And...there goes hope of a more sane foreign policy, as Trump's VP pick JD Vance comes out swinging with the "brilliant" idea of REALLY attacking Iran, not just those "little bombing runs." What Vance doesn't understand is that this is not the world as it was ten years ago. A war on Iran could well bring in China and Russia, and at the least would mark a massive Middle East escalation where a good deal of the fallout would affect the Israel that he claims to so strongly support.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well, still recovering.
You know, we had another minor outage on our electricity.
Even though we thought the electricity was all back, we're still having a little trouble with our internet, but we'll be able to have a program today.
So I'm glad you're there and ready to go.
We'll improvise a little bit, but there's a lot of activity going on.
A lot of people are interested still, you know, what's happening, you know, with the campaign that's going on.
And right now, I think that appointments have become very interesting.
Something I've been paying a lot of attention to.
If you wanted to know, the person I'm watching most closely is who's going to be the appointee to run the economy.
But also, I'm looking at Mike Pompeo.
He's around again.
He's on the TV.
And he's not vice president, but he may be another Dick Cheney for all we know, you know, and pulling strings.
So I'd advise people to keep an eye on him because also I think that Donald Trump actually admitted that he came up short on some of his appointments last time, but has assured us that he'd be more cautious.
So we'll help him be more cautious.
So if we know something about these appointments, we should comment on it.
But they've spent a little bit of time because it is a big issue.
I've argued that they don't talk about the big issue.
They talk about Biden's health.
Everybody knows he's not doing well, but they spend about 98% of the time this last month or two on his health and his capabilities.
But now, all of a sudden, the economy has to get down to brass tax.
And the initial reaction by many of our friends, Daniel, has been, well, one thing is he's for lower taxes and he will probably work the lower taxes, did it before.
Inflation Tax Concerns00:09:46
So maybe we're home free on that.
But I would suggest that a closer look at this should raise questions.
The first question being, he is really supercharged.
I would say of all the presidents that have been in office in the last 20 years, he's been the most enthusiastic about placing on tariffs and protectionism for all kinds of reasons.
And if you think about it and you admit the truth about it, the tariffs have to be paid by somebody.
Oh, China will have to pay for that.
And that will take care of that.
That'll punish the Chinese.
It won't do anything.
They won't go out and become more friends with Russia or Iran.
No, that wouldn't happen.
So we have to do that because we have to punish them.
And in the program, the RNC program, there was a lot of mention about the hostility toward China.
So that should be on our list of concerns that we have.
But so if they put on tariffs and they've admitted that and they love tariffs, who pays?
It's a tax.
It's a tax on us, the American people.
And the people end up paying more for their products.
So it's part of the inflation scheme.
So that people say, well, what we need are price controls and things like that, to counteract this.
But they won't connect the enthusiasm for tariffs with prices to the homeowners and the shoppers at the store because that turns into a tax.
And it turns into the inflation tax.
But I've always argued that the best way to think about this problem is think that we shouldn't have an income tax.
The money you earn is yours, and you ought to have a constitutional moral right to spend that money the way you want.
What's wrong with that?
A lot of people used to believe that, but now it's throw it in the pot and see who gets the most out of the pot.
But not only that, but the hidden tax of inflation.
The Republicans don't have a very good record about lowering spending and reducing the deficits.
And there was one time I was in while in office, we had the presidency, the Senate, and the House, and it didn't matter.
So they spend too much money.
You get votes that way.
It's like an alcoholic.
One more drink, I'll stop tomorrow.
So, no, but they never stop.
They keep drinking.
The drinking is a spending.
And how do they do it?
Oh, deficits.
But our dollar is still great.
Everybody wants our dollar.
It's still the reserve currency of the world, although not as strong as it used to be.
So it affects the currency.
And the inflation pushes prices up.
So if that's how they monetize, they print money when they run up the deficit.
So as long as you have unlimited deficits and an unlimited way of supporting those, like with the Federal Reserve cooperating, you have this inflation.
But guess who suffers the most?
The middle class and the poor, because they suffer the most with the prices going up.
So their cost of living goes up.
And one thing that people have revealed over the decades and years of using tariffs as a tool that wages never keep up with the rising cost of living and the prices going up when you inflate and destroy the currency.
They try to, you just think the minimum wage they've tinkered with that used to be $3.
Now, who knows what it is now, and probably going to go up again.
But that doesn't work.
It's a tax.
And so this idea that, oh, good, one thing for sure we can depend on.
This new administration are not people who are bragging about what we need are more taxes.
Only Democrats level with you.
That they're more likely to say, we need to raise taxes on the rich people, and that'll solve all our problems.
So they lie through their teeth and on it goes.
So I would say people should be very cautious about accepting the fact that the taxes are going to go down.
I don't happen to believe that.
And I don't think there's any indication from what's been going on in the television recently that there will be any restraints placed on the Federal Reserve.
That's going to stay.
The status quo is required to keep funding.
You don't want to have a new administration.
All of a sudden, they get a little bit more economically inclined to not print so much money.
That's not going to happen.
So, well, you know, the dollars holding up.
We'll just keep the old hat there and keep Powell in place and he'll take care of it.
He'll work it out.
But soon we'll find out that's not the case.
And I think the foreign policy blends in with some of the economic concerns I have because it's easy to become strong patriots with the foreign policy.
And now we've had some pretty strong words, Daniel, coming from the potential vice president JD has said that he wants to be tough.
I don't see that as a good sign.
Be diplomatic and be firm.
Have strong beliefs, but stick to them and make sure they follow the principles of the Constitution.
And I think that is one thing that we have to watch.
And Daniel, hey, if you go ahead and mention a couple of things that we talked about earlier in the day.
Yeah, just a couple of thoughts on what you said, Dr. Paul.
I mean, punitive tariffs are always a bad idea, but this is not, you know, 20 years ago and we still manufacture things in the U.S.
I mean, what about all the things that China makes that we don't make anymore?
There's no way to compete with them if we do the terrorists.
It's a terrible idea.
And even talk about the de-dollarization you mentioned, Dr. Paul, and we haven't talked about it on the show yet, but I'm sure you saw that Janet Yellen a couple of days ago said, well, you know, all of the sanctions we put on other countries have forced them to get together and gang together against us.
And so we're at really risk of our dollar being no longer the country.
You know, we've absolutely shot ourselves in the foot.
She finally recognizes it after all these years.
But as you say, there's little hope that she'll do anything about it.
And you did also touch on personnel, which is so important.
The personnel is the policy.
We said it during the Trump 1.0 administration where we looked with dismay at people like Pompeo and Bolton and all of the others who were going into the administration.
And then the president was acting shocked, very shocked that they were stabbing him in the back, or at least not doing what he said to do.
But unfortunately, what I'm hearing, Dr. Paul, and I still know some people in the foreign policy and national security area.
And from what I'm hearing, Trump 2.0, and I hope they're wrong, doesn't look very good.
Some of the people that we're hearing that are really having the president's ear right now are, as you mentioned, Mike Pompeo.
He can flatter the president and get his ear.
But also O'Brien, who was the president's national security advisor.
Now, he was a mortal enemy of our good friend Doug McGregor and did everything he could to prevent McGregor from doing the job that he had when he was the advisor to the acting Secretary of Defense to prevent him from getting out of Afghanistan and Syria.
So he's a bad guy.
He's there in the middle.
And then you have these two guys, General Kellogg and Fred Fleitz.
Fred Fleitz is from the Neocon think tank, extreme neocon think tank, that he and Kellogg put together this cockamame idea to end the war in Ukraine by basically going back to the status quo ante after these two years.
And it's a non-starter.
So if this is the product of his brain trust on foreign policy, it's not a good idea.
And the other name I'm hearing that's close to Trump that may well get an important appointment is someone is a gentleman called Eldridge Colby.
Now, that last name may be interesting to you because his grandfather was William Colby, the former head of the CIA at a very interesting time in history.
Well, Colby is a mega China hawk, a very serious China hawk.
He was actually being considered when Jeb Bush was running in 2016.
He was being considered for a major appointment if Jeb Bush had won.
So that tells you a lot about where he's coming from.
He was in the Trump administration, the first Trump administration.
It looks like he's going to come back.
The long and short of it, Dr. Paul, is from what I'm hearing, you're going to see the same bad guys.
And I hope Trump wakes up, but you're going to see a lot of the same bad guys who followed up his first administration coming back in spades.
Again, I hope it's wrong.
Well, you know, I mentioned Mike Pompeo, some individual we've watched for a long time, and he's not on our side of even considering a non-interventionist foreign policy and sticking to the Constitution on what we're allowed and able and should be able to do.
And but there was another name that popped up, and she, politically speaking, redeemed herself.
Hard Diplomacy and Unity00:15:32
And that's our friend, Nikki Haley.
I mean, politically, you know, unity.
That's what they want.
Unify.
We don't care what we're going to unify ourselves on, but let's do it.
Let's make it sound good.
But one person said, like, JD Vance says, well, we need to unify under our foreign policy, too.
We have to be tough.
And the headline is: Trump's VP, Pick Vance, says Iran needs to be punched hard.
Well, that's great diplomacy.
I'll tell you.
You know, there's a lot of problems in the world.
And if you're sincere in changing it, you stick to principle and you have an open door for at least a discussion.
If people will not discuss and will not talk and aggravate, and some people interpret that's our foreign policy.
You do it our way or not, or it won't do it.
But acting like a bully does not work.
But Nikki Haley gave that great talk, politically speaking, and we'll probably hear from her more.
And that is not good news.
But the idea and the goal being unity no matter what is a little bit nutty.
What you want is liberty maximized for as many people as you can and rejecting the confrontation and the violence to try to get your way.
And that's quite a bit different than saying that's unify.
Oh, what should we do today?
Should we bomb Ukraine or should we go down there and send some bombs toward the Palestinian?
Or should we go to Taiwan and get prepared, which we're doing.
I mean, this sounds like that crept in last night on many speeches.
Be tough on China.
And that is the goal that they have, which, but the immediate thing, Daniel, and I know you realize this is, oh, you guys, you guys don't care.
They're a bunch of commies.
And but you know what?
For a bunch of commies, they have a pretty astute understanding of how the international current world works and the economy works.
And they also know how to combat it too.
And that's the establishment of the movement called BRICS.
Well, if the Americans don't change their attitude and put more emphasis on monetary policy, something else will come along.
It always happens.
The currencies, the world currencies, last for a while, 100 years, 200 years, sometime, but they eventually get too greedy.
They get too big.
They spread their wings too far because they think they can have an empire and then the currency fails.
And I think that's what we're witnessing.
But I don't think that was on the minds of anybody, certainly in that audience.
They were enjoying it.
And they deserve a little bit of that because they've had to face up to so many lies and innuendos ever since 2016.
It's been very clear that our institution, especially the Department of Justice, is so outrageous that they have a reason to do this.
So I think the voluntary pressure we can put on by talking about policy, whether it's the Department of Justice or whether monetary policy or foreign policy, I think I see that as an obligation for us, Daniel.
Yeah, I mean, I think JD Vance, I think this was, if not his first interview, one of his first interviews after being named the VP pick by Trump.
And I think it just shows that he's, in terms of foreign policy, he's not ready for prime time.
You know, we are cautiously optimistic.
There's a possibility of good things happening.
You know, with Biden's people, there's no possibility of anything good happening.
So cautiously optimistic.
But this was a dumb interview.
And it shows that he doesn't understand the world very well.
The idea that he's calling for an all-out war with Iran.
Now, that may please some of his donors, his mega donors, like Miriam Adelson, these people who they claim to be Israel first.
A lot of these people in the Republican Party are.
But I would say, you know, this is not the world of 10 or 15 years ago.
You can't just go around with this cost-free bombast where you're threatening everyone around the world.
The world is tired of hearing threats from people like JD Vance and the neocons.
And the fact of the matter is, if JD Vance hits Iran hard, Iran is going to hit Israel hard and is going to.
We've already seen with the strike a couple of months ago how they were able to breach the Iron Dome.
And that was with a very, very small amount of missiles.
And they have a lot of missiles.
They have very high-tech technology.
They're sending technology to Russia.
That's how good it is to fight against Ukraine.
The people who profess to love Israel in pushing for a war with Iran, they are going to see Israel decimated.
The people who actually care about peace are the people who care about places like Israel and want them to live in peace.
So Vance is way, way off the mark in this.
He needs to assemble a better foreign policy team.
My guess is he won't, because you know how it works, Dr. Paul.
There are think tanks filled to the brim of so-called experts, the people who have done the same thing year after year after year, even as it fails.
20 years in Afghanistan, another surge in Iraq.
We need to occupy Libya.
Everything they've touched is gone to garbage.
Yet somehow they stick around, they slink around, they hang out at the think tanks, they get very, very good salaries.
And then when it comes time, when a Republican is elected, they will pretend to be the flavor of the day until they get back in power.
Boom, there you go.
You have the same old dumb policies.
And so it's very disappointing, but this is a different era.
This is not the era where the U.S. can throw its weight around.
The fact of the matter is, you want to put in a lot of China hawks.
Well, here's a wake-up call.
Here's a rude awakening.
If the U.S. starts war with China, we will lose.
The U.S. will lose.
And not only will we lose the war, but probably lose half the country in a nuclear explosion.
Is that really what we want?
Aren't there better ways of approaching the world than this kind of absurd bombast and threats?
So, you know, one complaint I've had so often trying to figure this out is the changes that occur.
And a lot of people think, and this came up during the presidential campaigns that I was involved in, is, okay, let's concentrate on economic policy.
That's separate from foreign policy.
Then we'll have somebody else come in and talk about where you drop the bombs.
But it's all connected because the main motivation right now is preserving the empire, which is under threat.
And that is our empire that we've been running, especially since the end of World War II.
And right now, the reserve currency is under attack.
And just think of the good it has done for those who have disliked us for a while.
What countries are coming together and they're unified?
You know, we talk about unity.
We talk about trying to get Haley to endorse Trump, that kind of thing.
But what about bringing together the various countries that are in the BRICS?
And this is economics.
This is economic policy because it is a major weapon.
So we have Brazil and we have Russia.
We have India and China's involved.
That's a lot of people.
And they're tinkering around, but I would say that they're not on the verge of victory.
But I think the crack is there.
But I still think the dollar is the reserve currency of the world, the most popular, but it is getting shakier.
And sometimes these things go quickly at the end.
Once it becomes contagious that they don't want to use it.
And this BRICS group have used their independent currencies to do some trade.
But the whole thing is, is none of them have a hard currency.
But right now, they're talking about at least partially, using gold to back the currency.
But you can't do it.
You need an honest gold standard in order to restrain people if you have interest in foreign policy, because it's a policy because otherwise you have people dealing with their foreign policy.
We have to punish China because they steal our secrets and we're going to put on terrorists of that.
And then that hurts us back at home.
And like I said, that's a tax.
It's a tax on the people.
The people don't need to be taxed.
And this whole idea of the statistic, I think the statistics, I think most of the people in our audience, Daniel, are aware of the fact that you have to be leery of pronouncements by the government, you know.
And that is a big deal because the government usually is designed to mislead us and enhance their power.
Absolutely, Dr. Paul.
Well, I think we're about ready to close if you think so.
And I think we will keep an eye out.
We want to try to be optimistic about the administration.
I hope Trump will start listening to some people who have a different approach.
I would be happy to hear that.
I will remind our viewers to, and I will include it in the links in the description here.
Go to ronpaulinstitute.org.
Go to the link at the bottom.
Get your tickets for our conference on August 31st, the Liberty Platform.
We're going to put together our own platform and we're going to make recommendations as to what we need to do in our foreign policy, in our medical freedom policy, food freedom policy, in our justice system.
So you're going to want to be there.
You're going to want to hear what a real Liberty platform looks like.
And then we can judge the candidates and put them up against what we believe is the right way to go.
So get those tickets right away.
The link will be there.
And I want to remind our upper division undergrads or grad students or anyone who knows them to go to ronpaulinstitute.org and click on the application to be a Ron Paul scholar this year.
It's a great program.
It's our fourth year of doing it.
It's a lot of fun.
You're going to develop great networks of people, like-minded people for personal friendships and career contacts.
And it's a great program.
So click on that and apply to be a scholar.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I'm looking forward to it.
But I do want to mention something that I think is very important.
And that is to be prepared and understanding where we stand with the big picture, with the big picture that for the United States started a couple hundred years ago with a freedom movement, which yielded us a constitution that it didn't take too long to start to undermine it from the very beginning.
But there was a recognition of what the problems were back then.
They knew that they had to stand up for what they believed in, and they believed in a system of liberty.
And they did change the world to a large degree.
But systematically over the years, especially in this current century, as well as the previous century, that a movement has been very, very determined to undermine any of this business and this nonsense about individualism.
That's evil.
Individual liberty?
What do you mean?
What are you talking about?
So, no, it's been universal.
But I think there's room for optimism because I think more people agree with what we talk about and what our supporters support.
And that is believing in liberty, believing in self-reliance, believing in personal choices, and not having over an abundance of government and having a system that is not hard to understand.
We call it non-intervention.
We don't want to intervene in the peaceful activity of all citizens.
It's their business and they shouldn't be penalized because we disagree with what they do.
And also, you know, in economics, it should be the people's choices.
And I already mentioned that in tariffs, why should somebody put tariffs on cheap products that are coming in and punish the poor people who use those products?
It's your money.
You should have the right to spend it the way you want.
And also, the non-interference, which is a major hurdle, and that is stay out of the internal affairs and the internationalism of all these wars and many wars and killing.
And yesterday, I talked a little bit about how much violence occurs.
And somebody said, well, you know, there's so much violence out there.
If you look at the immigration is violent, yes.
And it's government policy that invited all that violence too.
But the violence has to be rejected.
But compared to what happens with people who argue in a local area or in a local community, the policies that we have,
the foreign policy of aggression and fearmonger, just think of how I'd like to know, and somebody could probably figure this out: how many people since World War II have been killed by American-made weaponry?
And I'm not asking, oh, it was intended.
They targeted that school.
No, just the stupid policy that prompts it.
It's happening now in Ukraine and the Middle East, all over.
And now there's this, the big decision is, well, I think we've dropped enough bombs on Ukraine.
So let's go and see what we can do to stir up a little more trouble with China and Taiwan.
But the principle has to be clear-cut of non-intervention.
The government shouldn't be regulating us in anything that we do peacefully.
The government shouldn't have any regulation on telling us what we can buy and sell as long as we're not fraudulent in what we're providing.
And certainly, it should be easy to understand that we ought not to have our military spread around the world.
And we ought to have a sound currency.
Fortunately for us, the knowledge of this is growing and growing.
People are ready for change.
And some changes are coming no matter what.
They cannot stop the ultimate change, and I believe we're in the early stages of a major change in the financial and monetary system.
But the big question is: what is it going to be replaced with?
Many times, they go to a worse condition before it's cleared up.
But there's no reason we still do have freedom to speak out, even though it's being hindered and we're being monitored.
We still can talk to people, we still are allowed to have our conferences that we can get together and talk about it because it's the policy that we have to get people to understand.
Personal Liberty Worth Working For00:00:08
And the policy of personal liberty is worth working for.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.