Does Blake Masters Have The 'Right Stuff' For Senate? With Guest...Blake Masters!
Businessman Blake Masters has run an underdog race for the US Senate against former astronaut Mark Kelly. He has openly embraced the free market, foreign policy restraint...and Donald Trump. As Masters gains on the establishment-favored Kelly, the Arizona Senate race may be bellwether for what to expect in the midterms just weeks away.
Follow Blake at https://www.blakemasters.com/
Get your tickets to the RPI Conference: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/shut-up-cancel-culture-and-the-war-on-speech-tickets-421629353747
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host, Daniel.
Good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Very good.
Exciting.
We have an interesting guest today.
So we don't have to work too hard, huh?
Because I understand that he will do the talking if we just allow him.
He knows all about this politics thing.
Exactly.
And I think most people in the audience that are viewing will know the name.
And he's running for the Senate in Arizona.
And his name is Blake Masters.
Blake, welcome to our program today.
Thank you so much.
It's great to be here with you.
Very good.
Now, Blake grew up in Tucson.
I understand he played a little bit of basketball, so I'm not going to compete with him there.
And he's been to school.
He went to Stanford, so I guess he's Stanford.
That's a challenge, isn't it?
That's a rival to my bears.
Yeah, well, and he's also been involved in finances, and I understand he understands that.
So I'll tell you, Blake, I guess if we can just get you into the Senate, you'll probably have the budget balanced in no time.
And that, well, we just need to find people whose goal that might be, but we're pretty realistic about how locked in we are into a system of government that has been bipartisan for a long time and spending continues.
But Blake, you've been on the campaign trail.
How long have you actually been active campaigning for this seat?
Since July of last year.
So it's been over a year.
And you were just asking me before the show started, was I having fun?
I am having fun.
You know, we've been at it for a long time, but just getting to meet people and hear their stories, right?
And it's frustrating, of course, because things aren't going so well under Joe Biden and his administration.
We'll talk about that.
But campaigning has been an absolute honor, and I think we're going to close it out in two weeks with a victory.
Oh, that's very, very good.
You know, our program, sometimes when we're reporting all the news, whether it's COVID or useless wars, you know, it's all negative, but we always find a positive thing to say about it.
And that's why I've always advised, if I happen to get a crowd of people out, I tell them, you know, this is serious business, and we have problems to face, but you've got to have fun doing it or life gets too short.
And I'm glad to hear you're having fun, but it's going to be a lot more fun.
Let me tell you, I've been on the losing end and the winning end.
I'll tell you what, it's a lot more fun winning.
So we're really rooting for you.
But, you know, talking about a little bit of fun, I saw something this morning in the news.
I'm just going to mention it, and then you might even have a comment about it.
This was on Zero Hedge, an area where we get a lot of information.
Why Inflation Won't Go Away00:14:31
And the title is, Pelosi Admits Democrats Need to Change the Subject from Inflation.
Wow, that is startling.
I wonder who told her about this.
But I think the neat part really comes later on when she explains this.
Why would you do this?
She says, well, the world is engulfed with inflation, and we can't do much about it, so it doesn't exist and all that stuff.
And then she concludes her statement, the fight is not about inflation.
Oh, well, that's for sure.
They're going to lose the election.
But she adds, it's all about the cost of living.
So I thought, well, her economics seems to be a little bit confused.
It's really funny, but it's also sad, right?
Because the people in charge, they have, well, it's either this.
They have no idea what's going on, or they know perfectly well what's going on, but they don't care, right?
And it's this age-old question.
Are they incompetent or, and I do think they're incompetent, is it worse than that?
Are they also malevolent?
My opponent, Mark Kelly's official explanation for inflation is, well, you see what happens is all the greedy businessmen get together and they decide to raise prices at the same time.
They're price gouging.
It's their fault.
It's the fault of capitalism.
And I'm like, he either doesn't actually understand anything about capitalism or how markets work.
And that might be it.
But you know what?
I actually think they are a little bit more clever than that.
I think he just doesn't care.
He knows perfectly well that this inflation was caused by surrendering our energy independence, right?
By making us dependent on expensive energy abroad.
And also, mainly, the money printing.
The people in charge have printed and spent six or seven trillion dollars in the last 21 months.
Did these geniuses really not expect inflation when the government prints a trillion dollars?
Normal people understand very well that makes every dollar in your wallet worth less and less.
So they're either lying to us or they're completely incompetent.
Or you know what I think it is?
I think it's both.
But I'm not surprised Nancy Pelosi doesn't want to talk about inflation because she caused it.
Joe Biden caused it.
Mark Kelly caused it.
I think the American people are sick and tired of it.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned the monetary part of the inflation because most people don't and most Republicans don't worry about it either.
And the Federal Reserve seems to get a little bit of a pass with conservatives and liberals.
But you mentioned the spending and they're running it up and what do they do?
They print money and they lose the value.
But it seems so simple and yet it is a void.
But they hear Nancy Pelosi, oh, it's the cost of living.
And then they blame it on the businessman.
So that's a system to me it's a reflection of bad economic policy.
And I want to just ask you one question about that on economics.
You've been through college and graduate school and all these things and you've been in politics and you've been in business and all.
Do you feel like when you had your official education, the formal education, that they lacked in teaching you about finance and value of money and spending and what the true cause of inflation is?
Oh, 100%.
No, I didn't learn any of that in school.
In fact, in school at Stanford, you know, they teach you basically the opposite.
They try to confuse you.
But honestly, it was two influences in my life.
One was my father.
You know, he was a good pro, pro-capitalist entrepreneur, sort of Ronald Reagan, you know, Republican.
But then my father and I each discovered your work at the same time.
And my dad still has the Ron Paul 2008, Ron Paul, 2012 yard signs in his garage.
But it was me walking around the Stanford campus with your books, right, with M the Fed or with Murray Rothbard or von Mises.
That was my antidote to the progressive and liberal education that I was receiving.
And so I'd take these books to class and fight with my professors about them.
No, maybe inflation is caused when you print trillions of dollars and inject that currency into the system.
That's going to make prices rise.
And they're like, no, inflation has nothing to do.
And so thank you for providing me the antidote.
I wouldn't be here without you and that work.
I don't think that's great.
Well, Blake, you know, this wasn't supposed to be this way.
You were supposed to get run over by the astronaut.
And it turns out, and we were both talking off camera about this politico article that really brings to the point that this is a serious race.
And you are within a couple of points, give or take, of a real shocker.
Give us your take of how things are going on the campaign trail.
And why do you think all of a sudden you're coming from behind and you're within breathing space of Mark Kelly?
Well, we're surging.
That's undeniable.
We've got the momentum.
You know, I think this race is neck and neck.
Right now, I think it's a jump ball, and people have already started voting, of course.
But I'm the underdog, and we're going to win.
Both those two things are true.
And it's true we're being outspent by a massive amount of money.
I think Mark Kelly and the Democrats have spent 80 or 90 million dollars, all told, attacking me and trying to lie about him and boost him up.
But that's just the thing.
They have to lie.
Mark Kelly pretends to be a moderate, pretends to be a middle-of-the-road kind of guy.
He's voting in the U.S. Senate to the left of Bernie Sanders.
This guy is a rubber stamp for any spending bill that Joe Biden wants to pass.
And so then he comes back home to Arizona and lies about it.
People don't like that, right?
And when people look around and they ask themselves this question, am I better off now than I was three years ago?
The answer is almost invariably no.
We've got a wide open southern border.
Fentanyl is just flowing through and killing our kids.
You've got double-digit inflation.
Did you know in the greater Phoenix Metro, we are suffering from literally the worst inflation in the country.
Technically, 13%.
I suspect if you measure it properly, it's more like 18 to 20%, right?
Violent crime is going up.
Nothing is going well.
And people look at this Joe Biden administration.
They know that Biden has failed.
Well, when we get the message out that Mark Kelly's not who he says he is, right?
He's this guy that's been rubber stamping this failed agenda.
Surprise, surprise.
They want to vote for a change.
Yeah, you know, what's interesting, Blake, is that you were running explicitly as a Trump-friendly candidate.
And I looked through your campaign website.
There's a ton of pictures of you with President Trump.
Now, that's not supposed to be a good idea, right?
That's supposed to be anathema.
That's supposed to get you sidelined.
Tell us a little bit about your strategy of openly embracing Trump.
And do you think that is partially responsible?
By the way, I have to say before you answer, the thing that I liked best when I looked at your Wikipedia page is that you got in trouble for an article on LewRockwell.com.
I don't think there's anyone we've ever talked to, except for a senator from Kentucky, who's probably read LewRockwell.com.
But anyway, the Trump question, running explicitly as an ally of President Trump.
You know, I remind people every day, you were much better off three years ago than you were now.
And it's because Biden is a horrible president, and Trump was a pretty darn good president, right?
He was a great foreign policy president.
He drew down these endless wars.
He was fighting with the blob, right?
The establishment foreign policy consensus.
He got median wages to rise again, right?
He cut so many government regulations that were really just hamstringing American business.
And of course, we were energy independent at the tail end of President Trump's administration.
So you can point to all these successes.
I understand that he went to war with the media every day and the mainstream media that lies to people.
They've ginned up a lot of outrage.
So some people don't like Trump's style or they don't like his tweets.
His governance was the best we've seen in a long time.
He upset the establishment, right?
He upset their establishment apple cart.
And so I don't believe in running a certain way in the primary and then shifting gears and running a different way in the general election.
My message to the people of Arizona is, hey, this is who I am.
This is what I bring to the table.
Look how badly Mark Kelly and Joe Biden are failing.
And wouldn't it be nice to have the economy, to have the foreign policy that we had three years ago?
Your streets were safe.
Your kids had better schools three years ago.
Now look at how far and fast everything has just been engulfed in flames.
And so, no, I'm going to call it like I see it, right?
Some people say this is controversial.
And I believe in being bold in the service of a very common sense agenda.
I will boldly defend the Bill of Rights while Mark Kelly pretends to be a moderate and slashes away at our constitutional rights.
So I am who I am, and I think the people of Arizona are waking up.
They're liking what they see because they don't like what they see from Biden and Mark Kelly.
Very good.
You mentioned about Ukraine.
It sounds like you're not super supportive of what's going on over there and a bit critical.
And I want to follow up on that because there's one bill that goes through the House and the Senate, and that's the military appropriation.
It's very, very bipartisan.
When I first went to Congress, if six people challenged anything in there, it would be a lot of people doing it.
It's changing now.
The attitude is changing.
But how do you suppose that you will be handling that?
Because the bill comes, it doesn't come and say, okay, we're going to give $67 billion to Ukraine.
There's all kinds of bills going on.
They're packaged in there.
And it's very, very bipartisan.
And there's a strong power in the Senate, you know, to put pressure on the members to go along with this.
So the bipartisanship, I think you'll find is very strong in Washington.
They do quite well.
They figure this out.
And you have to have a military bill.
So I'm just sort of trying to get your feel because this to me is very important to the country, to the financing, and why we don't seem to get hold of the budget.
Well, totally.
And that's how everything works, right?
They just put these horrible pork-laden bills.
I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff in that military bill.
And then if they want to add $40 or $50 billion for Ukraine, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
I think that actually is increasing the chances of nuclear war at this point, right?
And so I need to use all the leverage that I have.
And this is something to get that bad stuff out.
And this is something that I really respect your son for doing, quite frankly.
I think he stands on principle.
A lot of people in there, as you know, do not.
And he's really willing to use some of those parliamentary tactics and all the leverage he can to really get the bad stuff out.
I remember recently, right, when Senator Paul couldn't block the $40 billion.
There was too much bipartisan support, that $40 billion bill to the Ukraine.
But he really stood up and said, no, let's at least, hey, if this is going to happen, let's at least assign an inspector general, right?
So that we can get a, can we get a spreadsheet of like where this money's going so we can evaluate?
Is this a good idea?
Was this a bad idea?
And look at that bipartisan consent.
I don't even think that works, but it was a great maneuver because so many people in the public got educated.
They saw, hey, look at this foreign bipartisan consent, foreign policy consensus that doesn't even want to track how we're spending this money in the Ukraine.
And things like that, I look forward to joining forces with them.
Yeah, you've got the IRS breathing down your neck if you're off by $3 on your return.
But hey, $40 billion, just take it, enjoy it.
Sure, they'll spend it wisely.
Right.
Yeah, that's not true.
Well, I like this on your website.
You said you want to protect us from the stupidities of the military-industrial complex.
And that's a great point.
You know, as Dr. Paul has always said, we don't have a defense budget.
We have a military budget.
It's a budget for militarism.
It's a budget for the global overseas empire that doesn't protect us whatsoever.
As you rightly point out, our borders are not protected whatsoever.
And meanwhile, we're spending $40 billion to protect Ukraine's borders.
Now, regardless of how we feel about what's happening in Ukraine, that's simply a fact.
But I don't want this to become a love fest, Blake.
And as much as I respect you, I think it's good to change.
Our late good friend Walter Jones changed his mind about war and was very vocal about it.
But I'm going to challenge you a little bit, if you don't mind.
in March, you appeared on a tweet to be in favor of sending weapons to Ukraine, of sanctioning Russia.
Do you see things differently now?
And obviously the media, as you know, tells one side of the story.
But do you see now with some months having passed, do you see things a bit differently over there?
Well, I actually don't think I said that we should send weapons.
Okay.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong.
What I think I did in September, early March, I thought sending humanitarian food, fuel, medicine, I think that can make sense.
You can have a debate about that, by the way.
I understand reasonable people can disagree.
But I've drawn the line at weapons.
I don't think we should be engaging in a proxy war in Ukraine.
I do feel that even more strongly now, right?
Because now you've got Biden sleepwalking us into something closer and closer to nuclear war, right?
But I remember, no, there were many Republicans that were saying, sell them javelin missiles, send them, you know, F-14.
I don't think we should be doing that.
And I'm pretty sure I didn't think we should be doing that in March.
I've been a decades-long skeptic of U.S. over-intervention, right?
Look, I want a lethal military.
And I know you guys do too.
We need a serious military for defense purposes.
But, you know, I was coming of age right in that Iraq war.
And, look, they either lied to us about the intelligence or the intelligence was just wrong.
And we got into the war that turns out not to have made a lot of sense, right?
And what a shame that was.
Afghanistan.
You know, I think it made sense probably to go in in 2001, of course, and kill some terrorists.
But it was a 20-year war.
There was mission creep.
We started to be more concerned about nation building and exporting democracy and are the young ladies in Afghanistan getting properly educated.
Economic Consequences of Interventionism00:05:48
That's not the job of the military, of course.
And you looked over at Libya.
Hillary Clinton destroyed it.
It was way worse now and more of a breeding ground for terrorism than it was even under Gaddafi, who, of course, is a horrible dictator.
But our job is to not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy to pull out that 100-years old quote.
Our job is to make sure that the military is ready to protect lethal force in defense of America and our security interests.
And that's not what I see this foreign bipartisan policy consensus doing in Ukraine.
I just really worry that they're inching us closer and closer to nuclear war, which is not something we had to worry about three years ago, by the way.
It's the difference between a successful president and this failed one.
And to be fair, you did say we should keep our own military out of this in that tweet.
I just wanted to push a little bit.
You know, there's a great old meme.
I'm going to give it back to Dr. Paul, but you remind me of this great meme.
We spent 20 years and several trillion dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
That's our fault.
We have more territory now.
The Taliban has more territory now than they did in 2001.
It's crazy.
Well, Boy, that's the reason we draw sharp lines pretty early on, and that is non-intervention.
So we don't have a whole lot of negotiation about, oh, we'll cut out here and cut out here.
No, we want to stay out of the affairs of other nations.
It's in the Constitution, and that's what the founders advise.
But one example of the incrementalism getting involved, one is the funding and designing, designating how it should be sent, and that sort of thing.
But we use now recently, and the Republicans as well as the Democrats, they say, we work closely.
Daniel, of course, worked with me in the congressional office.
We work closely with the other side whenever we could find it.
If you knew there was a Republican president, we could find progressive Democrats that would be willing to look at some of these military extravagance then.
But one thing that some people who would be progressive and against war and would never vote for war, you know, one thing that they would cave into, and a lot of people have caved into it.
And I want you to look at this in an economic way as much as a foreign policy way.
Now we have become careless in putting on sanctions.
Sanctions all the time.
Sometimes they have so many sanctions on them, and then they do something to us.
We'll put another sanction on them, that kind of stuff.
And then on tariffs, you know, I know that things have changed in the last 10 years or so that the American people, the Republicans and Democrats, the conservatives and liberal economists, have all of a sudden accepted the stuff of tariffs and protectionism and sanctions.
And I just can't see because I say that if you put a strict sanction on somebody, it's a blockade.
And if they did it, the us would be at war with them.
So what's your opinion about these sanctions?
Do you think they're overused or do you think they're just unwisely used?
I think both.
You know, I think sanctions can make sense.
But hey, look, they are, like you said, they are economic war.
It's economic warfare, right?
So if you need to do that, because that's where you are geopolitically, hey, have no illusions that that's what you're doing, right?
I think one huge problem with the sanctions that the Biden administration put on Russia was they unloaded everything right at the beginning, right?
And they're threatening to take Russia off the SWIFT system that just kind of excommunicate Russia from the world.
And like, look, I think what Putin did to Ukraine is horrible, right?
And I've condemned that.
But if you push Russia out of the Western world completely, and there's no ability to sort of end this war, right?
Everybody should want a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia imminently.
But if you just push them over into the arms of communist China, that's not good for the long-term security interests of the United States.
Plus, I think those sanctions mostly backfired.
The ruble's stronger now than it was pre-invasion, right?
And so I don't think the Biden administration is competent at this.
I don't think they understood that they were wielding these tools of economic warfare.
I think it backfired.
Basically, I think they're massively incompetent and they don't know what they're doing.
So I think sanctions should rarely be used, right?
Only in the most serious situations.
Same with tariffs.
I mean, tariffs, look, I grew up steeped in this free market economic theory, and that's the default, right?
I believe in free trade.
I believe in fair trade.
And to a first approximation, hey, no tariffs anywhere except maybe on communist China, right?
Because there's no such thing as free trade with China if you've got a communist dictatorship that basically forbids private enterprise.
Those are state-owned enterprises.
They're dumping steel.
They're putting their thumb on the scale.
But should we have tariffs on anything coming from Vietnam?
No, obviously not, right?
That's a capitalist wonder.
And we want to be realizing the benefits of trade with countries who are actually going to be liberal and free.
Yeah, it's fascinating, all of the sanctions on Russia, and they're actually in much better shape than Europe, which is going to be freezing this winter.
Talk about, as Victor Orban of Hungary said, we shot ourselves in the lungs and now we're gasping for air.
But yeah, obviously we hate war.
War is terrible.
But the Ukraine situation, I don't need to tell you, is a poster child for why interventionism is wrong.
If we hadn't gone in in 2014 and overthrown the government and put in our own, you know, our own puppet in place, we probably would not be having this war right now.
Ukraine wouldn't have been in NATO.
They wouldn't have been trying to get in NATO.
And there wouldn't have been this sense of that there's an existential threat to Russia.
So rightly or wrongly, that's the situation.
So it just shows the unintended consequences of interventionism.
They can come years down the road.
Corporations and Bailouts00:09:32
As Dr. Paul always says, we overthrew Iran in 1953, and that's still coming back to haunt us.
So non-interventionism solves pretty much every problem.
But I wanted to ask you one thing, Blake, and that is something fascinating that Dr. Paul and I were talking about before the show.
You know, we're all about coalitions.
The Ron Paul Institute is all about coalitions.
We have Dennis Kucinich on our board.
We have conservatives like Judge Napolitano on the board, and John Duncan, the former representative conservative from Tennessee on our board.
It's all about coalitions.
And we were actually quite happy to see that Tulsi Gabbard is going to campaign with you in Arizona.
I'm sure you've been watching this interesting political transformation of Tulsi, and we're big fans of hers.
What do you make of it?
I think it's fascinating.
And I, of course, have a lot of respect for the Congresswoman.
She's, you know, she was one of the few, I guess she's not a Democrat anymore, but when she was and she ran for president, she was one of the few voices of reason in that party against excessive military intervention, right?
Against the endless sort of warmongering.
And I think that took a lot of guts.
And then it especially took a lot of guts for her recently to just defect from the Democratic Party and say, I'm done, right?
And she said, I haven't changed, but this party run by these militant left-wing activists, they really are totalitarians.
She said, they've just gone crazy and crazier.
And the wokeness and the censorship, the authoritarianism, she's like, I'm done with it.
I'm done with it.
And so she's helping Republicans who, hey, we don't agree with her on everything.
She doesn't agree with me on everything.
But there's enough common ground.
There's enough respect for the Bill of Rights and our constitutional republic and basic freedom, basic sanity that she defected from her political party and came over and is helping us.
I find that a remarkable profile and courage.
And so I'm grateful for her help.
Absolutely.
Yes.
You know, we started our program talking about inflation and studying the wisdom of Nancy Pelosi, which we didn't get very far.
So I'm still looking for it.
But, you know, and one of the things, Blake, that you mentioned is, yes, you run into this problem all the time, and they come back and they blame the corporations for raising their prices too much without realizing, you know, it's the dollar going down.
So that's it.
But there's a big thing going on there that I think, if we don't recognize it and admit to it, is the monetary system is designed to help the wealthy, the people who have access to the credit.
They get it first, and by the time it gets to the middle class, they corrupt the middle class and they go broke.
And this is a problem that is legitimate.
And if it's not fully explained, then we say, oh, yeah, the corporations are doing pretty well.
And they get bailouts.
We don't even know how much bailouts they get when you start looking at the XM Bank.
They get bailouts there all the time.
It subsidizes their exports.
But what about when there's a crisis, whether it's COVID or whatever, the distribution of these funds are totally secret.
So I don't see how we can get a handle of one of the basic things going on here unless we say that we need to know a lot more about this Federal Reserve because it's, in a way, for me, it's an immoral, corrupt, unconstitutional system that does serve the very wealthy.
And a lot of people right now see the difference.
If you look at the statistics, half of the people in this country right now are living in poverty.
Their wages below poverty.
But for us to blow it off and say, ah, it's not the corporations, then I think we're careful.
So I think we have to at least acknowledge that.
Chris?
Blake?
Oh, I do too.
I mean, you couldn't be more right.
And indeed, it was 20 years ago.
You didn't know it, but you taught me that.
I remember as a high school student reading for the first time about how the Fed works and open market operations.
And here's how they just, here's how they just print money out of thin air.
And it's like, well, wait, isn't that unfair?
Because the government and their allies, they get to spend the money first, and that just causes inflation, a silent tax on everybody else, on everybody in the working class and middle class.
And yeah, it's unfair, but it blew my mind that, hey, that's the way our system works.
It's not honest.
And surprise, surprise, it doesn't work.
And then you get someone in there who really doesn't understand it, like Joe Biden and his enabling lieutenants like Mark Kelly.
They run the printing presses.
They create this inflation.
Then they blame capitalism and use it as a pretext to grab even more power to shore up their totalitarian control.
So the whole system doesn't work.
I want to get in there and do as much as any one person can to really get accountability, right?
To get oversight.
How do we get?
Can we audit the Fed?
I think that'd be great.
I think we should audit every single department.
But let's start with that quasi-private, quasi-public money printing institution.
And there's a reason why the establishment fights so hard against politicians that try to do that, as you know all too well.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm just going to, my final comment, Blake, I'm going to confess I do have a bit of a conflict of interest because with me, Mark Kelly is personal.
My son is an aerospace engineer.
Once, when he was a bright-eyed young fellow interested in airplanes and space, we went to an embassy reception.
I brought him along.
And Mark Kelly was there, and a Russian astronaut was there.
And Mark Kelly was very grouchy and very not nice to my son.
So I've never forgotten that.
That's really not the thing to do for a young kid that looks up to astronauts.
So anyway, it's personal.
So I want to be the first person to call you Senator Masters.
Good luck.
It was great speaking with you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And Blake, we're optimistic for you.
The numbers are shifting, and you're a good candidate.
And you want to audit the Fed.
What more can we ask for?
And no, it's very good.
So, and I think there will be probably a big sweep here that will help.
And I'm a realist, even though I'm a purist on what I believe in.
I'm a realist in knowing what we can do.
But I think people who say that they can target things, well, you can't have 100%.
I'm going to target my goals at 60%.
But you've conceded 100% of the principle.
So that's why I stick to 100% of the principle with a realization that as long as you move in that direction, matter of fact, I think we can do this on the budget.
There are some programs that I just don't endorse, but I would vote for them.
You know, the thing of it is that in a libertarian society, you don't have the government taking care of every problem, every flood that occurs, and all the bailouts and everything.
But if it's obvious that the people are so locked into it and dependent on it, I say fund it, but pay for it by docking money going to Ukraine and a few other places because there's places you can dock.
I think if there was an emergency, a real emergency, and the budget was slashed by 25%, we'd be okay if we had a little bit of freedom left.
But the whole thing is, it still happens.
We will get cut.
The debt will be liquidated, and that's what happens.
But we're in the middle of this now because it isn't because we will fail to pay the bills.
It will be that we will, as a government, especially, pay the bills with junk money.
So it's still the liquidation, and that's what we face.
So, long term, do you have any quick suggestions on your optimism about how we're going to get out of this mess?
And then also, if you would like, as you close, put out your website so if anybody that's viewing us today can go to your website.
Yeah, thank you.
I'll start with that.
Just go to blakemasters.com if you want to get involved in helping this race.
This is an exciting time.
We've caught Mark Kelly.
Pretty soon we're going to pass him and never look back.
Look, I believe in the balanced budget amendment, right?
Now, I'm also a realist.
I don't think we have the votes for that anytime soon, but it is common sense, and I will introduce it every year and fight for it until we get it.
The government should not be able to spend more than it takes in, right?
And this money printing ability, I think, is really tricky because a lot of people think the government is mostly financed through direct taxation.
But it's not, of course.
They always have this avenue, this side route of being able to just print apparently unlimited arbitrary amounts of money.
And it's dishonest, it causes inflation, and it's stealing from the American people.
So I'm going to do all I can to put a stop to that.
I liked what you said, though.
As long as we're moving in the right direction, right?
The problem is too many Republicans just want to play defense and we just play defense.
And then progressivism wins over time.
Authoritarianism wins over time because we surrender the principle and they chip away at our freedom.
No, I want to play offense.
We believe in the Constitution.
We believe in the Bill of Rights.
We believe in freedom.
And here's the agenda.
Here's what we're going to do.
And if the left wants to try to slow that down, okay, hey, that's politics.
But as long as we are gaining on the field and not losing ground, then we're saving this country.
And that's why I set out to do this.
So here we go.
And thank you so much for having me on.
It's a real honor to speak with you.
Very good, Blake.
And thank you for being with us today.
I'm sure our viewers have enjoyed the program.
And I do want to express my appreciation to all our viewers for tuning in today.