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March 29, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:18
Speeding Into Bankruptcy

Last week, we asked ‘What kind of country allows itself to be invaded?’ This week, we ask ‘What kind of country bankrupts itself?’ Why are we even forced to asked these questions? The role of government in the United States needs to be seriously reconsidered. Attempting to rule the world needs to be abandoned before it’s too late.

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Time Text
Total Debt Uncertainty 00:04:54
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today we have Chris Rossini as co-host.
Chris, welcome to the program.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Chris, today we're going to be talking about a lot of things we've talked about before, you know, what's going on in the economy and what to expect from the Congress.
And today we're going to talk a little bit specifically about the total debt.
But there's a lot of that in the media now.
And even the CBO say, maybe it's getting pretty high.
So when they start to admit it, you know, you better watch out.
But it's soaring and it's out of control.
And yet the marketplace and so many people who are lining up in Washington wanting more appropriations for their special project, they either are, their brain is numb or they think that if they don't mention it, they'll just get anything they want.
And if you look at that supplemental bill last week that was passed and everybody got what they asked for, except they cut out the money to protect our borders.
Everybody else got something, including this special interest, and there were a few earmarks in there that took care of some special interest.
But that is what's going on, and there are more and more people that are getting worried about.
And there's a lot of uncertainty about what's going on.
But, you know, last week along with this, the gold, the gold responded as well.
It went up sharply yesterday afternoon as the markets were closing.
And I think the futures markets are up $38 and they're not open today.
But gold is really getting involved in this.
And a lot of people will come and tell me, they say, well, it used to be way down.
It used to be $35 and $20, $100.
So this has to be, we have to be too late.
I don't want to get involved in buying gold.
I said, if you take that and follow that approach, you have to be a believer that the government is going to get their budget under control.
And, you know, less and less people, Americans, believe what the government tells us, and fewer people than ever believe that they're ever going to get control of the budget.
So if you say, well, it looks like gold's been going so high, you know, one time it was $20 an ounce, and a while after that, you know, it eventually went up to $200 by 1975.
It was $200 after the Bretton ⁇ Woods Agreement broke down.
So it went up from 20 to 200.
But guess what happened just recently this year?
It went over 2,000.
So it's because they get mixed up on numbers.
It was easier for them to just add a zero.
20, add a zero, 200, 2,000.
So the question is, could they ever add another zero on that?
And even when it was 20 and 100 and all that, I said, no, this just can't continue.
This was outrageous.
But that looks like nothing now because people have adapted.
And right now, for somebody to say, oh, it's going to double.
It's 2,000.
It's going to double again.
And I'll put a, not double, I'll put another zero on us 10 times and have it go to from 20,000 to from 2,000 to 20,000.
Well, it's possible unless we get our house in order.
And I don't believe that looks like it's in the near future.
And that's why we keep talking about gold.
That's why we partner with With the Birch Gold Company, because they offer some information on this if people are deciding that maybe they should pay more attention to gold.
And are there ways that you can invest in gold and buy gold or have substitutes or whatever compared to conventional investment?
There's still a lot of people who do that.
They just fall to the stock market and they say, why do we want to quit?
Stocks are going sky high too.
They're wonderful.
We're making a lot of money.
Well, there are reasons to believe that that is a bubble and that that won't last forever.
And in those times, gold sense this and they react.
And I think that's what Gold's doing this already.
So if you're interested in getting some information that might help you about gold from Birch Gold, all you have to do is look at the number on the screen.
And that is you text Ron 989898.
And they'll send you some materials.
They don't charge for the materials.
They get you to look at it and you can follow up if you think this is the time that you have to do something about trying to protect what's coming.
But like I said, if you believe that next month the budget's going to be balanced and we're going to get our house in order, you might be still arguing against gold.
Bridge the Deficit Gap 00:04:15
But I don't think we have very many people in our audience that would take that position.
I think they are concerned.
And of course, in that mix, one thing that I've always been concerned about is I work hard in trying to protect myself and my family and my constituents and all and learn and understand how monetary policy works.
But overall, I think there's another investment that we're all morally obligated to do once you discover what's really going on in Washington, and that is invest in the promotion of liberty.
Because all these problems could be solved if we would follow the instincts of liberty and the limitation of government and get the hands out of the cookie jar and start all over when it comes to monetary policy.
So if you are interested and want to get a little bit more information, like I said, look at the number there and just text Ron 989898 and you can get some material to take a look at.
But Chris, we're going to talk a little bit more about and emphasize sort of what I've been talking about.
It's too much spending.
We've witnessed it and I'm cynical about them doing anything about it.
But people say, well, it's impossible.
Yeah, I still say it's pretty much impossible.
But it's solvable if we did the right thing.
Now, when I was in office and running for Congress and running for the presidency, I always wanted something where you could say a possibility.
But let's say we had a sincere effort, but we don't wait for the total collapse and we don't wait until there's runaway inflation and breakdown of law and order, which is already happening.
That you could do the budget in a sequence.
What you could do is say, well, cut off the welfare.
They will say, how can you cut off all this spending?
A bridge went down over there in Maryland, a big bridge, and it's going to cost a lot of money, but the president was on the spot.
We don't have to worry about the president that day or whatever, he says, that's my favorite bridge.
I used to take the train over that bridge frequently.
And he promised that the federal government will pay for everything to rebuild that bridge and do it quickly.
Well, you know, that's not the way to go.
So what if they have adopted, people have adopted a position of transitioning to a better system?
I would say, find, and just for an argument, let's say the bridge is going to cost a billion, probably more.
A billion dollars.
Where are we going to get it?
We have to do it.
We have to do it.
We'll deficit finance it and the feds always accommodate and they'll print the money.
No, that would just perpetuate the problem.
I would say we have a lot of messy, useless, danger spending.
And I would say the most bitter part is the money we spend on other countries running our empire, agitating for war.
And just think of what's been going into Ukraine.
I think you could immediately cut some of that spending more than the bridge would cost, pay for the bridge from that money, save it and take it away from the stuff we shouldn't be doing, and putting it into what would help us.
That would be one way of doing it.
I always argue, too, take enough cuts in it that you have some left over and cut the deficit.
That.
And you want to know what my predictions are of the Congress doing that?
Zero, unfortunately.
But we should talk about that.
And that's why we do talk about gold and limited government and trying to teach people about what meritocracy is and trying to get people to understand what wokeism is all about and what the transition is and why our streets are filled with people homeless and violence is epidemic.
So that we should deal with immediately.
And I tell you, we can do that without spending deficit money.
There is so much evil spending out there that we could do it and have enough leftover to start whittling away with the debt.
Chris.
Very good, Dr. Paul.
Yes.
Lies And Employment Rates 00:06:37
You know, last week on our show, we asked, you know, what kind of country allows itself to be invaded, you know, by migrants.
Just let anybody in.
This week, we're asking what kind of country bankrupts itself at ever greater speeds.
I mean, I remember going to school.
I don't remember learning in school that our amazing U.S. Constitution says, oh, yeah, just let anybody in, give them free stuff, and let them vote, you know, so they can vote for more free stuff or to spend money beyond their means so that they ultimately can't even pay the interest and eventually go bankrupt and default.
I don't remember learning this stuff in school about government.
I heard about checks and balances.
I remember that.
Where did that go?
So what is it?
Why is our government like this?
And my guess is it's desperation.
They are frantically trying to achieve an unachievable goal, which is ruling the world.
And this is their goal.
This is not our goal as a people.
They want to subjugate the world to, you know, so it does, you know, the rules-based order, as it's called.
You know, there's, and again, none of this is in our Constitution, which they swear to uphold when they get into office, having a thousand bases all over, endless wars.
You know, what do you think this Ukraine is all about?
This has nothing to do with us.
Nobody's bothering us over here or the Middle East or maybe someday Taiwan.
This is all this crazy goal of wanting to rule the world, which goes back.
Everybody's tried it.
So now America is taking its crack and getting the same exact results.
It's failing out there, but even at the same exact time, it's destroying what's happening here.
And that needs to change.
They're missing and they lie about it.
They lie about statistics.
So the inflation reporting is never truly what it is.
You know, oh, we have inflation down to, we're working hard.
It's just about back to where we wanted it, 2%, and everybody's going to be happy.
So they keep lying and trying to make people feel better.
And the markets play the game.
So if they do something like something happens to the employment rate, the employment is going up, unemployment is going down, and everybody's happy.
The markets say, hey, that's good news.
We better buy more stocks, even though they might not even believe what is happening.
And this is what's happening.
But Zero Hedge frequently has a lot of good information along this line because they had a recent article up and had to do with how they report the people who are employed.
And they say they overcounted and said there were more than 800,000 people employed that weren't really employed.
Used to be if you were employed, you went to a steel mill and you got a job for 40 hours a week and you were making good pay and it was a job you could identify.
Today, as the adjustment for the inflation rate goes, a lot of companies are cutting back, firing people, regulating, getting machines to help out.
And the people who still want to take care of themselves, they'll have to go and get another job or two or three jobs.
And they work very hard to do that.
And if they're there and their real job was cut back way back, they keep that and they add some other ones.
Every time they add another burden on of a part-time job, it's another employee, another person employed, instead of saying, you know, the employment is not nearly as good as it used to be when we were living a little bit better under our means.
But no, they don't do that.
They say, oh, the employment is good.
When all this mess is looked at by the Federal Reserve, they realize they never reached their goals, that they are there and they have to have periods of time.
Every month they come out with a report and try to convince the people to be optimistic.
And in many ways, they're pretty successful at that for the marketplace.
But the market loves the inflation.
So with all this confusion and mess, instead of going back to a market operation that would allow the market to decide what interest rates should be and what should be done in the economy rather than fudging it with the government help and largesse.
So in all this, the Fed say, we're ready, in spite of all this inflation around, we'll cut rates for you.
Now, that doesn't mean that cutting rates is bad.
It just means that they're doing something, they don't have the vaguest idea whether it's right or wrong.
They don't know whether to cut it half a percent or 2%.
It's all fibbing, and people know about it.
And I think the people who take advantage of it know about it too, but they take advantage of it on the short run.
So stocks go up.
But with all this mess, the Fed says, you know, the market is turning down, so we have to manage the market, and they don't like high interest rates.
So we have to lower the rates.
We can't let the rates increase like that.
So people depend on the Fed for the guidance in the economy.
And of course, the people in Congress and the government are clapping hands.
They're really happy about this because the spending continues.
And this recent bill they passed, huge bill, a lot of unnecessary spending.
And it went sailing through with Republicans and Democrats supporting it.
And that is what is going to continue.
The welfare warfare state is alive and well.
Welfare Warfare State 00:13:15
And anybody seriously challenge it, you can get into big trouble.
People who in high positions, if they challenge the military-industrial complex, it's very dangerous to that person's life.
And also in the welfare state, you know, if you do anything, oh, he's going to be tomorrow.
You won't have your Social Security check.
So it demagogues and work.
But of course, the Social Security, no matter what you do, is going to self-destruct because it's a Ponzi scheme.
And they have to cut back.
And they already have.
Because the people that have been living on their Social Security, they come along and give them cost of living increases, but they never can keep up with the cost of living because they're still printing money.
So it's a system that doesn't work.
It will not be cured by tinkering.
It is only going to be cured when people admit it doesn't work.
Interventionism and Keynesianism doesn't work.
And it will only be when we think that maybe the founders had a little bit of advice for us, you know, have sound money and limited government's interference in the marketplace.
Maybe we would get somewhere with that.
Chris?
That's for sure, Dr. Paul.
And the founders, the U.S. Constitution was meant to chain down the power of government.
Well, those chains have been broken long ago.
We have the biggest government in the history of the world, not just in the world, in the history of the world.
I found out this last week, I think it was, that the federal government employs 23 million people.
That is incredible.
That is the size of a state.
They could just federal government.
Employees can have their own state.
That's how big it is.
And they extract trillions and trillions of dollars from us per year in taxes.
But that's not even enough because they run deficits.
They're 34 trillion in debt.
So the problem in our society is clearly not us, the people.
We're doing our jobs.
We pay our taxes.
Thank goodness we have each other.
There's people that will feed me.
If something breaks in my house, they'll come out and fix it.
The problem is not in the country itself.
The problem is in Washington, D.C. You know, and they really don't care.
But what do they do specifically?
They say the problem is us.
They're constantly telling us how horrible we are, that we're all racists, that we're all misogynists, that nobody wants women to get ahead, that we're xenophobic and hate everybody out there.
Now, why would they do this?
Why would they create this?
And the reason is to divide, to divide us so that we fight with each other so that you don't pay attention to what they're doing.
There's no unity, so they'll just keep going.
Nobody's going to stop them.
There has to, at some point, be some form of unity.
Now, obviously, everybody's not going to agree on everything, but we should agree, libertarian, conservative, liberal, far left, far right, that this government is destroying us financially.
And even by letting everybody in, they're destroying who we are here.
And it's all because we're divided.
We need to at least gain some kind of unity, some kind of basic thing that, hey, we don't want to live like this anymore.
Yes, and that is absolutely true.
And it's going to continue.
You were talking about the government employees.
But what about the million or so that are pouring across our borders who displace some of the people who are struggling to make a living who have built, I just saw a number the other day of how many hospitals have had to be closed in just the last several years.
It's just horrible.
In a free market, you would have more hospitals, more medical services.
But now, because it's a government operation, you say, oh, no, you could still pick your doctor.
Oh, yeah, that's what they told you.
Join up on this program, the government will allow you to pick your own doctor.
It's a government-run medical system.
And if you want to see a good example of that, is how they used how they regulated and took care of COVID by denying the good medicines and having people take the bad medicine and put people in jail or fire them and give them all kinds of trouble.
Doctors losing licenses.
That's what government medicine gives you.
So on top of this, the mix now of these numbers coming in, which for many years I've always said you have to watch out on the borders, because if you do this and claim you're humanitarian, you might be inviting in revolutionaries.
You might be bringing in an invasion of people economically.
We can see this now, but also the violence is increasing.
And the American people are getting sick and tired of it, but they're slow to learn.
And the politicians are slow to respond as well.
But I think we're in a transition, and we have to keep encouraging it, but we have to define what we believe in.
And one thing, Chris, I think we should always start with, because some of the basic principles that are in our Constitution are very helpful.
Chris?
Very good, Dr. Paul.
I'll finish up with my closing thoughts, trying to remain optimistic despite all this.
One thing we could count on, though, is that things do not go as planned.
You know, we have these planners.
They obviously have nothing else better to do with their lives.
So they plan.
They plan thinking decades out.
Some, I'm sure, even plan thinking centuries out.
But their plans do not ultimately come to fruition because life is far too big and complex, and there are an infinite number of variables that always throw them off, things that cannot be planned ahead of time.
Think of COVID.
It was not planned, I'm sure, that Ron DeSantis would throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing and show pretty much the whole world that, hey, this is nonsense.
Look, we have no masks down here.
We're not having any mandates.
And it threw a monkey wrench in.
We were supposed to have passports, vaccine passports.
We were going to live in this new normal.
Remember what they're coming on TV?
New normal, new normal.
We weren't even going to shake hands anymore.
I remember all of this.
And all of it came to naught.
Only destruction.
Same thing with, I'm sure it wasn't in the plans that Elon Musk would pay $46 billion so that there's at least one crumb of relative free speech in the world.
So what this also tells us is most people, the masses, are not courageous.
Usually there are single individuals, a DeSantis, a Musk, perhaps even a Trump, who knows.
You know, this unpredictable gust of wind comes and the whole house of sand collapses.
So these things are, you know, we always have to keep them in the back of our minds that as dark as it gets and as tyrannical as these people are and they even tell us they're going to be, there's always those things that they can't anticipate, can't plan for, that will throw it all into chaos.
Very good.
Chris.
You know, I've always argued and continue to argue that when you're trying to devise or improve a system, you have to understand what the basic principles are that you're trying to promote.
And I don't think we look at that very often because things like non-intervention, people, what is that all about?
Well, in foreign policy, non-interventionism is something the founders believed in, stay at home, don't mind our own business, and also don't get involved in international groups, you know, have national sovereignty.
And this is well spoken and as well as free trade.
Oh, but right now, both parties are itching at the bit to limit trade to get political points.
And that is not the answer.
That is, you know, always backfires all.
And the pay, if you put it on a tariff to protect somebody in one country, you usually hurt the consumer of that country that put on the tariff because there's retaliation.
So it's not a principled stand.
Because in a society that promotes liberty, they would say that everybody gets to be free.
And the people who oppose us say, oh, you guys are crazy.
You libertarians.
You're a bunch of anarchists.
Who would tell people what to do and who would guide them?
Who would write the regulations?
We wouldn't have them.
But we'd have something much more powerful.
We'd have regulations based on a basic principle of non-aggression.
You don't have any right to hurt other people, steal from other people, and kill other people.
But now it's running rampant with, and what do they do?
The worse it gets, the more they say, well, we have to coddle these people who have had family problems just because they robbed that store and killed the owner.
We have to help these people.
And if you don't, then you're not a humanitarian.
So the principles are pretty easy to define because you reject the whole idea of authoritarianism.
It's authoritarianism versus voluntarism.
In a free society, everything is voluntary, as long as you don't hurt anybody.
It's the Bastiat principle.
Bastiat, of course, said, if you and I can't do it, we can't go and take stuff from our neighbor.
You can't send your congressman there to take it and give it to somebody.
And these are basic, it's property.
If it's your property right now, whose property?
Now they have squatters being raised up to a high level where, yeah, they need a house.
And if they're in that house, you better be careful on trying to get your house back.
I mean, the whole thing has rejected the idea of private property, volunteerism, and allowing people to make their own decisions.
And they say, well, still, how are you going to take care of the poor?
Well, a lot better than the poor are taken care of right now, because that's one of the very great benefits of a free society.
There's more prosperity, less poverty, less starvation, and a lot more freedom and less war.
Now, how in the world can they reject that?
But the better question is, how in the world could we fail to present this case to a maximum number of people?
Because the people know about it and hear about it, but they still short-term think, well, I've got to get what I want tomorrow and next month I'll start practicing your philosophy.
But anyway, we're going to be forced to make those decisions.
And I think when we see days like we saw yesterday in the market, the longer, the more we're approaching that time, that the whole system is going to come unglued.
And like I was pointing out at the beginning, gold went from 20, added a zero to 200, added a zero to 2,000.
And when are they going to add another zero?
And they could do it in a few days if things get out of total control.
So that is what we work hard for here at Ron Paul Liberty Report is try to inform people how and what we can do.
It's not hard to understand, and people want that, but they have to realize that it takes a little bit of effort.
You have to be able to understand why you divide and you promote and you take care of people due to merit, not because of the color of your skin or where you came from or whatever.
It's distributed by merit.
And that's starting to come back.
But that used to be what it was when the great day when the country was started.
Because if you didn't go out and work, you didn't have much to show for it.
So I think there's enough known about the principles of liberty to really improve our system of government.
The problem is, once again, more people have to be, once they're convinced of this, to be promoters of this philosophy because what is coming is not going to be good.
And it's a lot easier to start these wars.
It's a lot harder to get out of these wars without a lot of tragedy.
And that's what we're thinking right now.
The most recent one is Ukraine.
You know, we sneaked into that war, precipitated it, you know, with participating in a coup, and now look at us on and on.
And everybody's given up.
Oh, the Ukrainians can't win, but we have to keep sending money.
We have to maybe have to send some troops and all that.
That is a bunch of nonsense.
It's going to end, and it will lead to the anarchy that they blame libertarians would bring about by having less government.
The answer to it is not more government.
The answer to it is having limited government to protect liberty, not to manage all of our affairs.
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