Transcript

Alan Colmes: I’m Alan Colmes, and I’m always delighted to have with us on the program Congressman Ron Paul. Dr. Paul is leaving Congress after this term, he served during the late 1970s and early 1980s and returned in 1997 to represent the 14th congressional district in Texas. In 1988 he was the Libertarian Party candidate for President, he’s also the author of several books, including The Challenge to Liberty, The Case for Gold, and The Republic. By the way, you’ve done some great cookbooks, too.

Ron Paul: Oh, yea, my wife did those and we kid a lot about that. I always ask, “Why do you want to do such a silly thing as a cookbook”, but then it turns out that she probably got more votes for me than I got for myself.

Alan Colmes: Are you disappointed with the results of this election?

Ron Paul: Well, not in any way, it is probably exactly what I expected. I remember a couple of days before the election I was asked to predict the outcome, and I said the status quo is going to win. So, from my viewpoint, where I want less war and better protection of civil liberties and free markets, we still have the status quo, we still have the deficits, and they’re going to argue for a while longer. So, I guess I wouldn’t say it’s a disappointment. It’s disappointing, I guess, if we don’t ever shift gears, but it wasn’t unexpected.

Alan Colmes: You didn’t think it would make a difference if it if it was Obama or Romney?

Ron Paul: No, not really.

Alan Colmes: Did you vote for Garry Johnson?

Ron Paul: I’m not telling.

Alan Colmes: You haven’t answered that question yet.

Ron Paul: No, I haven’t answered it, and it’s a little bit late now.

Alan Colmes: What do we do about the fiscal cliff, can we avoid it? And I know you’ve said it’s already happened, but what’s the path that should now be taken by the Congress and by the President?

Ron Paul: I think if you’re in a deficit crisis and a debt problem, that you have to cut back on the spending. If you or I got into serious trouble, we would have to say that if we were ethical, we’d want to pay off our debt. And what we would do is we would get two jobs and we would cut back the spending and get out of the mess we’re in. Governments are different, they never do that, they always just keep borrowing more and printing more and making the problems that much worse. So I would get out of it by cutting back. But during the campaign, I emphasized some priorities, and my idea would be to get people to agree on the overseas spending, because our debt, in the last ten years, probably went up over 4 trillion dollars just from the militarism and the wars. And that’s going to be ongoing when you think of all the men who have come back and are suffering and all the seriously wounded; and I think we can save a lot of money. We don’t have to go immediately after the entitlement system or Child Healthcare. Of course, as a libertarian, I don’t think those are good ideas, I think they usually end up the way they are today: they cost too much and services get rationed and people are worse off. And this was the message that I gave and it was well received on the campuses. The young people are inheriting this mess, they know the wars are useless and they know the spending doesn’t make any sense, and they were very open to my views on the Federal Reserve System, too.

Alan Colmes: So it seems, in your view, perhaps, that if we went off the fiscal cliff, that wouldn’t be such a bad idea if no deal were made, right?

Ron Paul: Well, it’s going to be bad if it doesn’t wake us up. If it wakes us up, it’s good. It’s good that the Soviet Union went off the cliff, and they had to retrench, and they went back home and they quit invading these countries. So I think when it’s admitted in the world sense that the United States is broke and they can’t afford it and they’re tired of loaning us money, we’re going to have to come home because we won’t be able to afford it, because I think then they’ll say, “We better take care of the people here at home rather than fighting these senseless wars”. And I think this is one of the things that actually hurt Romney, he wanted to spend 2 trillion dollars more on the military. And I always think that the candidate that sounds like he’s better for peace, wins the election. And even though Obama actually softened his stand, yet his policies aren’t very peaceful.

Alan Colmes: Yes, he had the surge in Afghanistan and he went into Libya, that’s where I differ from the President, and that’s where your messages resonates so much with me in terms of troops. And you’ve talked so often about all these military bases we have based on the geo-politics of World War II around the world, and how many dollars could we save there

Ron Paul: Yes, and also, as soon as you get this war attitude and you end up with carelessness about civil liberties. Now we have a President that can kill and assassinate American citizens and put them in prison without a trial.

Alan Colmes: Anybody can be declared an ‘enemy combatant’. And how about the Defense Authorization Act where the homeland is declared a ‘battlefield’ or smt.

Ron Paul: Yes, and the military can arrest people. But this is why I see that there is too much bipartisanship, both parties endorse this system. If people are honest with themselves, the foreign policy didn’t change from Bush on to Obama, civil liberties were abused by bush, and they’re abused by Obama. About spending, the conservatives have a reputation for cutting, but they never cut. As a matter of fact, they took a position that deficits don’t matter, that was supply-siders. I think deficits do matter, even though in the short run people think they can keep borrowing. But governments eventually get into trouble, and if an individual gets into trouble, the banks quit giving them any more loans and they have to quit. But governments only quit when they ruin the money, and we’re very capable of doing that.

Alan Colmes: We’re talking with Dr. Ron Paul, you obviously still have a lot to say, and you’ve had a very consistent message for a long time now. Any second thoughts about leaving Congress at the end of this term?

Ron Paul: No, matter of fact I’m sort of looking forward to a little bit different schedule, I’ll get to do things that I have been doing and hopefully I can get back to college campuses. I think that’s where the action is, you can’t have revolutionary changes without young people endorsing it, and I believe they are very open to some of the many things that I’ve talked about.

Alan Colmes: But you obviously want to still be part of the political discussion, you want to be part of the dialogue that’s going on.

Ron Paul: Yea, at least on policy. I have a foundation, and the foundation is going to concentrate on foreign policy. I had dinner last night with Dennis Kucinich, and we’re good friends and we’ll be working together trying to show that somebody who’s calls himself a progressive and libertarians can get together (Republican and Democratic) and agree on some of these things.

Alan Colmes: Some of us talk about the Kucinich-Paul ticket 4 years ago, right?

Ron Paul: Yea, some people said that, but I think it’s not likely to happen. But we can still work together since we’ll both be out of Congress.

Alan Colmes: I’ve also been fortunate enough to have your son, Rand, on the program a few times. And is he now carrying the torch of your message going forward, and can you talk about him running as a candidate in 2016?

Ron Paul: Well, we haven’t talked about that, but I hope he basically sticks to the principles of Liberty, and I believe he will, but it has to be more than Ron Paul and Rand Paul. I mean, if this is significant, you have to have literally thousands of people involved and you have to have an intellectual change, and that’s what I’m interested in more than the politics. And that’s probably why I never became a chairman of a major committee, because I was sort of bored with that. But, hopefully, a few people got to thinking about monetary policy and foreign policy.

Alan Colmes: Let me ask you about the secession movement, and you’re belief is that it’s patriotic. In fact, and it’s called for in our founding documents that states that we certainly have the right to speak up. But are you surprised by the number of people who have signed petitions on the White House website since the election?

Ron Paul: Yes, a little bit, it just seemed like that popped out of nowhere, but many of us have believed that if people read the history honestly, it was sort of understood. But the numbers of people signing up sort of surprised me. But those people who tried to paint us as a little bit off the wall by saying , “Yes, the principle of secession should be there, we should be able to leave”, wonder what they would say about if Greece wanted to leave the European Union, do we say that the European Union ought to invade Greece and destroy them and kill them all because they’re leaving?

Alan Colmes: Do you have empathy or sympathy, at least, for those who want to secede?

Ron Paul: Oh yea, I think the principle is a very good principle. But one thing where I get hesitant about it – because I don’t take the position that Texas should secede, I’m not going to believe that – is because you have to look at what the states are doing. Maybe the state officials are going to abuse the system just like the federal government, so you have to know what you’re substituting it for. So, for me, it’s more important to understand free market principles and why we don’t need these wars and why we should have a government that protects civil liberties. And, you know, the states can be very abusive, too.

Alan Colmes: I only have a moment left, let me take a quick call here for Ron Paul. Rob in San Jose, go ahead quickly.

Rob: Hi, first of all I would just like to say that I so wish that Dr. Paul would have been the nominee. Actually I wish he would have been the third party nominee, which leads me to my question: what can we do to get a viable third party in this country, because the two parties are just …

Alan Colmes: Okay, we only have about 30 seconds left, but let’s try to get an answer, go ahead, Ron.

Ron Paul: Yes, that would be nice, and I’ve worked in that area and have tried to change the rules, but it’s not going to happen in the near future because the Republicans and the Democrats write all the rules. Guess who runs the debates, it’s the Republican and Democratic Parties. So it’s very biased, you can’t get on the ballots and you don’t get recognized by the media.

Alan Colmes: And that was Gary Johnson’s frustration, I’m sure.

Ron Paul: Yea, we go over and send kids overseas and get killed trying to promote democracy, and there are a lot of shortcomings here in this country, that’s my argument, we ought to clean up our mess.

Alan Colmes: Dr. Paul, I appreciate having you on, thank you so much for being with us tonight.

Transcript

Interviewer: Ron Paul is packing up his Washington condo this week, preparing to sell it and move back to Texas for good. Paul is retiring from Congress, and last week he gave a farewell address from the House floor, repeating the small-government sermon he first shouted in obscurity, and then injected into the national debate. With his time in Washington DC coming to a close, I sat down with Paul for a kind of ‘exit interview’.

Question: You’ve been here on-and-off since 1976, what would you say the three most damaging special interests are in Washington?

Ron Paul: You know, I see so many, and they’re all the same.

Interviewer: I know, but you much have some that really bother you.

Ron Paul: I think the military-industrial complex is very bad.

Interviewer: That was No.1.

Ron Paul: I don’t know if they should be in order.

Interviewer: Okay, don’t give them in order.

Ron Paul: Another one would be the banking system: how the Federal Reserve works and how it helps big banks. The interest that I would like to see, and that I worked on, was to try to get those people who just want their freedom to take care of themselves, and that’s the one that’s the least influential. Up here, it’s the people who want stuff and who get the benefits by just lobbying for those things that they want.

Interviewer: Another thing you mentioned in your farewell speech is your belief that we need to build coalitions, not necessarily reach compromises. And I wonder if you think your beliefs could be a 51% coalition in your lifetime, or in what timeframe?

Ron Paul: I think if I talk to a crowd of people, no matter which crowd, and say, “Do you believe in the free enterprise system, that people should be able to work and have their earning?” they say, “Yea, I believe that”. And if I asked, “Do you believe that your privacy should be protected, that the government shouldn’t be in your bedroom, that they shouldn’t be spying on you?” people would agree. And, most of the time when I asked, “Do you think we should be the policeman of the world?” they say, “No”. But when it comes to the particulars, they don’t stick with it, and they say, “Yes, but go too far, you want too much freedom”.

Interviewer: Well, this is another thing you touched on in that speech, you said this idea of liberty is popular, has been popular, so why doesn’t it win. It’s kind of a question that you didn’t fully answer in that speech, why do you think it doesn’t win?

Ron Paul: Not a lot of people talk about it, and I did try to explain it in the speech, in that, the concern about freedom was lost because freedom creates so much prosperity, that people get complacent. Then they become materialistic, and all they can deal with is redistribution and they find that with the government, you can make more money by getting a contract from the government than by being a genius and being productive. You know, when I first came here in 1976, I think I was under the impression that if you talk about welfare, you’re talking about those people who won’t work and get food stamps. But I have a very different opinion now. That exists, and it’s not healthy, but that’s minor compared to the food stamps the wealthy get. The wealthy get the contracts and the special deals, and that’s where I think the biggest trouble is.

Interviewer: That’s a way of speaking that most Republicans don’t usually engage in. Your son, the senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, said recently that the Republican Party is in danger of becoming a dinosaur.

Ron Paul: Yea, but I think the whole government and the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are all dinosaurs.

Interviewer: What’s the future of the Republican Party, though?

Ron Paul: Well, the same as the Democratic Party. The principles are dinosaurs. The parties are going to linger because they’re locked in by law. You know, we’re not allowed to compete, the laws are biased against us from competing. And if you go third-party, you can’t get in the debates and you can’t get on ballots.

Interviewer: You talk about the grip of that two-party system, did you seriously consider running as an independent for President in 2012?

Ron Paul: No.

Interviewer: You didn’t consider it because it’s not practical?

Ron Paul: Not practical, absolutely not practical. Because this would have been a good year to have an alternative, and you can’t get much of a showing either on the Libertarian side or the Green side.

Interviewer: So then, how do we get out of this system, what do us see as the answer to this, or do we just keep bumping along with the way things are? You can’t believe that, that would make you too sad.

Ron Paul: No, you go to the campuses, you rally the young people, and you stir up a whole generation of people. Ideas do have consequences, and that’s where the good news is, because the campuses are alive and well with these views and they know the system is bankrupt. And there is this illusion that you can spend endlessly and print endlessly, and there will always be credit out there. And so far so good, but credit can end quickly, the dollar can crash quickly, and a new system will have to be developed.

Interviewer: One last thing, where do you pride yourself?

Ron Paul: Nothing in particular, other than the fact that the people say, “One thing we can say about you is that you are very consistent”, and they say this in a very nice way.

Interviewer: And you’ve changed the discussion in this country, you must be proud of that.

Ron Paul: Yea, that would be nice, time will tell. But what I always get a charge out of is when they’re so nice and they say, “This is good, you’re very consistent”, they must say to themselves, “But I’m always inconsistent”, and that’s wonderful. And they run the show, I never ran anything, I was just bubbling along here when it came to legislation. So the people who, in a way, admit they’re inconsistent, get to run the Legislative System.

Interviewer: Thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it.

Ron Paul: You’re welcome.

“Remember, remember the 5th of November!”

2016, here we come!

RonPaul.com is the largest Ron Paul fansite on the Internet. We receive hundreds of emails each week from all over the world. These messages give us a good sense of the currents of opinion and sentiment prevailing among fellow Ron Paul supporters.

In recent weeks we increasingly gained the impression that many supporters were feeling a bit out of the loop. They want to know… “What is Ron Paul up to?” – “Is he still running for President?” – “Has he endorsed anyone?”

We don’t claim to have any specific inside information, but we do feel that Ron Paul supporters deserve to know what’s going on. That’s why we decided to analyze some of Ron Paul‘s recent speeches and interviews. Our findings are presented below.

First, a few quick facts:

Ron Paul is no longer actively running or campaigning for President.

He ended his campaign on August 28 with a one hour speech at the University of Florida Sun Dome.

Ron Paul: During the campaign, I got a lot of advice. Can you believe that, a lot of advice? Sometimes from strangers, sometimes from our enemies, sometimes from my family as well.

(“During the campaign” refers to the past and obviously implied that the campaign was now over.)

Ron Paul is an official write in candidate in several states, but that’s entirely due to his supporters’ efforts. Ron Paul did not discourage these efforts but he stated very clearly that he is not actively participating.

Ron Paul: I get a lot of questions on that, a lot of phone calls and emails, and people sometimes want me to sign something, to fully endorse it as a legal matter. But I haven’t signed anything, so I neither encourage it nor discourage it, because of the frustration, because in some places they won’t count the votes. But if people feel totally exasperated and still want the satisfaction of doing something, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it. But I don’t ever want to lead people to deception like, “Oh yea, if we have this write in campaign and all of a sudden major things will happen”. And that’s not true. If there is a write in campaign, those individuals that are doing it, the most important thing is to hold their feet to the fire and make them count them. But they don’t [count them]. Politics is not always a very clean business. That’s why it’s a lot easier to deal with philosophy than it is with politics. Politics is a tool but it’s not necessarily an end. The end is changing the philosophy. So if these campaigns one way or the other can get attention to serve the issues then I think it’s worthwhile.

Ron Paul has not endorsed anyone and he did not reveal who he will be voting for, or if he is going to be voting at all.

Ron Paul: I haven’t decided yet, at least I have decided not to announce it, so I’m going to sort of sit tight for a little bit longer. [...] I haven’t announced support for Romney, that means it’s very unlikely, and I don’t think anybody thinks I’m going to vote for Obama. It’s back to that frustration level of not seeing a dramatic choice in the way the system works.

Ron Paul said a few nice words about Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, but they do not amount to an endorsement.

Ron Paul: I think [Gary Johnson] is wonderful and I think he’s doing a good job, and people should look at him, and every individual should make up their own mind.

Ron Paul recently stated that Romney might be better on taxes and Obama might be better on foreign policy. But none of that can be construed as an endorsement.

Ron Paul: Would Romney be better for America than Obama? I think not necessarily, no. (Applause) Is that a gentle no? (Laughter) And the reason I say a little bit is, maybe in some areas he might be a little better, and maybe in other areas Obama might be a little bit better. The odds of us expanding war and getting in more trouble is worse with Romney. When it comes to maybe hitting you with a higher tax, you’re a little bit better off with Romney.

What Should Ron Paul Supporters Do Now?

With Ron Paul out of the race, what is the best course of action? Write in Ron Paul to express our principles? Support Gary Johnson to build the Libertarian party? Vote for Romney to get rid of Obama?

Why Romney Doesn’t Need the Liberty Movement

Mitt Romney’s political career is a testament to the fact that he would say and do anything to get elected. If he believed that gaining some of the votes of the 5+ million Ron Paul supporters in this country would have been worth the effort of reaching out to Ron Paul and the liberty movement, Romney would not have hesitated to have done so.

But hesitate he did. And not just that… he went on to viciously and repeatedly spit in the collective faces of Ron Paul and his supporters.

Does Romney believe that the morally bankrupt rallying cry “But we have to defeat Obama!” will be sufficient for the liberty movement to hold its nose and vote for Mitt?

Romney is an intelligent and calculating man, so he must know that this will work only with a small percentage of the movement.

This leaves only one possible conclusion:

Romney already knows that he is going to win, and that he can do so without the liberty movement’s support.

Rand Paul basically said the same thing just a couple of days ago:

Rand Paul: My prediction, and of course I could be wrong, but my prediction is that this is going to be 1980. This is going to be an election that was projected to be very close, we have all these battleground states, but in the end Romney is going to pull away and he’s going to win by a bigger percentage than anyone predicts, because I think the polling is modeling on 2008 and not really factoring in an enormous wave of Election 2010, and I think that we’re still headed in that same direction.

If Rand’s assessment is correct and if Romney has victory in the bag, then there is no reason for Ron Paul supporters to vote for Romney just to get Obama out of office.

2012 Is Lost – But the Future Belongs to Us

More than 20,000 Ron Paul supporters have already pledged to cast a principled vote for Ron Paul even in the face of electoral defeat. That’s commendable and wonderful. Others are supporting Gary Johnson to help strengthen the largest third party. A few will still be voting for Romney because they hate Obama or believe that Romney is the lesser of two evils. And some Ron Paul supporters are even strategically rooting for Obama, saying that the inevitable backlash against a second term would lay the groundwork for a Ron Paul comeback in 2016.

For those of us who have been hoping for a Ron Paul Independent run this year, or at least for clear directions on who we should vote for… well, none of that is forthcoming. Ron Paul simply says, “You can do what you want… but just do it.” And that’s what liberty is all about.

America Isn’t Ready for President Ron Paul… Yet.

It’s up to us to prepare America for Ron Paul‘s ideas so that we can prevail in 2016 and beyond. We have to wake up our friends, families, neighbors, and even random strangers, by educating them about liberty. We can still use the open and uncensored Internet to spread the message, but who knows for how long? This is a race against time, and every day counts. Will you too do your part?

Ron Paul: Although I see so much good progress, I see also danger on the horizon and it makes it even more crucial that we’re successful in what we’re trying to do. Fortunately, we still have a little bit time, but that time may run out quickly. It may run out in a month, it may run out in a year, it may run out in five years. So the more time we have to persuade more people to our side. I do not work on the assumption that all of a sudden we’re going to have a new Congress and we’re going to start repealing. I’ve never believed that for a minute. But, that doesn’t mean that things can’t change. Things are going to break down, and then there’s going to be opportunities, and the best thing that can probably happen is when government totally loses its credibility and their money doesn’t work and everybody goes on their own and people become independent and there will be de-facto nullification and we’ll just flat out ignore the Feds. And that is a possibility, but the real danger is they will cling to power, because that is all that they know, is clinging to the power and using that power to suppress the people.

Disclaimer: This is a non-binding poll by and for Ron Paul’s supporters to express our opinions and make our voices heard. Obviously, the poll’s outcome has no binding effect on Ron Paul’s eventual decision.

Transcript

Ron Paul: Thank you very much. It’s so nice to see you, I thought you would be all worn out from the campaign, but it’s great to see you here. The campaign continues, the campaigning for liberty will last a long time. Somebody that campaigns with me, and has for a long time, is my wife, Carol, sitting over here. But it is a delight to see an enthusiastic crowd, I’m delighted you’re here tonight, and this week, and are being involved in the Campaign for Liberty. Because, in many ways, that’s what all of us are doing and what I’ve done for a few years. And since we started this organization 4 or 5 years ago, I got to name it, and I thought, “Well, why don’t we call it something that I’ve been doing: ‘Campaign for Liberty’, that’s what we’ll call it, that is it. So that type of campaign goes on for a long time until we win, and since the world is imperfect, we’ll never have perfect liberty. But if we don’t campaign for liberty, the other side is going to keep campaigning for stateism and big government, and they are our enemy and we must stop them. Probably the best success we’ve had with the Campaign for Liberty has been the grassroots effort the Campaign for Liberty has done on making sure that we got the bill to audit the Federal Reserve System at least passed in the House of Representatives. But not only about getting the legislation passed in House, and who knows, we might still get the rest of it done in the Senate, but we don’t know. But the more important thing is calling attention to the American people to the issue of monetary policy. They’re never going to put that back in the bottle, let me tell you. The people now know the importance of the monetary policy and the Federal Reserve, thank you for all your hard work and effort on that.

Ron Paul: Really, liberty is the issue, because if you understand liberty, you can apply it to everything, whether it’s civil liberty, foreign policy, monetary policy, or economic policy, it’s all very much the same. But, in order to understand how the system works, you have to understand the monetary system, because big government can’t exist without a Federal Reserve, it just wouldn’t happen. Because Congress would have to pay their bills, and with the Federal Reserve, they’re able to deceive the people, pretend that they’re not being harmful and delay their payment, and that’s what this is all about. Now, Bernanke, this weekend as usual – and as all the Federal Reserve Chairmen that I have met always say when they get into trouble and they can’t seem to get out – said, “Well, Congress has to do more”. Of course, they shouldn’t do more, they should do a lot less, that’s what they need to do. But it isn’t the Fed against the Congress, or the Congress against the Fed. The Congress created the Fed, and you know what, they can get rid of the Fed if they want to, and they should. But if there are special interest groups, as there certainly are in this country, that support the warmongering going on and the military-industrial complex, and if they had to tax the American people to pay all the bills for all the wars, just think in the last ten years, the national debt went up over 4 trillion dollars just for the wars that we have been fighting in the Middle East. And just look at the disaster in the Middle East today, 11 country embassies being demonstrated against with violence against Americans because, for some reason, they don’t like us dropping drone missiles on their countries. But this expenditure couldn’t happen, and wars couldn’t be fought if we had honest money, because the people would have to be that taxed and they would rebel and say it’s a bad investment. But it is so deceitful, and they can delay the inevitable for a long time, but that long time is coming to an end, and that’s why our work is so important right now. We have to keep plugging ahead.

The same is true about domestic welfare spending, if we paid all the bills, the people would rebel and everybody would know how much it’s costing. But if you can run up the deficits, there is an absolute agreement that the Fed is going to monetize it, they’re going to buy the debt. If not, what happens, interest rates go up. Well, they can borrow for a while, but there’re not enough lenders out there, so interest rates would be higher, and this would be hard for the economy. But then all the pressure would be on the people and the Congress to cut the spending and let the people spend the money, not the government. If you look at our history, up until 1913, it was far from perfect, but the size of government didn’t have steady growth. And it was the inevitably bad year or 1913 that changed our history so dramatically: bringing in the Federal Reserve, changing the foreign policy that said that we’re going to make the world safe for democracy. They said we’ll have to fight one more war to end all wars, and you know how well that has worked out, and created and income tax. And just think of the last past 100 years. But as I have tried to say so many times and I certainly tried to point it out in Tampa, it’s all coming to an end and we should be grateful that it’s coming to an end. So the question isn’t so much about will the Keynesian, socialism, welfareism and interventionism end, it’s how it’s going to end and how many people are going to be prepared, how many of us will be out there, how many will then argue the case for sound money and personal liberty and economic liberty and a sensible foreign policy? That is what we have to have out there. Now, as I suggested in the campaign, there is no reason why we can’t have a transition. We can move from one to another, we can turn down the spigots of spending and bring our troops home and just cut back on spending and just work our way out of this. The odds aren’t very good that that’s going to happen, just this week there were efforts for a continuing resolution for 6 more months, and one thing is for sure, the party that’s in charge of the House of Representatives made sure that the military budget went up 26% on the continuing resolution.

See, this is the reason why I am unconvinced that we are going to keep doing the same thing over and over again. When are we going to see that the Fed is all of a sudden going to be a good manager? We saw what the Fed did this week, I mean, they’ve been trying for 5 years to bail out a system that collapsed because they spent too much, borrowed too much, printed too much. So what did they announce this week? They announced, “Well, what we need to do is we really need to print money, and we’ve tried QE1 and QE2, now we’re going to have perpetual QE. And now we’re going to give 40 billion new dollars every month”, which is nearly half a trillion dollars every year. And if necessary, they’ll increase it, they’ll guarantee low interest rates for another three years, and then they wonder why people don’t get their confidence restored and people get confused on what to do. Well, there’s one reason why they get confused, and that is the most important thing for individuals to make decisions on business and investments, and it’s the issue of interest rates. Because, in a market economy, if the people save money, they drive the interest rates down. And the business man says, “Oh, interest rates used to be 4%, they’re now at 2%, this is the time I should invest and rebuild”. So what happens if nobody saves any money and interest rates are 0%? Then you get real mal-investment, the money is printed, passed out to the banks for free, and they can put it back into reserves and get interest paid from the Federal Reserve. Or the banks themselves, or the Federal Reserve, buys debt, and there’s no incentive to go out and invest in a risky economy because the more the Congress interferes by passing more laws and not knowing what the tax code will be, passing socialized medical programs and on and on, people don’t have their confidence restored. So this is the reason that we are going to go on like this, we do not know when it will end. It could end soon, it could end in a year or 2 or 3 years, who knows. But I believe we’re getting awfully close to this. Then, this is where our efforts have to pay off, because the campaign for liberty is actually trying to get more people to not only understand it, but at least not be hostile to freedom, because our answers can be found in freedom. Because, in so many other countries, when they have faced these crisis, they end up with dictators. And we have more dictatorial and authoritarian government than ever before. And now not only do they tell you what to smoke and drink and eat, but they’re telling you how big your coca-cola can be, how big a glass of coca-cola you can have. And it’s pretty absurd when you can’t drink raw milk and you can’t make rope out of hemp and if you have a serious medical condition that can be helped with marijuana, you get put in prison with your wheelchair and all. There’s something seriously wrong, I would say they don’t understand what liberty is all about.

But obviously you do, and that’s good and that’s the good news, and there are a lot more like you out there than you ever realize, a lot more than I ever dreamed of. Because I have often made the comment that I did do a little bit of speaking, I used to practice a lot of speaking because I would go to college campuses. I used to be able to get 30 or 40 people out in one group on a college campus, but now a few more come. Now, in the old days if you were running as a conservative Republican, you’d go to a conservative campus and you’d get a nice crowd on you and you’d get all the plusses and you’d say, “Hey, this is great”. But, if you went to Berkeley and you ended up getting a big crowd there, or even the University of Texas, you would say, “Hey, you’re in Austin, you better be careful”. But now, with the freedom movement, you can go to a conservative campus and get a large crowd out, and you can go to Berkeley and get a bigger crowd out. So, that makes my point: freedom brings people together, people who believe in freedom for different reasons should all come together. We should eliminate this whole concern about diversity, whether you want to spend your money or save your money, or waste your money, in free society, you can do it. But if you waste your money, don’t go to your neighbor and say, “You have to bail me out and you have to pay more taxes”, that’s what you can’t do. But it truly does bring people together, and that’s why I think it’s so magnificent about it. Not only on the money issue, we understand it on the religious issue. Americans are pretty good, except when they get angry at certain groups and they have to bash them and say, “They’re the cause of the war” and this kind of stuff. But, in religion, we have so many different religious beliefs and we have people. Guess what, in a free society, you’re even allowed to be an atheist, we don’t put you in prison for that. But it isn’t the point I want you to believe, it is the point that you’re allowed to believe. And the other important thing is that when you legalize freedom, whether it’s personal habits or economic habits, you don’t endorse what the people do, and that’s a big difference. A lot of people will come up to me and say, “Ron, I agree with you, this drug war is horrible, but I can’t endorse people doing those things to their bodies, we have to protect them from themselves”. And I would think, yea, politicians and bureaucrats know more about protecting you against yourself than they do themselves. That doesn’t work. This whole notion that we have to depend on the government to tell us what our habits should be … but if we allow people to make these decisions, in economics it’s easy, and socially and religiously, the First Amendment, it’s a philosophy of tolerance. But tolerance is not endorsement. If you get to keep all your own money, and you gamble it away and lose it, that doesn’t mean I endorse gambling. But, like I said, though, if you have a lifestyle that punishes yourself and you suffer from it, you cannot use force to be taken care of by other people, you have to suffer the consequences.

Not only should you suffer the consequences, you should also reap the benefits. What if you were frugal and you saved and you invested? You should be able to keep the fruits of your labor, and that’s why the income tax is morally wrong, you shouldn’t have an income tax. But in any society with the government that we have now and have been putting up with for so long is, instead of being the protector of private property, they destroy the concept of private property. Instead of protecting and enforcing contracts, they interfere with the contracts and put force on us and manipulate things. So they’re working perversely. You know, the constitution as well as the Coinage of 1792 says, “Don’t counterfeit”, it’s a serious offense. But what do we have, we have the Federal Reserve as the chief counterfeiter of the world. And then we have the Fed manipulating money and credit, we have people who still would like to take care of themselves: work hard, save some money, put it in the bank, earn some interest, maybe 0.5% or 1%. And Bernanke was on the air today recognizing this because he’s done it to me in the committee when I bring it up and I say, “Alright, somebody wants to save their money and they don’t want to take risks in the stock market and they want to earn a little interest and they don’t earn enough”. And he says, “Yes, but the health of the economy is more important than marking sure that everybody is taken care of. Some people will suffer”. So if you’re elderly or of a fixed income or you want to save and you can’t earn any interest – and the market rate of interest would be 5% or 6%, but that’s beside the point because ‘we have to help the economy’. Usually, the world ‘economy’ means banks and big corporations and politicians and governments and foreign interventions, that’s what it is, that’s why we have to attack this whole system. But the really good news is that a lot of people are hearing this message. You have helped to spread it, the internet spreads it, you have had numerous speakers here. You know, I was kidding the other day, but it is true that it used to be that voting by myself used to be a neat little event, at least I’d wave a flag and say, “Look here, you guys”. But now I have these guys like Justin Amash and other people that are voting with me and I can hardly be by myself at all.

And there are going to be some new people. It won’t be fast enough, we have to keep doing it, but setting a standard and setting a record is very, very good because people are watching and they will be encouraged. And this is why, no matter, we must get the good people in Congress, and they have to be perseverant and stick to their guns, we have to keep working with the Campaign for Liberty, we have to change people’s minds. Ideas do have consequences, bad ideas have bad consequences. So these things are powerful, powerful weapons that we have, and we have truth on our side, which makes a big difference. If freedom is the answer, and authoritarianism is something that has been around for thousands of years and has always failed and undermined personal liberty, then maybe we do have truth on our side. We just have to energize people, we have to get their confidence back. This is what has happened to the American people, they’ve lost confidence in true freedom. They say, “Freedom is good, that’s a good thing, but you have to give up some of it to be safe. How can you have a safety net and how can you be protected against the terrorist if we didn’t have TSA?” I think that’s a little bit confused thinking and I think more Americans are beginning to understand this. But private property would solve all those problems at the airport. The people who are supposed to provide the security are the airlines, not bureaucrats that belong to labor unions and everything else. We’ve not only given up on the idea of private property and contracts and sound money, but we’ve also been careless on allowing certain small groups of people talk to the American people into believing that if you don’t support the wars and you don’t support the troops, then and you’re un-American and you’re not patriotic. Guess what, the people in active military duty have spoken, they have been very vocal, and guess what? They support the cause of liberty and they supported our campaign and they said these wars are unnecessary and not beneficial.

And, of course, that’s a very good reason to just bring them home, and we could. I can’t understand the inability of us to convince more, because, to me, it seems so logical. If you’re out of money and the wars aren’t any good and they’re not constitutional; we’ve spent 4 trillion dollars we didn’t have, and we would have more peace and prosperity by having a foreign policy where we defend our country properly and constitutionally with the permission of the people through the Congress, instead of allowing the President and the United Nations and NATO to decide it. Why shouldn’t this be welcomed with open arms and say, “It’s time to bring them home”. So, the rule of law has been taken carelessly, we don’t really follow it, not many in the Congress really care about the constitution. They take the oath of office, but the worst part about it isn’t that they don’t follow the constitution, which is horrible, but they believe they’re following it. They’ve been rationalized by our education system that said, “It was never meant to be overly rigid, it has to be adaptable, we have to adapt it to modern times”. Even today, I was on an interview and we were talking about the economy and I said the economy was pretty good without a central bank back in the 19th century. And they said, “I don’t want to talk about that, that’s old fashioned, we don’t even want to go back to that”. But we do have to recognize that markets work and foreign policy works and going backwards is not the problem. What we want to do is pick up the pieces. We had a good system, we knew what we had. We have to quit doing the dumb things, because it’s so easy to figure out that we have to live within our means as individuals, and governments should have to do it and the politicians should be held responsible. But the big question is the question that always has to be asked, and for which you have to get the right answer, and that is, “What should the role of the government be?” And governments have been around for a long, long time, and governments always overstep. But, if the government would be what the constitution says it should be, it should be very limited to the protection of liberty. If you want more government, it should be local and not at the federal level, and certainly it shouldn’t be international, it shouldn’t be United Nations. But it’s been rationalized by the members of Congress and by the people, I certainly heard it and it really hurt to hear people so often say right after 9/11, “Well, it looks like we have to sacrifice our freedoms now to be safe”. The truth is, if you take an oath of office and you take an oath to be a president, you don’t swear an oath, “I’m going to keep the American people safe from here on out”. Matter of fact, if you say that, that means, “I am going to keep you safe and you’ll have no more liberty”, because that’s the only way you can be perfectly safe. So, no, you want to obey the law and you want to protect life and liberty and property and a judicial system and not much else. But we had given up on this a hundred years ago. But the magnificent story now is that, and it has been much more than I ever expected in these last 4, 5 years, there has been a tremendous surge in the interest of this. Just think that a whole new generation of young people right now are joining us. I mean, a lot of us have been fighting this for a long time and we’ve always been outnumbered. But if we can keep this energy going with the younger generation … and I’m not talking about the college graduates, I’m talking about the college student and the high school student, they know and understand this stuff. I get pretty impressed about high school students, one of them told me, “I’ve been reading about Mises and Rothbard”, and I hadn’t even heard those names until I got out of college”. But the people I meet from the younger generation are way ahead of anybody I ever met when I was in high school and college. But the needs are much greater, there was a lot of wealth left, there was a lot of momentum, and we’ve been consuming it for several decades now. There is no real wealth in this country, what you see as wealth, most of it is debt. The dollar functioned, but the dollar is debt, so it doesn’t have a real value. But, the trust in the dollar is still there, so there is always a subjective element on value, there’s still a thought around the world: “Well, the Americans have all the weapons and they have a lot of wealth, so we’re going to take their dollars” and that sort of thing. But, it could come to an end. Matter of fact, in the last 4 days since Bernanke announced this continuous QE, the dollar has gone down sharply. With this stuff going on over in the Middle East, as well as the oil prices going up, we could be getting pretty close to this. This stuff in the Middle East is really dramatized, I guess you’ve seen some of the maps on TV, they will paint each country in red that had some revolt or rebellion or demonstration against America in the last week, and there’re 11 countries right now. And they want to tell you these protests are because somebody in some place did a video that nobody has seen and nobody understands, and they say, “Oh, that’s why they hate Americans”. Well, guess what, it’s all in Arab countries that we have been taking over, we prop up the dictators, we’re on both sides of all those issues. We prop up dictators like in Egypt, give them billions and billions of dollars and pay them to be friends of Israel. And then, all of a sudden, the people rebel against that government, and so we participate in the overthrow of our puppet leader in Egypt and then somebody else comes in and, lo-and-behold, guess who’s in the rebellion, the Al-Qaida.

And the Al-Qaida is in Libya as well and they’re involved in Syria. They weren’t in Iraq, but they are now. I mean, the whole thing about the foreign policy makes no sense whatsoever, we spend all that money and we’re less safe. And that can get out of hand. There’s a lot of planning done on how to manage and spread our empire, and they don’t sit down and say, “Well, let’s have a world war”, but sometimes some of those plans get out of control. What I fear the most is a false flag; something happening where one of our ships goes down or a plane goes down, and, of course, it had to be the Iranians, for sure, for certain. But then, the emotions go high. But even today, when our ambassador was killed, there were are a lot of people ready to go to war over this and never asking the serious questions. But I am convinced that if we have a sensible foreign policy, we would have more friends in the world, and I think that is important. But the neo-cons are quick to criticize and say, “Well, Ron Paul just doesn’t understand, nor does he care about, this great thing called ‘American Exceptionalism’, that we are the greatest and the best and we can tell people what to do. We could be the greatest and we could be the best and we’ve had good traits in the past, but, the one thing that we as a people have come to realize, is that if we have good traits and we do a good job and have a good economy and have sound money and a sensible foreign policy and mind our own business, guess what, others might want to copy us, they might want to emulate us. But, right now, there’s not much effort in that. I am also concerned that if there’s a false flag and things break out, what’s going to happen is we’ll go bankrupt at the same time. And if you think the map of those 11 countries expressing their anger towards us is bad right now, I think there’re going to be a lot more who have been held in check because we’ve had weaponry and we’ve had money. And my complaint has always been that we’ve always only had two options on foreign policy, 1) You do what we tell you and we’ll give you a lot of money, or 2) if you don’t do it, we’re going to give you a lot of bombs.

Right now, we’re doing both to some of these countries, we’re shooting them and at the same time we’re giving them money. Why don’t we offer them this other approach based on the constitution and liberty: why don’t we offer them neither of those and just offer them friendship and trade and no money and no bombs, that’s what we need. One of the things that the freedom movement and Campaign for Liberty has being doing, is it’s being trying to get people to think of liberty as a whole, not in pieces. And liberty was chalked into pieces, and still today you have conservatives defending one part of it and liberals defending another part of it, and then it’s also mixed up by even the conservatives who might be pretty good on economics. If they get a president that’s not so conservative, they have to go along with him because it’s a partisan thing. And then, on the other side, you might have a president whose supposed to cut back on arresting people for marijuana and also have less wars, and he defies it. And then the democrats say, “Oh, we can’t challenge him at all”. What we have to do is challenge people and say, “Look, when a conservative says the right thing about economics and a liberal or somebody else says something right about civil liberties and getting the government out of our personal lives, or anybody who’d say we should have a foreign policy that makes sense … And we have coalitions in Congress now. Because there are less democrats because we have a current Democratic president, the coalitions is smaller, but the numbers of the Republicans are growing in this coalition who’re saying, “We don’t need this”. So, this is, once again, bringing people together and seeing liberty as a whole. Its one pieces, and I think that’s what we have to work on.

A lot of times they want to accuse us of wanting to go back to the dark ages, but the dark ages are authoritarianism. Freedom is a relatively new idea. The history of man, when you consider the history of the universe and how many billions of years the planets and all existed, man has only been around for a short period of time. And knowledgeable man has just been around for thousands of years, when they were reflecting and writing books. So it’s a very short period of time. But the history of man making great progress and understanding how important liberty is, is very, very short. In terms of all history, it’s just a couple of seconds or couple of minutes. So, we’re really just on the cusp of understanding what this is all about and what it can bring about. But there’s only one principle that has to be followed – because our views and our desires and our preferences are all different – and that is, you can’t force other people to do your bidding if they’re not hurting you. But a lot of people will accept that, it’s easier to get them to accept that: just don’t hurt me or don’t steal my property. But then they say it’s okay for the government to do it. The government’s not allowed to initiate force against anybody, either, they can only be a participant in trying to repel force or settle disputes, but they can’t come along and say, “We’re going to use force to make other people do our bidding, even if the individual shouldn’t do it”. So it’s individuals and government that should never be able to initiate force or violence against another to bring about social or economic changes. That one rule would solve practically all our problems, I’ll tell you.

But we should be very optimistic, I know there are some who say we should have done better in the campaign. Quite frankly, I think we did pretty good. Those who said we should have done significantly better, I don’t know whether they quite understand what we, as a group, are taking on. It isn’t like we’re taking on one small faction of the Republican Party and say, “Yea, we want to nudge you into being a little bit more conservative”, or something like that. We’re taking on the establishment that controls both parties. So, it’s the banking system, it’s the welfare state, it’s the military-industrial complex, it’s a lot of corporatism and subsidies that go out to so many. So I’ll say that the task is rather large so the success, I think, is very significant. But the other way you might look at it, if you’re looking for a positive sign: I don’t know how many candidates were there 4 years ago, let’s say there were 12 and let’s say there’re about 10 or 12 more this time, so there are about 20 now. There weren’t many that came in second, there were a few that dropped by the wayside that didn’t make an impact and they were done and gone and they have debt in the bank and they don’t even pay their bills. But the real excitement is from the number of people that are joining us, and that’s where we should be positive. We have so many more people now in office at all levels of government, and there are going to be a lot more added this fall. Now, that isn’t the total measurement, but it is a significant measurement. There are some people that love liberty and fight for it and write about it and say, “You know, this voting stuff doesn’t add up to too much”. But, political activism, if it had been ignored by the founders, we would still be in a pretty big mess, because they were philosophic and they were idealistic, but they took political action, too. So that’s why, I think political action is quite alright. But I want to encourage you and thank you for all that you have done. Continue to do your work and do your job. And you might ask, “What is my job?” You have to decide what your job is. The only thing I can urge you to do is try and understand the principles, understand the principles of liberty. But you’re here, you’re participating, you’re involved and we have people representing us at different levels of government. But everybody has something to do, it can be purely educational. When people come in to my office and ask, “How do I become a congressman?” I say, “Don’t even try, its okay if it happens to come along, most of it is luck”, and this sort of thing. There are a lot of uncertainties about running for office, and there is some luck in it. But, a lot of times, if they were very interested, I encourage them to by saying that I would just love to see more of them in the media, more writers, more in the newspapers, and the TV. But, even that’s getting easier, because, right now, if you look at the number of people who look at CNN for their news, most people are now getting more news off the internet on their computers than they are from CNN. So we’re already there in many ways. And everybody has different talents, some people don’t even want to do public speaking, some people enjoy it, some people want to run for office. Some people actually have a knack to make money even under these circumstances in this economy. Well, let them go make the money and let them help out the other groups. And we have a lot of supporters that way and that’s the prime goal, that they do well and understand it and they make money and they donate to these organizations. So that is pretty important.

Once you discover what’s going on and you basically understand this philosophy, actually it’s a pretty uncomfortable position to put you in, because I hope you’re miserable for the rest of your life unless you’re trying to do something about it. And I do believe that the people who are informed, if they’re moral persons and they say, “We know this is a bad situation”, and if you’re directed by wanting to know the truth and spread the truth, and it’s a moral principle, you do have a greater obligation. And you know what, you’re in a group that’s only going to be probably the group that’s about 10% of the population, because you know the issues and you understand and study and you read. But most people, even those who vote, don’t think about it until the day before the elections sometimes. All this polling on who’s going to win in November, I think that’s all talk because I think a bunch of people aren’t even going to pay much attention. And, who knows, there might be something else to do that day or it might rain and they might not even show up, for that matter. But your role is very important, and that’s why I work very hard and encourage everyone on the team for Campaign for Liberty to be involved. I’m glad you’re here and want to assume some responsibility. And, of course, if you don’t have any fun doing it, it can be a real dull job. So have some fun doing it, and one thing that is fun, is being with like-minded people, isn’t that pretty neat? And, to tell you the truth, I like to be with people that are like-minded that might have a completely different attitude about what their social values are and what they want to do with their money and how they want to do it, because I can just sort of smile and say, “Well, I wouldn’t do that, that’s a pretty stupid thing to do”. But I think it’s still neat that we can bring these people together and say, “It’s freedom, it’s liberty, that’s what we’re fighting for”.

Thank you very much for all your efforts, thank you.

Dear Ron Paul,

You are at the right place and at the right time not only to educate Americans about the principles of personal liberty, sound money, free markets and a sensible pro-America foreign policy, but also to continue the Revolution and lead us to victory.

We the undersigned don’t want to change the GOP — we want to change America. We pledge to “write in” your name on the presidential ballot this November 6th no matter what happens until then. Please consider quitting the GOP and officially announcing your candidacy as an Independent. We pledge to assist you in every way we can.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

• Signatures #1 – #5,000
• Signatures #5,001 – #10,000
• Signatures #10,001 – #15,000
• Signatures #15,001 – #20,024