Ron Paul on Bill Press Radio

Show: The Official Morning Show of the Obama Generation
Host: Bill Press
Date: 2/23/2009

Transcript:

Bill Press: 14 minutes before the top of the hour. Monday, February 23rd, it is the Bill Press Show. And we remember him well from the 2008 Presidential Contest; among Republican candidates, he stood out. Because a true fiscal conservative has been from Texas, Congressman Ron Paul. Hi Congressman, how are you?

Ron Paul: Good, thank you Bill. Good to be with you.

Bill Press: Good to have you on again. I want to start before we get into the banks and the stimulus package and all of the economic stuff, I attended the White House briefing Friday, Congressman, and there was a lot of news last week, and the reporters asked questions about every issue you can imagine, but there was not one single question about Afghanistan.

Ron Paul: Oh, trying to repeat history once again, and show that Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan don’t want foreign occupants, as some people claim that is getting pipelines or pipelines and gas pipelines through that country and some people think.

Bill Press: They think of Afghanistan as the good war, right? Iraq was the bad war, but Afghanistan is…

Ron Paul: War. They realize it’s not going to be quick, but they are willing to accept this idea that they have to be there. It’s interesting that the NATO was willing to send in troops over there where they weren’t willing to go into Iraq. And I’ve never gotten an adequate answer for that, but the best one I heard was; “Well, it was like NATO was getting to the point where they thought they were non-essential and they had to be a participant”. Somebody said the other day that they were ready to bring their troops home.

Bill Press: Yeah, they are bringing their troops home. A lot of talk these days, Congressmen about possible nationalization of the banks and Chris Dodd says the other day he doesn’t like it, but he things it’s necessary in the short run, so does Alan Greenspan. What’s your take?

Ron Paul: [...] nationalized because the banks are sort of partners with government. They exists because of licensing and they get guarantees of all their insurance and they get to create the credit. You know, fractional reserve banking is a method where the banks get to pyramid debt and create money. The Fed starts it off with high powered stuff, but then banks pyramid new money so they’ve been very much involved, but they’ve been allowed to keep their profits. This is a little bit of that.

They have been nationalizing the losses, that’s what they are trying to do. They’re trying to find more victims and therefore they’re using that term, nationalization. But, you can have socialism and nationalism without total ownership, and that lends itself toward more like fascist state, where even in early history under Hitler, corporations where willing to become partners with government. In never liked this term “partnership of business and government”. It just scares the daylights out of me and a lot of them are talking about it, and I think the best thing is to let the companies and the banks go bankrupt, and it is rough, but to destroy the currency and with the [...] financial system. I mean, the financial system doesn’t work, the dollar reserve standard [...] not to spend money, you want people to live within their means.

This whole idea that, you know, the Keynesian view is that you need more spending, but how could we have had more spending in the last ten years, that’s all the consumers were doing. They were told; “Spend, spend, spend, spend!” So, seriously, it has been blown, I mean if it couldn’t prevent the recession/depression, how is it going to get you out of it, by getting consumers to spend money. And that’s what they are doing with all these bailouts is to make sure your house mortgage’s value doesn’t go down so you can keep borrowing, keep spending. I don’t think it can work.

Bill Press: Yeah, it does seem at some point that we are going to run out of money, but I don’t know. I don’t know.

Ron Paul: Well, we are not going to run out of money. What we are going to run out of is value. Social security recipients are always going to get their checks. The big question is, “Will the money be able to keep their standard of living going”.

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