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Sept. 21, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
43:26
'Liberty Platform in Three Easy Steps.' Ron Paul.

RPI CEO Ron Paul tells us how we can really "get there" from here...

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Ron Paul's Sense of Humor 00:13:35
We have reached a time where the boss is going to give the last word of the day, the man.
Before I bring him up, I'm often asked if I'm on a podcast or something, what's it like, what's it like to work with Ron Paul?
What is he like?
Well, what's it like to work for him?
It's awesome.
That's what it's like.
And what he's like is what you see is what you get when you see him on television, when you see him here.
That's how he is in person.
The one thing that you don't see because of the professionalness of our field is his sense of humor.
He has an amazing sense of humor.
We joke a lot.
He's a happy guy.
Before we do the Liberty Report, we're always laughing about how crazy our world is.
So he is a happy warrior, and he is a warrior.
He's as peaceful as a dove, but he is a warrior.
We do the show five days a week.
There's three of us that do the show, and only one of us does it all five days, and that's him.
He's a man that pours his entire life into the cause of liberty.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Ron Paul.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
That was very nice.
Must be a lot of friends out here.
Sure sounds like it.
But no, it is great to be here.
It's of great benefit to us, and especially to me, to find out what people are thinking and doing and whether they like what we're doing.
And so it gives us a lot of energy, and I deeply appreciate that.
But I think some of the people that don't get enough thanks would be in this audience, the supporters, the people who are motivated to help us along, and also the speakers and the people who put effort into this.
And I want to make sure that you know that we deeply appreciate your support because without support, yes, there was a time in my life where I wasn't in politics, though I was in politics.
Nobody really cared, and sometimes I got booed and things like that.
I never felt uncomfortable about it because I never had high expectations.
Somebody told me once, how do you handle all that stuff up in Washington?
It's so different what you believe in.
I said, well, I just didn't establish high expectations and then you don't discourage too much.
But there's also a great feeling when your expectations are superseded by people who found out more information than we believed we had.
So that to me is wonderful.
But I do want to emphasize a little bit about one individual who had a lot to do with this.
I've known this individual for 10, 15 years.
He'll correct me if I get it wrong.
But that happens to be the organizer of this organization, the organization and this function too, many functions.
He loves this stuff.
He loves the people to deal with, even though he's a nervous wreck doing it.
So, no, that's Daniel.
Daniel really deserves an applause.
Well, I haven't checked yet to find out.
You know, I'm going to be talking about a program that I think endorses liberty in a political sense or an educational sense.
But I do want to make sure I'm in the right crowd or you're in the right place, but you are not close friends of the Federal Reserve, are you?
Well, I think we're in the right place because I will dwell a little bit on that.
But I do want to talk about several points and making points that I think are important.
They're all points you've heard of.
There's nothing unique or different about this.
So I approach all that I do in a way that a lesson I learned from Mises.
I did hear Mises give one of his very last lectures.
And the year he died, he had passed through Houston, and I went to a lecture.
But in Human Action, he has a statement that stuck with me.
And his explanation was: there are intellectuals who will do investigative work, and it will be complex and difficult.
I said, well, I'm not one of them.
But he had a closing statement to that part that he was talking about because I listened carefully to that.
He says, there will be those intellectuals who write fancy books.
And I said, well, but he said, there has to be people who know how to take those complex ideas and make them palatable to the people.
And that's what I work on daily in trying to make liberty palatable to as many people as I can find.
But I have had a good time in my lifetime, and it's delightful because I feel very fortunate.
I had a chance to practice medicine for a lot of years and deliver a lot of babies and a family now that's very much involved in medicine.
And of course, most of us in the family, matter of fact, probably all, that we are not very happy with the direction of the American medical system today.
We'd like to see medicine delivered like it's supposed to, like the market would deliver it.
But it is an exciting time for all of us now because there is a tremendous influx on what is happening politically speaking.
And there are changes and sorting it out.
That's what we did this for a whole day, or two days, and we do it frequently.
We try to do it each morning, trying to sort things out.
I see it as a challenge to me because I think the answer to this monstrosity that we put up, which is based on lies, that our goal, my personal goal, is to seek the truth.
And I think that keeps us busy.
And that doesn't mean that we are experts and know exactly what truth is, but I said seek the truth because I think this has been known for a long time about the contest between right and wrong and truth from falsehoods.
But more so, I guess in my lifetime, there's certainly been more lying than ever before that becomes public.
That doesn't mean there was a period of time that there was less lying.
Maybe they were just a little bit more sophisticated in hiding their lying and hiding behind the media or whatever.
So I think that that is a challenge.
And I happen to also believe that the world has changed.
We just heard a lecture.
They might try to change it with the guns, but it doesn't work.
I believe it changed intellectually.
And that's why we want to have education.
I was a fan of and still a fan of what Leonard Reed wrote in the Foundation for Economic Education.
He emphasized education.
And I am convinced that that is what is important.
And I also like the Victor Hugo quote.
He says, you know, the neat thing about all this is, you know, there are a lot of armies out there.
A lot of armies want to override all naturally good instincts.
But he says, an idea that has come cannot be overthrown by guns or armies.
And that should give us encouragement.
But I guess you can't be complacent enough to say, well, not all ideas, that is correct.
I would say the ideas that were behind our revolution, you know, the John Locke's and the Jeffersons and the many others, that was an idea whose time has come.
And the founders believed there was a divine destiny for that to come about and it would burst forth.
And it did.
And it's been great.
We've had a good constitution, but of course there's been limitations to it, and we know that, but that doesn't mean that we should quit.
But we also have to realize there are some evil, evil ideas out there.
I mean, were there ideological people behind the totalitarianism of Nazism and communism and fascism?
Yeah, there's always intellectuals behind there.
But I still think that the good ideas are important and you can overcome them because the others have to defend on force and violence and debt and eventually that collapses.
So instead of complaining deeply about where we are and what's going to happen, I think the disintegration of a lot of our institutions is a very good opportunity to offer our values about what liberty is all about.
You know, the one subject I've already mentioned is something that I got interested in very early, and that is why should a country have sound money?
And if we're seeking the truth, you know why we seek sound money because there's a big difference about honest money and dishonest money.
And we have many good parts of our freedoms and our Constitution have been eroded because we have accepted the so-called emergency need for destroying the monetary system.
And it's unnecessary to have a unit of account.
And the unit of account is the thing that I think is important because that is talking about the honesty of money.
And if you can define what the unit of account is and you have a trustworthy government, you can do pretty well.
Some gold standards have lasted for a long, long time and some have collapsed because they quit defining it.
Now the defining moment for me in deciding to get involved in speaking out, I wouldn't say I got involved in politics because I never felt like I was doing that.
But I was looking for an opportunity to have a platform.
So The date that I had an eye-opener that I think at the time I jumped out of my chair because, and that was August 15th, 1971, when Nixon announced, well, what we're going to do today is put on tariffs and raise taxes and all these things.
And we're going to quit practicing our beliefs that we should steal.
The last link to gold was the $35.
We'd pay to foreigners.
It had already been taken from us.
But this was the last link.
And to me, that was a big event.
And I think that it might have already, we already see signs that it's probably bigger than I thought at the beginning.
It was and is a big event.
And it breeds so much harm and danger because it's so seductive.
And the whole reason they did that is always for humanitarian reasons.
We have to have a welfare state and we have to police the world.
We're going to bring about peace and on and on.
And it always costs money.
And, you know, after a while, they spend more money than we're producing.
And when you're a very, very wealthy country, and we have been and still are pretty wealthy, but we're very wealthy.
But believe me, we have consumed a lot of wealth.
And guess what?
We have consumed our gold as well.
And we've consumed our liberties.
And so on and on.
So things are different.
Though the 70s were very important to me.
And even in the 60s, I think conditions are much, much worse than they were in the 70s.
Amazing Thing Happened 00:05:43
And in the 60s, I remember, well, for political reasons, foreign policy reasons, monetary reasons.
And that is there was a problem with missiles in Cuba in October of 1962.
And guess what?
I was in the middle of my residency and I got a little invitation from Uncle Sam.
He says, you're my favorite nephew.
I want you.
But fortunately for me, instead of, you know, I wasn't ready to really fight it.
I was, you know, you know, when to capitulate a little bit.
So they said, but if you're coming in, we know that.
But you can pick your service.
And they said, if, because if you don't do that, you're drafted and you're a buck private.
And that made me very wise.
So they said, but if you volunteer, we'll make you an officer, a captain, and you can pick your service that you went and even indicate what city you want to serve your prison term.
I mean, so I picked the Air Force.
I was always interested in flying and went to the aviation school, medicine school in San Antonio and made the best of it.
But the 60s had a lot of interesting things politically and for foreign policy because although the Cuban crisis ended rather quickly, they said, no, you can't leave.
We have Vietnam to work on now.
And Vietnam was escalating.
And that was tragic for me personally.
And it's still so tragic when I see either TVs or stories or memories about the tragic figures of the men who were so unnecessary.
Not only the ones that we can weep for when they die, but how about the kind that come in with one limb left?
And it just, and I tell my wife, and I'll be sitting there, and I said, that is so bad, so bad, because the reason to me it's so bad is because it was all preventable.
All preventable.
But on economic terms, what was interesting, the war ended when the people woke up.
People said, we've had enough.
We're running out of money.
There's inflation.
And people demonstrated in the streets.
And the congressmen, who were still, there still were some, there still were some when I was there, that that was the worst thing we did, was ever took defeat like this and walk away.
We had to win.
And we should go back if we need to.
Sort of like now we're back in the Middle East still doing it.
So the big thing that I noticed was there were consequences economically.
In the 70s represented those consequences with a lot of serious economic problems.
But the whole thing is, is not long after that, an amazing thing happened.
How long had we been in there?
Somebody in this crowd probably knows the exact days, but a lot of years, if you count France and you count us.
And you know, one thing a lot of people forget about, because I want to say good things about Eisenhower at occasion, but he put the first troops in there to train these people.
So he was still an interventionist that invited these kind of problems.
So what happened afterwards?
I mean, we've been there during all those years.
I had a school teacher killed in the Korean War and had a neighbor's son killed in the Vietnam War.
It's just so horrible.
But what happened to our effort to democratize and make Vietnam like us?
You just heard a wonderful lecture about how foolish that is.
So the one thing that I noticed, and I would use it in speeches because I think it's so emphatic, and that is we were, a lot of them well-intended, although I believe the military and complex have their intentions too.
But a lot of other people have good intentions.
They think they can go in there and make good American Democrats and free market people in Vietnam.
And the war ended, and we came home, and it was within years.
We were trading there.
We were going in and out of there.
And I would tell my audience that, you know, what couldn't be done at all made worse with arms and all.
All of a sudden, just look at what happened with peace.
It was just a difference of all night and day.
It's a powerful, powerful message that is, you know, totally ignored.
So those are the kind of things that I remember so clearly, and I kept wanting to put the philosophy together.
And I started with economic policies.
They fascinated me in reading Austrian economics.
But then I went off to Congress, and I still think it was a mistake, not a personal mistake on me.
Congressional Food Policies Cut 00:12:28
I didn't think it would ever happen.
I didn't run to it because it was so impossible.
We had three Democrats, three Republicans in all of Texas in 1974, the first time I ran.
And We had, it was Watergate Year, and I was looking for a place to speak out about the insanity of the monetary system.
And the worm who got out and got to, with the district was partially in Houston.
So when the chairman of Harris County heard about it, they started loving me and said, oh, yeah, you come, you know, and they encouraged me.
So I went and did it on a work.
And I remember telling my wife, because she got to worrying about this, I said, what are you worried about?
She says, you're probably going to get elected.
But that was one thing that I was emphatic.
She didn't know anything about politics or economics.
Hell, you just don't know.
They don't elect a person who wants to kill Santa Claus.
But she said, you know, she said something that sort of lingers, and maybe I'm trying to live up to her expectations.
He says, no, you'll be telling the truth, and that people are going to believe you.
So frequently I would ask for her advice, but be careful, don't send me someplace off.
So anyway, that was good.
But after getting to Washington, you know, I was a pretty typical conservative Republican, and welfare always bugged me.
Why do these people get food stamps?
Why do they get all the housing?
And they don't have to pay anything.
Really bothering me.
Now they get kicked out of their houses and we give it to all the illegal immigrants.
But anyway, when I got there, it didn't take me long to find out that welfarism is not something that poor people who have been subjected to monstrosities of government, the monstrosities of government spending and inflation.
We were in the midst of all that inflation.
And although there were some people getting food stamped, I tell you what, the people who were really getting the food stamp that we needed to really crack down on were the food stamps for the industrial elite.
And that is where the problem, I believe, still exists.
And that is something that continues to exist.
And that is why so much of our policies have to be changed.
Now, I promised that I would mention at least three issues of what we should do and think about.
They're not precise amendments to the Constitution, but they're precise as I could make of the issues of three policies that we could look at that would help us curtail the ugly growth of government.
And of course, the one that to me popped up early in my career was, and you've all heard my statement on it, is end the end of the engine of inflation and the Fed.
And when you think about it, you know, they can use up our gold and sell all of it and have to prepare.
As far as I'm concerned, August 15th was a declaration of bankruptcy because we couldn't meet our obligation.
And how did they do it?
They wasted it fighting the wars and on and on and all the welfare goes on.
Deficits don't matter.
But I still saw it as an intellectual thing because they sort of forgot about the old-fashioned liberal free market economic policies of economics.
And so they rejected that.
At the same time, there was the pressure.
Well, we're wealthy and we're powerful.
We can do this forever, they thought.
But that's coming to an end, obviously.
So they did that.
But the money would be spent, and I saw in two ways.
The debt would, when they had the debt, the politicians would spend the money, and that would run out the budget.
But I think one other thing that people don't talk about very often that I think is very important is that when you mess around with monetary policy, you're messing around with the most important price in economic policy.
They're messing around with the price of money, and that's the interest rates.
And we just went through this insanity of, I guess it was in 08, 09, when they came in with QE, we had two or three years zero-rate interest.
That is utterly economically crazy.
And the results are what we have here.
So you had all the money they were spending and running up the debt, but because the interest rates, when they go below what is normal, when you have to depend on savings, what you do is you have the malinvestment.
You make bad investments.
And many people in this room would probably remember there was something used to be called the savings and loan.
And I remember the first house I bought, I had to go to the savings and loan.
And they said, well, we're not making many loans now.
This is when I first went to Texas.
We're not making money right now.
Our reserves are low.
They said, but you know, just a little bit further down the road, there's another county, and there are a bunch of people on there.
They're doing very well because they had rice, and they were raising rice.
So I went there, and they had savings.
And that's the way it worked.
You had to say.
But now, what are they doing?
What is it?
I don't know the number, but they're like, they're going to give $150,000 of down payment for illegals.
I mean, the whole thing is nuts.
And that's a rather soft word to use.
But no, the economic policies are foolish.
The debt is a disaster.
I think this debt is going to eat our lunch, and it already is.
And to me, the biggest problem that comes from that is the division of society.
You know, the rich against the poor.
Yes, the poor should get some food stamps.
But like I said, my discovery was they weren't the big spenders of government, largest.
But they do.
They get it, and they have benefits.
But it's the whole principle.
It's the people, military-industrial complex, and just think of how they spent the money for COVID.
And this is not the Democrats that are doing this.
They're part of it.
It's the Republicans and the Democrats and the Independents.
Everybody.
It's a system.
It's ingrained in our system.
And, well, can't the Congress, can't you make sense out of it with the Congressman?
No, they all went to the same school.
They all went to liberal schools and they were taught these economic policies.
So that's a big problem.
But the other thing, though, is the dissension.
And that's where we're going to see more and more violence.
Because what are they doing?
How are they going to distribute the bailouts evenly and make everybody happy?
And the one thing, one rule about recovering from economic policy is that prices go up.
They call that the inflation.
That's a result of the inflation.
And the poor and the middle class suffer the most.
If you're into billions and millions of dollars, you're not worried about the price of bread.
The people that were supposed to have been helped all those decades are the ones who are getting the bill.
And people have to think of that bill as a tax, because if they wanted to collect it, it would be a tax.
And it's the most vicious of all taxes.
Because what they have done is they have devised a system where they steal the wealth from the people.
Because if they double the money supply and your dollar becomes worth 50 cents, they just taxed you 50 cents on the dollar.
It's immoral, it's wrong, it's wicked, and it always ends badly.
And what we're seeing right now is the opening, the beginning of this.
And the poor will lobby and they will be always told by the politicians, we'll take care of you, we'll take care of you, but they can't do it.
Because a lot of people now, the politicians go out and campaign, they'll meet a group, what's the matter?
Well, prices are too high.
We need more money.
Send us more money.
That's what caused the problem.
So it is an overwhelming tax.
I do not believe from my experience that I can predict and say that, you know, it's great that Thomas Massey's there and a few others.
And there are some that lean that way.
But, you know, if all of us got busy and got a new Congress, I'd encourage it.
I went there and did my best.
But I never had this naive belief, nor should we have the naive belief that if you go and get enough members of Congress, all of a sudden they're going to vote for a balanced budget.
No, impossible because, you know, if they cut, if they cut, they don't even cut a nickel out of the budget.
What they do is they say, well, this year we have to have a new budget and we'll have to, oh, it's a bad year.
So we're going to have to raise the spending by $10 billion.
And then somebody comes, oh, that's too much.
Okay, we'll raise it only $9 billion.
So the news is Congress just passed the cut of $9 billion.
You know, it's just all chicanery.
But it's not going to happen.
I mean, this is why I know the difference between the political candidates running for president, but I'll tell you what, I look long term, and I was telling somebody the other day the first presidential returns I remember was sitting with my dad, I think it was 1940, with Window Wilkie was running.
And all those years I've watched it, and they have promises here and promises there, and nothing ever changes.
You know, they say there's a real rout this year, and the good guys win, so-called, good guys.
But what are they going to do?
Are they going to cut any spending?
And no, the Fed's going to be there.
Do you think they're going to get rid of the income tax?
We're lucky if we can just protect 1% of our capital gains tax or something.
Because the spending is, but right now the spending is on autopilot.
It's not like they really appropriate money.
It's on autopilot because they have to use up most of their income just to pay the interest on the debt.
So the preparation for this is big time.
And I've talked a lot about that.
At times, get involved very much in gold.
I was out of Congress when I did see much.
I left Congress after six years.
And then I stayed out for 12 years.
But during that time, I did a newsletter on gold, thinking gold was a good haven.
Regulating Crypto and Guns 00:11:33
But that's not the answer.
Ultimately, because look at what Roosevelt did with gold.
And do you think they won't touch crypto?
Believe me, they already have that regulated.
So they cannot do that.
Gold, I don't think they'll confiscate gold, but they might make it so difficult for you to spend it.
They might say, oh, how much did you pay for that?
And they might charge you 50% tax or something, but they're not going to do it.
But that is something that is important.
We should do it.
But ultimately, I want to talk about what we are talking about here, all day today, yesterday, having young people come, what we do on a daily program.
Because I don't think the solution, the solution is understanding economics to motivate people, but ultimately is to get people to understand what personal liberty is all about, where it comes from.
It comes to us in a natural way.
And when people understand that, and when you put the liberty together with individuals who will tell the truth, I tell you what, solutions aren't that difficult.
You know, we can do it.
There's another principle that I'd like to mention, and that is the principle that citizens are always told what to do and can't do.
You'll have all these regulations.
Regulate your guns and whatever.
But there should not be any regulation made, like even the basic fundamentals, don't lie, cheat, steal, or kill.
Those are pretty good, natural law viewpoints.
And most people think that they're still on the books, and we should follow them.
But why don't we have it where we apply that to the government?
They shouldn't be lying, cheating, stealing, and killing.
So that simple shift in attitude would go a long way to pinning it down where the problem is.
And I think that people, I think, would think that is a logical thing to do.
I never thought of it that way.
And the other thing I wanted to mention as another place to place a rule, a rule, and that is related to the lecture we had on foreign policy.
And mine there is disband the empire.
We don't need an empire.
So that is, you know, some things that are easy to do or easy to talk about and it should be easy to do.
But it's been mentioned, the climactic end that we're coming to.
And this whole thing is coming down.
The monetary system will have to have radical work done with it or a new one.
And foreign policy is going to stop.
We can't do this.
The empire will be done.
You know, during campaigning, they'd ask me questions and I had to come up with a quick answer.
They said, what would you do about the Middle East?
How are you going to handle that during the Iraq war?
I said, well, we just marched in.
we can just march home.
It's not that complicated.
So, but I am on the long run.
I'm an optimist.
I think it's wonderful what we have.
I think there's been pointed out even here about the opportunities to get information out.
If we did not have the internet, we couldn't have the Liberty Report.
So in many ways, I sort of described myself internally that maybe I'm like a pamphleteer.
You know, getting information out there.
But sometimes people compliment me and they say, well, Ron did this.
He wrote these books and things like that.
And I have to usually soften that a little bit.
I said, you know, I don't like to use that because there are others in this room and have been here all weekend who write real books.
They have footnotes and everything.
And mine's pretty simple.
Mine's just sort of a commentary.
But they do that.
And I think that is important.
But getting information out is good.
And I think it's available to us.
But the first thing is, and I will repeat the advice I got from Leonard Reed, is do your best to educate yourself.
And that's why many of you come here to learn more.
That's why I have you here because I learned from you that we have to learn the correct and proper theories on economics and how to handle problems and work with reality.
I think people have to realize history, at least current history.
There was a time I was being interviewed during one of the wars, and one of the Fox commentators said, well, so-and-so, and I was so bold as to say, well, you know, there's a reason that we have problems with Iran.
You know, we committed a coup in 1973.
And he says, I don't want to hear anything about history.
Shut me up.
But I also, I bet I'm going too long.
I want to finish by talking about a little pamphlet, not a book, a little pamphlet dealing with a coup.
Because we just said there was a coup, and in a way it was.
Pretty slick.
Kamala, she must be a really sharpie.
But she got couped in.
There has been a coup.
And that's amazing.
Never had a vote cast.
Is that, and they're fanatics on this democracy.
I mean, this democracy stuff, you've got to be careful because some people see it as a substitute for the word freedom.
But I'll tell you what, the dictatorship of the majority is what I fear.
But I think we have a lot of that.
But I think the coup that I've written about, I think, is important because it's been changed our lives.
And that is, and I remember them so clearly, and I can't go over the personal things that I remember about it, but the Kennedy Kennedy assassinations, as well as Martin Luther King assassination, and the theory, who did what, when, and how about investigations.
Well, we had an investigation, and somebody said that the final word is, Oswald did it, nobody else.
Well, I'll tell you about just a general opinion about commissions and studies.
They're not worth a nickel.
They're worth less than that because they're evil.
They have commissions to, you know, there probably were some honest people, dumb, but honest, honest people that truly wanted, you know, to do the right thing and they went wrong, but they want to cover their tracks.
They don't want to get fired.
So it's to cover up the mistakes made.
And then the next thing is they want to cover, they want to cover up the conspirators.
But I've always been opposed.
My instincts were, even before, a long time before I got involved in politics, my instincts were that it might have been in 1988 when I was running as a libertarian, that I took a strong position that we did not need and we ought to get rid of the FBI.
And also, we can't get rid of the CIA, of course.
The CIA is useful.
But if we have a system there where we end the FID and where we also say that citizens, governments should be prohibited from doing things that they prohibit citizens from.
They're not allowed to do it.
But also getting rid of the empire.
Well, I mean, there's only three little things to do.
But I tell you what, the other thing is, and this crowd looks like they've met up to the instructions, when you get together to talk about these very serious things and you meet new people and you get to be friends you've had before and you hear new ideas, you ought to have a lot of fun doing it.
Because if you dwell on only tomorrow, there's going to be a black swan event and you're going to lose a lot of money.
You better worry about that tonight.
I shouldn't say that.
So, no, there's every reason to believe that there's no reason.
I have good time, and I'm sure there's a lot of you, if not all of you, probably enjoy, even when you're with a smaller group, to be able to talk to somebody and talk about issue in a serious manner without wondering, I wonder who's telling a lie, who's telling the biggest lie.
I'll go to the television.
I'll find out.
I'll go to my internet.
But anyway, I feel good about being here.
I am delighted you came, and I want to thank you for all your support and encouragement.
Keep fighting for the cause of liberty.
Number Eight Down 00:00:05
Well, there goes number eight.
Let's hope there's a number nine.
See you all next year.
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