Ron Paul in San Francisco – Amazing Speech!

Ron Paul gave an amazing speech in San Francisco this weekend. The event was titled “Principles over Parties” and other speakers included Candidate for Congress John Dennis as well as activist Matt Gonzalez.

Watch Ron Paul’s speech above, or the full event here.

Transcript

Ron Paul: Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much. What a delight. Now, I think everybody here knows the condition of Washington DC. Let me tell you, I could use some help, so send John up to DC for me. Now, not only would that be a victory and a pleasure for me to work with John in the Congress, but if he wins, I think a lot of people are going to notice, not in San Francisco, but the whole country, the whole world will hear about this. So let’s hope things go well for him this fall.

It’s great to get a nice crowd out and talk about peace and why we don’t need war. We have too much war against the American people and something has to be done. War is not a good idea, it’s a bad idea. It was a couple of years ago, probably in 2007 or 2008, I was asked on national television about the technique of – they knew I wanted to bring the troops home. They said, “But how would you do this? It’s so complicated. What would you do?” So my solution was, “We just marched in, we can just march out.”

Whether we’re fighting unconstitutional wars overseas, or fighting idiotic unconstitutional wars against the people on the drug issue, it all adds up to being a racket and it’s against the people, it does not preserve liberty in any way whatsoever.

We talk about a revolution, I believe this country is in the midst of a revolution. I believe it’s a philosophic revolution and that’s the only kind that count. And we are in a position now, I think, 3 years out and we are in a lot better shape than we were 3 years ago; our numbers are growing. I thought the campaign essentially would be over when the campaign ended, but with the Campaign for Liberty and all the other things that have gone on, we find out that our numbers are growing. So you’re not alone; there are a lot of people out there and I’m delighted to see everybody here today.

I’d like to talk a little bit about the state of the republic. The state of the republic, if you’re in Washington DC and you look at what’s happening and if you look at what Washington DC is doing to you and your friends and your neighbors and family, I would say that it looks like the republic’s in bad shape. But, if you want to look for some positive things, if you look at the number of people who have opened their eyes, have decided to look at what’s going on, especially the young people of this country who not only are interested in their personal liberties, they have an interest in economic liberty and they’re very interested in doing something about getting rid of the Federal Reserve system.

So the revolution is alive and well and growing. There are a few questions that come up about the revolution; sometimes people join the revolution just because they know where the momentum is. And sometimes they want to be in charge of the revolution and pass out the same pablum that’s been passed before. So it is up to us, those of us who have thought about it and you who’ve helped to build and start the revolution, make sure that we have our changes, that we have real changes, and that we don’t endorse the nonsense that going on. That if you’re for limited government, you’re not for limited government in economic issues and yet be for big government around the world. They’re totally inconsistent.

We have to face up now with wars overseas and wars against the people, wars on drugs and the whole bit. It’s endless and it’s always a threat to our liberty and confiscates what is happening. You know, the whole problem I think so often is language. Because I have never heard of a congresswoman or congressman go to their district and say, “You know what? I really believe in big government. I really believe in raising your taxes. I really believe in printing money endlessly so we have inflation.” They never do that. Most candidates go and they talk our language and it can be a little bit annoying because sometimes they’re believed. But, our job is to make sure that we know what they really have done in the past and what they really believe, because words aren’t worth much if they don’t stand behind them. And I think that’s our job.

I don’t think we can get very far unless we talk about the role of government; that’s where we have to start. The founding fathers understood rather clearly what the role of government ought to be, and they believed in the way they talked and wrote the Constitution, they believed that the purpose of government was to protect liberty, that was the purpose. It wasn’t there to regulate our lives, it wasn’t there to police the world, it wasn’t there to tell everybody how to spend their money and what they have to take into their bodies. They were there to protect liberty. The Constitution, if you read it carefully, it’s so clear. It has nothing to do with restraining peaceful activity of individuals; nothing.

It’s essentially a document written for the purpose of limiting the government, that is what it’s for. Then the little bit of government they were conceding to, they were trying and advising and they wrote down where this power of government, the authority of government would be, and basically, very little of it was supposed to be in Washington DC; it was supposed to be more local. But now it’s been turned on it’s head. We have government getting bigger in Washington and it’s intrusive throughout the country. But the revolutionary spirit we have today actually is rather delightful; we’re actually talking about nullification and the tenth amendment once again.

But, you know, you hear often on TV if you happen to listen to a liberal commentator, they come down real hard on you if you believe in nullification: “That’s some right-wing wild conspiracy theory about just nullifying laws we make”. Yeah, like California would like to nullify the laws against smoking marijuana.

So the nullification principle, I think, is a good one. You know, it was also intended by the founders – actually the principle of secession was based in the Constitution – and the northeast always threatened to secede from the terrible south. And that was there. But, you know, you can believe in the principle of secession and nullification without undermining our whole system. It’s the idea that if we’re mistreated or overtaxed and over-regulated and fight too many wars, that we have that option that would put so much breaks on the federal government if they understood that.

I have, in the past, talked a lot about foreign policy. I want to talk about that a little bit because, very simply, I believe in a non-interventionist foreign policy: “mind our own business”. The Constitution gives us no authority to go around the world and police the world. And sometimes when I get on a conservative station, they start pushing me about this radical extreme isolationism. I say, “Well, I just support George W. Bush’s foreign policy when he was a candidate in the year 2000″. When he says “a humble foreign policy” and “no nation building” and “don’t police the world”. That’s what they say to appease the people, but then once they get in, they do something else. I think, too often what happens is we have Republicans and Democrats fighting back and forth. And they’re real fights – over power, not over your liberties or over principle, because if you get a Democrat in or a Republican in at the administrative level, they generally endorse with vengeance the Federal Reserve system, the tax system, and the foreign wars. That’s what we have to put a break on and break that up.

Our foreign policy today has led us to having 13,000 special ops individuals around the [world], because we have a world war; it’s global, it’s a global war on terrorism. And they’re always saying, “You know, the Taliban did this, the Taliban did this”, and, of course, it isn’t the Taliban that came here on 9/11. So it’s just an excuse to go. But we have 13,000 special ops. You know what their main job is? Assassination. I mean, this is despicable of what is happening. And not only that, these individuals go out and they do target individuals and they shoot them and they kill them because they’re leaders of Taliban. You know, the Taliban was the Mujaheddin in 1980s and we were allies and Bin Laden was on our side that time. But now we’re targeting them and shooting them, then they wonder why they hate us. They say they hate us for our freedoms and our prosperity: that is not believable.

But now that we have a foreign policy where we have CIA agents running the bombing mission with drones and we have special ops individuals assassinating certain individuals, that we also live in an age coming out of the last administration, and that’s a foreign policy on war because now they claim it’s legitimate, it’s the American position, it’s the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. Preventive war doesn’t sound quite as bad as ‘aggression’, but it is aggression when you go and start wars and start killing people because you don’t like somebody. And then tell the American people, “Of course, we’re doing this because we’re protecting you”. But I think what is happening, nobody with our group in the Campaign for Liberty but all across the board I think the people… the healthy thing about the Tea Party Movement isn’t that it’s monolithic and everybody agrees on everything except for one thing: they don’t trust the government anymore and they want something much different than what we’re getting today from Washington.

Last week I put out a press release because I felt motivated to do so, and I was surprised how much coverage it got. It had to do with the Islamic center that they’re building in New York. And I don’t know whether it was the time to make the point that conservatives should be more protective of property rights and, of course, first amendment rights. And also the strongest point I wanted to make was that this was contrived not by everybody who supported the position they shouldn’t build this Islamic center there, that actually isn’t even a mosque, it’s a convention center-type thing. So, what they wanted… the most important thing I thought was if they could prevent it, that means Islam is guilty. That was the goal; to say Islam is guilty because if they don’t have enough hatred in this country built up to have an enemy, they can’t justify these wars. And I hear too often, people come and tell me, “How can you take this position?”. Congressmen come to me and say, “They want to kill us, they’re evil. They hate Christianity and they hate capitalism”. And they go on and on so they have to have an enemy. They have to have a Hitler to attack. So that’s why I thought it was so important to point out that Islam has very, very, very little to do with 9/11. Al-Qaida had a lot to do with it. And our foreign policy had a lot to do with it as well.

You know, on the issue of economics, that’s a war on our wallets and that’s continuous. And they have direct taxation, and they have the invisible taxation of inflation. Some people say the poor people never pay taxes; they pay Social Security taxes, that’s a big chunk. But they are really the ones that suffer the most from the inflation tax. We run up the spending, we borrow a bunch, we still don’t have enough, the Fed prints the money and devalues the currency. They’re the ones who, because there is a financial bubble out there, we say, “We can give you a free house. Everything is free. You have a right to this and a right to that.” Guess what? It’s all artificial, it’s all based on debt, it’s all a fallacy and when the bubble bursts, who gets hurt? It’s the poor people that they pretend that they wanted to help. It doesn’t help at all. But who gets bailed out? Republican or Democrat administration, the rich get bailed out, the military-industrial complex, the bankers get bailed out.

It’s very important that we, as a country, as a people, make the decision on why we had the financial collapse. Why does it come about? And if we don’t pin a major part of the blame on the Federal Reserve, we’re going to fail. In the Depression they said it was the gold standard and too much free enterprise that caused our depression. Today they’re saying the same thing: “Too much free enterprise and capitalism and all that other stuff”. It was too much crony capitalism is what we had.

You know, we’re going back to Congress, not this next week, but the following week. And I’m sure they’re going to spend some more money. We were off for the month of August, but we had to go back. The Speaker of the House called us back and said, “Emergency, emergency. 26 billion dollars, come back.” And we all flew back, we were there for an hour or two and they voted another 26 billion dollars. [Audience member: How did you vote?] He asked me how I voted. If you have to ask, you don’t belong here. Hahahaha.

The bailout and the spending is bi-partisan, everybody knows that. But now it’s a political football, back and forth, who are the biggest culprits. But rarely do they mention the Federal Reserve and this problem really starting… I think the big bubble that we’re unwinding that was first started in 1971 after we delinked our dollar from gold. I won’t go into that completely, but I want to talk about this bailout. If you add up the dollars that Congress spent and the money the Fed, you know, without congressional consent, without any knowledge, without any auditing, they created two trillion dollars, that’s all. Two trillions dollars, and they passed it out to their buddies. What did they do, what did they buy for us? Oh, they bought up all these illiquid assets. Illiquid means worthless. So they did over two trillion dollars and the Congress passed the rest of 3.7 trillion dollars. That’s about 3 years now. The big question is, what do we get for it and they’re wondering, “Well, why isn’t the economy doing well?” Well, all the money went into the pockets of the bankers and the corporate giants and the internationalists, and the people didn’t get anything.

Now you think give it would give a little boost – they’re worried about a double-dip. Don’t worry about a double-dip, we’re in one big dip and it’s straight down. Just because they can give you a government statistic where they’re pretending the economy is improving, they say, “Oh, the GDP went up a little bit”. Well, of course, if they spend more money on the military, the GDP goes up. But how do you benefit if they build a helicopter and they send it overseas and it gets blown up. It doesn’t raise your standard of living. But even in spite of this, with 3.7 trillion dollars in nominal terms, the GDP went up 100 billion. That’s very, very small. In real terms the GDP went down. 3.7 trillion dollars out the window, the people suffered, the special interests pick up the pieces and they get the money. That has to stop, or the people are going to eventually get very angry about what’s happening.

And I’m afraid the time when the people get a lot angrier will come when the dollar quits working. And what they’re doing is practically guaranteeing that our dollar is going to quit functioning. There is no history throughout world history where a fiat currency lasted for long periods of time. But, you know, gold’s been around for a while. They’ve used gold ever since they’ve recorded history, and it’s still money. So, eventually paper money will fail. But the bubble is bigger than ever, it’s worldwide, it’s based on the dollar. There’s an illusion about our strength, which is fast disappearing, but they still trust us as an economic power and a military power and that all conveys trust in the currency. But they’re gradually moving away; China will move away, in Malaysia they have already started a parallel standard, they’re using gold coins. Paper money is coming to an end. That is when our job is going to get a lot tougher. You better hope that each of you can round up another 100 or 200 or 300 individuals that would be converted to the principles of liberty, because we need more individuals who understand this in order to put it back together again properly.

I claim the bubble started in 1971 and it tried to deflate many times, and they were able to print money and spend money and sort of reinflate it. Just look at it like the bubble had a little hole in it, and if you pump hard enough, you can keep it inflated. But that’s not the case now. We have a big hole there, and they’re pumping, the $3.7 trillion didn’t do one thing and therefore this one is different. This is the big one. But, you know, I think our economy didn’t go sour just in 2008. I think the economy went sour in 2000 when the NASDAQ bubble burst. I think that was the big warning. But, they were able to create the housing bubble and then people got along a little bit better. But if you look at the economic statistics, things have been drifting downwards, they just got much worse in 2008, and that is if you look at how many jobs there are in this country compared to 2001, almost 10 years ago, there are 2.3 million less jobs than there were 10 years ago. 26 million more people. I mean, that is scary stuff. That’s why there are a lot of people who are very, very unhappy.

You know, my system of economics comes from having studied Austrian economics, it’s based on personal liberty, but it’s based on free markets, property rights, contracts and sound money. And, of course, we would have very, very few taxes under those conditions. We would, like, not have an income tax, as a suggestion. But, you know, a few times on the TV they will say, “Well, that sounds good, but what are you going to replace it with?”. How about we don’t need to replace it, unless you think the government should run the welfare state and the warfare state. You know, if that’s what you want, you have to continue to do that. But, you know, there is one concession, if you want to call it that, if we had the chance to work the transition, which I don’t think is going to happen. From my experience in Washington, they’re going to keep marching on. “We’ll go up there next week and spend more money,” the debt’s going to go up higher. So I don’t think we’re going to have enough people even after the election because the correction is quite painful. It’s like getting somebody off drugs. Politicians much rather give you another shot and another drink in order not to watch you have the symptoms. So that is probably what’s going to happen. But eventually, though, we will have to stop. And I have a suggestion. If you wanted to do something, even before we get rid of the income tax in order to get their attention, we could pass one law in Washington. Well I have a couple I would pass. But I have three I would like to pass, and they’re all only one page, you know, like get rid of the Fed.

But I would do away withholding taxes. To make the point, everybody send a check to the U.S. Government at the end of 30 days and we would have our revolution. But the other thing I would is I would have a rule in the House of Representatives; I would say that every member of the House, on August 15th, they had to bring all their paperwork on to the House floor by themselves without their accountant and sit down and do their tax return, and they can’t leave until it’s finished. They would change the tax code before they would do that.

The marketplace certainly is under attack. There is one question, though, that I am asked quite frequently or that I’ve heard others asked quite a few times, and it annoys me to no end. And there may be some of you that would disagree with me on this, but I think it’s an important point, and that is if they want to give you a tax cut. They say, “We want to lower your taxes by 10%.” Those who believe in big government and those who believe they own you, they’ll say, “Who’s going to pay for it?” Now, why does somebody have to pay for you being allowed to keep what you earn? You know, that annoys me so much that I got thinking, can you imagine what it would be like if the founders were sitting around writing the Constitution and they said, “Well, okay, we have these farmers out there and they’re raising tobacco and corn, and we’re going to allow them to keep a 100% of what they raise. What do we have to do? We have to figure out how we’re going to pay for that to allow them to keep that.” So the whole thing is, if you have a free society, limited government and balanced budgets, you don’t pay for tax cuts. Now, if you want to do something about it, if you want to cut the taxes and you don’t want to massively expand the deficit, what you do is you cut spending.

The type of thing that I would work on with those who disagree with me on the economics, would be that I would cut overseas. We’re spending a trillion dollars a year on our military and I think what we should do, if we work deliberately, start cutting overseas; it’s easier to cut there. But to come and say, “Well, the first thing we’re going to cut is child healthcare.” You know, that makes a lot of sense politically, and you might even believe, of course, the medical system is getting worse because the government is too involved and it’s going to get a lot worse. But there could be transitions. Unfortunately, though, I think this whole thing is going to come unglued and then we all suffer because you won’t be able to buy medical care if your dollar doesn’t work.

But let me talk for a minute or two about the drug war. I think everybody knows where I stand on that. I think drugs are terribly dangerous, I think the doctors, especially, are derelict because people abuse and misuse prescription drugs probably a lot more than illegal drugs. But anyway, it isn’t so much that I want people… I don’t emphasis the drugs. What I emphasis is choice, freedom, your own decision. But also, with that decision on what you want to do with your own bodies, you have to assume a 100% responsibility for the consequences of bad choices.

But you know, this idea that the government regulates what we put in our bodies really makes no sense. We’re still pretty good about protecting intellectual speech, we allow them to teach socialism and communism in our schools and different things like that. So we’re rather tolerant. We’re tolerant generally up until recently, now that we have to hate all Muslims, but generally we respect freedom of religion. But when it comes to putting something in your mouth or in your lungs or in your body, for the last 70 or 80 years it’s just been determined that you’re too stupid and, therefore, you have to be told what to do. And I have had members of Congress not only on economic issues, but on drug issues, tell me that the people are just too dumb and we have to take care of them. Now, that attitude we should make sure that we eliminate some day and get rid of those people who believe that.

But, you know, the Food and Drug Administration, some people mean well. In the Food and Drug Administration they believe they’re going to protect us, but they also protect the big drug companies. They can have compulsory mental health testing and they sell more psychotropic drugs and on and on. And if you’re into alternative medicine, they want to regulate that and they want to make sure they sell vitamins and you can’t buy it on the Internet, and it goes on and on. But it’s also led to some really, really silly stuff, like we can’t grow hemp in this country, they’re afraid you might smoke it. Now I understand that if you want to smoke hemp in order to be equivalent to one joint, it has to be the size of a telephone pole. And also milk, why do they want to regulate milk? Oh, because you might drink raw milk. Well, some people think that’s better for you. But why is it assumed that you’re not allowed to make your own decision and the federal government has to come in and regulate it? What we need in this country is a much greater determination that what we demand is we demand that we legalize freedom.

You know, some groups will agree with us and say, “This is good, we should legalize this, legalize all this activity; gambling, the whole works – so we can tax it”. And then there’s another group that wants to prohibit it. Why can’t we have this third option of saying, “Just allow people to do what they want, neither tax it, nor prohibit it”.

It’s something like the choices in foreign policy. I said they have only two choices; I’d like a third choice. The one choice is, “We’re the tough guys and we can go and say, alright we want you to do this” and if the leader of that country says, “Sure, we’ll do it”. So what do we do? The people get taxed and they send the money to prop up these dictators around the world. But then if he says, “Oh no, we don’t want to do that” and they start to rebel and look how they turned on Saddam Hussein, he used to be our best buddy, and all of a sudden look what happened. But if they don’t do it, we bomb them. So they have the alternative, they either get money from us, or they get bombed from us. I would say, why don’t we just leave them alone and offer friendship and trade with them and at least try to deal with them.

But I am sure you’ll be glad to know that Congress is very much against people lying. Did you know that? They don’t want you to tell lies. The greatest crime in Washington is lying to the government. I got to thinking, I was taught as a young person not to lie, and I don’t lie. I think lying is very bad. And, you know, in a free market your not allowed, either. That’s fraud and you should be punished for that. But in Washington, they do things they shouldn’t be doing and then the whole issue comes to be whether or not they’ve lied. And I think of Roger Clements. Now what in the world would the founders of this country think that the members of Congress called hearings, put a guy under oath, finds out what he takes into his body to play some sport. I mean, we have no authority over that.

Now it might not be a bad idea to have rules against it, and if you are a professional baseball player or football player here, you should participate, sign your contract and say I’m not going to use drugs. They should have the right to enforce it and you should suffer the consequences. But for Congress to come and say, “You didn’t do this, you broke the law, you just lied to us and now you’re going to jail”. Then you wonder about, has government ever lied to us? What should we do with them?

Then if somebody wants to tell the truth in government, like what was his name? Bradley Manning, the private. He says, “You’ve been told lies about Afghanistan and here I want to reveal this, and I’m going to release this information” Technically he’s breaking those rules, but maybe he’s following a moral code. Maybe he’s following the Constitution, who knows. So we’re going to put him in jail as well, yet the people, and they were quite a few and they weren’t all in one party, that lied us into Iraq and lied us into Afghanistan and keeps the lie going and keeps the lie going like the war has just ended in Iraq or practically ended. No, you know, we should revise that code that we have in the coinage act of 1792. The founders didn’t like counterfeiters, I mean, they didn’t have many federal laws, but one was “don’t counterfeit the currency or a public document”. So they didn’t want counterfeiting money. But they put the penalty as death if you counterfeited the money. Now, if we revived that, the Fed would be in big trouble.

So we have, of course, the work cut out for us. And I want to paraphrase Victor Hugo about an idea whose time has come. But I would like to say “no government war can stop an ideological revolution whose time has come.” So all these wars on us; the wars on our liberty, the wars on our economic well-being, the wars overseas – but now we have an ideological revolution coming. And we have reason to be hopeful. Our country is a lot better off than some of the other countries that have gone through this. Certainly our history is a lot better than the Soviet system and the Russian history. They haven’t had real good examples of property rights and sound money and civil liberties, and we have. So it’s not that complicated. You know, if we really were determined, although it’s not a perfect document, but it would really help us, why couldn’t we just start using the Constitution again?

And that could be very helpful. So there’s a lot that we can do, and I’m really more optimistic now than I had been. I’m very optimistic when I get to the college campuses. We will continue to do a lot on the campuses. Young Americans for Liberty is very energized, and I work with them closely. And, to me, that’s where the future is and so I’m very encouraged by that. But talking about war, did anybody attend the rally in Minneapolis in 2008? Well, up there I had somebody sing a song that I particularly liked, it was an anti-war song. It was written by Buffy Sinclair. And that song that she wrote in 1964, it was called “The Universal Soldier”. And I want to read a couple of verses from that, because I think it really has a strong message and it makes one think. She talks about the universal soldier. She says,

And he never saw the writing on the wall
But without him how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau

Without him Caesar would have stood alone.
He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war
And without him all this killing can’t go on

He’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him and you and me

And Brothers, can’t you see
This is not the way to put an end to war

Now, the only part about that that bothered me a little bit – obviously I like it – is putting the blame on the soldier. Because I was in the military, I was drafted, I was through medical school but I was drafted during the Cuban crisis. And I did not have the same firm convictions, nor could I defend my convictions at that time. And I was still in a learning mode. So to put all the pressure on the soldier is pretty tough, although some are sophisticated and understand it. But she also pointed out that it’s not just a soldiers, he has responsibility, but ultimately it’s you and me; we all have a responsibility and, of course, we know the Constitution is very clear: we wouldn’t be in these wars if we forced the Congress to declare the wars.

Now one year later Phil Ochs wrote a song that you may have heard. The name of the song is, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”. And a couple of verses there: he says,

For I flew the final mission in the Japanese sky
Set off the mighty mushroom roar
When I saw the cities burnin’
I knew that I was learnin’
That I ain’t a-marchin’ anymore

Now the labor leader’s screamin’ when they close the missile plants
United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore
Call it “Peace” or call it “Treason”
Call it “Love” or call it “Reason”
But I ain’t a-marchin’ any more.

I don’t think we should march in those government wars that are illegal and attack our liberties and eventually there might be a lot more physical attacks on the American people. So we should not be marching in those wars. But we as individuals and as groups, as we get together in political actions, or in education as teachers or whatever. In the ideological struggle, yes, we are marching. And our marching is getting stronger and those who are marching are getting much more numerous. So that is what encourages me so much because I am firmly convinced that the principles of liberty are the most important thing that we can do. You say, “Oh no, my religious values are… my intellectual values are…”. No, liberty is key because it is under liberty that we’re allowed to promote our excellence and virtue. That’s what life should be all about in my viewpoint.

But what we have allowed our government to do is to take over that moral responsibility of making us better people, or making the economy fairer or telling other people around the world that they should be like us and have a democracy. So we’re making these assumptions. Every time the government assumes responsibility to be a nanny or an instructor to tell us how to live and what to do do, no matter what the motivation is, they can’t do it without undermining liberty.

So that is the purpose. Now the wonderful thing about true liberty, and when you understand it, and hopefully this will keep going, is that liberty brings people together. I think you’ve already witnessed this on the stand and here in the crowd that people of different values should be able to come together. And I have very strong personal values and family values, but they’re mine and I want the responsibility and I want to take care of it. But, if we have a society that is more tolerant – this is why I’ve been so annoyed that they can blanket-accuse a whole religious group. I mean, they’ve done that before. I think it led to the second World War by taking a group and blaming a group. So I really don’t like that. But, liberty does the opposite; it brings people together because it’s not challenging. We don’t challenge each other as long as you don’t initiate force against them. That is the key to it.

In a free society you are permitted to do anything that is constructive and not harmful. If it’s harmful to you, one thing that we do in this country is that the government says, “We have to protect you from yourself”. That is very, very dangerous. What we want to do is protect the people from the government. So there’s every reason for us to be optimistic and energized. We still have freedom enough to come here, we still have freedom to get certain people into the Congress; this Congress is going to change. And this, to me, as long as that’s available, I feel compelled to be involved. Even though I keep thinking and wondering, when does that time come where this isn’t working. There was a period of time when the Gestapo came for some that it was the most important thing that you were a good liar. And we’re not there, but it’s conceivable that if we have a breakdown of society, which can happen when the economy breaks down or the currency breaks down, then we’ll have to make tougher decisions. But in the meantime, we have to continue with this momentum and energize the new generation that’s interested in this. And this understanding of what made America great, this freedom, is to me so important.

I want to close by making one point that I believe. One hundred years ago, what happened was they took freedom and chopped it into pieces. One group said, “Oh, we defend personal liberties and we know what the first amendment means” And somebody else said, “Yea, and we know what the free market means”. They’re one and the same. Freedom of the individual means you have a right to your life, your property, and the fruits of your labor.

Thank you for coming. Thank you.

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