Remember The "CARES" Act? That was when the federal government spent trillions (that it didn't have) to hand out for the lockdowns (that should never have happened). When the Fed prints trillions of dollars, prices skyrocket. When prices skyrocket, shoplifting increases as well. We get rising crime and a lower standard of living because the government "CARES"? The federal government and Federal Reserve create problems and then compound them! Limited government and sound money can get us out of this predicament.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
We're going to talk about our usual things, gold, government spending too much money, and why the government continues to mess things up when they shouldn't be doing these kind of things.
So later on, you're going to go over in the details about who's doing all the shoplifting.
Does government do that?
Or is it somebody else?
But anyway, it's in a bull market, shoplifting.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that.
But before we do, I wanted to mention a few things about the gold market.
This week it was interesting because gold prices jumped around.
There was one day it went down sharply, but we had a CPI report that showed the CPI went up a little bit, more than expected, but the markets went nuts.
You know, wow, stocks dropped.
And all of a sudden you say, well, CPI is going up.
The logic is pretty too much money, and that's what you'd expect.
And there's still a lot of debt.
So that would make sense.
Gold would probably do pretty good.
But no, it had a very bad day.
And the reason they do this is they don't see, some of the investors don't see it long term.
They see it short term.
And they look at what's going to happen the next hour in the marketplaces or the next day or two.
But that isn't the real test.
The test is going to be longer term.
But here CPI goes up.
The logic is gold is probably going to go up too, but it goes down and it will adjust.
And there's a subjective theory of value and finding prices for things.
And it explains what's going on.
But I was a little surprised when the gold went down sharply on that day.
And some people say, hey, that gold isn't a very good haven.
Prices are going up and the gold went down.
But that'll work its way out.
Gold's pretty smart on the long term.
Because when I first started looking at this, it was before 1971.
And we weren't even allowed to own gold.
And gold was $35 an ounce.
And now it's $2,000 an ounce.
And I suspect it's still going to go up a lot more.
And that is the reason I work closely with a partner in this business.
And that's Birch Gold Group, because they help people invest in gold.
And I want to put a number out there in case you want to get more information from Birch Gold.
And that is you text Ron, 98-9898, and you'll be able to get some information on how you can invest in gold.
And that is useful.
And the information, even if you haven't invested in gold, it might be good to just get the information.
Some people say, oh, no, it went down when it should have been going up.
And it's too leery.
But I tell you what, the long term makes a big difference.
When the Fed took over, when they took over the monetary system, gold was $20 an ounce.
And now we have 98 plus percent where we destroyed the value of the gold dollar.
It's still around.
They play the games.
People don't trust the government.
A lot of people now don't trust the money.
This is the reason you should pay attention to gold and silver for that matter.
So if you want to get in touch with Birch Gold Group, you text Ron 989898.
They'll send you materials, and there's no charge for that, because I think it would be worthwhile.
It can't hurt you to have more information about the investment in gold because it is the one thing long term that has always followed a pattern that is predictable, but not on a daily basis or a weekly basis.
It does go up and down a lot.
But long term, though, the way they're printing, the symbol that I watch for, the statistic, what tells me what they're going to do in the future is the debt.
And the debt is humongous.
It's huge.
And they're not going to, they can't tax the people.
That'd annoy the voters.
We can't do that.
And now, right now, it's reported that the household debt for Americans is $70.5 trillion.
And the consumers and the household people, they don't have much money.
And there's no sign that that's going to stop.
So if you just want one, it's going to happen on a daily basis.
If you watch it for a month or two and you say, hey, he's wrong.
The spending is going down.
They balanced the budget.
The debt is shrinking.
Well, you call me and tell me about that.
No, that's not going to happen.
They're so locked in.
It's an addiction to doing what they're doing.
Because on the short run, a lot of people would be hurt if they didn't get all that printed money and artificially low interest rates.
So they have a strong lobbying force there.
And the one thing is it's designed to make sure that they can finance the military-industrial complex.
That's what's real important for the big guys because that's where a lot of the money goes.
But eventually, great empires always end with the inability to spread themselves too thinly around the world and destroy the value of the money.
Well, we've destroyed a lot of the value of the money already, and there's no sign that's going to reverse.
So this is the reason we do talk a lot about gold.
We talk a lot about spending.
We do talk a lot about taxes.
For instance, inflation is nothing more than a tax because it's the value of the dollar.
If they can print so much money that the dollar goes down 50% in value, they stole 50% of your income, of the value of the dollar.
Inflation's Evil Impact00:02:28
Now, today, what we want to talk a little bit about is the fact that what other activity do people do under these circumstances?
Well, we've seen it happen.
It's just unbelievable.
It was involved with COVID and all these things, the shoplifters going in and stealing thousands and thousands of dollars worth of goods.
And it's amazing.
Even if they get arrested and kill or hurt somebody, they're frequently out on the street again.
So this is not going to last because the American people won't put up with it.
But that is what is happening.
But we want to compare, and Chris looked up a little bit of statistics on this about shoplifting because it isn't just a little bit.
There's a lot of shoplifters, and they say, well, the people are getting more evil.
Well, if you want to look for evil and destruction of money and inflation, you have to look to the government.
The people have responsibility because they play the game because everybody's on a receiving end and they don't quite understand that you have to quit spending if you want to get rid of the inflation.
You can't have the price controls and you certainly can't depend on the shoplifting because eventually people will rebel.
It's amazing, though, If a shoplifter is caught stealing from a store, which we see it on television all the time, they usually don't get arrested.
Even when they kill or hurt somebody, they can get arrested, but they're back out on the streets again.
So it's a terrible, terrible system.
So what's your opinion, Chris, about this shoplifting?
Have you ever seen anybody do that?
Fortunately, no, not in person.
But yeah, so our studio engineer will put up this graphic that we came across this week.
And it shows shoplifting cases in Los Angeles.
And you can see the dramatic rise recently.
And you can see, actually, that shoplifting was declining for several years.
Now, what happened to change that dynamic?
Well, that was during COVID.
And what happened during COVID?
Well, they locked everybody down.
And in order to help, you know, the people that they locked down, the government passed the CARES Act.
Now, many of us know that when they name something, it's always the exact opposite, because what happened is they printed trillions and trillions.
Trillion Dollar Problem00:15:39
I think it was like $6 trillion to pass out that the Fed had to monetize.
And that, of course, led to the skyrocketing prices that we are still dealing with today.
And skyrocketing prices leads to, even though everybody is responsible for their own actions, so the Fed doesn't make people shoplift, but what they do is they create an environment where shoplifting becomes attractive, where prices are so high that, especially if you're poor, now you have to decide, well, now I can't get anything.
Can I get caught?
You know, let me go try to steal.
And like Dr. Paul even said, in many places, it doesn't even matter if you get caught.
They'll let you steal whatever you want.
So the Fed sets the stage with the inflation that the government spends money that they don't have.
And here we are with skyrocketing prices and skyrocketing shoplifting to go on, you know, to complement it.
So it's a very bad situation.
Many people don't even understand why all this is happening.
Fortunately, we help to hope to shed, at least for our viewers, so they can better understand the situation.
You know, the statistics that come out from the financial markets where the investors are looking at it, should I buy gold or interest rates going up or down, this sort of thing.
There was a recent article on Zero Hedge.
It caught my attention because I think it's fascinating how sometimes they put a twist on an article or put the information out.
It's not so much that the information is incorrect, but what does it mean?
This one said, the propaganda wars began.
Illegal immigration will boost our U.S. GDP by $7 trillion.
Well, that means we should have more illegal immigration, right?
But when they go and look at it, the employment statistics are pretty good.
U.S. workers have lost 1.4 million jobs, but there were 3 million new jobs.
The whole thing is the U.S. workers lost the jobs, and the immigrants gained on the jobs.
That doesn't mean in a free market we wouldn't have immigrants and contributed to the GDP and all this.
And for the most part, over the centuries, immigrants have really built the country.
And there's something good.
If you have reasonably sound money and a reasonably free market economy, so numbers wouldn't be nearly as possible.
But that's not what's happening here because this just means that the money is being transferred.
And you think about when they have immigrants and then they move into a community and they then have to find a place to live and they might remove people from schools, from public places and hospitals, all over because there's too many immigrants.
But my understanding and how I try to explain that, I like to simplify it, is if you subsidize something, you're going to get more of it.
And we subsidize illegal immigration, and guess what?
We get more of it.
There's tremendous rewards from that.
And even then, they don't have enough money being given to them.
We give them billions of dollars.
That's why it contributes to this shoplifting.
And one big thing is, is shoplifting, you know, legally isn't considered such a big deal.
You know, that just has happened, but they don't, everybody that got caught shoplifting, you see it on TV, hundreds of people ransacking these stores.
But no, you could, there's some stores that actually had employees trying to stop the people who are robbing the store, and they got into trouble.
I mean, we have things turn on its head.
And yet, the statistics are very important, but we have to know what they're doing.
And the whole principle here of the shoplifting, it is related to the monetary system.
It's related to the decrease, cost of living, or the decrease of the dollar and the cost of living going up.
And people are just desperate.
So they get to the point, the desperation and the endorsement by the government.
The government does it all the time.
They're the ones that orchestrate all this.
So people, our condition, the government's a condition.
The bureaucrats certainly are conditioned.
They never say, you know, we have to quit this.
This is wrong.
No, they don't do that.
There's no sense of guilt by just printing money and people suffering from this.
And, yeah, we'll just pass it on.
What we need to do is just raise the wages.
Now, there was a candidate out in California.
She had the answer.
Well, yeah, of course they need more money because prices are up.
Not because we spent too much money on welfare and warfare, but the prices are going up.
So she wants to have a minimum wage of $50 an hour.
I can remember when it was $3 and $4, but the principle of the minimum wage is wrong.
But when it was $3 and $4, you know, it worked.
Then we go up to $5 and $6, and they've been working on it for a long time.
But eventually, though, it doesn't work.
Even the $50, it won't work because prices will go up faster than the printing of the money.
And the money doesn't come from work and effort.
It comes from robbing people.
And that's what the government is involved in.
So government is operating on an illegal, immoral system.
So that's why people who participate in it don't end up with any guilt about what's happening.
But it doesn't solve our problems because all we do is build this debt bubble bigger and bigger.
Right, Dr. Paul.
And I'm sure many people wonder, you know, this isn't very complex.
You know, we put up that chart and explain what's happening.
This isn't some algebraic equation that we're explaining.
This is very simple to understand.
Is it possible that the government doesn't know what they're doing, that the Fed doesn't know what they're doing?
Now, there are many that really don't know.
They have no economic sense whatsoever.
But there are those that do understand what they're doing, and they have their own motives.
Dr. Paul mentions often on our show how there are people that create chaos because that's where they believe they will thrive.
Lenin said that the best way to destroy a capitalist society is to just keep printing the money, destroy the money, and you'll destroy the capitalist society.
And he's right.
He was right.
So there are those people today who thrive and want to create chaos.
They want to create the destruction of the dollar, increases in crime, shoplifting.
Now, why would they want that?
Well, they believe that they could use that to their advantage.
If you want, let's say, a strong man to come in and say, I'm going to bring back law and order.
Now, normally, many people will not want a strong man.
They will absolutely be against it.
But when crime is going through the roof, when the dollar is worth less, when people are fighting over bread, they'll be more susceptible to, yes, bring in this law and order person and he'll straighten things out.
This is what happened in Germany.
Hitler arrived after hyperinflation.
That's not to say that that's what's in our future, but we should keep it in mind that that's, you know, what those people that lust after that power, what they are looking for to capitalize.
So it's a very bad situation not to understand money.
More and more people do understand it, thanks to Dr. Paul and what he has done, but we still have a long way to go.
Very good.
You know, the inflation is the printing of a lot of money.
Goods and services don't accommodate.
And so more money chasing these goods.
That's the simplistic explanation, but that's basically it.
It's a monetary problem.
And then they always have this patch up, works, you know, wage and price controls.
And then here comes a consequence that is illegal.
It makes it more illegal.
And all this is the shoplifting.
Well, you know, in a way, I guess if you can get away with it, that's sort of going to help your situation for a while.
But it won't last because you have to have production, and that doesn't produce anything that takes away from the production.
And it's an illusion if people think that helps, because people will say, well, I'm going to get it, like right recently, I think the Social Security sent $1,600 more per check for anybody who asks.
And yeah, for a week or two, that goes, but it just makes prices go up.
And guess who suffers the most?
It's the poor people, the middle-class people.
The wealthy don't have to pay that tax.
It's always the poor people.
But the poor people and the middle class get bamboozled into it, accepting it.
Well, I need help, so do this, give me this program and that program, and we need more money for schools and this sort of thing.
And they go along with it.
But on the long run, it doesn't solve the problem because the poor do get poorer and the rich get richer under these circumstances.
They have more billionaires now than ever before.
There's more financial bubbles around the world than ever before.
And it has to do with the massive monetary inflation that's been going on for the last 10 and 15 years.
And it looks like to sustain it, they have to keep increasing it.
If they even slow up, there'd be too much chaos.
That's what happens when they say, well, we've got to slow up.
And the Fed says we have to raise interest rates to solve our problem.
Well, all of a sudden, you know, the whole sentiment of the market shifts and they change their plans because it's illegal, it's immoral, it's unconstitutional, it doesn't solve the problem.
But people don't say, well, the thing we have to do is live within our means, and the prices would probably go down, which is true.
In a good free market, sound money, prices generally go down.
But people don't want to hear any of that.
This is a problem that we've had.
It's going to stay until we stop spending the money.
And I think the whole thing about spending the money is that Congress spends the money because they work in collusion.
Sometimes when I was there, they'd always argue the Fed was fighting with the Congress.
The Congress is spending the money and the Fed has to monetize it.
That's not true.
The people spend the money and the people who want the program get the programs and then they are sent to the Federal Reserve.
The Fed might monkey right and say, well, we have to tighten things up and change interest rates.
They don't do that.
That's just talk.
They accommodate.
Without the Fed, you would not have this steady, outlandish, steady growth of big government and inflation.
And shoplifting will not solve that problem.
Very good, Dr. Paul.
I will finish up by taking a broader view on a big lesson that all of us are going to have to learn at some point, and that's that power must be kept locally.
The reason being because you know who you're dealing with locally.
There's recourse locally when people get out of hand.
The further you get away, the less recourse you have.
I mean, do you feel like you have any control over what happens in Washington, D.C.?
I know I don't.
Or the Federal Reserve.
Absolutely not.
They don't really care what I think, and that's it.
And that also puts in their minds, hey, there's no recourse.
We can do whatever we want.
And they have that attitude.
And the further you get away now, let's go on the global scale.
There's these goofy globalists that want world government.
And look what happened with the World Health Organization during COVID.
It was all nonsense and lies on a global scale because there is no recourse.
If there's a world government in Brussels, what are you going to do about it?
Nothing.
So that's why they want world government.
They want no recourse from anybody.
But when you're talking about local, you may know your mayor.
I know my mayor goes to my gym.
He's responsible and the people are right there.
So that's what you need.
And the reason we also need that is because men are not angels.
We are susceptible to greed, to envy, to all the bad sins, to use religious terms.
So you can't have unlimited power.
You need to be kept in check.
So we need a big lesson in going from all these global Federal Reserves, all this nonsense, back down to real local government.
Very good.
You know, going back to the local government, I think it's a great idea because that's where it was supposed to be originally to a large degree.
And I still think that's worth talking about.
You know, one thing that they deceive the people on economics, because if you're for free markets and you're not for tariffs and restrictions on trade and manipulation of interest rates, all these things, then they say you're an isolationist.
But the truth is, the free market is very interventionist.
That is, people, you know, trade more, visit people more, and there's an intermingling that goes on.
So that is the wrong idea.
But that's what they like people because now, if you say you're a free market person, they think that, well, you're an isolationist, which is not true because the freer the market is the less mischief that goes on.
And you know, in a case that we're just talking about today, government should go back and they should be more local and local government.
So if you go all the way back, we have world government, we have the globalists, we have the UN and NATO and all these things well in place and doing a lousy job, but they still exist.
And they keep doing the same thing over the time.
But then you go down and then you have national government.
And our founders worked very hard to keep that very small in a special type of government.
And that's been lost now.
It's a universal central government that runs about everything.
And the intervention still comes.
So if you go down to the state level, then you go to the community level and you say, oh, that's anarchy.
A Lot of Government?00:01:56
We don't want anarchy.
But you know what?
Guess what?
If all your decisions and responsibilities are laid upon you and your efforts, that is a lot of government.
If you believe in that, you have to be responsible for everything you do.
And that's what people don't understand and they don't want to because they still believe that the world would fall apart if you didn't have socialist, fascist type of economies where the government would pass out the goods and make it all fair and equal.
It's failing now.
It's going to continue to fail.
That's why I advise people, a good way to start, if you want to go back in the other direction, take a look at the Constitution.
The Constitution is pretty good on this, on what kind of government we're supposed to have.
But right now, there's still people begging and pleading and demanding from government.
But also, we see more and more people joining us and saying, this is absolutely right.
Limited government.
We should have a system where merit and a meritocracy.
That's when people get promoted by what they can do and what they can offer, and not what the government decides that you can do and artificially line up all the redistribution, which is artificial and unfair.
So that's what is available to us.
And there's no reason why we can't do it.
And we're going to have a bigger chance because the system we have is failing.
And then we ought to be ready to get the message out.
People will say, well, it's such a mess.
What could we do?
Well, it's such a mess, it's going to get worse.
Maybe you could slow it down, and maybe there will be a chance to change it.
You have to change people's minds.
So it's a matter of changing people's mind that makes a difference.
And that's where I'm on optimist.
I do believe that if people are fully informed, they will finally realize that freedom is so much better than authoritarianism.