All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 15, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
37:20
RonPaul Speeech @ The Ron Paul 90th Birthday BBQ

This is Ron Paul's from his 90Th Birthday BBQ in Lake Jackson Texas.

|

Time Text
List Of Supporters 00:07:00
So it's over and done with.
We can retire.
Quite too early for that.
But where did all these people come from?
How did you get them in this building?
Did you have to bribe them or what?
Oh, wonderful, wonderful.
This is wonderful.
Boy, I'll tell you, you know, I was thinking about introducing my family, but I understand we did get an introduction to the family.
But I wanted a list.
I asked the staff for a list of everybody who has helped me and supported me and worked for me and all.
So I have that list, so I'm going to read that list off and make sure everybody was personally a thing.
But that list got pretty long.
And one of the frustrations I've always had in campaigning and working and getting so much support, and I always felt a little guilty or neglectful that I never thanked you all enough.
And because, you know, yes, I'm a figurehead and I have a message, but there's no message without you.
There is none.
So thank you all very much.
This has been a wonderful day here today.
And to see so many people.
And to start off, it's not all that easy.
But you've talked about my career, if that's what it is, or my activities or my attempts at trying to change a few things.
And it's something that has been around.
So there's not a whole lot of new things I can tell you.
You already know that one big issue that motivated me over the years was to get a sound monetary system, and you had to get rid of the Fed in order to do that.
So that, I was thinking about the first time I heard that slogan, and I didn't invent it.
I mean, I talk like we ought to end the Fed, but I remember being on a liberal college campus, and I was giving a speech, and all of a sudden, I guess I could name the school, I think it was up in Michigan someplace, and we considered it liberal.
But all of a sudden, there was a crowd.
Maybe there were only a dozen Ron Paul supporters, but we heard from them.
They got up, and when we started talking about money, they started burning Federal Reserve notes.
That's against the law, you know.
Just sit back.
Somebody else is going to burn the value of it, and that's where our real problem is.
So they did that.
But then they started chanting in the Fed.
It turned out that when I wrote the book on the Fed, I used that term, I thought it was pretty elite, and it was sharp.
And you can't get confused with, you know what we stand for.
We stand for sound money.
Can't have sound money unless you investigate, understand and realize the power that is wielded by by a system of government where that you have fiat money well, can't you keep, can't you audit them and find out what's going on and and participate in it?
Oh sure it's, it's.
You know when they, when they talk about you know independence, you know?
No, we can't let anybody audit and know about what's going on because the FED wants independence.
You know, there's one word that you can use.
Anybody ever tells you that, well, don't you think they ought to be independent?
The word they use for independent is secrecy.
That's what they want.
But I was always, and some people, I've had a criticism, why don't you just talk only about ending the Fed, none of this audit stuff.
I said, yeah, but audits a step.
And if we ever got a true audit, what would the people in this country do?
They would end the Fed if they knew what was going on.
But, you know, even before 1913, there were people talking about establishing the Fed.
And they had academic resistance to it.
And they still passed the Fed.
But there's always been a group of people who talked about the Fed.
But, you know, in recent decades, I think prior to the 1970s, when the Fed really messed up our money, and we had our first step toward ultimate bankruptcy, and that was August 15th, 1971, when we renewed, we cheated.
We published printed so much money, paper money, the currency, and also that we fooled the people into accepting that as the reserve currency of the world.
And there was some logic to it.
We were very wealthy.
We had natural wealth, and we benefited tremendously by not suffering as other countries did from the war.
And so we were able to do that and end it.
But August 15th changed a lot.
And I remember the day very, very clearly.
It was Sunday night, and our president was going to give a special speech.
And I think his name was Nixon.
And he gave a speech.
And, you know, I really was startled.
And I thought, wow, this is a big deal.
And it turned out a big deal.
And if you were trying to measure how big a deal it was, one of the best measurements of the purchasing power of the dollar, gold gives you an idea.
The price of gold goes up, it's an indication there's some problem.
What was the initial reaction to the closing of the gold window?
I remember I was a member of the Chamber of Commerce at the time.
And on Monday mornings, we always had a meeting, and we talked about legislation.
It was pretty boring.
And we talked about that.
But I was even startled more because the Chamber of Commerce, they're free enterprise, aren't they?
Monetary Policy Shifts 00:15:45
They're not crony capitalists.
So they came out strongly in favor of that monstrous bill that changed the world on monetary policy.
There were tariffs on all kinds of stuff.
And I said, this is ushering in a bad, you know, a bad situation.
The decade, many here probably remembers of 70s, but the 70s were very, very tough economically.
And to end it, Volker got there, and interest rates had to go to 21%.
And what do we have today?
We have two people, you know, thinking they know what interest rates ought to be.
And they're arguing, that's the big argument over fiat money.
What should the interest be?
Should it be 1% or 3.5%?
As if they knew.
They don't know.
And it's just this distraction.
They're not talking about monetary policy, but they have their reasons because some people benefit from lower interest rates.
Some people benefit from higher interest rates.
So it was all a game they play, but it serves the interests of the people who believe in big government.
And who are those people?
Well, you know, there are some people who believe in pure democracy.
The founders hated it.
But pure democracy and interventionism is what we have today.
And that means that it encourages everybody to have a pack, you know, and be lobbyists to go to Congress and get up 51%.
So you get a bunch of people, different packs, and put them together, then go to the government.
And then they respond by, you know, just spending more money.
But that really feeds into it, especially, you know, you can think about that as individuals or families.
They might be very, very wealthy and they might spoil their kids or something.
Well, we were a spoiled nation because we had a gold standard for a while.
We had a lot of natural wealth and we survived some terrible wars.
And that gave us this position where we were able to do whatever the people wanted.
And they were true Democrats in the negative sense.
Democracy.
I happen to be annoyed by the word democracy.
That is just nothing more than the dictatorship of the majority to get the majority together and demand.
So you can expect what would happen.
Well, adjusting was a tremendous thing in the 70s because gold was theoretically $35 an ounce.
Before the decade was over, it was over $800 for a while.
It was just this tremendous adjustment.
And there were times when I anticipated, you know, that this is going to get bad if they don't correct it.
And they haven't corrected it.
But where are we now?
I thought, even though I prepared myself psychologically and academically that things are going to get bad, you know, it's still hard for me to say, what was the price of gold this morning?
$3,600, you know, going up.
And the tragedy for us, the tragedy for the peace and prosperity, is it hasn't gone very far yet.
It is just, if it doubled, tripled, quadrupled in the 70s, it could do that again.
I mean, I can remember when it did hit $500 in the 70s.
And I thought, wow, this is unreal.
And there was a period where the people were lulled to sleep, and the indicator, gold indicator, went to sleep.
And, you know, at the beginning of this century, gold was $270 an ounce.
And that's the way markets work.
But, you know, the believers in inflation by printing too much money and special interest getting control.
And to do this, they have to undermine our liberties.
They don't enhance our liberties with a system like this.
They encourage, you know, the people to just become much more attuned to manipulating the government.
So what does it do to our system?
Well, what the system does is, you know, there's been a few warmongers in the 20th century and the 21st century, and they were mainly Americans because we've been involved in, you know, a few wars here and there.
But by far, we have been involved in way too many wars for over 100 years.
And that has to stop if we want our liberties back.
You know, our slogan for the organization we have now is for, you know, peace and prosperity.
And peace, it looks like we have a few good peace dicks in here for the right reasons.
But that encourages a whole business in itself.
You know, if you had that type of system that I just mentioned, guess what it would do?
It would undermine if we couldn't print the money and we had to live within our means.
All of a sudden, guess what?
The military-industrial complex would be wiped out.
They couldn't exist, and I think the world would be a lot more peaceful.
I know there's been some good words said in the last year or two.
Maybe people were getting serious about cutting back.
But so far, the promises that we heard about in the last six months, I can't come and say, well, good news are here.
They said they were going to cut, and they cut the budget this year by $10 trillion or $10 million or 10 cents.
Not one cent has been cut.
And so things are in a momentum.
There's no way under today's circumstances that we can break the spending.
Well, first, look at the interest on the payments.
That's just out of control.
Now, Donald Trump wants lower interest rates to help the government.
But they're not going to go down.
They're more likely to end up where they did in 1970 and 79 and 1980.
They hit 21%.
So the conditions we have will force interest rates up.
And as soon as the Congress made a good effort and would like to have cut, and there were some good people trying to do that, but they didn't get anything cut.
The people really rebelled.
There was too much, and the Congress backed down.
So we're on autopilot, whether it's interest rates or the spending or the warmongering.
So what we have to have is a change of attitude about the role of government and our responsibilities.
Because I don't believe in pure democracy and the dictatorship of the majority.
But I really strongly believe in the concept of a prevailing attitude.
And what I'm talking about there is if you look at what happened with COVID, a total disaster created by our government.
It could have been prevented.
But, you know, and the government was on the wrong side of this and a lot of people suffered and they're still suffering from that.
And it could have been solved and prevented by just saying, where in funder did the government get the authority to manage our health care and they're not doing a good job.
horrible.
So the spending will continue and we have to be prepared and the prevailing attitudes have to change.
The prevailing attitudes right now have been cooked up by a conspiracy of bad education in our universities that we paid for.
So if you look at the economic, if you look at the economic policies they taught in most of the universities, the bigger they were, the better they were known, and the richer they were, the more they were.
It cahoots with big government.
So that is the big problem is changing that result because the result is there.
I think one example of the pervasive result of that type of education is in our judicial system.
The judicial system has, one thing for sure, it has very little to do with justice.
But I think in the judicial system and those ideas with Tulsi around, we might get a break and get some help up there one of these days.
But prevailing attitudes come from education.
That is it.
And it isn't going to come from the progressive universities.
That's not where it's going to come from.
But, you know, a lot of stuff, I could go on with more negatives and how bad things are.
But we can also think about some of the good things that are happening because there is a sincere effort to change and alter the prevailing attitude that government has to do this.
People say, well, who would provide me safety?
Well, the Second Amendment should provide your safety, but the prevailing attitude will come.
And I think the COVID was a good example.
The universities didn't change the attitude of the parent-teachers associations when the parents finally woke up to what was going on.
And they started attending these meetings and firing some of those people that were doing these terrible things.
And I think people, their attitude changed not with the help of the government.
It was in spite of the government that people will wake up.
And I think it was parental control of their children that was really a blessing to this.
And guess what?
Maybe in a free society, who has the ultimate responsibility for their children?
That's the parents.
That's why we have a breaking out and war all the time.
During COVID, I have a little homeschooling program.
The number of people wanting homeschooling went way up, and that is good.
And the attitudes changed when necessary.
We still have enough freedom to do this.
We don't have a lot of enough freedom to do all the things we'd like to do because we're still asking our government for too much permission.
And the other one thing I think we've been enslaved, and the thing that I use to defend that position, is the fact that they keep the registration for the military draft on the books.
That even shouldn't even be there.
Now, the big argument is, should we draft the women too?
Or what are we going to do?
How are we going to solve these problems?
We just don't draft people.
Their lives don't belong to me.
And there's another little rule that we have here that we adapt to, too readily.
And that is what they do with us on taxation.
There's two taxes, the income tax.
The income tax is based on the assumption that the government owns everything, and you get paid $10,000.
That's not your money.
You only can keep what the government gives you permission to keep.
And so those two things means that the sovereignty is with our government, and we lose our own sovereignty and making our own decisions.
And that is where the answers are.
And that is what we have to signal.
But people get frightened.
You mean we wouldn't have troops overseas?
How are we going to police the world and how are we going to bring peace around the world?
And maybe a lot more people paying attention if we could do that.
But I'll tell you what, I still think that things are changing a lot electronically and technically.
I'm not real good on the technology, you know, some of the computers and all, but I do recognize the good part of it.
The information is much better.
They didn't even allow me to get on the internet once in a while and reach a couple of people.
So the technology, I think, gives us danger because you could use the comparison of nuclear energy.
You know, nuclear energy can destroy the world, and nuclear energy can provide probably the cheapest, cleanest energy ever, but that's prohibited from it.
So that means education.
And we should allow the people to make these decisions, and it would be a far safer world.
You know, the word that I use for that on trying to decide what you could do is volunteerism as compared to authoritarianism.
And there are too many authoritarians because they just delight in telling other people what to do.
They don't know what to do with their own lives, but they think they're smart enough to tell you what you could do with your life.
Volunteerism Over Authoritarianism 00:10:22
So authoritarianism.
But volunteerism, just think if everything you did, whether it was personal, whether it's religious, whether it's sexual, whether every, how about buying and selling?
Well, there's still some volunteerism there, but less and less because there's all kinds of regulations and everything.
But voluntarism, if everybody falled down in all those categories, guess what we would have?
We'd have peace breaking out everywhere if everything was voluntary.
But, you know, this argument about the authoritarians and the voluntarists has been around for a long time.
I happen to have a strong belief in law.
And I think natural law tells us that without any government teaching history and civilization, you're not supposed to lie, cheat, steal, or kill.
And all civilization, all the way back to primitive times, when they first had the first writing, that they knew and understood this.
And then as the civilization advanced, it was incorporated.
The founders knew something about natural law.
But natural law tells you you're not supposed to be aggressive and going killing people.
And yet, who are the biggest aggressors?
Government.
Just think of our own government.
How many people could we go and get into these places?
How many innocent people killed?
Oh, no, we don't do it.
We didn't lose any soldiers last week.
Well, but did any of our bombs that we built and paid for?
Were there any killings?
And so it's this obsession with empire.
And people love it.
The militarists just think this is really a lot of fun.
And it is so bad.
But they see this as the way to keep people in line because they don't trust people.
They don't trust liberty.
And yet, I see two groups of people in Washington, the people I've been introduced to.
And that is there's several, even though they might not be, you know, libertarian per se, but they are seeking and trying to find the truth.
They have a sincere effort to find the truth.
And then there's another group called nihilists.
I think nihilism has won many battles here after a while, but they believe that you can't know truth.
You can't even define it.
You have to tell fibs.
They're telling lies, but what they're doing, all those things when they, well, we have to have some spin on this next issue because it's controversial.
But they're saying, we want to lie about it.
So lying, what would happen if governments all of a sudden quit lying?
I would think it would be a tremendous help to it.
But if you eliminated all the deaths caused by governments, that would be a healthy thing.
But I really do believe, in spite of all this, that we live in a better society than past.
I really got interested in monetary policies in the 60s.
And even in the 80s, people would ask, what are you talking about?
Why are you worried about the Federal Reserve?
But a lot of people now, one of the biggest arguments right now is a silly argument, but the argument there is over monetary policy.
What should the interest rates be?
And they don't admit, well, we don't have the vaguest idea what they should be, but we want to argue and fight about it.
And so they'll spend a lot of time on that.
And that's hard for some people to accept.
But the market is really very, very powerful in deciding things.
And The manipulation of the monetary system is the creation of a business cycle, and that is well known, and it makes a big difference.
Somebody would ask me, how did you know we were going to have a slump in a depression or a recession?
And I said, well, you don't know it when it starts.
You know it when they print all the money.
When you inflate the currency, you have to have payback.
And they do pay.
You have to pay back.
All that debt, that $36 trillion of debt has to be liquidated under these circumstances.
And look at fast it's growing.
So I think we're moving rapidly toward the situation where it's a complete blow-off.
The whole thing crashes.
And we have an obligation.
And the people in this room have a tremendous obligation because as far as I'm concerned, you're further ahead than all the professors out there.
But you're already participating.
You're involved.
You come to events.
And this message has to be spread, but it has to be outside the government.
The government is, you can't wait until you get enough good professors.
And it's good that finding better congressmen and getting them in, that should be the case.
But you've got to be realistic.
That is not going to change things.
It has to be a prevailing attitude of people change.
Vietnam was an eye-opener for me.
I was drafted in the 70s, 60s.
And they were busy.
They were trying to solve the problems just by fighting these wars.
And they would refuse to negotiate.
It was just horrible of what was going on.
So I see the problem as being so much government, you know, out of control.
But in many ways, I see so many improvements.
I was influenced a whole lot by Leonard Reed at the Free Foundation, FEE Foundation, and also by Murray Rothbard and the libertarians and the professors.
So that was the influence.
It was academics, and I found it fascinating.
This is interesting, you know.
And that's one thing that we have to do.
We all have an obligation.
If you come to this conclusion that I have in a miscellaneous way tried to pronounce about what freedom is all about, if you believe it and you believe that things are bad, I believe that you have a moral responsibility to spread that message one way or the other.
And I think I think a lot of people do that all the time, but everybody has different talents.
And, you know, my daydream, my nightmare is I'd like to spread the message if I was a great singer and I could sing this song, but I'm not.
So I have to do what I do.
It's just express myself.
But, you know, I think that, you know, looking at this, it's very, very exciting.
It should be a lot of fun.
That's the other thing.
When you get together, like a group like this with like Nymph, you're supposed to have a lot of fun with like-minded people.
And although there are serious problems, I think we can get by better.
You're having fun.
It seems to me, and I'll ask you the question, have you been having fun at this meeting?
Well, anyway, I don't consider things complex.
You know, when they talked about bringing troops home and how many troops could be bringing home at a time and like this, and they were agitating over the details that made no sense to me.
And I tried to simplify.
I said, this was probably in the Middle East.
I said, we just marched in.
We can just march out.
So it isn't complicated.
One phrase, I guess I'm just lazy because some of my best phrases were very short.
Though, I would say, freedom is popular.
Okay.
Well, okay.
So, no, it's, no, it's been a blessing for me to be able to participate.
And some people would ask me, why did you get frustrated?
How could you live with those people up there?
They're a bunch of creeps.
I said, it never bothered me.
My attitude was to make the best of it and talk to people and get along with them.
And I left Congress three different times.
After the second time, I wrote a little booklet about leaving Congress.
Make The Best Of It 00:03:27
And that was back when we had, well, they still do it.
They have a Republican Democratic baseball game.
And I was always a frustrated baseball player and I got to put a uniform on.
I never did as a kid.
So I wrote in my book, I said, the one thing was in these sports that the Democrats and the other side and the Republicans, we never talked politics out there.
And if you remember the friendship, oh, you were a baseball player back there.
So I'm a strong believer that countries ought to do more of that too, because in a way, that's what Nixon did with China.
And yet people turn that around too.
But I do think sports are just great for individuals and communities and everything.
But it's wonderful.
But I think it's hone in on the one issue, is give people their liberty and they will take good care of themselves and they will take good care of protecting liberty.
And we can do that and we are doing it.
And I think I'm just convinced when I look at a crowd like this, and they're even clapping for what I'm saying.
Wow.
You know, I think that's a lot.
But this is, so there's more people out there.
So I end up saying there's a lot more good people than bad people.
But I say the bad people are in the government, and that is what we have to deal with.
But I want to close by saying I really I appreciate very much your willingness to support our efforts and what we do.
And the one thing that you don't know is because I know if you're interested in the issue of liberty, you talk about it.
You probably have newsletters with this.
A lot of you do a more like that.
You may be professionals spreading this message.
And I talk to young people who have their own podcasts and radio stations, you know, that they did just recently.
And I would be on their program.
I said, you don't have any idea how much good you're doing.
They said, well, we just have a small station.
But everybody's, but you don't know where the message goes.
And just remember that a message whose time has come cannot be stopped by bullets or any little force.
And I believe the time has come to spread the message of liberty.
Thank you very much.
Happy Birthday Wishes 00:00:13
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday to everyone.
Happy birthday to you.
Export Selection