians and talking the people into accepting the fact that we need less spending across the board.
Right, Dr. Paul.
And this spending machine began in 1913 with the Federal Reserve.
That sealed our fate once that was created because it gave the Fed a monopoly to create money and they could create as much as they want and we are forced to use it.
So we're trapped using this.
And give that power to any human being.
Ultimately, it's going to end up with people who think to themselves, huh?
We could print whatever money we want.
Why don't we just try to take over the world?
We can buy off other countries.
We could shovel the money into the corporations, the weapons makers.
We could shovel it to the politicians that we want, into the media.
We can shovel the money wherever we want, you know, and this is what they've been doing for 100 years.
And look at what it looks like.
It's ugly.
It's terrible, you know, because these people believe that they could buy whatever they want.
And they, in many respects, that they can, up to a point.
Again, empires always fall.
World governments always fall because they must still live in a world with economic laws, supply and demand, scarcity, billions of people who all have free will, that do what they want, that value what they want, that can obey you or tell you to, you know, take off, whatever, to put it nicely.
So they have to still deal with reality.
And that's why they can never overcome these things.
What happens is they just keep printing and printing and printing and printing.
And it's amazing because 100 years ago in 1923, me and Dr. Paul and I were talking about this, Germany went through its hyperinflation where they just kept printing and printing and printing.
And all that happens is they don't control the world.
The money loses its value.
Everything costs is sky high and keeps going once you get into hyperinflation.
That's the crackup boom that we're talking about.
And the whole thing falls apart.
And it's a shame because you'd want to avoid this, but the propaganda and the drive by the people themselves is strong.
Nobody wants to cut.
Don't cut anything in government, the military, the corporations, the empire, just spend.
And, you know, we still live with supply and demand.
The money ultimately becomes worthless.
Very, very good.
I'm going to go over a little list that I made that I look at or pay attention to to help tell me how close we are to this and how things are moving, because there are certain hints to what's going on.
And there's a lot of hints when I finally did my little list, because excessive debt is one big hint at that.
People spend too much because of the monetary system.
We have a lot of excessive debt across the board.
The spending, the spending is endless because people are not disciplined.
They talk about cutting spending in Washington.
They really don't.
You change parties, but you really don't.
And they might argue over cutting money from, say, Ukraine after spending $100 billion, but too little, too late.
And it really hasn't stopped, but they're arguing about it.
But it continues.
And as they get wind down one debt area, they think about, oh, well, we have to be ready for defending Taiwan.
So on and on it goes.
And then we, and a warning sign would be alterating interest rates, ultimately interest rates going up.
And that's what finally shifted here in the last six to eight months.
Interest rates have started up and they're going to go up.
And that is what happens.
And that's a sign that we're approaching that time when the system collapses.
The gold price is a good indicator.
We all talk about that.
Standard of living starts to go down.
We know about the middle class, more street people than we've ever had before.
Social unrest.
And there's various reasons why there's social unrest today, but it has a lot to do with the economic system doing a lot of bad, bad things.
And then another thing that develops under these conditions is political infighting.
People fight over.
People might even get into a fist fight, you know, over stuff in the Congress.
We haven't had fist fights in the Congress in a long time.
And I would have been shocked if it would have happened back when I was in Congress, but I wouldn't have enjoyed a fist fight, let me tell you.
But there's a social unrest.
And I would think another sign of bad things coming is what is the status of the work ethic?
And not only working or not working, but the quality of work.
And I would say that's gone down.
And even though there's still a lot of fiat money there and a lot of jobs that you can still get if you want, really the work ethic is, I think, seriously diminishing.
And that is not good.
The political infighting gets worse under these conditions.
We certainly see that.
But the one that I have on my next list is something that I think is one of the most significant and one of the things that we have to fear the most.
And that is an unequal political judicial system that's going on now, especially in our elections.
That is a big problem.
And that's drifted a long way from how a republic should work.
The other symbolism that we get, if we think we're getting closer to that problem, is how many people trust the government?
You know, it used to be, there was probably a time when 80% of the people said, yes, you trust the government.
Trumble's good and just good people and argued the case for decency in government.
Not today.
It's up and up.
You know, you take, you know, when we have a major problem, you know, a 9-11 or an assassination or something, we have a commission to study it.
And yet nobody believes the results when they get them.
And I think commissions have been set up to either take the blame away from the people who caused it or just to cover it up and make sure that people, you know, know that all is well, the government has checked it out and we took care of it.
Let me tell you, you can't have much confidence in commissions relaying the truth to the people.
Right now, the confidence in the people in our government, all government has been diminished greatly.
And actually, I look at that as a positive because why should you have blind confidence that the government, I still hear it, the government's there to help me.
And, you know, they helped me, sent me a check when COVID was here.
But they need to ask, did the government cause the problem that they try to come by and give you money for and get credit for fixing it?
And they don't fix it.
They just create a new problem.
So I think we're there.
I think there's a lot of evidence.
In spite of it all, I still believe there are ideas floating around that are wonderful, a better understanding of economics.
And the ideas ultimately cannot be stopped.
Chris already mentioned that ideas and the movements start with small number of people.
They don't start with 50 or 60% of the people.
And that's why I remain an optimist in many ways.
Chris.
That's right, Dr. Paul.
And that's how I'm going to close my show.
In spite of it all, we have a lot of stuff that we talk about every day of the week.
But in spite of it all, we're optimistic because, like you just said, it only takes a small minority of people to prevail.
And I mentioned the Soviet Union.
The Bolsheviks, they were a tiny, tiny handful of people.
That's all it was.
And they took over Russia, you know, one of the greatest empires in the world.
Nazis were a bankrupt, you know, ragtag people at first.
And look what they did.
The Chinese communists with Mao, very, very small.
Now, these are all bad examples.
So, you know, bad ideas start small too.
But we also have the good.
You know, our founders were a small group of, boy, were they smart.
You know, now, not smart enough to create the perfect system because that can't be created.
But boy, what they did create was amazing and shook the entire world.
And in my mind, whether you're religious or not, nothing compares to Christianity.
You know, and Jesus didn't say, give me 12 million people or 12,000 people.
He said, 12, give me 12.
And one would betray him.
So good begins with a tiny, tiny, but committed group of people, you know, just as the bad ideas do.
So we live in a world where it's a battle between good and bad ideas.
And we may be in the minority today, but who knows in 100 years what the world looks like.
You know, when Dr. Paul started, the group of people that believed in the ideas that he's talking about was much, much smaller than it is today.
And today we have the internet and we have, you know, we have tools that were never available before to reach so many people.
So we all have a mouth and we all have keyboards and a phone and a computer screen.
We have to use it.
And our small group may someday surprise the world.
Very good.
I'm going to mention a couple points on the reason why I think we shouldn't give up.
We should keep plugging away, but be realistic because we know what it's been like for thousands of years and what the conditions are among human beings that there are times that seem to continue, that there are conflicts.
Why We Shouldn't Steal00:04:09
But there are also times when you see spurts, tremendous positive spurts of the concept of liberty.
Certainly the Enlightenment, along with our revolution in this country and our Constitution, was very, very positive.
So with all these problems I described, I think that we only should hone in on a couple principles that would take care of this.
You know, the one that libertarians share and many others do, because it's part of religious belief for people, that you give up the issue of aggression.
You don't decide, well, if you have an argument in Congress, what you have to do is see who's the most aggressive and gets knocked out first.
You can't use aggression to reorient the whole society.
And that's what we see all the time.
Just think of the law breaking that goes on.
Right now, most of it is not even being punished at all.
So if people should, on principle, give up the idea of aggression.
The non-aggression principle would go a long way.
And if everybody followed it, there'd be a lot more peace and a lot more prosperity.
But the other little thing comes from Sebastian.
Bastia said that you and I, and we Understand more likely, I think less so today than 10 years ago.
But most people understand that we shouldn't and don't steal from our neighbors just because they have three cars and we have one and we have a right to take it.
No, most people still believe on it.
And there is some outrage because what we're seeing today is the breakdown of law and order and just the stealing.
But we have to, that should not be that difficult.
But the bigger problem is it's bigger than the individuals who break their rules by going and robbing from their neighbor.
It's getting the government to do it.
That's where the real crime is.
You say, well, I can't steal from my neighbor.
He has more than I have, but I have a right to it.
I have a need, I have a demand, and I have things to do.
So the individual, you know, still thinks that.
But if you come to the point where I shouldn't do that, it's very comfortable.
And they've done this throughout history.
But in our country for 100 years, we say, yes, we want the redistribution of wealth, but we have to get that small group of people to grab hold of the universities and teach them that morally that's what you have to do.
You have to go and show that morally the government is different.
They can take what they want and regulate what they want.
They can exert aggression and they can Mickey Mouse around with the justice system, whatever they want, because they are the government.
That has to change.
Governments can't do anything more than you as an individual can do.
You can't steal, you can't kill, and we shouldn't allow our governments to get away with doing it either.
So I think the other major principle that makes this thing work is that the argument now is big on rights.
How do you have a right?
Well, the big difference for me and my understanding is we have too much collectivism, too many groups, this group, this group, this group.
You're discriminating against that group, that group.
I don't like that at all.
Individuals have rights.
And it should be that because they belong in a group, they never can get a benefit and they can't get a punishment.
They can't have abuse.
And right now, everything is done in groups.
And it sort of annoys me on election night.
How did so-and-so group vote?
Well, I think individuals vote.
And I understand the politics of saying, putting people in group and thinking about it.
But no, everything should be individual rights.
There is no such thing in a free society as collective rights.
And I would like to go ahead and close today by thanking all our people for tuning in to the Liberty Report.