Campaign for Liberty

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. If you notice any errors please report them using the “Help improve this post” link at the bottom of this post.

Ron Paul: Thank you very much, thank you, thank you. Thank you for coming, and thank you for that very nice reception. I want to thank Jack for the introduction. Also, I want to thank Mark for all his hard work. It seems like I get to (?) quite often for Campaign for Liberty, but Mark has something to do with it; he has good organizational skills, and he has a lot of people to work with. Thank you very much for helping out.

This year I particularly wanted to make sure I’ve made this meeting because we had that little straw vote last week, and I wanted to make sure you knew about the results. You might not have heard about it, so I wanted to come and let you know how things came out. But someday, when this momentum continues, which it is, the crowds are getting bigger, the enthusiasm is getting louder, the country is coming our way. Pretty soon, we’re going to get some of those big interviews on Sunday morning, who knows. But it is great to be here, I’d like to talk about what I talk about all the time, and that’s liberty, but I want to address it in a certain way. Generally speaking, I am sure you have been challenged, as I have been for many years, and continue to be, and that is the accusation that we who have these particular beliefs that we believe sincerely in the constitution, they’re strange ideas, they’re out of the mainstream, there’s something odd about them. But I’d like to talk about what’s being going on in this country, because I think the odd balls have been in control of this country for way too long. The one issue I’ve talked about for a long time and which has motivated me even in the early years of being involved in politics, happened to do with Breton-Woods and the monetary system. But just think about it, how often now they say that this idea of commodity money and gold and the constitution, how silly it was. The other day I read something I found rather entertaining, I was by myself and I had to laugh a little bit, because the person that was writing this said, “Yes, Ron Paul has interesting ideas about monetary policy, but its pre-industrial”. And I got to thinking, does he realize where this country is moving? What has happened in the last 40 years, we’ve been de-industrialized by this runaway paper standard. It is only honest money that really promotes the industrialized world and money is very important in doing this. So, monetary policy is key, it’s key for those who believe in the entitlement system because you have to finance it, it’s key for those individuals that will finance wars overseas, and therefore, it is a very, very important issue. And when you think about what is happened over the last 100 years, essentially since we’ve had our Federal Reserve, we’ve lost – you know, I have to keep up, I have to check every morning exactly how much we’ve lost against gold – it’s about 98.5%, 99% of the value of the 1913 dollar we have lost. And then they want to say this is a good system of purposely devaluing the currency? I would say, after a 100 years, it’s time we re-evaluate it and we should come to the conclusion, and that is we don’t need a central bank and we need to get rid of the Federal Reserve System; is what we need.

So when they tell you that it’s a silly idea to think about gold, how could anything be sillier than taking pieces of paper and writing numbers on them, and have value? You know, I think grade school kids can be taught something about money that they don’t understand in Washington; it’s because they want it that way. They know it serves the special interest, they know it serves the interest of big government and it serves the interest of big corporations, the military-industrial complex, the financers, the bankers. They know they can make a lot of money getting hold of that money first, but they also know when they control the money, and they can control the ability to inflate at will, they also can bail themselves out when necessary. And that has to come to an end, we need to be a lot more concerned about our middle-class.

But it’s pretty bad when the Congress goes and inflates and has these stimulus programs; billion dollars here, billion dollars there, soon it’s up to a trillion dollars. It’s a lot of money, but it’ minor compared to what the Fed does. And the Fed actually believes they should be able to and be allowed to do it in secret. You know, if we don’t get rid of the Fed soon, we better, at least get to audit the Fed and find out exactly what they’ve been doing. But just think they’ve been pumping around 15 trillion dollars these last 4 years, a third of it went to the foreign banks, foreign central banks and foreign governments. I mean, this is such an outrage. When the people here this, they become outraged and more and more people are hearing it. The truth is, is I am very surprised, pleasantly so, that we are this far along on delivering this message. 4, 5 years ago before the last campaign, nobody knew how many people like you were out there that had already thought about it and knew about it, and here there were thousands and thousands. I believe today there are millions and millions of people who are now aware of what’s going on.

So here we take a monetary system, they argued the case that printing money is real and we should do it in secret and bail out all the special interest. At the same time, they mock the notion that we should follow the constitution. The constitution says only gold and silver can be legal tender, you cannot emit bills of credit which is paper money. And what do they do, how do they have to protect their system? By force, they use the force of government and the laws: the legal tender laws say you must settle all your contracts using only money, which is paper money. If you are so eager and so bold and think that you have the right, because of the constitution, that you have the right to use gold and silver coins – even those that were minted by our government and that still say “legal tender” and the constitution says they’re legal tender – they could be arrested and put in prison for this, charged with counterfeiting. To use American hard money is counterfeiting. The counterfeiting is over at the Federal Reserve.

So it’s absolute economic fact that by duplicating units of money with nothing behind the currency, but just to duplicate paper money, there is no additional wealth put into the economy; none. All it does is dilute wealth, redistribute wealth. It is very well known in the study of monetary history that when governments do this – and they’ve been doing it for centuries, this is not brand new – and when they do it, it inevitably wipes out the middle class. I mean, just think in recent history, Mexico’s gone through a re-monetization and runaway inflation; Germany did it; Zimbabwe’s done it; South American countries have done it. And it’s been done so many times and yet, inevitably, the only way to restore confidence is always to go back with real money and, of course, when you do and when we will do that, the people have to believe the individual’s doing it. Because if they announce tomorrow, “Okay, it looks bad, so we’re going to go to gold standard. We’ll make the dollar(?) 1/1500th of an ounce of gold and we will honor that. But we won’t change our foreign policy, we won’t change our spending habits, we won’t change our deficits”. Who would believe that? Nobody would believe that. We had one example in our history when we did that, and the people had a little bit more conviction about the country and what the government said, and that was after in the Civil War. They had a resumption act, it took 3 years, they quit printing greenbacks and they withdrew some, and we didn’t have a welfare state, we didn’t have an empire. After 3 years the price of gold went down dramatically from a couple of hundred dollars down to 20 dollars, and it was a non-event. But today it is so different. So to deal with the monetary issue, you have to deal with something else that is very important; and that is the role of government. And then the more important thing is to have people in government, from the presidency on down, individuals who you can trust and understand and who won’t lie to you.

As bad as it is in Washington from top down and as bad as it is that we are suffering from the consequences of decades of teaching by socialists and Keynesians and inflationist, it’s really as much the people at fault as anybody. Because we’re not in a challenge now. Even an audience like this who are sick and tired of it all, we know what has to be done, but we’re still probably numerically in the minority because more than half the people in the country have become dependent on the government, and therefore any attempt to do it will make people very angry and we’ve seen this already. We’ve seen this happen in the states that have tried to correct things. People get quite angry, they’re angry around the world, they’re very upset about what’s happening and they don’t quite understand because prices of food are going up. They don’t know that the world economic system and the monetary system is manipulated by us printing so much money. So they’re reacting to prices going up and therefore they act out and they’re capable of doing it in this country and they’ve already shown some anger around the country as well. But the people have an appetite for big government, that’s still what’s happened. We have a large number of people, I mean, I meet them on the stages when I have debates. They don’t think we have enough wars going on, they think we need more wars going on. But thank goodness we’re breaking through on that, the people are with us on that. When you get a former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, coming home and finally getting out of that business, saying, “Anybody who thinks we need another war needs their head examined”, and I agree.

But if we allow those who find special reasons for wanting to keep our presence around the world, so many bases in so many countries with no real effort to bring these troops home. There was an announcement today that we’re working now on an agreement with the Afghan government to be able to stay because they’re inviting us to stay until 2024. Sure, sure. And the odds of us leaving Iraq, what do you think the odds are of leaving Iraq? I think they’re slim to none, until we’re broke. Unless we get somebody in office that will change the foreign policy and bring the troops home.

You know, sometimes little items stand out bigger than the trillions of dollars; it’s hard to comprehend the trillions and the hundreds of billions. So there’s one thing that went on in Iraq that I think you can remember, and it makes them look silly. Why are doing this? And that is, they decided after we conquered Iraq – you know, they had all those nukes and everything over there, and we had to conquer them. But we conquered them and we started having the green zone, and we built and embassy in the green zone. And the embassy is as big as the Vatican, and just recently in the DOD budget they put authority, authorization, and funding for 17,000 people to be employed in the embassy in Iraq. And do you think they’re planning on coming home? I would say the suggestion be that if you’re going to save that 1 billion dollars, what we should do is save the billion, put half of it to the deficit reduction, and put it into some program here at home where we can help some people who have learned, unfortunately, to be so dependent on the government just to stay alive. I think that is the solution that if we stop that money spending overseas, help people out here at home, and take those 17,000 jobs and make sure they’re jobs here at home, not overseas.

The president shouldn’t go to war without the Congress’s approval and he should have a declaration of war, but the one thing the President can do, and I would do, is that I can end the wars that are undeclared and unconstitutional. The commander in chief is in charge of the military, he can direct the military. We can bring them home. And they say, “Well, you want to bring them home too fast, we don’t have enough time”. Well, when they want to send them over, they get them together and ship them off rather fast, why can’t we ship them home just as fast. It’s not just in the warzones of the Middle East, but it’s in the perpetual occupation of countries that we don’t need to be occupying, and that is South Korea and Japan and Germany and all these countries and the nearly 900 bases that we have. Close them down, bring them home, and very quickly. I mean, if we pursue this, you will organize a military someday, you don’t do that the first week. But get them home. And just think of how many people would be spending their wages here at home rather than in the German economy and the Japanese economy. Bring that back, that would bank like a stimulus.

The big issue in the campaign has been the economy and jobs. And the interviews have been pretty good and you get a chance to answer them, but you get 30 seconds or 60 seconds. They ask, “What are you going to do to turn the economy around?” And you got to answer in 30 seconds. They took 40 years to mess this up, and you’re supposed to answer in 60 seconds about how to correct it. But I can list a few things in 60 seconds that would help a whole lot: have sound money, get rid of the regulations, reduce the taxes, bring our troops home, change our foreign policy, and repeal the laws, and low and behold, that could be very, very helpful. But it does take a while to get a consensus and have this happen, but the most important thing you have to do to turn it around, is you have to get rid of the mistakes that have been made. Pricing in a free market is crucial. Misses, way back in 1912, said socialism can’t work because they don’t have a free market pricing structure, and it’s impossible to work; and he was right, and it failed. But in Keynesianism and what we have today, we fix the prices on one-half of it, we fixed the prices and altered the value of the dollar and fixed the interest rates, and it causes all the distortions. But you can’t get back to growth until you get rid of the distortions. So you have to liquidate debt and you have to get rid of the mal-investment. And politically, that’s difficult, people don’t want to do that because they’re frightened. When the crisis came in 2008, it was announced, “Well, if we don’t bail out the banks, everybody is going to suffer, there will be a depression”. So what did we do? We spent trillions and trillions of dollars bailing out the people who were making all this money, and guess what? The people got the depression and the people lost their homes. So that didn’t work, we still have the debt on the books. It was just shifted from the wealthy to the poor and the middle class because it’s on our books, on our monetary system and in our treasury. So that has to change.

What we should have been doing in 2008, which has been said by many Austrian economists, is when the crisis comes and somebody’s bankrupt, you have stricter regulations, not weaker regulations. And the strict regulations say, “You’ve messed up, you go bankrupt, and wipe that debt off the books. You don’t go to the people”. But in many ways we’ve lost confidence in freedom in general and we have lost confidence in an understanding of how free markets work, and we’ve been always taught into saying, “Well, there’s always going to be people that will need help, and therefore we have to help them or they’ll fall through the cracks”. Well, when you do it their way, the way the Keynesians have done it, the cracks get bigger and more people fall through them. And we always get charged with, “Well, if you don’t help those kind of people, then you don’t care, you have no humanitarian concerns”. But I’ve come to the conclusion that if we do have humanitarian concerns, which I have and I’m sure you do, the best way to take care of human needs, is to have a free society and free markets and sound money; that will take care of the maximum number of people.

They’re always charging us with this ‘not-caring’, but if you sacrificed a little bit of liberty, let’s say that you do say, “Well, we have to help those in need”. The reason I think that is wrong is because, first, it’s not morally right to steal from one group to give it to another, regardless of what their needs are. Economically it doesn’t work and it fails, it’s not constitutionally authorized. But when you help a little bit a few people, you’ve sacrificed a 100% of the principle, you’ve endorsed re-distribution of wealth, and it will be bound to grow. That’s sort of like saying, “The income tax is not so bad if it’s 1%, like it started out”. But 1% has endorsed the principle that the government says they own all your income and they’ll allow you to keep a certain percentage according to their dictates. That’s why the income tax is the worst type of tax on a free society. I think so much of what we’ve done in these last quite a few decades has been undermining this principle of our personal liberty. So many have not understand exactly where our liberties come from, they think it come from the government, that’s why they own our lives. One member of Congress sitting beside me when we were voting on something that was protecting the consumer and doing something, and I said, “Why do you have to do this, why do you feel compelled to vote for this?” He said, “Well, the people are too stupid to take care of themselves”. Those were the words he used, and that’s the attitude they have, and they believe that. But they don’t recognize it and we can’t argue that there will be no problems in a free society, it’s just that they would be minimized. And there would be a lot more wealth in the country, and there would be a lot more charity in the country and we wouldn’t need the government. As soon as you do the government, you just destroy the wealth and you destroy the free market and the whole thing on the whole property rights. But what we have done, though, is we have undermined across the board this whole idea of whose life it is. The government assumes it’s their money, the government’s money, and that it’s your life. The basic principle of the draft says that they can draft 18 year olds to go off for war. I know there’s no draft now, but young people still have to register just to remind everybody, “In case we need you, we’ll ship you off.” And the most outrageous suggestion I hear, and there’s a famous liberal economist today now talking about and arguing the case that wars end depressions and recessions. That is a criminal thought as well as it’s absolutely wrong. It was taught to so many of us in school: “Oh, the depression ended with the Second World War”. Yea, because they hauled off 16 million Americans and put them in uniforms, the unemployment rates went down, but they were getting shot at and killed. But the prosperity didn’t come, prosperity came well after World War II. It took 17 years to get rid of it. But this idea that when we get into trouble, if you have a war, that will stimulate the economy, it doesn’t. It just redirects the investment. There will be war profits; some workers and business people might make it, but if you build a bomber that goes over and gets blown up, that didn’t increase our standard of living in any way whatsoever. So this is a very dangerous thought, but it’s based on the fact that governments think they own us and control us.

They do that with the assumption of foreign policy that they can use our young and send them off to fight these wars of no purpose. They do it in economics, assuming that they have to regulate you to take care of you and tax you and assume that they own you. But what about in the other sense, the other sense that they are convinced that you can’t protect yourself? But giving up liberty in order to gain protection from the government is foolhardy and we should never have to give up any of our freedoms to provide security for ourselves. So, in a personal way, this attack has been systematic for many, many years, it’s been done with this ill-advised war on drugs. Just think of what they do in the name of regulating drugs. I thought we had a pretty good test of prohibition back in the 1920s and we had to repeal it. We’ve spent over a trillion dollars on the war on drugs, we haven’t got rid of the drugs, but we’ve gotten rid of our liberties. People have these SWAT teams going into the wrong houses and killing people. But it’s time we recognize it’s your life. Yes, if you want to do something dumb, you’re allowed to do it in a free society, but you can’t go and beg other people or require the government to take care of you if you do dumb things.

One thing that’s always been hard for me to understand is, our country is still pretty good in protecting religious freedom. I think there’s less tolerance than there used to be because there are some phobias around on this. But basically most Americans say, “Yes, you have a right of no religion or any religion”, and that seems to be fine. We protect intellectual freedoms as well pretty well. But when it comes to your own body and making your own decision about what food you eat, what you drink and what you smoke and what you do and your personal habits, all of a sudden there’s a bunch up there, liberals and conservatives, who say, “The people are too dumb to protect themselves, they’re always going to do harm to themselves, and we know what’s best for them and we will take care of them.” So that is insidious in the culture, and there’s this belief that you need some nanny-state to take care of us. But once again, it isn’t an argument that it’s a society. But the society that I don’t want is when the government controls us, whether it’s financial control or personal control or religious control or control by forcing us into these wars, that’s what we don’t need. We need to stand up and demand our freedoms.

Of course, nobody will forget where they were on 9/11, that’s 10 years ago, and those were difficult times, especially for those of us who were trying to explain exactly what 9/11 was all about. But immediately afterwards there was a fair amount of legislation that came up. The first bill that came to the floor to rectify these problems that existed, wasn’t to address foreign policy or exactly asking questions, “Why do people commit suicide terrorism, where did these people actually come from?” It certainly wasn’t Iraq. They didn’t ask that, they said, “What we need to do is pass the Patriot Act, which makes no sense. I talked to one member of Congress who voted on it, and I asked, “Why are you even voting for this, you haven’t even had a chance to read it and it has some terrible stuff in there”. He said, “How can I not vote for the Patriot Act under these circumstances. How could I go home and explain it”. I said, “Well, that’s what your job is. But almost every bill in Congress has a title to it which is exactly opposite of what it does. This is a perfect example because I think if it had been properly named, it would have been called ‘Repeal the Fourth Amendment Act’. And most likely they would have had a difficult time passing that piece of legislation. But how in the world can attacking your freedoms, initiating these attacks on our privacy, searches without search warrants all the way down, which more or less established what we have to go through at airports, why we are suspected terrorist without probable cause and we’re treated that way, why if you’re involved in the monetary issue you might well be charged as a terrorist and the term is just thrown around. And how in the world will passing the Patriot Act make us safer without an understanding of what’s going on in the world?

Ron Paul: And it’s an attack on our personal liberties. So it is liberty that is the cause, that is why we continue to campaign for liberty, that’s why this organization is so important. It’s to change people’s minds and to change the political situation in Washington. I am astounded at what’s happened since the last campaign and the last election period, with the Campaign for Liberty going around the country, I meet people that ran for office. I don’t think we’ve counted them all; the different offices they won and state legislatures around the country, even here in Florida some have run and won. But they’re numerous. That is where the encouragement comes from, because the ideas are alive and well. Yes, we have terrible problems; yes, they’ve undermined our liberties. But we still have some left, we’re still in this room, we still have the opportunity to elect different people in Washington. And right now we have a tremendous opportunity because the evidence is crystal clear that the views of the last century, almost, at least 70 years or 80 years on foreign policy and monetary policy; the evidence is in, they have failed, and our views are now appropriate to be put in place.

And we must remember that armies can’t stop an idea whose time has come, and I believe our ideas, our time has come. The country is waking up due to all the evidence that we see, the political landscape that’s changing. They’re desperately struggling for that one single candidate that will capture all of America, that can represent the status quo. But it doesn’t look like they’re finding one very easily, which opens up the door for us, I really believe that. But great strides have been made at the grassroots, the Tea Party Movement, and the changes going on. This has all been official, and there’s a good reason why the Tea Party Movement arose. And it isn’t so much that we know who’s in the Tea Party and exactly what the beliefs are, there’s no one Tea Party Movement. I think I remember when I really got started back in 2007 though. But there was a need and there was a necessity for a group of people to stand up and tell it the way it is and speak out against this two-party system that we have. We don’t have a two-party system, we have a single party system. Just think of how much doesn’t change, regardless of which party. Has medical care programs changed with Republicans versus Democrats, has monetary policy changed, has the entitlement system changed, does foreign policy change? No, they endorse the same ideas they’ve been taught by the same people. But what’s happening in the country now is this standing up and saying, “Yes, we can get their attention, but we don’t have the opportunity to do it in a third party”.

I am always annoyed by the fact that we know what one of the excuses has been for us to go overseas, which I just think it’s a real stretch of their imagination. We’re overseas to spread our goodness and spread democracy, at the point of a gun? So we’re going over killing a lot of people, a lot of our people are getting killed, and we’re spreading democracy in the world. At the same time, our democratic process – not democracy – but our democratic process where we can have different competing parties, is virtually impossible, it’s so difficult. I tried it once, I spent most of my money trying to get on ballots. And how many interviews you think I got, how many debates? It doesn’t happen. So this was the reason there was a need and there was a vacuum and something had to be done, and that’s when I think people finally got so incensed and they followed up with what was happening in 2007, and there’s been this spontaneous movement. Of course, I have to admit there have been a few that have come over to join and get some of the benefits from the Tea Party Movement as well, but nevertheless, I think it’s very, very healthy. But our job is to help define that movement, and how many people are upset, and I think that’s what Campaign for Liberty has been doing, and we will continue to do. Because we know and understand what liberty means and we know that it means personal liberty, we know it means a different foreign policy, and we know it means a different monetary policy, and certainly it means a different economic policy. We take the oath of office very seriously. But this is where the progress has been made.

And at the universities, young people, a lot of times represent any significant change, and if we had no young people, and the campuses were dead, and if they were totally uninterested in what we were doing, I would be very discouraged. And yet, today, this is the place where we get a lot of attention, this Young Americans for Liberty Organization is an outgrowth of the Campaign for Liberty and Jeff Frazee has done a magnificent job, and he’s literally getting hundreds and hundreds of organized individuals around on the campuses. I believe that’s very significant. And the people now have access to so much more information. I struggled when I decided in the 1950s, there was a lot I’m not getting and I don’t fully understand, I’m looking for information and I was trying to figure out the plain truth of these things, and it wasn’t that easy. I certainly didn’t learn it in college, but just the desire to find it motivated me to keep looking. There was no internet, you didn’t hear it on TV, you didn’t get it from the politicians, you don’t get it from the professors, so where do you get it from? You had to get it elsewhere, and it wasn’t books. And I give a lot of credit, back in those years, to how the Foundation for Economic Education helped me, because that was back in the day when there were so few people trying to keep it together. But that was part of a remnant; there’s always a remnant in society that holds things together, and they were part of the remnant. We still don’t know where and how big the remnant is, but I’ll tell you what, I get to meet a few in the remnant, and it’s a lot bigger than I ever dreamed it was.

So there were few of us and a few organizations, but now they have blossomed, they have blossomed and they have actually invaded the universities, the conventional universities, the professors that are getting in the colleges are associated with the Mises Institute and other free market organizations. This is magnificent what’s happening. And this, to me, makes the big difference. And then again the dissemination of information, whether it’s pure political information or educational information, it comes through the internet; it’s magnificent, it’s a real tool. So there’s reason to be very concerned, I am talking about and believe sincerely, although I do not claim to be a prognosticator and claim that I know when things would happen. I think good economic thinking tells you that pretty money, your dollar loses value and a few things like that. But I think things are going to be much worse next summer. I think the dollar is in a crisis, I think that’s what the price of gold is telling us. And it’s pervasive, it’s around the world, it’s the biggest bubble ever. All other countries use dollars in their reserves so this is not going to be one country, it’s not going to be just Greece, it’s not going to be just United States; everybody has to face up to this. And this is why people are rushing into something that they can fully trust, even putting money in the bank doesn’t help anymore, because they’re talking about charging you to put your money in the bank. There’s a lot of paper money and money floating around, beautiful nobody has any confidence. And this is a sign that something big is coming off. This week we saw that the consumer price index was going up at 0.5%, which means it’s going up 0.1%, it’s going up twice as fast as the government tells you. And housing sales this week are continuing once again to go down. But interestingly enough, if you look at the prices of houses in the last three months, they’ve been creeping up. That means that all things of real value, eventually there will be a need for those things and I think that is what’s happening. And we have this opportunity to use all these issues because the world is changing, the attitudes are changing, the understanding is changing, and there’s a lot of room to be very optimistic about our opportunities. But as bad as things are, it will not be easy. But we’re much better off than I say we were 5 or 10 years ago. Many of us were concerned at that time, but the evidence wasn’t in yet. But the evidence is in now, and they know that these problems are here so we’re being so much more better received because of this. But freedom is the answer, bringing people together. I feel so emphatically positive about the benefits of liberty and I don’t shy away ever from somebody saying, “Yes, I don’t care about people”, because it’s only the free society that cares about people, and that is what we have to convince people of.

And the magnificent thing about a free society is it’s not judgmental. Yes, on a personal basis you judge your own life, the life of your kids and your family, and you may be judgmental in the sense that you know what’s right and wrong. But it’s not judgmental in the sense that we want to write laws and decide how you should spend your money what you should eat and whether or not you can drink raw milk or not; we shouldn’t do that. But I’m convinced that it brings people together, I’m convinced that this philosophy brings together those who claim their progressives and those who consider themselves moderates and those who consider themselves conservatives and libertarians, because they all have bits and pieces of the freedom ideas and there’s no reason why we can’t work with people on those issues on which we agree. And this is a way that people feel less threatened, will come together, and I claim that I have worked as well with any other group in Washington as anybody, instead of being stereotyped and saying, “I’m a right wing conservative and I don’t talk to others on the progressive side”, because you get a lot of support from progressive who are sick and tired of Obama’s constant wars and his attack on civil liberties.

But in a history of freedom, it’s a rather young philosophy. Authoritarianism is how the world has lived for most of all history, and that is people wanting to run other people’s life and having dictators and czars and kings and all these authoritarians that want to tell us what to do. But we did have a good start, we didn’t have a perfect constitution, there were a lot of shortcomings there, but it was good compared to others, and it introduced us into an age where we recognized private properties, sound money, and contracts and self-reliance and not a welfare state and not a world empire. So we had this test and we became the most prosperous nation in the history of the world. We’re still very wealthy, but our problem is we destroyed our production, we got careless about understanding what liberty was all about, and now our prosperity is very, very fragile because we’ve destroyed the foundation and it’s not going to take a whole lot to push the whole house down because the foundation is gone. We need to restore the principles of liberty. When we became prosperous, people became infatuated with the materialism and thought, “Well, materialism is wonderful, it’s perpetual, and all we need is a government to help redistribute it”, and we forgot all about defending the principles that produced the wealth. But now we are being pushed, and if we think that we can do this by spending and deficits and printing money and not address the subject of repairing the foundation, we’re kidding ourselves. We have this opportunity, we have the people now coming with us, and right now the evidence is so clear that it is failing. Government is failing around the world; the only question is, what is it going other be replaced with? Are we going to go backwards and get dictatorial powers, or are we going to continue to process that we had a taste of and we have allowed to be slipping away from us? Can we restore that and get the people encouraged enough to say, “Let’s use the remaining freedoms we have to defend our liberties and promote this great country of ours once again”.

Thank you very much.

This legislation is very similar to HR 1207 from the 111th Congress and calls for a full and complete audit of the Federal Reserve by the Government Accountability Office, to be reported to Congress by the end of 2012.

HR 1207 had garnered broad bi-partisan support with 320 cosponsors in the 111th Congress, and was attached (but removed in conference) as an amendment to the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill.

In response to unprecedented public interest in the activities of the Federal Reserve, it hired a full time lobbyist for the first time in history during the 111th Congress.

“I was very pleased that so many of my colleagues were willing to stand up for transparency and accountability in government by cosponsoring HR 1207 in the last Congress. I am optimistic about our prospects for a full and complete audit in the 112th Congress,” stated Congressman Paul.

HR 459 has 56 co-sponsors at time of introduction:

Rep Alexander, Rodney [LA-5]
Rep Bachus, Spencer [AL-6]
Rep Bartlett, Roscoe G. [MD-6]
Rep Barton, Joe [TX-6]
Rep Bilirakis, Gus M. [FL-9]
Rep Blackburn, Marsha [TN-7]
Rep Broun, Paul C. [GA-10]
Rep Burgess, Michael C. [TX-26]
Rep Burton, Dan [IN-5]
Rep Calvert, Ken [CA-44]
Rep Campbell, John [CA-48]
Rep Chaffetz, Jason [UT-3]
Rep Coffman, Mike [CO-6]
Rep Flores, Bill [TX-17]
Rep Forbes, J. Randy [VA-4]
Rep Fortenberry, Jeff [NE-1]
Rep Gallegly, Elton [CA-24]
Rep Garrett, Scott [NJ-5]
Rep Gerlach, Jim [PA-6]
Rep Gohmert, Louie [TX-1]
Rep Graves, Tom [GA-9]
Rep Heller, Dean [NV-2]
Rep Huizenga, Bill [MI-2]
Rep Jones, Walter B., Jr. [NC-3]
Rep Kaptur, Marcy [OH-9]
Rep Kucinich, Dennis J. [OH-10]
Rep Lamborn, Doug [CO-5]
Rep Lance, Leonard [NJ-7]
Rep LaTourette, Steven C. [OH-14]
Rep LoBiondo, Frank A. [NJ-2]
Rep Marchant, Kenny [TX-24]
Rep McCaul, Michael T. [TX-10]
Rep McClintock, Tom [CA-4]
Rep McKeon, Howard P. “Buck” [CA-25]
Rep McKinley, David B. [WV-1]
Rep McMorris Rodgers, Cathy [WA-5]
Rep Miller, Gary G. [CA-42]
Rep Miller, Jeff [FL-1]
Rep Myrick, Sue Wilkins [NC-9]
Rep Petri, Thomas E. [WI-6]
Rep Posey, Bill [FL-15]
Rep Reed, Tom [NY-29]
Rep Rehberg, Denny [MT]
Rep Rohrabacher, Dana [CA-46]
Rep Ross, Dennis [FL-12]
Rep Schock, Aaron [IL-18]
Rep Simpson, Michael K. [ID-2]
Rep Smith, Adrian [NE-3]
Rep Smith, Lamar [TX-21]
Rep Thompson, Glenn [PA-5]
Rep Wittman, Robert J. [VA-1]
Rep Woodall, Rob [GA-7]
Rep Woolsey, Lynn C. [CA-6]
Rep Young, C.W. Bill [FL-10]
Rep Young, Don [AK]

Senator Rand Paul introduced the same bill as S. 202 in the Senate, with Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) as cosponsors.

The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2011 would open up the Fed’s funding facilities, such as the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, Term Securities Lending Facility, and Term Asset-Backed Securities Lending Facility to Congressional oversight and audit by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office. Additionally, audits would include discount window operations, open market operations, and agreements with foreign central banks such as ongoing dollar swap operations with European central banks.

Public polling conducted by Rasmussen Reports in December 2010 indicated that 74 percent of the American People demand transparency at the Fed and support a full audit as called for in the Audit the Fed legislation. In 2009 and 2010, Campaign for Liberty generated over 2.5 million grassroots contacts to federal lawmakers in support of Audit the Fed.

“The Federal Reserve and its loose money, easy credit policies are the culprit for so many of the dire economic problems we face. Americans continue to demand transparency at the Federal Reserve, and Campaign for Liberty is proud to lead the fight to make this legislation the Law of the Land,” said Campaign for Liberty President John Tate. “All across the country, grassroots citizens are uniting behind Ron and Rand Paul and will demand this audit, this year.”

Date: 08/13/2010

Liberty minded activists will meet in Orlando, FL Aug 13th – 15th to network, learn, and build as our grassroots Revolution to reclaim our Republic and restore our Constitution continues. Network with fellow liberty-minded tea party activists, learn about history and current events from a freedom perspective you won’t hear from the mainstream media, and prepare to take back our country with top-notch training from nationally known experts.

The Liberty Summit 2010 Regional Conference will:

• Strengthen your understanding of history and foundational principles necessary to maintain liberty
• Teach you how to persuasively communicate our movement’s mission and message
• Train you in how to recruit, equip, and mobilize an army of informed citizens and build the organizational structure necessary to win
• Help you master the political process on the local, state, and national level

Our confirmed speakers will include:

• Congressman Ron Paul, Honorary Chairman of Campaign for Liberty, best-selling author of “The Revolution: A Manifesto” & “End the Fed”.
• Tom Woods, best-selling author of “Meltdown” & “Nullification”, historian, and Senior Fellow at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute.
• Tom DiLorenzo, best-selling author of “How Capitalism Saved America”.
• Kevin Gutzman, best-selling author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution”
• Senator Carey Baker, Florida Senator, owner of the oldest gun store in America, and Senate sponsor of the Florida Freedom Bills.
• Representative Scott Plakon, Florida Representative, CEO, publisher, and House sponsor of the Florida Freedom Bills.
• Tom Mullen, author of “A Return to Common Sense”
• Peter Gemma, freelance writer and fundraiser.
• Kirk Shelley, C4L Senior Consultant and “Your Political Guru”.
• Other Special Guests TBA

Register today for only $49! The $49 fee includes all training sessions. The Friday night Liberty Celebration at 7:00 PM will be free and open to the public.

More information…

Transcript

Ron Paul: Thank you. Congratulations. Of course. Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s very nice to be here. I wasn’t sure I was going to get here a little while ago. I don’t know if they told you, but the plane was a little late. We were supposed to land here at about 6:30 or so, but we got on the airplane alright; that’s not too unusual. Getting through security, that’s the toughest part. I did that again, like I do it twice a week. But we got through that and we got on the plane alright, and it looked like we were going to go, and then the announcement came, they said, “Well, we got some bad news. We’re overweight.” What are we going to do? Why don’t you take some gasoline off or something? They said, “No, we have to get 9 people to leave the airplane. We need some volunteers” and they’re going to give 400 bucks so my hand went up right away. 400 bucks, I mean, just to get off the airplane. But no, I thought better of it and I thought I had an obligation and I wasn’t going to cave in for 400 bucks. But then they said, “Nobody volunteers, so we’re going to pick 9 people and they’re going to have to go”. I wondered how they’re going to do that. They said they’re just going to pick them. And lo and behold, my name comes up and I said, “What’s going on here?” So I had to pay 400 dollars to get somebody else to bribe them, and that guy got 800 dollars. That’s not exactly true, but…

Anyway, we sat for an hour or so and we made it in here. It’s so nice to see everybody, and it’s so good to understand things are happening in the Republican Party out here. That’s pretty neat. I’m so glad there is an influence. But the freedom movement is alive and well, and Campaign for Liberty is alive and well and doing quite well around the country. So to me it’s very exciting.

And I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but I have a personal interest in and election coming up soon down in Kentucky. I can’t talk about that, because I wouldn’t be very objective about that race down there. But if you try to be objective, it’s pretty interesting and it’s pretty good and it’s going to have a lot of significance no matter what they try to say about it. Rand’s doing very well. In the last poll – which was not his poll, it was an independent poll – he was up 16 points. So it is pretty amazing. But most individuals don’t believe it can be that good and it will be a lot closer, but we have 5 children, that means Rand has 4 siblings and we’ll be there on Tuesday. My wife will be going up with us there. So we’re hoping that it’s going to be an exciting evening and there will be a celebration and another message will be sent across this country that we’re ready for some changes.

I think one of the most remarkable things going on today is that the speeches are different, the promises are different. Now it’s almost a political negative to say, “I know somebody in Washington. If I can get elected, I’m going to make sure I can take care of the district and get your stuff and get all the goodies and get your earmarks.” It’s almost the opposite now; you don’t even want to be associated with Washington DC or bragging that they know how the system works.

And I think something has happened here in the last year or 2, because over the years as most of you have known, I’ve taken a rather firm stand about not voting for things that aren’t properly authorized in the Constitution. Even though that was not mainstream politics in Washington, I think subtly many of them respected those views, because so often other members would come up to me and say, “You know, this is amazing that you can do this and get re-elected, how do you do that?” But now it’s mainstream; we’re getting to be mainstream. It’s better now not to promise, to promise to go up and cut spending and cut taxes and cut regulations. No more deficits. This is what’s become popular. So there is every reason for us to be optimistic about what’s happening. Not what’s happening in Washington yet, but optimistic about what’s happening outside of Washington in groups like this, because our numbers are growing; there is no doubt about it. And of course, I’ve said so many times, and continue to be enthusiastic about going to the campuses, because the young people are certainly interested in this.

Yesterday or the day before, I was walking out of my office to vote, and there was a group of teenagers out in the quarter of the Cannon building, numbering 20 or so. But several of them recognized me and one ring leader, who really knew me and was enthusiastic, came over and introduced himself and he looked so young. But I asked, “How old are you?” he said they’re 17, they’re juniors and seniors in high school, and they wanted to talk about the issues. I asked, “Well, how did you get interested?” He said, “Well, I read your book on End the Fed.” And they knew about the Federal Reserve and they knew what was going on and there is no way I would have had the vaguest knowledge about what was going on when I was a senior in high school. I was trying to get good grades and trying to win a track meet and swim and things like that. But I didn’t know anything about politics. But the young people – there’s always large number of them – are really responding favorably and we should be very excited about that.

I guess the issue that has surprised me the most over these last couple of years has been the issue of the Federal Reserve and how much attention we’ve gotten. It’s something that I’ve been motivated about for many, many years. It was that event in 1971 when the prediction by the Austrian economists back then predicted that the Bretton Woods agreement couldn’t last, it wouldn’t last, it would collapse. I remember reading Henry Hazard prior to that time, and he was a prominent journalist in 1944 when Bretton Woods was established. He said it wouldn’t work. And when it collapsed in 1971 it was sort of a confirmation of how bad things were.

But that was when I became fascinated and thought, “Oh I need to talk about that this, this is important stuff”. And so I started talking about it and then had a token race and did it politically thinking that was the only place I can get a couple of people to listen. And there were only a couple of people at the beginning for many, many years. But even over those many years, decades literally, it was not an issue. It’s not been an issue until just recently. And I think that several things have come together. Some people give the presidential campaign a little bit of credit for calling attention to this issue. That’s part of it, but there’s more to it than that.

One, I think it’s the subtle education going on in Austrian economics throughout the country in places like the Mises Institute. Teachers like Tom Woods and others out there are reaching people. So that has laid the groundwork for this. But then, on top of that, the economic collapse came, the financial crisis hit. It hit and although they will not recognize it in Washington, it was recognized by so many others that this was a predictable event. It annoys me to no end, because they have another commission to study how this came about; another Washington commission. They did that in the 1930s, it was called the Pecora commission. Some people call this the second Pecora commission. But they have Republicans and Democrats to have it balanced. But they don’t have it balanced because they’re all Keynesians or socialists on the commission. And everybody they bring before the commission to ask them questions, it’s all the same. They’re not calling and talking to the people who knew it was coming, predicted it and understood it.

But nevertheless, the information is getting out there and the people are waking up and they know there’s another option. And I think that is part of what’s going on in the Tea Party Movement and the various groups and obviously the Campaign for Liberty, because something has to give. And the people are recognizing this, on this financial burden, this spending. I mean how long can we do this? And, you know, it was not hard to figure out that we got into this crisis because the government spent too much money, they taxed too much, they borrowed too much, they regulated too much, and they printed too much money. So they finally admit, it comes down to our heads 2 years ago. People panicked, “Oh, we’re going to have a depression, we got to do something. This is drastic, let’s do emergency legislation” So what did they do? They increased taxes and they increased regulations and they increased spending, they increased borrowing and they tremendously increased printing the money. And that’s supposed to be the solution to the problem.

But it’s not going to work, I’ve been saying in all the interviews that it’s not over. The correction hasn’t occurred, it’s just delayed it. And now it’s being transferred internationally with the debt burdens of the sovereign nations of Europe. But my biggest concern has been that everybody depends on the United States and the dollar to bail out everybody. So yes, we’re involved in this bailout, obviously, with the IMF funds as well as our transfer of payments to other central banks and other governments. So we’re very much involved. But what happens when the world loses confidence in the dollar? Who’s going to bail out the dollar, and there’s nobody left? And it wasn’t that many years ago when the dollar was rather weak. In 1979 we actually went to the IMF to prop up our system and our dollar. But we pulled ourselves out of that nose dive with interest rates up to 21%. So there will be a major problem to deal with. And I think it’s getting awfully close.

Now, I talk about a monetary crisis being somewhat different than a financial crisis. When the financial structures of the banks get over-involved in too much debt, then they have to do something about that. But a currency crisis happens when people lose confidence in the currency. And most of us can remember and have read about how many times… you know, not too long ago the country of Zimbabwe had a little bit of inflation. And Mexico has had it a few times, and Germany’s had it. America’s had it in the revolutionary times, as well as having pretty bad inflation during the civil war. So it’s a well known event, but it’s really devastating. But the main reason why it’s so devastating is it wipes out the middle class. The people who work hard and try to save and have some wealth, and everything gets wiped out of their accounts rather quickly because it moves so fast.

Now up until now it’s been moving more in a sluggish manner. You know, we as a people, our Congress established the Federal Reserve in 1913 to give us a stable currency (that was the argument), and to be the lender of last resort. Now how are they going to give you a stable currency and be the lender of last resort at the same time? Well, at that time the dollar was 1/20th of an ounce of gold, that was the definition. $20 bought an ounce of gold. So they’ve done a tremendous job. Today it’s probably like $1250, so that’s almost a 99% devaluation that they’ve pulled off. And what happens now if it keeps going and it goes rapidly, it will be very chaotic. And a lot of people suffered from this already. In the last 10 years, if you just start in the year 2000, from that period of time until now there has been an 80% devaluation. In the early part of the 1970s when they had fixed exchange rates, they had 2 precise devaluations: one at 8% and one at 10%. It was 18%. And I remember those days, because that was the time it was declared that the Bretton Woods agreement couldn’t be upheld. But those were very big events and that ushered in rampant inflation in the later part of the 1970s.

So I think we are destined to do this to move ourselves into that category, but the government says – you hear it all the time from the liberal economists, “There’s no inflation, we can do what we want, you guys worry too much.” Oh yeah, there’s no inflation in the cost of government at all. There are no costs going up there. There is no inflation in the cost to get medical care. There is no inflation in the cost to get an education. It’s constantly going up, and yet we still haven’t seen the worst part yet.

This is a subject that is not going to go away. But how do we solve this and what do we do? Well, for us in this room, I think most of us know and understand what has to be done. It’s sort of now how do you accomplish it. And that’s where we’re very much involved. To me it involves a lot of education, continued education. I think education is probably the most important thing. And then there are some of us that like to take the education and understanding our free market economics and try to translate that into a politically popular movement, and get people to understand it in a practical way.

And I think that’s the job that Campaign for Liberty is both educational and also an organization involved in partisan politics. And I think that’s necessary. Nobody can say I’m not interested in politics, I’ve be doing this for a long time. But I still say that education is at the top of the ladder. Because prevailing attitudes and ideas make all the difference in the world. Because since the 1930s it didn’t matter whether you had Republicans or Democrats. Oh yeah, a little bit here and a little bit there, but did it really change the people’s attitude about Keynesian economics or the Federal Reserve or getting rid of the income tax? So I would say, this go around when we clean up this mess, let’s make it very, very clear what we don’t want anymore. Like we don’t want the Fed and we don’t want the IRS and we don’t want the federal government bearing down on us every single day.

So I think right now we live in very opportune times to get our message out, because of the conditions, the groundwork laid by the people in education, and the people being energized. I am convinced that people now are looking at what we’re talking about because they know this system is broken and they are looking for answers. And even those who are on the receiving end of this big government, they’re frightened too, because they know this can’t continue. And what we must do is not only convince all those who believe strongly in limiting government to its constitutional size, we also have to start nibbling away at those people totally dependent on government.

And sometimes it’s a lack of understanding, and sometimes they actually believe that they are entitled, that rights means entitlements. And just the government was supposed to give it to us, “Oh yeah, you mean the Constitution limits these functions?” – “No, the Constitution is a living, breathing document and therefore we’re allowed to do this.” And those individuals in Washington are really following their oath of office. We have to re-educate them along that line, and we have to this opportunity. But for me it also gives us an opportunity to take the whole picture and put it together, because we have to bring people together on these views on how to do it. How do we get back to a balanced budget? They say, “Oh yeah, we’re going to cut child healthcare, that will do it.” And that’s not a good political idea. Even though we shouldn’t have started all this government medical care and all in education, I am still convinced that if we ever want to build a coalition with others outside our group, I think what we have to do is cut spending overseas. It is so much easier to cut.

So we not only could save a couple of million or a couple billion or a couple hundred billion, we could probably save many, many hundreds of billions of dollars even up to the trillions because already in Iraq and Afghanistan we’ve spent over a trillion dollars. We spend a trillion dollars a year just managing our military empire around the world. And that’s coming to an end and if we have to have priorities, I think that would be the easiest and best. Besides, I am absolutely convinced if we change our foreign policy, we’re going to be a lot safer for it; we will not be in danger.

Randolph Bourne’s statement that “War is the health of the state” is such a true statement because when there is a war, there is a declared war, even if it’s not legally declared. “Oh yes, we’re at war on terrorism, war on drugs, war on this.” People get trapped in this and say, “Oh war, it’s an emergency. We have to be more willing to give up our freedoms”. And notoriously they have done it. The big problem with this so-called war going on now is there is no end to it. In the past they’ve undermined our liberties, whether it was the Civil War or World War 1 or World War 2, just think of what they did to Japanese Americans and concentration camps. At least they closed those down afterwards and they backed away from some of the worst things that they did in World War 1. But this war is going to go on forever unless we change our foreign policy. And you know, sometimes they accuse us of getting too close to people who believe in conspiracies. But my answer to that is, “Don’t believe in that conspiracy stuff unless it’s true.”

But what I really want to say about conspiracies is that they have a conspiracy, they have this conspiracy that they’ve been passing out ever since the last administration, that “they attack us because we’re free and wealthy.” That’s why they attack us. Now that’s a conspiratorial idea, and if we don’t change that, we can’t win this. Because I don’t believe for a second that’s the reason they come. Do they come because of our culture and because of Hollywood? Yeah, they probably resent it. There are probably a few of us in this room that might resent a few things that come out of Hollywood. But they didn’t go and bomb Hollywood. They went to the Pentagon and they go to CIA overseas and they kill the people they at least think are trying to take over their country and they see them as occupiers.

That information to me is so crucial and yet it’s tricky because people get accused, you know. When you hear me talk like this they say, “Oh he’s one of those ‘blame America first’ people”. You know, I’m not bashful in blaming our government for the same thing, but I’m not going to blame the American people for this problem. We also should be very concerned about what is done here at home. Not only have we had these wars, but we’ve had this attack on our civil liberties at home. I never believed there would be a day when it would become official policy – and that’s actually official policy made worse by Obama because Bush never announced it this way. I can understand why they might do this, but to announce it as policy disturbs me. And that is that if you are an American citizen, that doesn’t make you immune from assassination. You know, just because its trouble getting you into a court, someday we could assassinate an American citizen. “Well, because he’s a terrorist.” But how do we know he’s a terrorist? He’s a suspect. And we are on a slippery slope on that. I mean, we have secret prisons and we have lack of respect for Habeas Corpus.

And I was just reading something today which I thought was interesting. This John Walker Lynn was the American citizen who was captured right after 9/11 in Afghanistan. To me, he looked a little … I bet he was the last one to have heard about what happened on 9/11; that’s what I think about him. I think we all knew it before he did. But anyway, they arrested or they captured him. And you know what they did? They read him the Miranda rights. They brought him back here and they tried him in a civilian court and sent him to prison. So what’s this hysteria about protecting our rights? Yes, some of these people are monsters, they’re terrible. But so are some of these mobsters in our country that kill and shoot people.

I mean, what if you find somebody in a store, he’s on a video, and he shoots somebody. Of course, he deserves the full force of the law thrown at him. But we still take him to court. And I don’t like this idea because the definition of somebody who is un-American or supportive of the terrorists can get pretty sloppy at times.

And then we have the war on drugs and all the terrible things that go on there that they use to violate our civil liberties. And too often these events, like the war on drugs and others and even the things going on at the border, I think a lot of it is directed at us to know what we’re doing financially. I think it’s the IRS to make sure you haven’t sent $25 overseas and didn’t report it to the government. That’s what they’re worrying about. But, you know, we really do have a mess on our borders and it’s a complicated mess because we have the illegal aliens coming in and we have the drug dealers on the borders. It’s getting very violent. There is a lot of corruption on both sides of the border, and a lot of killing going on. And I think it’s going to get a lot worse and there is no easy solution for this, it’s not like just putting the army down there is going to solve the whole problem. Because as much as I support tightening up and watching what illegals do, I think it’s an economic problem. I think it’s related to economics because the welfare state encourages a lot of our people not to work and then the welfare state feeds on the illegals who come in and they do work. And then they bring their families and they get in our schools and they get on the programs and then we go into a recession and it really gets painful. And that annoys a lot of us, it annoys me big because we have to close down hospitals and school districts are going bankrupt. So this notion that the solution is amnesty and automatic citizenship for these people doesn’t make any sense at all to me.

So it’s hard to deal with the borders without dealing with the economy, and it’s hard to deal with it without dealing with the drug war, and it’s hard to deal with it without dealing with enforcing our laws. I don’t like this idea that we punish people who happen to associate with an illegal. There are a lot of people coming into this country and they’ve been here for 20 years and they’ve never left this country and they don’t even speak Spanish. I mean, to round up 12 million of them and send them back, I don’t know how that’s going to happen. But we should do something about the borders. Now the one thing that bothers me about the borders and what’s happening now is it is regulating us just as much as it’s failing to regulate those that are coming in. Where can you go now without a passport? You can’t go to Canada. I lived on both borders and we causally went to Canada. I was at school in Detroit and we just went to Canada whenever we felt like it. I don’t what we did, showed our driver’s license or something. Mexico was the same thing. No more, now we carry our passports and there are already strict currency controls on how much money we can take or send out of the country and when this currency crisis gets worse, then the governments really crack down because people have a tendency to want to expatriate and go out.

You know, one time I was told that the line that you draw between a free society and a totalitarian society is can you leave your country with your money. And when you can’t do that, you don’t live in a free society anymore. And I don’t think it’s very easy, they don’t want you to do that. Now I have never been tempted to do that. I think, though, that everybody has to have the right to do that because if you don’t have the right to do that, that’s what we ought to be thinking about doing it.

And right now we’re tightening borders up, but I think in the wrong way as much as anything. But we have a lot on our plate, a lot of things that we have to do. But our opportunities are obviously very, very good. Our philosophy can answer the questions, very simply, even with our imperfect Constitution, because I never consider it a perfect document. But it’s been around a bit and it’s probably one of the best ever, if that not the very best written. But I do know one thing, that if we had enough people in Washington who would take that oath of office seriously and follow it, this country would be improved a lot and in a short period of time.

The other thing about the philosophy of liberty is that – I’ve said this many times too – and that is, it’s appealing. If we can present this the right way, it is appealing to more than just us in this room. It appeals to people who considered themselves as one time just extreme conservatives or even liberals believing in civil liberties. Honest liberals who believe in limited government in a personal way or maybe will share our views on foreign policy, we can bring people together. I am absolutely convinced that freedom does bring people together. It is the way you bring diverse groups together, by saying, “Yes, your life is your own. You can do with it what you want, and the government shouldn’t be telling you what you do with it. The restrictions are you just can’t hurt people. But in addition to that, you ought to have the right to do whatever with what you earn. Whatever you earn is your right. So you should have economic liberty and personal liberty and they should be one and the same.”

It’s taken many centuries for the principles of liberty to be developed. I believe with our revolution, the industrial revolution we saw the real benefits come out, the tremendous increase in wealth and production and standard of living going up. But, you know, it’s been around for a long time. In the Old Testament the Israelites talked about not having a king and having too strong a king and then, of course, there was a Roman Republic that was destroyed by the Roman Empire. They talked about personal liberties and the importance of citizenship. And, of course, there was a struggle in 1215 by the barons to insist that King John sign the Magna Carta and recognize that every individual has the right to be told why the king and why the government is holding him. This seems to be slipping away. And when I see some of these things happening in this very country, this is a dangerous, dangerous thing.

Another great danger I think we face – and this was established in the last administration and carried out in the current administration – and that is that we now, as a people, endorse preventive war. That’s the same as saying we endorse aggression because we’re the good guys and we’ll go and push ourselves on them. We have to reject that notion of preventive war.

So so much of what we talk about is not brand new. It’s been around for many, many years. But the real experiment of the last couple hundred years has shown what it can achieve; and that is the material prosperity. What I believe has happened is that the material prosperity of our maximum freedom that we had enjoyed for so long, taught the American people to get really lazy about thinking about where the wealth came from. And we drifted over to thinking the government created the wealth, and the government takes care of us, and it was more important to pay for lobbyists than to pay for R&D research by our corporations. And there’s been so much wealth and there still is a lot of wealth that it lasted a lot longer than it maybe deserved. The truth and the belief in freedom has practically vanished for so many people in Washington. But now we’re starting to see the consequence of not having an understanding of liberty, not understanding what the rule of law is all about, not understanding about restraining the government. The Constitution was there to restrain the government, never to restrain the people.

So we now face this crisis, this crisis and the understanding of liberty. And the making sure that in the maximum number of people the prevailing attitude becomes that of liberty. Now you might say, “Well, this is a small group. We have several hundred here. But we need millions and millions.” The truth is you really don’t. You just need a lot of energetic people determined to win and they have to be in places of leadership. They can be in teaching, and they can be in journalism, and they can even get into the Republican Party and be leaders, too.

People will respond. Most people will never be in that leadership position and they will go along. But they need to be convinced it’s in their best interest. That’s the only thing. For too long now, since the Depression, people have been convinced that it’s in their best interest to go along with big government and Keynesian economics and all this. But it’s ending. It’s all over. And we’re going to see this crisis get worse and we’re going to see a dollar crisis and when it hits the dollar, it’s going to be a worldwide event. And then it will be one big issue: Are we going to live in a free society, or are we going to allow the authoritarians to take over? Are we going to allow them to expand their authority over us as individuals? Allow them to take over more of the economy and actually pretend that they can police the world? That will be the challenge. But I am more optimistic than ever, since I’ve been doing this for quite a few years, that we can win this. We can win this if we continue to build the momentum.

I actually was very shocked at the attention we got in the presidential campaign. I didn’t know all of you were out there and you were interested. I didn’t know the young people would respond. But even then I became a little bit pessimistic after it was over. I thought, “Well, I’ll just go back to being a congressman.” And yet the momentum with Campaign for Liberty, what John has done with the Campaign for Liberty and all of you who have been involved and all the staff and just what’s happening in the country in the enthusiasm I see with these young people… it’s there, and it’s growing.

Now there is one thing that I am very, very pleased with, that there is so much positive conviction with the young people and even though, like tonight I talk about all the things I think are wrong, and so many of them say, “You’re the only one that gives me hope.” And I think this is great. It’s not me, it’s the message. The message of freedom is hopeful. And I tried to figure this out; why is it that we can talk about these terrible things happening to us, the dollar’s going bust and the country is broke and we’re at war and all these things. You know, it’s sort of like an addict. The addict never is cured till he admits there is a problem. And I think that’s what we’re getting the country to do. We’re getting them to admit that this is a serious problem, we’ve recognized it, we can’t continue what we’ve been doing. And what we should be doing, we know the answer. And that is believing in ourselves, believing in what freedom can do for us, and go back to the American tradition and defend our rule of law and our constitution.

I thank you very much.

Ron Paul returns to Iowa tonight to kick off the Campaign for Liberty’s Iowa Regional Conference and Forum on the Future of Conservatism in America!

John Tate provides the details:

At 7:00 pm tonight, Campaign for Liberty will kick off its Iowa Regional Conference and Forum on the Future of Conservatism in America with a free and open to the public Freedom Celebration!

Congressman Ron Paul and WHO’s Jan Mickelson will be our featured speakers.

The Freedom Celebration will take place at the Embassy Suites on the River in downtown Des Moines. Click here for more information on the hotel.

And don’t forget that our Saturday Forum on the Future of Conservatism is free and open to the public as well! This is your chance to hear Tom Woods, Jan Mickelson, Bob Murphy, Bruce Fein, Doug Bandow, Dan McCarthy, C4L Senior Consultant Kirk Shelley, and Virginia C4L Executive Director Donna Holt for free!

Although online registration for our other Conference activities is closed, you can still register at the door for the Freedom Celebration After Party with Ron Paul, Tom Woods, and Bob Murphy (starting at 9pm tonight), our grassroots training sessions on Saturday and Sunday mornings (for only $59 – including lunch on Saturday with special guest Mark Mix), and our Saturday evening private reception with our Forum speakers.

For more information on the Iowa Regional Conference, visit our Conference event page here.

I look forward to seeing you tonight in Des Moines as we kick off our Conference, take a stand for the principles that made this nation great, and continue organizing to reclaim our Republic and restore our Constitution!

Event: Virginia Liberty Forum
Location: The Waterford at Springfield – Springfield, VA
Date: 05/06/2010
Video by RONPAUL2012PRESIDENT. To view the full event, start here.

Transcript

Ron Paul: Like I always say, I never get applause on the House floor, so I’m glad to be here. It’s great to be with you tonight. As you all know, this Campaign for Liberty has been doing quite well and I appreciate all the work and effort that you’ve all been involved in because it has made a difference. I think you heard a little bit about what’s been going on with the Audit the Fed bill. On the very positive side, the impact of the Campaign for Liberty on the Audit the Fed bill has been magnificent. I just never believed we could get this far off.

But I’ve never been over-confident that tomorrow we’re going to audit the Fed and we’re going to find out all the things that they’ve been doing. They have still much to hide and they have so much power. It involves the presidency, the leadership of the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and so I’m not on the verge of thinking that we’re going to learn everything we need to learn. But I’ll tell you what. There are a lot more Americans that know about the Federal Reserve today than they did two years ago.

I work on the assumption that probably they’re going to self-destruct. They’ll destroy the system before we have our chance to do any revamping of the system and get back to sound economic and sound monetary policy. You know, it isn’t all that complicated. All we need is is enough people, the majority of over there in Congress to believe in the Constitution, then we would have some money. I think what will happen to our country will be something like the Soviet system. It collapsed, we didn’t have to fight the Soviets. We ended up with winning the Cold War not so much because we won anything as much as they failed. But our system is not a whole lot healthier. Economically, very unsound. Keynesian economics has failed, I think that is the whole message. You know, I was so amazed during the presidential campaign, to go to some of the campuses to bring up the words Austrian economics or Mises and actually get an applause. That to me was amazing.

I just wonder if any other candidate ever went to a college campus and said “Yay Keynes!” and get some kind of rally. “Karl Marx!” But no, I think it’s been great progress. But it didn’t just come. A lot of people say “Oh, it came with your campaign. You did this and that.” The campaign had something to do with bringing this all to light, but this has been going on for a long time. You’re all political activists now and you’re disseminating this message and that’s very important, but it took a lot of people in the last 50 years to keep these ideas alive. These aren’t brand new ideas, we have to reform the ideas of liberty and make progress all the time. These aren’t brand new. They’ve been trying to understand the principles of liberty since the time of Cicero. It’s a lot of baby steps and backward steps and of course we’ve had a giant step towards liberty, probably the biggest in our history with our revolution and the Constitution.

But you know, after about a hundred years, it sort of ended in the last hundred years, I think back to the 1900s, last hundred years, we have been slipping away from the defensive principles of liberty and individual freedom and I know tonight we just talked a little about medical care, but if we have an understanding about freedom and the marketplace and our Constitution, we would certainly be operating on this over the Hill with the assumption that everybody has a right to medical care.

We don’t have a right to anything that is material. We have a right to our life and our liberty and we have a right to pursue medical care, but we don’t have a right to demand that somebody else provide us certain care.

What we have witnessed during the last couple of years is the results of the last 40, 50 years of the people who held these ideas together. But even when I started studying there was just a few think tanks and a few individuals that really did the hard work. Our universities are still infiltrated with the teachers who teach bad economic policy. But not like it used to be. There are a lot more professors now and teachers, and now we have the Internet and the textbooks and Amazon selling books. It’s just fantastic what is happening. So I think the Campaign for Liberty has just come upon us at the right time because the need is so great.

Yes, there’s been the quiet teaching going on for decades, and there’s been all this explosion of information, spreading information with the Internet, but at the same time the failure of our system is readily apparent. It’s readily apparent whether it’s the medical care system… That’s been a failure and they’ll try and tell you “Yeah, it’s a failure of the marketplace, that’s why we need socialized medicine. That’s why we need single party payer.” But what has failed in medicine has been managed care. The managed care started by the Republicans in the early 1970s where they changed the Orissa law, the tax code, where they introduced the mandates on HMOs and BPOs and we’ve had now the managed care corporations involved. We’ve had organized medicine. The AMA hasn’t defended free market medicine, and we’ve had drug companies involved and insurance companies and trial lawyers all interfering and having control over medical care.

But that system has failed. It is very interesting that medical care has brought this to life. The current system that we have, the recognition that there’s a problem and then a great debate going on, and for the moment, we’ve lost the debate because we’ve taken another step. We want to have a victory by them not getting total socialized medicine and single party payer. So there’s been just a holding action there and they backed off a little bit.

The argument is there is failure, they blame the market and we need more government. They did that in the 1930s. They blamed the free markets and the gold standard for the Depression and never regulations and the Federal Reserve that deserve the blame. No, they went and made that decision, so since then they have systematically kept undermining the free market system and came up with all the regulations. The Federal Reserve can make mistakes and Congress can make mistakes and it won’t work so well, “we’ll just have more regulations”.

That’s what we’re talking about over on the Hill now. They’re just pouring on regulation, all this financial reform legislation going on and just more regulation. More on medical care or government, more spending, but it’s coming to an end. It just won’t happen because we got into our mess, no matter what, whether it’s education or medicine or whatever, we got into this mess because there’s too much government, too much spending, too much borrowing, too much debt, too many regulations, too much printing press money, and they believe that the solution for this is spend more money, run up higher deficits, regulate the people, print more money, more regulations. It won’t work.

The goal ought to be exactly what the goals have been set for the Campaign of Liberty, and that is to get enough people in the right places to intellectually influence the country and the taxpayers as well as to influence the politicians who are writing the laws. And this is where we’re making a lot of progress. If we did it systematically, we can have a pretty smooth transition. We won’t have to close anything down, I don’t even argue that you should close the Federal Reserve down tomorrow. I’d let them self-destruct.

What I would do is let you have the choice. If you want to use constitutional money, something that you can get in trouble and say “I’m only holding this gold and silver, it’s legal tender.” Yeah, you can go to jail, they can confiscate your gold and silver if you do that and say that you’re going to have your contracts in that manner.

So there’s so much we can do in a transitional fashion but I’m not that optimistic. Everything we’re doing is very important and we’re gaining a lot, but ultimately, I think the system is going to quit working. And we had a taste of that two years ago when the financial system came unglued. That’s still ongoing and that is a big event. I think a bigger event is arriving today and that is the currency crisis that’s coming.

Today, I mentioned this already to some that the markets are very shaky and the stocks are going down and ordinarily everything that has happened today usually says “Well, go to the dollar and the dollar will rescue, and even sell your gold and whatnot.” It’s not happening anymore. In the last week, something has shifted. What is happening is that people are still going to the dollar, but there is a limit. The dollar is next to the gold. The people gravitate to their most important liquid asset, and right now the dollar still works as a liquid asset. So that the dollar and treasury bills is still a haven.

But next to it is gold, and so far people have gone to gold because it’s a commodity. But today and this week, it’s been noticed that people are going to gold because it’s a currency. This was first noticed in November of last year when the IMF – and their usual notion is that gold is not money, let’s get rid of our gold, besides that will keep the price of gold down, this will make those gold-bugs suffer, so they dump 200 tons of gold on the market. Guess what, one central bank – a country that we think is poor – like India, they brought the whole lot of gold in one shot.

So significant events are occurring and the other thing we must remember is that economic events, especially when they’re associated with currencies, move rapidly. Just like today, for a while the stock market was down by almost a thousand points, gold was soaring and everybody was buying dollars. And here just a week or two ago, they were looking at, “new heights in the stock market. The recovery is here and every statistic looks great”.

And now there’s a different attitude which makes the work that we’re doing even more important because the crisis will be on going and a currency crisis is worse than a financial crisis. And we have to lead the charge of what we’re going to replace it with. We’re not going to let them pin the blame on too much freedom. And that is what they’ll charge; they’ll say “There is too much free, too much markets, not enough spending.” What we have to do is get the message across that our answers can be found not in anything other than “we need more freedom, not more government.”

You know, a lot of people ask about the Republican may well take over the Congress, or at least the House, this coming year. And the odds of them really cleaning up their act, I’m reluctant, I’m not going to write it off, but hopefully they can do a bit better than the group that’s running the show over there right now. But that’s not much of a challenge. So when people talk about cutting, especially on the Republican side, they tinker around and say, “We’ll cut this, cut this, we should have balanced budgets”; everything except welfare and warfare.

You know, they like to protect that. So nobody’s challenging it on principle, nobody gets up and says – maybe one or two of us will get up and say, “The federal government’s involvement in medical care is unconstitutional and people don’t have a right to demand that they be taken care of”. And right now what we have is that the consensus is, we just keep going too far too fast; you don’t challenge the welfare state.

I remember one time many years ago, there was a bill on the floor which we challenged; I think it was about the Export-Import Bank. And another member of Congress had an amendment up that was going to cut the Export-Import Bank, because it was so called ‘welfare for the rich’; it was supporting big business. So they were going to cut it by 10% or 20%. And it didn’t pass. But I had an amendment immediately afterwards, which should have come first – it went in the other direction – but anyway, my amendment right afterwards was to abolish the Export/Import Bank and to just cut the whole thing out of the budget. And the member who had the previous vote voted against me. I said, “Why are you voting against me, I thought you didn’t like this corporate welfare?” And he had a reputation for being a champion against corporate welfare. I asked, “Why are you voting against my amendment?” He said, “Ron, you always just go too far.” Well, we need to go just too far when it comes to …

So our job is to be prepared because it will come to an end and I think that’s where we should be optimistic. The Soviet System came to an end. But I saw some statistics the other day that showed – and this also is a reason I worry a little bit about our CIA being too involved in everything that they do. But it turns out the all the officials in the Russian government right now, all the important figures, 70% of them used to belong to the KGB. So, you know, that’s what they have to contend with. Of course, we also have to contend with our CIA. We worry about not auditing the Fed, believe me, we don’t audit the CIA either. I doubt whether the president even knows what the CIA does. Sometimes they get very much involved.

But our traditions are better: private property and markets, sound money, constitutional laws and all. And if and when we have economic chaos, we see in Greece the consequences that people want their stuff, they want their checks. They say, “No, don’t cut mine. We’re going to burn down the city”. There are a lot of people in this country that don’t agree with us. They think it’s owed to them, they think they do have a right to your life and to your property, they do have a right to be taken care of. And when we’re flat out broke, which we are, there’s going to be a lot of problems going on.

Our government now admits that our deficit in this particular year will be about $1.5 trillion, which is horrible. But if you take all the additional entitlement altercations that we’ve added on, the current deficit this year would be between $4 and $5 trillion. It’s unsustainable. It’s crazy to think that you can have an economic system where productive jobs go overseas and we depend on consumerism by just borrowing money for ever and printing what we need and think it’s going to work.

Right now, the world still trusts our dollar and they trust us and we’re still a wealthy country. But if it works, it will defy all laws of economics and it would mean that for us, as Americans, if they continue to trust the dollars, then really none of you have to work anymore. Because all we have to do is print the money, the world will take our dollars. But that will end, and that’s what the challenge will be, and that’s why our work is so important.

I think that the think tanks that have taught and are teaching Austrian economics and sound policies – and actually I think it’s very important we have a different foreign policy as well. This is available to us, and we have to be in a position of influence where we can influence the majority of the people in the Congress to do the right thing. Because this is unsustainable and this is where I think we are making progress.

I was first amazed and impressed with the interest that we got in the presidential campaign; it was very encouraging to me to know that people did care about this. And Campaign for Liberty followed through, and I was surprised by not only what happened in the campaign, but also what happened afterwards. Because, in a way, I thought I need to try to keep this going because we have a pretty good organization and let’s have something official, and that’s what came out of that: the Campaign for Liberty. But this, to me, is even more amazing on what’s happening.

I talk to a lot of people, a lot of young people come to the office and I asked them how did they get interested. And lot of high school kids and college kids coming in, and they bring their parents and they got their parents interested in it. But lately, I am meeting a lot of people who have, since the campaign – time goes so quickly, it’s almost been two years since that campaign. So a lot of people still are getting our message; the message that you’re spreading, what Campaign for Liberty is doing. Some of the old videos still exists. And they’ll come in and say, “Oh no, I didn’t pay any attention during the campaign, I just got something recent, came across a book or something like that.”

So the numbers are still growing, we have no idea. I keep thinking of it being like the remnant, we can’t count the remnant, we don’t know where we are. And I thought, through the campaign, it was just wonderful because it seems like people came out of the woodworks. Not only did we get new converts, we had a lot of people who had been sitting around for years thinking they were the only ones that ever thought this way. So the rest of us… and I think our numbers are growing. I think John Tate is doing a great job with Campaign for Liberty. And if we continue to do our job, there is no reason not to be optimistic. Because I think there is no doubt that ideas do have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences. I would like to think that we have good ideas.

One of the problems that I think we face in getting the true changes that we need is if you look at these spontaneous movements, which I consider very healthy, like the Tea Party Movement, it’s that there are a lot of views in the Tea Party Movement that aren’t exactly the views that we promote in the Campaign for Liberty. Because we’re very strict constitutionalists and that tells us about economic policy, it tells us about monetary policy, and really it tells us something about foreign policy as well.

I do not believe that we can resolve our difficulties without a change in foreign policy. I would like to think we could do that rather calmly and deliberately without an economic crisis. But an economic crisis will force us to have a change in our foreign policy, because it is well known that countries that get too big and become empires that spread themselves too thinly around the world – and we certainly have done that; we’re too far, we’re in too many countries, and even if some people disagree with this and say, “Oh no, we have this need to be over there”, it doesn’t matter, we’re not going to be able to afford it. So it is, to me, so much easier to deal with necessary major cuts, and say, “Look, let’s not cut the medical care from the elderly” even if we argue that should have never started this unconstitutional system. It is not very wise politically to say, “We’re going to balance the budget over the elderly on medical care.” Why don’t we start balancing the budget by saying, “Let’s quit spending all this money overseas and let’s bring our troops home”.

There are a lot of troops overseas and it costs a lot of money, and the estimates are that it’s up to a trillion dollars that we spend maintaining our empire. And that would go a long way in helping. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t cut the rest; we should. But I just think that we can get a coalition in the country to endorse spending overseas. There would be stronger resistance by both the political and the special interests, the military/industrial complex, and others who benefit from this type of spending. But there are also some very sincere people that think that our enemy now is radical Islam, and the only reason they want to attack us is because we’re free and rich. I think about that, we’ve been told that for so many years. So they’re working really hard to make us less free and less rich. I don’t know if that’s a terrible strategy, as far as I’m concerned.

But that’s not the way… if we don’t change that, we can’t change our policy. That is not the reason people have such anger and willingness to commit suicide in order to make a point. “You know, if I kill myself, maybe that’ll make a point that we don’t like Americans because they have too much prosperity and they have too much religious toleration and too much freedom.” You know, this is the most absurd thing I’ve heard. So this whole attitude has to change, and one of the things we have to contend with, whether it’s a challenge on our civil liberties or foreign policy, is that if you oppose what the government tells us what they want to do, then we’re unpatriotic. And I would say that it’s time that we define what patriotism is.

I would say that patriotism is much closer to defending what the people want, protect the rights of the people, and individuals who are willing to stand up to our own government when our own government is doing the wrong thing.

Let me conclude by, once again, complementing you for participating and being active in Campaign for Liberty. Hope you remain that way and spread the message. And do this in an optimistic way, believing that what we do is very, very important. It’s not that we know exactly what the outcome will be. But we know what the outcome will be if we do nothing. That, for sure, is something we can know. So what we do is very important.

The other thing is we have to spend our time doing something. And obviously you’re involved because you at least get some sense of satisfaction that doing this is worthwhile. And I actually believe that associating with other individuals who have the same interests, will have some satisfaction. And a lot of people have met other people in the last couple of years that are interested in the freedom philosophy, getting politically active. And I think that is all very, very positive. So it is best for us to not say that tomorrow is doomsday, we can’t even think about it, what are you going to do, where are you going to go? Some people do leave the country. But I’ve chosen to stay here and fight to my best.

Because the goal is to preserve our freedoms and live as free people, bring people together. Our Constitution brings people together and if we want our right to our life and our liberty, we have to defend that and then we have to be precise in defending the rule of law. And in that case, instead of appealing to others in minority groups and saying, “Well, why don’t we just compromise and say that we can pass out all the welfare here, welfare here, bring in minorities to be part of our movement.” I am absolutely confident that that’s the wrong way. And the Republicans do this and are always saying, “Well, we’ll be like many Democrats and we’re going to try to mimic what Democrats do.” I think this message is a message that is powerful enough to bring all people together and that we shouldn’t be bashful about it, and hopefully, especially, as it becomes much more apparent that the government is failing, they can’t provide handouts, that the most important thing is whether we belong to majority or minority or whatever. The best thing you can do is take our position and say the defense of liberty is the best thing we can do for ourselves.

Thank you very much.

The ad campaign will target ten states whose senators are key to passing S. 604.

Click on the graphic below to contribute to the effort and help turn up the heat on Congress to Audit the Fed!

Here is a breakdown to give you an idea of how many ad buys your donation can help achieve:

$18.71 ~ 9,000 views on Drudge Report.

$37.29 ~ 11,000 views on Rasmussen

$61.48 ~ 19,000 views on Human Events

$81.62 ~ (best value) 42,000 views on Drudge Report

$142.55 ~ 70,000 views on Fox News

$237.36 ~ 85,000 views on Rasmussen

Click here to contribute.