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Feb. 10, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
26:08
How Would Ron Paul Audit The Fed?

Over the weekend there were a flurry of viral posts on X - led by Elon Musk - suggesting that Ron Paul should head up the auditing of the Federal Reserve...and even that he should be tapped as Fed Chairman! Millions who have followed his often lonely crusade against the Fed are finally seeing some results. Can it happen...and how?

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Audit The Fed 00:15:00
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
Doing well.
Doing well.
Looking for a problem to solve.
Every once in a while, a problem pops up.
But you know, Daniel, a problem has risen to the surface, although it's been around for a long time, and it's been on my surface for a long time.
And that is what's going on, you know, with the Federal Reserve.
Most people say, oh, you're the guy that wants to audit the Fed.
And one time I had a libertarian come up to me.
He says, I'm not happy with your position on the Fed.
And I said, why is that?
He says, you don't want to end it.
I said, what do you mean?
He says, you only want to audit it.
No, folks.
I want to audit for as a process when the people demand, oh, boy, we need to end this.
Sort of like USAID.
They investigate it, they had the investigation, and they had the audit.
And the American people, I'll bet you 75% of the American people, except the really radical authoritarians, will say, oh, no, you didn't know what they're talking about now, how it was saving lives.
Yeah.
You know, saving lies and it's unconstitutional and all that.
So I think there's so much activity and a lot of people know my history and my interest in it, dating back to a special day in 1971.
So I'm excited about the interest going on, you know, people talking about it.
And I think at times, you know, I've always guarded against over-expectation or saying, boy, we have it.
And I'd much rather be surprised that things turned out much better than I said.
And in a way, the attention right now that we're getting on this issue, it's surprising.
It's still a big surprise, even though, why didn't they do it a long time ago?
Why did we ever get the Federal Reserve?
So I think that's good news out there.
The people want to know.
And I see so many events evolving this way.
I use the example of COVID.
When the people heard about it and witnessed and suffered from, you know, the government running that, what did they demand?
A little bit more freedom, you know, rather than medicine practiced by the government.
So anyway, I'm sort of excited about what's going on and the interest they have.
And I think everything comes from the people.
When there's a prevailing attitude, you know, the ideas can't be stopped.
And I wonder if this is getting to be a prevailing attitude, you know, about sound money.
It's been around for a long time and it has its ups and downs.
But it started thousands of years ago of the significance and the importance of understanding what monetary policy is.
Yeah, there are a lot of naysayers out there.
You know, Elon is the, you know, our friend Jonathan Turley said his opponents are calling him Muskenstein.
You know, he's this Frankenstein monster.
And I'm sure that, you know, not everything is perfect.
But what I find strange, Dr. Paul, is people basically saying, I don't want to know.
You know, he's got a team of young engineers, young, very bright people, and they're going through places like Treasury.
They're going through places like USCID, and they're saying, you guys would not believe what we found here.
It's incredible.
And instead of saying, wow, you guys are doing a great public service, this really is terrible stuff.
They're saying, we don't want to know, don't tell us.
But over the weekend, it was pretty amazing.
You talk about the Fed.
We want to talk about the Fed today.
Put on that first clip because this is something I just updated.
I just looked up this morning and updated it.
So Senator Mike Lee over yesterday, he said, raise your hand if you'd like to see Ron Paul as Federal Reserve Chairman.
And to which Elon Musk responded, that would be amazing.
And that has now 40.2 million views, Dr. Paul.
You probably never realized, I thought you would get that.
But it started out a little earlier.
I think it was a day early if you go to the next one.
Now, this is a friend of the Institute.
In fact, the former Ron Paul scholar, Liam McCollum, he tweeted out two days ago, Doge and Elon Musk should let Ron Paul lead a Federal Reserve audit team.
To which Elon Musk said, good idea.
And that was picked up everywhere on X. You go to the next one, including to this very, very large account, who reported it as a news article, Elon, Ron Paul should lead a Federal Reserve audit on and on it goes.
So really, Dr. Paul made a huge, huge impact over the weekend, this idea of you being involved in the process of auditing the Fed.
Well, my first reaction is, go slow, think about this, and don't get too excited because I know the ups and downs of all this.
Because over the years, even before I was in Congress, I was delighted to be introduced to the ideas of the Austrian School of Economics and what Sound Money was all about.
And educated enough by 1971 that there would be some big changes after that.
I personally saw myself as an educator in politics and that my efforts would be slow motion.
It wouldn't be like tomorrow we decide this and there's a revolution.
I expected and I still expected that method to be benefit because I do think that people have to have the ideas on the bottom in order to see it wasn't like our revolution popped out of thin air because they got mad at some British general.
They knew the history of liberty and they came up with some pretty good ideas.
So I think the money issue, and there's so much in history.
So I'd like to say that over the years, my comments come because I really know everything about the monetary issue.
But I'll tell you, I've enjoyed reading because it fascinates me that the history of the importance of money in central banking is really important.
And once you tie that into all the excesses, so today they're talking about efficiency of government.
Well, that's good.
And I support it.
But I also urge them to think about what's behind it.
What do you have to have in order to have an empire and militarism around the world and a runaway welfare state and a government taking over education and all this stuff?
And that is, you have to have ideology that supports that.
Now, I didn't invent the ideology.
It came from history.
And it also is something that is currently undermined.
I had to get it from people like Leonard Reed, people who wrote like Lou Rockwell and others that put the information out.
So I see that as important.
And I'm sort of in the middle of that, excited about it, but I never got offered a good job in a university to go and teach this stuff.
I was still practicing medicine, but that kept me in the very practical world.
You've actually been the biggest professor in history because the whole country, the whole world is your classroom on this.
But, you know, the Fed is a key.
And I remember we've talked about it on the show when we went and visited with Tucker Carlson.
And he said, at first, I thought this Fed stuff, it's esoteric.
I don't understand.
I don't think it's that important.
I don't know why he's into it.
And a little later he came to realize, I sort of felt that way myself because, yeah, this Fed stuff is interesting, but I'm in favor of anti-war activity to stopping the war.
And then I finally realized the Fed is the key.
You know, it's great that we're finding out what Treasury does.
We're finding out what AID does.
But the Fed is the head of the Hydra.
That's where all the money comes from.
That's where it flows from.
Yeah, I was fascinated with that interview with Tucker.
Because he says, when I heard that, because he didn't go out there, he was out there as an academician and an honest journalist and this sort of thing.
But he explained his surprise.
What is he doing?
You know, he came from an outfit at the time.
It wasn't exactly libertarian.
But he was very honest and upfront.
And he was very complimentary because who was giving me validation?
It was a lot of young people that we went and met and talked.
And he was writing an article on me.
Yeah, and that's actually, of course, for the life of me, I can't find it.
I read a great article about how Musk is going through these places.
And he's bringing a team of young engineers.
We talked about it earlier, who are coming in and finding all this stuff.
It's incredible, you know, that what they're finding.
So the young people are key.
They do understand it.
But, you know, people are talking about, well, let's audit it.
And you're right.
Audit the Fed first because that will provide the ammunition to shut it down.
Because when you saw what was happening with AID, that can't be reformed.
Get rid of it.
It's awful.
So what would you anticipate if you went in there and you just really ripped the lid off of what kinds of stuff do you think you'd see?
Where have we been for so long?
Why didn't our schools teach something about the Constitution?
Why did the schools give up on the idea of the tradition of our country talking about silver and gold as being the only legal tender we were allowed?
And that is still changing.
So that is what I think has to be done.
What I'm delighted about right now that's going on is the Constitution is clear that the states can only use gold and silver as legal tender to keep the federal government honest.
And I think that is just great.
And so we've been working with the states that it's their responsibility to use only gold and silver, but the federal government won't let them.
You know, you can't go in and pay your taxes in a gold certificate.
So that, I think, is just wonderful because what the states are promoting are the laws that would say, well, if it's legal, if it is, you can't tax money.
If it's real money, you just don't, you don't tax a Federal Reserve note because you use it.
You don't tax money.
Well, gold.
Well, why would you be able to have a sales tax to buy your currency?
Oh, it says $20.
Oh, but you have to pay $2,000 for it.
Oh, whoa, Taxia.
Look at the capital gains you had.
So they had to get rid of, or they work on getting rid of sales taxes and capital gains taxes.
And because that fits into my idea that one of the answers will be competing currencies.
And the competing currencies, from my viewpoint, shouldn't be strictly limited except by the laws of fraud, fraud and deceit, that.
And then let the market decide.
And under emergencies, all kinds of things have been used to tide these countries over.
In times of war and all, they'll use things that will substitute and work out.
But they usually fall back to some of the rules that established gold a long time ago.
Now, what would you think if you were able to shine the light if these young engineers found all these things?
What would you expect going back to the 08 crisis, financial crisis and bailouts, COVID, et cetera?
What do you think the two or three worst, most egregious things the Fed did might be?
Print money.
Print money.
Simple.
No, the big one, the big economic issue, is most people know they print a lot of money and debt and all that.
But what they don't realize is there's a lot of other stuff that goes on.
Prices go up, and people don't want to believe that.
It has to blame profits and things like that.
The other thing is, is they don't talk about prices going up for other reasons and sorting it out.
Prices will go up because the dollar is going down, but prices might go up because of a hurricane.
And there's a big difference to that, because if it goes up because of a hurricane, that's not inflation because you have to take the money from something else, you know, and you have to deal with your priorities.
And the other thing that I would hope to find and emphasize and teach people is the principle of malinvestment.
This is what Mises and other great economists have taught, that the interest rate is very, very important.
It should represent savings.
You know, if the people save, I remember not too long ago, in 1968, I moved to Texas to start my medical practice, and I had to get a loan for a house in my medical office.
And they didn't have any money to loan to me close to where I lived.
They said, yeah, but this town down the road, 50 miles away, it just happens that they have more money, they've had more success, and they save more money, so you go there.
So people have to realize that interest rates, well, oh, that's a pain in the neck.
You have to wait till somebody works and saves them money.
What they want to do is they want low interest rates, pretending that there's a lot of savings out there.
And people say, wow.
You know, people got a little bit nervous because when they kept it for 10 years at 0%, at real rates, 0%, they know a lot of people made a lot of debts, including our federal government, including everybody who took a check during that time because it sounded like a good deal, but it was all bad investment.
And of course, if my theory is, is that when it gets out of hand, that debt has to be liquidated.
The bad investments have to be liquidated.
And I would hope to find the evidence to prove that.
I mean, it's out there.
And the Austrian economists have talked about this for a long time.
But it's been known for probably thousands of years that money didn't come out of the thin air.
One of the things we're learning from looking inside USAID is how involved they were in regime change overseas.
Do you think that the Federal Reserve is involved in regime change and things of that nature overseas?
Of course, I've put out that statement that I believe that because I always had the greatest resistance from the audit, from foreign entanglements, foreign affairs.
They don't want you to know of all the foreign activity.
I think when there's an most of these financial crises in the last 20, 30 years have always been international.
So if the Fed creates credit and bills out of a country someplace, or if we're supporting some war faction someplace, it's not that difficult to make sure they can manipulate the budget and the weapons and the monetary system and keep some of those companies from countries from going bankrupt.
Subsidizing the Bubble 00:05:03
We're bankrupt, but we fudge because we still have the reserve currency.
I think they would find out there's a lot more activity involved in with foreign countries subsidizing our empire and subsidizing the people.
We say they're our friends and we have to take care of them and they've been able to get away with it.
I would hope that the evidence to show that it's not long-lasting, that it always comes to an end.
This is not new.
It's been there.
They might have to look at the current events, but they might have to be suggested.
We might want to suggest you ought to look at history.
If this is what you want to do, and if you don't follow through with these cuts in spending that Musk and others are proposing, I mean, these problems are going to come.
And this is the biggest event going on right now with the Committee on Efficiency.
It is not exactly put together the way I think it should be, but it's doing a lot of good because they're emphasizing all this spending and debt.
And Mises warned, he says there's going to be a crackup boom, you know, because prices are going to go up.
Oh, inflation.
That's how we get rid of the recession.
We have to prevent depressions and recession.
So I think that's going to happen.
But the crackout boom is when people throw in their chips.
They just get rid of it.
And it does, I still hope that we wake up and understand these things so we don't have to go through the ringer.
Can you imagine if our country and our dollar goes through the ringer like the like the Venezuela money?
You know, if that would have been a worldwide currency, that would be a big deal.
And that would come, and that would be a real dangerous period.
It's already getting dangerous because there's so much politicization of this.
I'd like to see people try to understand that the discrepancy between rich and poor has nothing to do with somebody like Musk or Trump involved in free market economics and they pick the right things and or produce a good product.
And it's the marketplace.
Under that system, the market rewards them, not the government.
So if they could come around to that, they would have to accept a principle and a blueprint that's been around for a couple years.
And I think our government schools have forgotten about it.
But that outline and sort of a guideline of what we could do because when the young people who seem to be getting really excited, what we do, I said, start with reading the Constitution.
It's surprising how much evidence is in there.
And then I says, along with that, because they had a lot of respect for natural law.
That is, people, and I believe this, all the way back before history was written, the human race understood something about natural law.
Because even in the very, even before language was well known, the cultures knew that it didn't make any sense to kill each other.
And that they knew that if you carved out a cave to live in, you better watch out.
You don't just walk in here and tell you property rights are there.
So that is the kind of thing that we should all be looking at, you know, not only the guideline of the Constitution, but also the history that's available to us.
What would you say to the people who said, well, back in 08 when we had the meltdown, we had to have the Fed come in and save us from Armageddon because that's what was going to happen.
Yeah, and then they wonder why, you know, 08, some people predicted, you know, and it's and you don't know when that's going to pay penalty and raise prices.
Sometimes you can see that in a month or two or a year or two, but sometimes it smolders, it sits there.
And they kept the interest rates very low and people got their mortgages at lower rates.
And some people probably got a good deal, but the bubble had to burst.
It was artificial.
It didn't come from saving.
So when it's like a pyramid, once the top, the person that stimulates that crashes, everything associated with, they go bankrupt too.
And so the Fed then has to struggle to put it back together.
A lot of responsibility.
And when people get upset with the Fed, so too often the politicians are upset with the Fed.
I want lower interest.
They want the bubble to continue.
But it's also, for people who understand monetary policy, say, yes, we don't want to do it.
But you say, and it suggests, what are the people going to say?
Wouldn't that hurt?
Initially, it might hurt.
You know, treatment for several illnesses, you might have to take a very serious operation.
But the one thing that we have learned from history of economic policy is that if everybody recognizes there's a bubble out there and it bursts and we have this chaos, if you do more of the same thing that caused it, it doesn't help.
Sounds Good, Reminds Me 00:03:17
But if you all of a sudden lift things, and I keep telling people, young people, when I talk to them, they're sort of interested.
I say, and they say, well, I take no government, wouldn't there be anarchy?
I said, how would you feel if you're getting out of college now and you don't pay any income tax?
I said, what if you never had to worry about a draft again?
No income tax.
And I think, and they would be excited about that.
But, you know, I always reminded the student on this issue, if that happens, that, yes, this sounds good and you like it.
You don't want taxes and regulations and all that.
But if you yourself make mistakes, because the government's always there to make sure you don't make a mistake and take the wrong medication, if you can't do that, the people would be responsible for it.
And you know what?
What surprised me is usually the students, the young people, I want my freedom, and they weren't worried about that, but that would be the thing that they'd have to learn.
Yes, you're on your own, but the net result is the greatest amount of prosperity and the greatest effort to promote peace under those conditions.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm going to show one more fun tweet before I close out, Dr. Paul.
Let's move to this next one.
Now, this came up, I think, yesterday.
This was, I should say post, not tweet, I'm sorry.
Terra Bull posted, Elon Musk is considering to have Ron Paul head up an auditor the Federal Reserve.
And then Elon himself came in and said, this will be great.
Not that would be great, but this will be great.
So I like that AI picture of you guys sitting down and taking care of business.
So interesting times, Dr. Paul.
But I'm going to close out thanking our viewers and reminding them, if you go to that very last clip, reminding them, now here is our lineup for March 22nd in Lake Jackson.
This is tremendous, Dr. Paul.
I'm really excited about this.
We've got the great Tom Woods, our great friend, Jimmy Duncan, representative from Tennessee.
We've got David Stockman, Reagan's OMB director, former congressman from Michigan, prolific writer, legendary investor.
And our old friend, Jeff Deist, your former chief of staff, now is the chief counsel at Monetary Metals.
Now, I got a couple of titles of presentations over the weekend sent in.
Tom Woods wrote me and he said his presentation, now this sounds really good, Dr. Paul, the Ron Paulian Origins of the Present Moment.
That's going to be exciting to see.
And then David Stockman wrote back to me and he said his title is going to be, his talk is going to be, Bring the Empire Home, Save $500 Billion Dollars a Year.
So this is going to be a very, very interesting conference.
There is a link in there where you can get those tickets, get them while we still have the early bird special on and save a little bit of money.
Come down here on the Gulf of America and listen to some great talks.
You know, when you put up that picture, you know, that picture that you snapped of that fellow by the name of Bosca, myself, I want the audience to know, you know, that is all fake.
Very Interesting Conference 00:02:37
And I don't know.
You weren't hanging out.
So you qualified it.
So that's all fake.
But I hope philosophically we are close together on cutting the power and the scope of big government.
You know, I talk a lot about history, our history on money and our Constitution, only gold and silver should be used.
But going back, I found it fascinating.
I wonder what this fellow named Aristotle thought of money.
Now, Aristotle, interesting enough, you know, we recite the terms, what should good money be like?
And most people will have heard of the quality, and they talk about having a unit of account, define your money.
That there's a means of exchange that people will accept it.
It's knowledgeable and they trust it.
And also, it would be a store of value.
And they didn't originate because Aristotle probably heard it from somebody else.
But that's it.
When did Aristotle look?
300 years B.C.
So it's been around a long time.
But even 2,000, 3,000 years BC, they were very much aware, maybe not of it, money circulating, but money circulated as if it was something special and different.
So the information is out there as hard as the people that gravitated to government to try to prevent us from getting this information.
I worried a little bit, and I still am clumsy with the internet, but I tell you what, it's very helpful.
It helps when we're trying to get some people together to talk about these issues.
And I think that is great.
But it's also a deadly weapon for some people.
What if Daniel had not given the honest opinion?
I really wasn't having a picture with Musk.
Maybe someday I will.
So we have visited philosophically, but we have not visited personally, but maybe someday we will.
But the other thing that I try to emphasize when I talk to, especially the young people, because they like to have fun, other people do too.
I think if you're talking about serious things, we're going to be talking about serious things at our conference here coming up next month.
I said, you should have fun.
So I've never had anybody after one of our conferences come up and say, Ron, you told us we were going to have fun.
I thought your conference was very boring.
No, we haven't anybody, and I don't want to hear that.
I want to hear people say, you know, as serious as it is, it's still fun because it's so important.
And I think we'd all have a better world if we looked at it that way.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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