Unilateral Tariffs, Endless Wars, and the March Toward Authoritarianism”
Washington’s appetite for power is growing—and the results are dangerous. From unilateral tariffs that punish American families, to endless wars launched without congressional approval, to the steady march toward authoritarian “clean-ups” in D.C., liberty is under assault. In this episode, we break down how economic meddling, foreign entanglements, and unchecked executive power are eroding the Constitution and concentrating authority where it doesn’t belong.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Sir Con Ash, our technician, who is now a co-host today.
Sircon, welcome to the program.
Hi, Dr. Paul.
It's an honor and a privilege.
Hi, Dr. Paul.
It's an honor and a privilege to be here.
We're going to do something a little different today.
And we're going to do a bit of a Ron Paul philosophy, if you will, on current events.
And this is Otto Len.
So our co-host, Chris, was sick today.
So I had to cover for him.
And pardon us if we have any technical difficulties.
But I'll go ahead and start you off with the first question, Dr. Paul, and it is on President Trump basically positioning himself as the mediator, both with Russia and Ukraine.
And he could argue with Palestine and Israel as well.
But my question to you is, how can someone acclaim neutrality while simultaneously fueling a conflict, right?
It's our weapons.
It's our money.
So what's your take on this, Dr. Paul?
Well, I think it takes a person that's very confident with himself.
And I think the president qualifies there.
He's very confident.
And he's had a lot of experience.
And he's had a pretty good role here in the last six months.
His first part of his administration.
But there are still some questions involved on just how is he going to work at this?
He has to really maneuver things pretty well because we're pretty well identified with supporting Ukraine.
We've sent money over there to the tune of millions of dollars and sent all the weapons.
We participated in the coup against Russia to start the war in 2014.
And also, now, how's he going to work with, these are the challenges that he has.
How's he going to work with Russia?
So right now, he is orchestrating a contest between punishing anybody who dare trade with Russia to try to get around some of the sanctions that we put on him.
So on and on.
But the one thing is, in spite of those shortcomings, I think Trump is doing pretty well from the conventional viewpoint.
And the idea is that people say he's working there and he's working for peace.
His image, I don't think, has suffered.
Others are challenging.
His political enemies are certainly going to challenge him.
But I challenge him from the fact that wars don't usually end like this.
Wars end with bankruptcy and that's coming.
But right now, that's not the issue.
The issue is, can Trump pull it off?
Can he be a kingmaker and tell everybody what to do and punish people with sanctions?
And that's where I really have some questions.
The headline this morning here that I have is Trump says he's working to arrange a meeting between Putin and Zelensky.
I mean, this is good.
Maybe it's going to work out real well.
But it's pretty amazing how much clout he has.
And I think he's being praised by many people in this country because, you know, anything that looks hopeful, why not support him?
And on occasion, when he talks about cutting and spending and doing things, we're strongly in support of him.
And this is a new challenge, I think, for him and for everybody else on how they're going to bring about peace.
He is a very strong leader.
There's no doubt about it.
But I keep thinking, you know, strong leader is one thing.
I could pick out a few people in history that were very strong leaders and they weren't our friends.
So yes, I think it's good to have a strong leaders in our country, but I much prefer a strong leader that's leading us toward our obedience to the Constitution to true peace.
And I think the rhetoric should be there, is there, but it doesn't solve the problem.
And right now, you know, what I see is I believe that our country, the United States, works on the assumption there's an empire out there.
They don't call it empire, but it's there.
But somebody has to maintain it.
And I think that he's fitting the role.
He is the head of this empire.
I think he enjoys it.
I think there could be some good things come from it.
We were hoping there would be more cuts in spending.
There was more discussion about cuts and spending, but nothing got cut.
So we can talk about peace, but if we don't have peace, it's not worth much.
It's just a lot of conversation.
And this is something that will be ironed out.
And I think we're right in the middle of it right now.
Jackson Hole has things going up.
The Fed is going to be meeting.
And there's a lot of unanswered questions, but there's a lot of problems.
And guess what I believe?
Since the campaign was going on in the election, there's been a lot of talk about what has to be done in all these places, the Middle East, Ukraine, Taiwan, and what we have to do and why there's never a nickel cut and many dollars added to the military-industrial complex.
So that to me is the bottom line.
And it still is supported.
And the American people complain about it, but they still know nothing about it.
But nothing gets cut.
And yet that means they're marching on to that day when the whole system collapses and then the country and the empire falls apart.
And hopefully that will only be a blessing in disguise because empires are not deserving of protection against the people who would undo our liberties.
And that is our greatest threat and what we have to take a close look at.
So there's a lot of important things going on right now.
And the president's right in the middle of this.
And he's popular for it by a lot of people, but it's also a big challenge to him because I don't think any of these issues go away gracefully, even with work at diplomacy.
But the president has, he does practice diplomacy, but it's a little bit different than what conventional people think what diplomacy is.
It's a little bit about using his club and a clout and telling people this is the way it's going to be.
And it's backed up by a lot of weaponry and a lot of money.
So hopefully this will sink in and we can once again target and aim for a more peaceful world.
And I think that comes when we have Boar's respect for the Constitution and we have more people in Washington representing that idea.
Sir Gon.
Very well said, Dr. Paul.
I'm on the same notion.
I feel like support is one thing, but we are being a little opinionated and a little biased on do we give that so that we went through and like you said the military industry complex is just a steeper regardless of who's in charge.
Our next question is everyone's favorite topic and that is terrorist seeing slaps on foreign countries.
These are often unilateral, arbitrary declining, made out of they or some rational accrual.
Tariffs and Inflation00:03:54
So how do we protect Americans and prices at home without disrupting trade or I say Knesset?
Sorry, Paul.
You know, this is a big debate going on in the financial markets.
If they see a blip up on some prices, then the people who want Trump to look badly, they say, see, it's the Trump policy structural.
The tariffs are giving us inflation.
Well, that is not exactly true.
Federal Reserve causes the inflation by printing money for all the debt that the Congress votes up.
So that's the thing that's going on.
But Trump is not doing well, I think, with the tariff.
Because the first thing is billions and billions of dollars are being collected, and this is supposed to do this, and it doesn't cause inflation.
Other people say it causes inflation.
The only way it can contribute to inflation, it contributes to price increases on the areas where the tariffs get involved.
But price increases are not automatically inflation.
It's inflation.
It inflated prices for various reasons.
If you have a hurricane and in the area of the hurricane, prices go up, you don't call that inflation.
You know, it's a result.
Inflation has to come from the Federal Reserve when it monetizes debt and then devalues the currency, and then you need more money.
It's a tax.
And there's two reasons why we should think of tariffs as a tax.
In all the debates going on right now, rarely is it mentioned.
Who pays the tariffs?
And amazingly, people say, well, we put the tariffs on China.
Let them pay and punish them for underselling our people.
Well, they can't do that because the way the system works, if you put tariffs on China, it's the people who buy their products and need their products for various reasons.
In the United States, in order to get the Chinese products, the Americans pay the tariff to the Treasury.
And it's put into a Treasury fund where the Treasury can spend the money any way they want.
And so it can be harmful.
Tariffs are generally harmful because it's so disruptive to the marketplace in the area of supply and demand.
The tariff is a tax on the people.
It should be seen as a tax because it's more of a tax than an instrument of inflation.
But if it's unhealthy for the economy, and I don't believe it is healthy for the economy, I believe the economy weakens and there'll be companies that will fail and there will be a greater incentive to bail those countries, those companies out.
And when they bail them out by debt financing, then that will lead to the inflation.
But it is not directly inflation, but it contributes to it.
But I know some people benefit from tariffs.
They've been around for hundreds of years and a certain amount, a certain usage of tariffs were endorsed by the founders.
But what's going now is to use tariffs as a weapon.
I think it's very, very bad.
You know, we put everybody dependent on largesse.
And just look at our universities.
The universities are nothing to brag about.
So we've given them a lot of money and then they violate or they oppose the president's administration in there and the people they allow talk on campus.
So the administration said, hey, we don't want those people talking on campuses.
So if you don't get them off your campus, we're going to take away your subsidies.
Well, they should have never had the subsidy.
Declaration of War Budget00:12:07
It should not be a weapon.
The colleges should be allowed to have the speakers that they want.
But the people who have the money and the money is taken from to build up these huge amounts of money into these universities, they should have a say in it.
And that is not what happened.
The universities get bigger.
The bigger they get, the more dependent they are on government.
And actually, the worse the education has gotten over the years.
Today, there's a little bit of awakening to this.
The progressive era was started by bad administration and bad education.
And that has to be reversed because that's where all this nonsense has come from.
The progressive era and this global attack on wokeism, it did come out of thin air.
It came basically from so much that came out of these universities that have been subsidized by the American taxpayer.
Sir Khan.
Yes, sir, Dr. Paul.
A couple of our live viewers are saying that they're seeing some audio issues.
We do apologize for that.
Like I said, I'm Manning here and I can't do much else at this moment.
But let's go ahead and go to our third question, and that is on war.
So the Constitution makes it very clear that only Congress has the power to declare war, yet we see presidents sidestepping this authority from Bush to Obama to now President Trump launching military actions without debate from our representatives.
So is there a solution to this, Dr. Paul?
And what would your recommendation be?
Well, the people ought to hold accountable the members of Congress who take an oath of office and still support wars that aren't declared.
That's where the problem comes from.
And this has been going on for a long time.
I remember shortly after I was first elected to Congress in 1976, I had a pseudo-debate with another member of Congress, a Democrat, and the subject came up.
And I, of course, took the position that we shouldn't have any wars that are not declared.
So if we aren't declared, therefore, I was very much aware of Korea and Vietnam and these problems that we've had all fought without declaration of war.
And I remember what my opponent in that small debate said and he was trying to firmly explain to me, he says, guess what?
There will never be another declared war.
Because he was on the committee, and just the way it worked, how he saw it, his intuition was that they're not going to waste time complicating things by trying to get a war declaration passed.
And it turned out that he was absolutely right.
We've never had a declaration of war.
But Congress is still responsible because if somebody starts a war, even the first time it happened, you know, it was after World War II, we went to war in Korea by an edict by the United Nations.
And Truman just said, oh, well, it's not a war, it's a police action.
So that's the way they did it.
But the Congress and the people are responsible.
The people allow their Congressman to get away with it because the military-industrial complex is so strong that all the weaponry from World War II on, billions and billions of dollars have been spent providing safety for us.
And I would like to challenge people who say that how that hasn't made us safer, I think it's made us more vulnerable by bankrupting our country.
So the money that they spend there is endorsed by the Congress.
They vote for it.
So it's a pseudo-declaration.
Oh, yeah, the president's going to war.
The U.N. says to do this.
NATO says do this.
And we spend the money.
So the people are not suffering at home that much.
So they don't worry about it or what's going on.
And so they do this, and yet it continues.
But the people have to wake up and say, you're not allowed to do this.
And I think this is one of the biggest issues because the lack of declaration of war and the expenditures on war is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, budget item that allows people to do this and spend the money.
Because if you vote against it, I've been accused.
Well, you're unpatriotic.
You're not supporting the troops.
Well, yeah, I'm supporting the troops.
I want to bring them home.
I'd like to have prevented the deaths in Korea, prevented the deaths in Vietnam, prevented the deaths in so many places, including the innocent victims, the civilians of all the countries that we continue to bomb.
So without a declaration, war and a definition of war, when your country votes for bombs and the people endorse it, and we are in 120 countries trying to bully us around.
And they're always indirectly, if you don't, if it's American weaponry, but it might not be American soldiers.
It might be the money we give to people when they buy the weapons from the military-industrial complex.
And then they go and they end up killing civilians and other people.
We have a moral responsibility for this because we participated and allowed them to do it.
So everybody's responsible if they do not come out with a constitutional position on war.
It should be talked about.
It should be emphasized.
And we shouldn't permit any administration to move troops all around the world at will and getting involved in the internal affairs of other nations.
Very well said, Dr. Paul.
I'll go ahead and close us off with the last question, and that is on DC.
We hear promises about cleaning up DC, but the approach is being pushed less like draining the swamp and more like consolidating power in the executive branch.
From the talks of purging civil servants to expanding presidential authority.
Isn't it as your floor?
You know, that would be my question to you.
Does it look like reform to you, sir?
Well, there's a temptation.
People should listen to the people who strongly support this.
DC is a mess.
It's a bad example.
There's no law and order, so to speak.
And if the city doesn't take it, I think it's one place where there's a little more debate over the jurisdiction of whether the Congress and the federal government should be involved.
But it's a federal city.
And the agreement was that the federal government would have some responsibilities.
And they certainly spend a lot of money there.
But it's still a worry to me because the use of disruption in a city and then you have to use the military to settle that down.
Almost the worst thing that could happen is that he has a major success.
And that's a horrible thing to say.
But what if the city settles down and then they reintroduce this whole notion to the country, you know, and say, well, it worked in Washington, D.C.
But I don't think that, and I don't like to see the fact that we have to use military people on our borders because it's so often the problems that we have are creations from bad policies that we have.
But I think the Constitution gives us good guidelines on this.
But it would be good if we could understand that it's a good thing we can do to make sure that people don't go to war and they don't use the military erroneously.
You know, the traditions have been pretty good since World War I since the Civil War of trying to keep the troops out.
But they've been in and out at times.
But if that continues to grow and it gets out of hand, it's set up because we're set up for a dictatorship already because we have so many people, even with the administration's efforts, the government doesn't shrink.
You know, we're in education, we're in medicine, we're in just about everything, you know, and a lot of people employed.
So there's a lot of vote going on there, and it's not going to go away easily.
But it doesn't, and I'm pessimistic that I don't believe getting new changing Congress to get a majority of people to vote that out.
That'll be too slow.
But we should send as many people as possible to Washington that will vote this way and show what we should do because it's going to end.
And there's going to be a time of rebuilding.
I think we're already in that process because I meet and see many, many hundreds and maybe thousands of people who are already starting to think in these terms.
I think that as bad as the federal government involvement in COVID, some good thing came out of that.
It alerted a lot of people.
What in thunder is the government being involved in the details on who should take a vaccine or not?
And I find out, well, it wasn't even good medicine.
So that wakes people up, and that's going to continue.
And I know a lot of groups doing whether it's on foreign policy.
People said I was not a very good politician talking about war issues when I was in Congress.
And they say, people won't vote for you if you do that.
And it became, and eventually, running as a presidential candidate, it was a very popular thing because a lot of young people came out.
And guess what?
Young people get drafted.
And it makes the point that young people don't like the idea of being drafted.
It's like becoming a slave.
And then all of a sudden, if they get a job, they're going to get a check.
And they say, they have to ask the government how much of it they can keep.
Otherwise, the government will keep it all.
They'll tax you for it.
So individual liberty is so important.
And a proper foreign policy of non-interventionism is so important to bring about peace and prosperity.
That's what is important.
And I am optimistic in the sense that the numbers of people that endorse this view are growing, but it's also going to be very difficult.
And it's going to be rough and tumble, taking the medicine to solve these problems.
But there's only one thing that's much worse.
It's letting it crumble and fall apart in that police state that we all fear becomes more dominant.
That will be very dangerous to all.
And it doesn't have to happen.
And that is why not only does this program, but many other thousands of programs participate in promoting the ideas of liberty, because that's where the answer should be.
Because if you want peace and prosperity, that is the only way to go.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.