All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 28, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
13:05
Daniel McAdams - 'What I Learned from Ron Paul'

RPI Director Daniel McAdams kicks off the 2025 DC Conference.

|

Time Text
Bringing People Together 00:12:06
This is also our 19th conference overall that we've sponsored or worked together, usually with the Mises Institute, a couple of them.
But in 12 years of our existence, 19 conferences, that's a lot.
And that really represents what our chief mission is, which is to bring people together.
And I like to think in an analog way.
That's why we don't live stream with some exceptions for very dear friends, and we don't have people on the screen when they're talking because the whole point of what we do, I think, is for people to get together.
And that's why I'm so delighted when I see people talking.
We have to get to know each other and speak to each other.
We're atomized.
We're in our own little world.
The social media is partly responsible for that.
So that's why I just really strongly feel the need to get together.
A couple of thank yous, and I'll make some short remarks.
I never get to speak at my own conference because there's too much to do.
But I wanted to express my deep appreciation for all of our speakers today.
These individuals are giving their own time freely to us, and they're sharing their lifetime of work and expertise with us to help enlighten us.
And we deeply, deeply appreciate them.
I would like to thank our sponsors.
The event sponsor this year is TexasCoin, and it's a great organization.
Dr. Paul and I met with the founder of the organization just about a week or so ago, and I would encourage you to look into them.
They're really neat guys and gals.
And I want to thank all of our gold sponsors who are here today as well.
These are the individuals that help us put on these conferences.
As you may know, it's very expensive to put on a conference.
And so there are some very, very generous people who step up to the plate and they put up some the money to help us make these things happen.
And I appreciate that.
And I would also like to draw your attention to the Ron Paul Scholars.
And they have their own table over here.
This is the 2025 class of Ron Paul Scholars.
This is our sixth class.
We even have alumni.
TJ, where are you?
You're over here somewhere.
TJ was in our first class, and now he's a Kentucky State Representative.
So that shows the quality of people that we have.
The Ron Paul Scholars Program is a program that I'm most excited about because we are helping to bring together the next generation of the Ron Paul Revolution.
And I think that is extremely important.
Investing in young people, I think, is the best investment that we can make.
And we're doing our best.
We would love to grow the program.
To do that, we need support.
So I'd love to talk to you anyone who wants to help us grow the program as well.
And I will go to a couple of remarks before I turn it over.
It looks like we got the good Trump yesterday.
I didn't get to see everything, did we or not?
From what I could see.
Until he meets with Lindsay and Lindsay gives him his marching orders, then it'll be a different tune.
And he'll be mad at Trump again.
But why do we do DC?
I say it every year.
We flew into DCA into Reagan.
And as we were flying over McLean, getting ready to land, well, two things happened.
For the first time that I remember, I looked down and saw the Pentagon as we were flying.
It was very close, and I was really hoping the pilot wasn't a psycho.
I was really worried.
And the other thing I saw before the Pentagon were the mansions of McLean.
Have you ever seen those?
Unbelievably elaborate, gorgeous homes with huge properties.
And I thought to myself, that's why we come here.
These people did not make their money producing really neat things that we like and need.
They made their money working with the government to rob us.
We're on the 28th corridor, which is where the military industrial complex is headquartered.
These are the people who are robbing us.
They're stealing our children's future.
And they're also creating mayhem overseas.
It is the center of the war machine.
And unfortunately, the war machine seems to be the only thriving part of our economy.
So we come here to remind them that we see you.
We know what you're doing, and we don't like it, and we oppose it.
And as long as we can do it, we will.
Now, we spend a trillion and a half dollars a year, and that's a very conservative estimate on our war machine.
It's not a defense budget.
It's a military budget.
It's the global empire.
We spend that much money, and what do we get for it?
We don't even get weapons.
We don't even get weapons that work.
When Israel decided it might be a good idea to start bombing Iran as we were in negotiations with Iran, and they realized about eight hours into it, oh crap, we're in trouble.
Well, what did they do?
They put Uncle Sam on speed dial and said, hey, we need some missiles, Pronto.
And of course, being the U.S., we said, yes, sir, how many can we bring you?
And we shot off about, I think the Wall Street Journal said about 20% of our THAD missiles in just that 12-day war.
I guess it was 11 days because we didn't shoot them the first day, to the tune of untold billions of dollars, 20% of our entire supply in one week.
Now, what does that tell you about people who say, we need to prepare for simultaneous wars with Russia and China?
What does that tell you?
They're smoking something.
They're in la-la land.
So we don't even get weapons.
We lost to the Houthis, right?
We lost to the Houthis, who probably, a lot of them, are in sandals.
All of this money does not buy us the strongest military on earth.
And I'm in no way denigrating the men and women who are in the armed forces.
But what they do is they feather the nests of the people who live up there that we flew over.
And that's what we're getting.
It is a massive, massive ripoff.
And it's destroying our country.
And it has to stop.
Our military industrial complex doesn't make weapons like we've seen, like the Oreznik and the weapons that Russia is using now.
They make small, extremely expensive boutique weapons that don't work very well.
We've seen that over and over again.
The Iron Dome didn't work very well.
So, well, they do, well, they actually do work well against children if you're in Gaza starving to death.
They seem to do fairly well over there.
But against an actual peer enemy, they don't do very well.
So my talk for the couple of minutes that's left is what I learned from Ron Paul.
Now, there's sort of a canard, I would say, for lack of a better word, that Ron Paul was not a successful congressman.
How many bills did you pass, Ron Paul?
You weren't very influential.
And I wrote a piece about this that we published, and Lou Rockwell picked it up about how Ron Paul changed the world.
He didn't pass bills.
You know, he, just as an example, I mentioned the speech, what if?
And the judge always riffs off that and does a terrific job riffing off that speech.
I remember when he came in and said, he mulls around in his mind.
I got this good idea.
Let's work on it.
He drafted the whole thing.
Let's work on it.
Let's tighten it up a little bit.
Let's do the timing.
Because before the one-hour special order speeches, you can do five minutes.
And they stick to that time.
So after Congress is out of session, there is a group of five-minute speeches.
And so we had to get the timing right.
We had to get the five-minute right.
And that speech, I think, was an extremely, extraordinarily powerful speech, and it was an interesting concept that he came up with.
I think that speech was very influential.
The other thing that Dr. Paul did was simply vote no.
What do you mean passing?
We don't need any more bills.
We have enough bills.
We have enough laws.
We need to pass no.
And though he hated doing it, when there was a particularly pernicious bill on the floor, dealing with foreign policy, usually, well, both the R's and the Ds were all for it.
Going to war with Iraq, everything.
But there's a feature in the U.S. House of Representatives where their time is allotted between those in support of the bill and those in opposition to the bill.
So the R's and Ds are both for it.
Dr. Paul would reluctantly go down and say, is the gentleman for the bill?
Yes.
Is the other gentle lady for the bill?
Yes.
Okay, then I would like to claim time in opposition.
And that's how Dr. Paul would get a slot of about 20 minutes or 30 minutes or however long the rules committee passed the rule for.
And that meant he controlled the entire time in opposition to this bill and could proceed to completely rip it apart.
And not only by himself, but he had his friends come down.
And his friends were from all other parties, were from Dennis Kucinich on the left, Mr. Duncan on the right, the old right, would go down.
And they would claim the time and they would proceed to destroy the party.
It was supposed to be unanimous.
It was a Soviet Politburo.
Everything had to be 100%.
And he went down and ruined the party.
And he was on C-SPAN doing it too.
That's powerful.
That's saying, no, we don't all agree with this.
We don't all agree with the war machine.
There's a big group of us who hate it.
And we're on the left and we're on the right and we're everywhere in between.
That changes the world.
It took a while.
It took a while for people to wake up and think and realize that the Iraq war was an absolute disaster.
And the people who were most rude to Dr. Paul, calling him Saddans, whatever, they're the ones who, of course, when the wind changed, said, well, I was never really for that war.
And for me, I get mad when that happens, and I got mad.
They didn't deserve that.
They didn't deserve for all the grief they gave him to say, I was always against the war.
But this is the point.
What did I learn from Ron Paul?
He never got angry when that happened.
I was the one who got angry.
He was always patient with people.
They'll come around.
Just be patient.
They'll come around.
Learn, study, and then teach.
And that's what he always did.
That's what he always did.
And when I first went to work for him, when I was interviewing for my position, he said, so what do you think about libertarianism?
I said, yeah, I agree with pretty much all of it.
He said, is there anything you disagree with?
And I said, to be honest, I have a problem with the position on drugs because I think they're terrible and horrible.
This was a while ago, guys.
And he didn't say, okay, well, you don't get the job.
You clearly don't get it.
You're clearly not qualified.
He said, that's okay.
Just read, read some more about it, study some more about it.
I think you'll come around.
And he was absolutely correct.
Patient, teach, don't get angry.
And that's what he's done.
And to say that I have learned these things from Ron Paul is not to say that in my daily life I continue to practice what he's taught me because I still am hot-headed and I still get mad at people and I'm still pissed off that they don't support peace like we do.
But I try.
I try to emulate Dr. Paul and I apologize and he I'm sure he was devastated when he wasn't able to make the trip to come down here.
He's had some challenges this year.
He's going to turn 90 next week, guys.
But he wanted to be here, and it's one of the very few times that I see emotion in Dr. Paul's face when he told me, Daniel, I can't make it this year.
And it was very touching and sad.
But he will be here with us live stream, and you can bet your bottom dollar that he's with us right here in spirit.
Decide Early 00:00:59
So with that being said, I want to introduce our first speaker.
It's going to be a different one this year, and that's thanks to the judge because he's a very creative thinker.
He said, Daniel, how about if I come do a show during a conference?
And I said, Judge, that sounds like a pretty neat idea.
I love doing the judge.
It's the only one I can do.
But what I did, and I rarely decide on speakers early because I want to get the sense of what's happening now.
But one speaker I did decide on early, and that's Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
And I bugged him, and I bugged him, and I sent him emails over and over.
And he said, I'd love to do it, but I've got a really challenging travel schedule this summer.
And I was just about to give up.
And I even said a little bit, this is the last time I'll bother you.
And I finally heard back from him.
Export Selection