Ron Paul takes viewer questions from Twitter/X followers on "hidden" inflation, the impunity of many in the ruling class, and...would he accept Fed Chairman if offered? Tune in as we bring back a favorite feature on the Liberty Report!
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Understanding Inflation's Roots
00:04:34
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| Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. | |
| With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host. | |
| Daniel, good to see you, Don. | |
| How are you doing today, Dr. Paul? | |
| What are you up to today? | |
| You told me there was a surprise. | |
| Yeah, we're going to do something we haven't done in a long time. | |
| It just reminded me how much fun. | |
| Well, it's fun for me because I don't have to do any work. | |
| I just have to read, and I can actually read. | |
| But it's Ask Ron Paul, which we haven't done in a while. | |
| So this is where you get to put on your hat as a clairvoyant and give out all your wisdom. | |
| So let's go to a couple questions from our audience, and we appreciate everyone who submitted them. | |
| A lot of great questions this time. | |
| It was really hard. | |
| In fact, we're going to use one more than we wanted to because we couldn't narrow them down. | |
| But the first one is great. | |
| It's from, if I put that one up, Sherilyn Jones Freed. | |
| She asks a great question. | |
| She says, Dr. Paul, thank you for taking questions. | |
| When I go to the grocery store, the prices are clearly up by as much as 25%. | |
| But I keep reading that they're not. | |
| Is it just my area of North Carolina that has inflation? | |
| Well, the big problem is there's a lot of people who lie. | |
| The people who do the statistics and people in government, and for various reasons. | |
| You know, they say, but prices aren't really going up, but they might shrink the size of the item that they're selling. | |
| So there's a lying that goes on. | |
| But there is a lot of discrepancy in trying to understand inflation. | |
| Inflation, we start with the manipulation of the currency, which is motivated by debt and all other things. | |
| But when they increase the supply of money, the value of the money goes down, and you have to use more of it to buy something. | |
| And other times people say, well, food prices are up 25%, and this one's actually down a little bit. | |
| See, they can increase the money supply. | |
| They can measure that pretty well. | |
| But what they can't do, because prices are set subjectively, people have to scurry around, they have to adjust, and you can't do much planning. | |
| So the planning is, and the money gets distributed in various ways because the very wealthy don't care about the price of bread and others do. | |
| But if you had a system where you could increase the supply of money and people so-called have their benefits, you'd say, well, that's, and all the prices go up at the same rate as your income goes up. | |
| Well, the big problem with that is that when the prices go up, they don't go up at the same rate as the money supply. | |
| If everything went up at the same rate, well, your labor, your income goes up at the same place, you know, it's an even trade. | |
| But that isn't the way it works. | |
| It doesn't happen because the money is distributed in a more voluntary manner and it's not controlled and therefore prices will go up. | |
| But it's safe to say that the people and the public understand the big picture. | |
| When prices go up, they have to keep telling themselves, and I think a lot of people recognize it, that means the value of the dollar is going down, which means that there's a different answer to our problems. | |
| It isn't like, well, we need to get hold of the farmers and tell them they can't charge that much. | |
| We have to get control of the unions so wages don't go up because there's a discrepancy. | |
| That is the problem. | |
| So there will be a variation in the prices. | |
| And one of the things that people say, why is it doing that? | |
| And they don't want to give up on the inflation of the money. | |
| So they say, oh, we have a solution. | |
| We will regulate wages and we'll regulate prices, wage and price controls, which always makes things much worse. | |
| And in my short life, I remember very clearly that we had wage and price controls during World War II, as well as during the Korean War. | |
| But we have price controls that are incidental and manipulative all the time. | |
| So this is the argument when you understand this, is free market pricing is the best thing. | |
| The big thing is you had to have a unit of account to measure those prices. | |
| And that's why we argue the case for a sound currency and why the founders argued for gold and silver as being the universal currency. | |
| All right. | |
| Let's move on to Professor Shade. | |
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Injustice and Accountability
00:12:13
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| And he's asking a question about accountability, which is a big one. | |
| You talk a lot about the Justice Department in the two-tiered system of justice. | |
| If we can put this one on, he says, will even one government official or elected representative who had broken the law ever be held accountable? | |
| Parentheses, Fauci, Hunter, Garland, etc. | |
| The complete lack of accountability in today's system is deeply troubling and demoralizing to Americans and to our faith in our country. | |
| Oh, yes. | |
| Will these people ever be punished if they switch their allegiance from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party? | |
| They may go to jail pretty fast. | |
| Now, we have a dual system of justice, and that is what is so critical. | |
| I don't think we have equal justice before the law. | |
| And there are some people, you can't say that none of the bad guys ever got caught, but I'll tell you what, a lot of people are very disgusted right now when you see some people have minor infractions, some people who go to the Capitol and look around and they're encouraged and they do some mischief and have a good time and they get themselves into trouble. | |
| But the justice delivered to them is a great injustice. | |
| They're still suffering. | |
| Many of them in prison for this. | |
| So the political system now has controlled the justice system. | |
| And of course, right now, in the political process, the one thing that we know is finding who's guilty, who's not, who's going to prison, it's all driven by hatred toward Trump. | |
| And even if they don't actually get some of these people in jail, they try to destroy them, you know, one way or the other. | |
| And that can be pretty harmful, too. | |
| So, no, there's not many, but there's probably a few out there that did something bad and got caught and they had to go to prison. | |
| But the one thing is, you know, when we're in a more normal situation, sometimes we send people, I was thinking of the years and decades we had where we were putting teenagers in prisons for smoking, you know, smoking marijuana. | |
| And that turned out that it was unnecessary. | |
| It didn't make any sense. | |
| And nobody ever seems to have learned that lesson of prohibition of alcohol. | |
| They even changed the Constitution. | |
| They thought it was so important and made it illegal. | |
| And it made everything worse to the point where they had to repeal that. | |
| That doesn't solve the problem of people who do harm by habits that harm other people because that certainly shouldn't be permissible. | |
| But when you have laws that are unnecessary and regulations that are unnecessary, they become manipulative and they're used for partisan reasons, but also for business people. | |
| Business people, you know, we'll take care of the farmers, we'll take care of the banks, we'll take care of whatever group we're looking to, and they're unfair. | |
| And the enforcement, it gets so big it's out of control. | |
| And I think it's the bureaucracy that has way too much power. | |
| And that's why with all the laws, and then we have a bureaucracy that doesn't even have to get the law passed. | |
| They just write a regulation. | |
| They write a lot more laws than the Congress. | |
| If we, one way we could correct some of this injustice would be making sure that the Congress takes their responsibility seriously because there's even a law in a book where the Congress can repeal regulation, but I think they've done it about once. | |
| You know, they don't do it. | |
| They're irresponsible. | |
| So the Congress has responsibility. | |
| The people in the court systems have responsibility. | |
| But the individuals who want advantages in a system of government like we have, they are always manipulating. | |
| And that's why a system can be more easily manipulated if it's a so-called fair democratic system, which means that all you have to do is get control, then you do what you want. | |
| So yes, very few people who deserve to be put in prison don't get put in a prison. | |
| And you think of how many people have been responsible for Assange being in prison by our government. | |
| And maybe someday there will be justice for him, but so far, how could they ever compensate for it? | |
| But there's a lot of that goes on. | |
| It's too politicized. | |
| So we have drifted a long way from where the founders envision, and it does need a revamping for sure. | |
| All right, let's move on. | |
| This is another one about inflation with a little bit different of a twist. | |
| But this is submitted by David P. LeVay. | |
| And if we can put that up, can you analyze the impact on inflation caused by Trump versus Biden? | |
| Republicans keep calling Biden the inflation king, but inflation prince seems more accurate. | |
| Trump still holds the record for the first and second largest socialist bills signed into law in human history. | |
| You know, that's a good question because that shows an understanding of what's going on. | |
| And, you know, if you're a loyal Republican and you do a good job to try to be a good conservative, then when a person like Biden comes in, a week after he's in, there might be an economic incident, something, prices go up or something like that. | |
| And they say, oh, it's the Democrats, they did it. | |
| It's not, that's, I think, a negative because it's not exactly true. | |
| You don't have this type of inflation where prices are going up all over the place. | |
| If you wait a few months, everything says, well, it's Biden's fault, it's my fault. | |
| He aggravates it, he makes it worse, he participates in it. | |
| I'd say probably his votes as a senator overall probably did more harm than his week or two or a month or two being in the presidency. | |
| But certainly, his encouragement to have big government, whether it's for war or welfare, he's a participant because that's one of the incentives that's put on and pressures put on the Fed to accommodate because the Fed always knows they have to take care of the debt. | |
| They're never going to say, if you had a Secretary of the Treasury come up and say, okay, you're over our limits, we're not going to issue any more debt. | |
| That would be a calamity for the marketplace. | |
| So they would say, no, you have to do it. | |
| So the Fed always does it. | |
| So whether it's the Congress or the President, they're responsible. | |
| But then when you look at it, I think we frequently have said on this program, and I think libertarians are very much aware of the fact that inflation should be blamed on just about all the politicians. | |
| There's a few, we know a few that don't vote for all this spending and definitely, but that is few and in between because they keep saying that they want to blame somebody in particular, and they can't. | |
| But it's ingrained in our system. | |
| It's been taught in our university. | |
| They have rejected. | |
| Remember the question I asked Bernanke, you know, where's gold money? | |
| Oh, no, it's not gold money. | |
| Yet it was the elimination of gold, the final elimination of gold from our standard in 1971 that has been one of the motivating factors for me to want to spend a little bit of time talking about this issue. | |
| All right, well, let's close out with something, maybe it's a little more lighthearted. | |
| It's an interesting question, I think. | |
| And this comes to us from Sleepy Slim. | |
| If we can put up Sleepy's profile, he says, would you accept the position of Fed chairman if it was offered to you by Trump? | |
| I wonder if he was sleepy when he asked that question. | |
| If they offer me, no, the answer should be no, because why would I want to join a bunch of people that are, well, I was going to use some strong word, a gang, a gang of criminals, because they're the orchestrators of counterfeiting. | |
| And so, no, it wouldn't work. | |
| Let's say I go in with a sincere interest in doing it. | |
| And what if he did what I just mentioned in the other question is what if somebody sent the bills, you know, sent Treasury, you know, sent the debt over to it, and the member of the Federal Reserve refuses to buy the government debt. | |
| That's a big deal. | |
| I mean, the world financial system really comes down. | |
| But because we'd be reneging on that paper asset. | |
| But you know what is interesting, though, is we always honor that to prevent the crashing coming up suddenly because if today they said we're not going to buy any more government debt, there would be a calamity out there. | |
| But the answer to that really is if you don't stop this nonsense, there's still going to be a calamity because what they're paying these bills with would go, you know, become less valuable. | |
| And when you think of the evaluation of what's been going on, you know, in the Fed's history, you know, taking the ratio of gold to the dollar, $20 to an ounce, now it's at more than $2,000. | |
| I mean, this is astronomical, so to speak. | |
| But if it gets real big, then you have that calamity of somebody stomping. | |
| So I don't think it would be worth my effort to go and say, well, maybe we'll have a little meeting here. | |
| We'll talk about where the inflation is coming from. | |
| No, that's not going to work. | |
| People wouldn't like it, and it would be very chaotic. | |
| There would be some people who could protect themselves, as we all must try to do that. | |
| Protecting against inflation is a big deal. | |
| It's hard and difficult because if you don't have your freedom, you know, it makes it more difficult. | |
| There are some people trying to protect against the problems that we had in the 1930s, and the very first thing that Roosevelt did was confiscate the gold from the people, turn it over to the government, and then they devalued and inflated the currency. | |
| So it's one of the reasons why I always go back. | |
| You want your freedom to be responsible for yourself and accept that responsibility at the same time, That you can do what you want, but you have to protect yourself. | |
| And if you have trouble, you have to be responsible for that. | |
| And that is very difficult. | |
| But that's what we have to have because if you do all the things, we can list six or seven things that people have done to try to protect against the encroachment of government when they try to save a system that's not deserving of being saved. | |
| That is like the monetary system, and do whatever you can because the more they try to save by printing money, the more difficult it's going to be. | |
| So, that is the reason. | |
| So, it is going to be the principle of liberty, which includes, of course, once again, a currency which is illegal to counterfeit. | |
| The founders actually believed if you were a counterfeit of the government's money that they were going to issue the death penalty for doing that. | |
| They thought the counterfeiting of money was a serious matter, but they didn't point out the Fed back then. | |
| They were still arguing about whether we should have a Fed. | |
| But anyway, we're where we are right now, and I'm still arguing the case that you need sound money and freedom to solve our problems. | |
| Want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report. | |