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April 3, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:10
Double Whammy: Trade Wars And Real Wars!

President Trump unveiled his new tariff policy yesterday, sending markets reeling. Meanwhile, it appears his administration is gearing up for a real war on Iran. Is the honeymoon over?

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Time Text
Liberation Day Concerns 00:04:32
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to 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?
Good.
Good.
Some days we don't have much to talk about, but I think today we have a few things that we could go over because lots of things are happening.
But, you know, we talk about two things, basically, a lot of foreign policy and a lot of economic policy because we want peace and we want prosperity.
But there's a double whammy today, as far as I'm concerned.
Wow.
And I think the president needs a better understanding of the definition of words.
I mean, what do you call this?
Liberation?
Liberation Day?
And he pumped the people up and he's good at it and he's been successful.
And he did promote the concept of looking into the wasted fraud and made some very good points and pointed out the disaster.
But so far, we haven't seen the budget shrink.
It looks like they're not even wanting to deal with that.
And I think the Republicans are supporting raising the debt limit or something like that.
So it's a little bit disappointing for those who had more hopes from it.
But it turns out that our economy has been, and we've warned about this, very fragile.
The bubbles are out there.
The inflation is out there.
People are already suffering.
And one of the attempts to solve this is the big thing that we're going to be talking about is today that tariffs would help solve this problem.
But it doesn't look like that right now.
And tariffs have been around a long time.
And in the last week or two, since we've been talking a lot about it, I keep pointing out there was a time when it was a bipartisan support for tariffs.
A lot of economists on both sides of the aisle would say tariffs aren't very good.
But this time, with the president's ability to galvanize people, he did get a lot of people.
Sometimes it was just by intellectual debate, but sometimes it was just a bit intimidating.
And so a lot of people have supported it.
But two things are going on, and it's a challenge to our whole concept, peace and prosperity.
On the other side, I want to mention, we'll probably not spend as much time on this as we are on the tariff and the economy.
But here's one on anti-war that we follow all the time.
Trump, DeCamp didn't even put a question mark here.
It didn't say, is Trump.
It says Trump is preparing to bomb Iran with Israel.
But unfortunately, it's believable.
And that's a sad story.
Trump is considering Iran's proposal for indirect negotiation, but is building up forces in the Middle East like crazy.
And, you know, there are two understandings of what Iran's doing.
One is the people who want wars, that they are well prepared to invade the world and use nuclear weapons against the West and all that nonsense.
And the others are saying, well, you know, they're imperfect, but they have responded.
It's in their best interest to do a little bit of cooperation.
And they have allowed inspectors to come in, you know, and look, and they get a clean bill of help.
They're not working on a nuclear weapon.
So that's one issue.
But the preparation is continue.
And it's big time.
It's money.
It's a big thing is that it's liable to spread.
The way the weapons are being spread around there, it is already spreading.
But our friend Larry Johnson raises a question on this.
He says, will Russia help defend Iran against a U.S.-Israeli attack?
That is the concern that we've had.
And Larry sort of makes this point.
Yeah, absolutely.
So Liberation Day, we've got a big slate of tariffs.
And some people, Arnold Bertram has a good piece out on it.
And I just saw it.
I didn't bring it up.
Prices And Tariffs Uncertainty 00:14:28
But apparently, the way they calculated what these tariffs should be is rather arcane.
It's not as it's been advertised.
Nevertheless, you'll see, well, we saw in stocks yesterday.
You saw it in the gold markets yesterday.
Looks like Apple lost about a quarter of a trillion dollars as they, I think they do 90% of their manufacturing overseas.
You know, he's arguing that this is going to make things more fair.
Everyone's going to, you know, all of our foreign trading partners are going to be more fair, that we'll be able to get rid of taxes at home.
I don't know.
I don't feel so sure about that.
What is your impression?
Well, the one thing he tries to convince us of is it's going to help the working man here, and it's going to help solve the problem of inflation, which is exactly the opposite because tariffs are taxes.
The economy weakens.
And yes, you're going to have a deflationary item here, but some of the prices will go down.
But the cost of living in comparison to what the income is going to be like is still going to rise.
And that's a big problem.
So tariffs can hardly be adding another cost, which is paying for the import is not a way to make the consumer health, wealthy, and wise.
So that's the thing that's going on.
But Politico has a good article about this.
We've even read Politico, you know.
This could get much uglier.
I happen to agree with this.
I think it's only starting, even though there's been many of us that have been concerned and expressing concern because the inflation has been so bad.
And the bubble, I mean, if you want to originate the current bubble that is trying to be corrected by the market, started in 1971, but especially bad in the last 10 years.
And that is, you know, the bubble that comes from low interest rates and printing a lot of money and spending and too many regulations.
It's been recognized and people even recognize that there's too much debt.
But you don't eliminate $36 trillion worth of debt very easy.
So the debt will be liquidated either through inflation or some other means.
But the Politico said this could get much uglier.
And they talk about the problems that we have in having fair tariffs on people.
And it just doesn't work.
And they talk about a trade war.
People from the founders said, watch out for trade wars.
They can cause real war.
Well, that's not what happened.
We had the real war and the trade war sort of right on our doorstep.
So it is dangerous.
You can't live beyond one's means forever.
Eventually, the market is more powerful than all the politicians.
Yes, you can get away with it, lies and innuendos and talking to people into it.
And sometimes the most vulnerable system that allows this to happen are pure democracies.
Just gather the gang together.
We have 51%.
We can get anything we want.
And guess who runs the gangs?
Special interests.
You know, maybe the military industrial complex.
Oh, yes, but there'll be a nice spinoff for the working man.
And it turns out that the working man and the middle class are the ones who suffer the most in their suffering today.
There were some statistics out about the people who have been frugal and saved the money in their 501ks and IRAs and what is lost.
I don't think anybody can add it up because it's worldwide.
Trillions and trillions of dollars, paper wealth that people thought they had, there's going to be a way till that, you know, well, they already know the people have that.
They don't even want to look at their report.
But the reversal of this is not going to be easy.
Well, one of the things in the Politico article, it's a decent article.
You know, we know that they hate Trump, but this is, I think, a reasonably well-coherent article.
If you can put that first clip up, here's the article we're talking about.
And the idea is that with these big tariffs overseas, manufacturing will return to the U.S., will have good old American jobs and all of this stuff.
But Politico makes an important point.
If you go to the next clip, here's one of the fatal flaws, they say, in this trade plan.
And I'll read a little bit of it.
President Donald Trump's sweeping tariff regime will completely transform America's economic relationship with the rest of the world, all in the name of revitalizing domestic manufacturing.
And yet, many businesses won't be rushing to shift their supply chains to U.S. shores.
For all the detail in Trump's Wednesday announcement, his endgame is still shrouded in confusion.
That's lethal for long-term investment, making confident planning all but impossible.
If you want stuff put on the ground, you have to tell people the price.
That sounds like something you'd say, Dr. Paul.
And the price needs to be fully included in the terror, in the tariff risk.
So they're talking about not knowing what the prices are going to be.
They're not going to dump billions of dollars into putting manufacturing plants in the U.S.
This is on top of the variable that happens when you have inflation because you distort the value of the currency.
You can't define the currency.
You don't know what the interest rates are.
And this makes it very hard to make these calculations that are necessary.
But the interest rates are significant.
But here, well, one thing is that the market, if you just have the inflation and prices are going up, if you allow the market to work, they'll figure it out and they will come up with where the value is, but it's very cumbersome and it does a lot of harm done.
But now it comes in, we have the difficulty with interest rates.
The worst thing you could do with the inflationary problems, the monetary thing, is to put on wage and price control.
So we have a bunch of that going on.
Matter of fact, these tariff things are supposed to be helping the inflation, you know, help keep the inflation down.
Well, they are.
They're rapidly bringing on the deflation, but that's not going to be the bringing down of the wages, that people don't have any money to spend on top of it.
But when you take the inability of markets to work smoothly when you can't define the unit of account and you have the malinvestment and you have the price inflation, and then you add on to another system that is equal to it, practically, that causes more of the same thing.
And that's the price and the cost of what's going to be passed on to the consumer.
Because this type of.
There has been reports that the amount of mischief here in these rates on, on the uh, on the rates of, on the tariff rates, is probably historic highs.
So, figuring this out, no wonder the businessman.
Can you imagine if the businessman who watches this all the time and and some of them would have anticipated this, but they not too many of them uh would be probably Austrian train realizing how big a deal this is?
So that uh, that is that is the problem.
It's going to be hard, to hard, to work this out, but you have this combination of tariffs which distorts the pricing mechanism, and then you have the inflation uh, which is something we've talked about all it's always distorting the price price uh position.
You know the, the pricing of goods, and the uh, the pricing of goods and services.
Let's look a little bit into this article to kind of highlight the point that you're making, Dr Paul, if you put this next one up now, this is from that article.
This is the author saying, I've asked multiple corporate executives in recent weeks whether companies are likely to start investing in manufacturing in the United States in response to Trump's policies.
And the message has basically been, that is an unanswerable question right now.
And I highlight this because making those decisions requires understanding the relative costs of doing it versus not doing it.
And Trump is far too unpredictable to allow for that kind of calculation.
I go to the next one.
Here's one final point.
In this article, the administration argues that it's setting the stage for long-term economic growth.
As Treasury secretary Scott Besent put it to the FOX NEWS on wednesday, we're putting ourselves back onto a sound trajectory.
The article continues.
In the meantime, domestic manufacturing sector is shrinking amid corporate paralysis.
Quote, manufacturers are putting these decisions on hold, said Jay Timmons, head of the National Association OF Manufacturers, in a CNBC interview ahead of the tariff announcements.
Quote, they're waiting to see whether they should invest and hire, and that's not good for the economy.
So lots of uncertainty out there.
Yes, you know the other variable that uh we haven't emphasized, and that is the political variable.
You know what's going to happen.
You know to the next election what's going to happen to the Congress.
Things move along rather quickly and you know the clout that Trump has been able to use.
Uh is probably not going to be as strong as it is, and which means that is, will he back off and uh listen to some other advice, or or will he just uh, you know, bulldoze ahead and keep saying no, what we need are more tariffs or something like that.
So uh, but it's good, it's going to have a political impact.
So, if you think the money issue causes a variable and tariffs causes a variable, the political thing is another big thing, because there's going to be a lot of anger, because some of the people well, you know, are already a little bit upset.
Uh, you know about, you know, cutting back yeah, Yeah, they're upset about that.
So there's going to be a lot of anger.
But this is to be expected when a whole government and a system of government and a system that's been run on a reserve currency lives way beyond their means.
That eventually, when the correction comes, there's a lot of pain and suffering and it becomes a political issue.
many times it leads not only to the wars that we talk about, but a reorganization of many nations, which means active, vicious wars that are likely to break out.
That's why I fear this talk about the aggressive talk.
And yet, during the campaign, we heard other things that we should stop all this fighting and we should start any new ones.
And this was a reversal.
The Iranian position has been a reversal of attitude.
In spite of the shortcomings of the other party, that we weren't worrying quite as much.
We weren't excited, but we weren't worried quite as much as we are now.
True.
Well, let's listen to, sorry, Commerce Secretary Lutkin.
He is interviewed.
Let's get your earpiece ready.
And he's basically saying, look, you know, prices are going to go up.
It's going to happen.
He tried to make it sound good, but I don't know.
Maybe I'm, I know I'm not an expert.
It doesn't sound that great to me.
Listen to that first, that first video clip of Secretary Lutnik.
You're going to see employment leaping starting today.
So if employment, in fact, leaps, and we'll come back to that, it may not help much if prices themselves are also going up.
So let's just level with people in the short term.
Every economist seems to think the prices will go up.
Should people be prepared for that and for how long?
Well, I think you have to sort of understand how things work.
When tariffs come into place, foreign goods may become a little more expensive, but domestic goods do not.
So if you're looking at Poland Springs water versus something let's say Fiji water, the Poland Springs is not going to be more expensive.
So for the first time in your lives, you're going to actually think about the Americans who make the products, the Americans who produce these products and work in these factories.
It's time for us to take care of them instead of taking care of the.
So yeah, so prices will go up.
But don't worry, they won't go up for domestic brands.
I don't know if that's true, is it?
Well, if it did increase demand, the prices are going to go up because, well, it did cancel out some foreign goods coming in.
So they have to buy American goods.
And then when the demand goes up, sometimes prices will go up too.
So I don't know.
And under these conditions, to predict that it's really the inability for them to do all this so-called planning, just because we argue the case that you can't, you can't say, well, I know what interest rates should be.
Just let me do it.
And, you know, we have sometimes presidents get involved with groups like the Federal Reserve, and they pretend they know all this stuff.
And to try and explain the horrendous confusion about this much activity changes and going from, you know, the status quo of confusion to turning an extent to a super complex issue.
And just knowing what the ramifications are going to be is going to be overwhelming.
Yeah, I mean, I'm far from an expert.
It seems to me, using his analogy, if both Fiji and Poland Spring water are a dollar and then the tariffs makes the Fiji water two bucks, seems like the Poland Springs people say, well, maybe we can push it up to $1.50.
It will still be cheaper.
They've reduced the supply.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, let's move on to the second whammy because your title double whammy.
Double Whammy Diplomacy 00:12:36
And let's move ahead to that one on Trump that you mentioned on Iran that you mentioned that Dave DeCamp wrote up.
Now, I've been seeing a few of these reports, and I'm not sure if they're true or not.
If you go ahead to that report, Trump is planning to bomb Iran with Israel and put that up.
We can get that clip.
Here we go.
So, this is what Dave writes over at anti-war.
U.S. and Israel are currently planning to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, an attack that could happen in a few weeks' time.
Daily Mail columnist Dan Hodges reported on Wednesday.
Dave continues, he wrote the report while in Tel Aviv, and he cited Israeli political, diplomatic, and military sources.
He said the purpose of the strike would be to eradicate the threat posed by Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Although there's no evidence Tehran has a nuclear weapons program, a fact recently confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies.
So, and we talked about this last week.
The intelligence community comes to the president and says, Iran's not working on a bomb.
They don't have a bomb.
And so, but somehow Trump wants to bomb Iran because they're working on a bomb.
It doesn't make any sense.
But here, I think is the real reason Dave uncovers it.
If you go to this next one, I think this is what it's all about.
A senior Israeli diplomatic source told Hodges that Trump's presidency offers the best time to hit Iran.
Quote, from Israel's perspective, with Trump in the White House, this represents the optimum moment to deal with Iran.
There won't be a better chance, the officials said.
So, that's what they're thinking.
We've got Trump in here.
This is the best time.
We're never going to have things better.
He's doing our bidding.
So, now the time is to bomb.
You know, I haven't heard, I'm sure some journalists have in the public and gotten national attention for challenging Trump on what was said.
But that is so commonplace.
You know, the Republicans have done that before.
The Democrats do it all the time.
They say one thing and they never look at their promises.
You know, it's just a game they play.
So they're probably not asking Trump, well, I thought you were going to end war.
Doesn't this sound like you're moving toward war?
Yeah, but this is a good war.
Yeah, this is a good war.
This is very important that we do this.
Yeah.
And if we move ahead to that American conservative, George O'Neill, a great, great guy, he has a piece I encourage everyone to read.
We have a little excerpt on the Ron Paul Institute website.
This is a great piece.
War with Iran is a path to destruction.
Now, the entire piece is definitely worth reading, but I have this one little part because this is what I've been talking about in several interviews lately.
Go to this next one.
This will sound familiar.
In fact, he starts it by saying the pitch is familiar, isn't it?
A swift blow, maybe a few airstrikes on Tehran's nuclear sites or a green light for Israel to do the dirty work.
And the mullahs will crumble.
The region will stabilize and we'll be home by Easter.
It's the same tune the warmongers hummed in 1914 when Europe's leaders promised their boys would be back from the trenches by Christmas.
These are also the same deceptions we heard in 2003 when Iraq was sold as a cakewalk, a war that would pay for itself with oil and gratitude.
Millions of lives and trillions of dollars later, we're still witnessing that tragedy.
And he's pointing out here, Dr. Paul, that the same neocons are making the exact same arguments now that they made in 03, and they're not even blinking an eye.
In fact, we have one of those neocons with us right here, or at least virtually with us.
If you put on that second, no, the second audio video clip, here is, might want to put your earpiece in, Dr. Paul.
Here's Tom Cotton and tell me you were there.
You remember.
Doesn't this remind you exactly of every single neocon in the run-up to the Iraq war?
Let's listen to Cotton.
And finally, there's some hysteria about the prospect of the president ordering these strikes or someone like you in uniform providing him advice that it's going to lead to another forever war or another endless war.
Are you aware of operations, maybe operations against Iran, like the Tanker Wars in 1988, in which the forceful but discriminate application of military power did not lead to a forever war or an endless war, but rather led to peace and stability?
Yes, sir.
Those examples in our history do exist.
Maybe the Qasem Suleimani strike in 2020 as well that caused Iran to pull in its horns for the rest of President Trump's first term.
Thank you, General Kane.
Thank you.
And finally, yeah, you know, the first cakewalk we were promised, I was in high school and the Korean War was going on.
And a general that has had and has a very good reputation, you know, MacArthur, he says, we'll be home by Christmas.
We're going to go in.
But what they didn't figure that China was going in there with thousands and thousands of people and a lot more people were going to die.
But it was still going to be a cakewalk.
So it's always better.
Now, yes, every time some bomb is dropped, you don't know the extent of it.
Sometimes you don't even, you know, it's much worse than you predict.
It's natural that you can't predict it exactly because somebody got away with bombing.
Good Lord, there'd be a war every single day for the next 50 years, you know, because we're always bombing somebody.
You know, and thinking of the people that, and then one people, the one group that we don't have a good number for completely are how many civilians die on and how many people die indirectly from the wars that go on.
So this idea that, well, we bombed six times and we only caused one big war, you know.
Yeah, sorry, I was just going to say the other thing that Cotton did that was really irritating is he used scare quotes about talking about forever wars.
Well, the Afghanistan war was 20 years.
That's close to a forever war.
You know, he's pretending that there's no such thing that's made up.
It's not made up.
It continues to go on.
And also he cites the Soleimani as an example of how successful taking out one person could be, that it doesn't lead to escalation.
What he fails to mention is that after the assassination of Soleimani, Iran hit many U.S. military sites in the region, Iraq and Syria.
They hit many of them.
It was the U.S. who backed down.
It was the U.S. who didn't escalate, who allowed Iran to hit those sites in retaliation.
That's a fact.
So he's misrepresenting it, but he reminded me of so many people that went through.
We saw them every day, hearings in the Foreign Affairs Committee, you know, Foreign International Relations, it was called back then, committee.
All these neocon experts coming in telling us how easy it's going to be.
That expert that was on that TV didn't look very enthusiastic about what he was saying.
You know, the Iraq war, the Middle East war, that lasted a long time, still going on all the way.
We had the Vietnam War went on, and it continued, and we had changed the president and everything else, and it continued for a long time after that.
And then we had Afghanistan that we were, you know, fought to try to stop.
That lasted 20 years?
20 years.
We walk away from it.
It doesn't seem to enter their mind that there's a cost to it.
But if it is, if you don't deny that, you're unpatriotic and you hate the military.
So It did surprise my supporters that the military supported me because they thought I was on their side.
Yeah, exactly.
Not sending them out to a no-win war.
I would like to ask Cotton: what is the upside?
Name our success in any of these interventions that you supported.
How did they all come out for the better?
They didn't.
Libya is certainly not for the better.
They can't point to one success, yet they still push, push, and push.
It's irritating, very irritating.
And one other thing, like that last clip, this is from our friend Larry Johnson.
You mentioned in your opening as well.
Here's the $60,000 question, as they say, or they used to say in the old days.
I guess 60 grand is not much these days.
The Sonar 21, if you can put that up, the question of the month: will Russia help defend Iran against a U.S.-Israel attack?
Nobody knows.
Larry says he thinks it's very likely.
We know Scott Ritter, now he's arguing the opposite.
We don't know, but Larry, and this is a good article.
I would recommend Sonar 21, have a look at this article.
He goes through the recent treaty that Iran and Russia signed.
And although not strictly a mutual defense treaty, there are several components of that that would suggest that Russia might to some extent get involved.
You know, we were talking about the unintended consequences of all these wars that last longer than they claim they will be.
But what about the great and honorable patriotic war of World War I?
You know, we had to rush in there before it was over because it was heard that the world would be divided up property-wise.
Looks like we're doing some of that right now.
Who's going to divide up the country lines, the geography?
And of course, we went in there to make the world safe for democracy.
And yet, today, if you say that in public, so I don't want the public to know what I just said because they would say, well, that's unpatriotic.
And so the intentions, there aren't very many times.
Some people argue the case that about the only war that can come close to justify as a libertarian would be our revolution to overthrow an authoritarian government.
And I remember Leonard Reid often saying it's the only war that he could name that actually the people were better off than before they started.
That the people themselves, you know, if it's World War II or the rest or Vietnam, there's so much suffering and loss of liberty.
Nobody talks about the loss of liberty and the authoritarianism that goes along with these hot wars.
So it's a big issue.
And I'm just saddened by the fact that, you know, this is a double whammy and it's going to be overwhelming.
And you can't tell.
Maybe there will be an enlightenment and there'll be a lot of reversals.
Oh, we missed, we put the wrong number down here.
We didn't want 25% tariffs on this.
We only wanted 2.5.
Let's see if that happens.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I'm going to close out and thank everyone for watching.
Remind everyone to set your calendars August 16th for the Big Ron Paul Institute DC area conference.
We'll have some more details soon, but we have that date drilled in so we can move ahead with that.
Over to you, Dr. Very good.
I too want to make sure that our audience knows that we deeply appreciate the support we get.
We do have our conferences and they are well attended and lots of excitement there.
And usually it comes across not only during the programs, but at the end of the program, it's very cordial and very positive and optimistic because we talk about what we could do.
And it's not that difficult.
It's not that complicated.
It doesn't cost a whole lot to quit the government for spending money.
That's like saving money.
It doesn't cost money to save money.
So I think that this whole program that we're dealing with right now is more difficult and that we have to be much aware of how dangerous it is if we continue with this.
So once again, the advocation that we have now is for a foreign policy of non-intervention, an economic policy of non-intervention.
If we had that today, we wouldn't be strategizing to deal with nuclear-armed Iran, and we wouldn't be dealing with a horrendous financial crisis coming, which was fostered by the deficit driven by a flawed monetary system.
The answers are there.
Choosing Freedom 00:00:30
It's just a matter of people whether they want to live in a free society and assume responsibility for themselves completely and totally, or they want to accept the idea that pure democracy demands that the government takes care of us and makes sure we're safe and happy people.
There's a better way to go, and that is through peace and prosperity in a voluntary manner.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Livery Report.
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