Ron Paul comes to Iowa

On November 13, 2009, Ron Paul visited Iowa State University in Ames.

On November 14, 2009, Ron Paul headlined a fundraiser for Indianola state Rep. Kent Sorenson’s Iowa Senate campaign at the Des Moines Airport Holiday Inn.

Videos from Ron Paul’s visit to Iowa.

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On Monday November 9, Congressman Ron Paul is scheduled to deliver a lecture at the University of South Carolina. The lecture, which starts at 7 pm and takes place in the Carolina Coliseum, is entitled “The Politics of Tolerance”.

Ron Paul intends to highlight the importance of civility and tolerance in politics and everyday life, and will also talk about the future of individual liberty and the importance of the U.S. Constitution.

On November 13, Ron Paul will speak at Iowa State University in Ames on Nov. 13. The speech is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Benton Auditorium in the Scheman Building.

On November 14, Ron Paul will headline a fundraiser for Indianola state Rep. Kent Sorenson’s Iowa Senate campaign. The fundraiser is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. in the Iowa Room at the Des Moines Airport Holiday Inn, 6111 Fleur Dr.

Next stop New Hampshire?

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Ron Paul and Carol Paul at Mann’s Village Theater in Westwood, California

Ron Paul and Carol Paul at Mann’s Village Theater in Westwood, California

Vince Vaughn at Mann’s Village Theater in Westwood, California

More photos here…

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A student town hall discussion at the University of Minnesota will be held with U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (MN) and Dr. Ron Paul (TX) at Northrop Auditorium on Friday, September 25, 2009 at 7:00pm CT.

This event is free and open to the public.

Both members of Congress will address the student body to discuss monetary reform, limited government, and free market economics. Faculty and students are asked to submit their questions upon arrival for a short question and answer period following the Members’ talk.

“The country has seen a rise in civic discourse this August,” said Jeff Frazee, Executive Director of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL). “Americans from across the political spectrum have spoken out against President Obama’s healthcare proposal, bailout mania, and the rapid rise of government control and spending in our economy, and this is the student body’s opportunity to join the discussion.”

The event is hosted by Young Americans for Liberty and sponsored by the Minnesota Campaign for Liberty, Republican Party of Minnesota, Minneapolis City Republican Committee, College Republicans, CFACT, and Students for a Conservative Voice.

For more information visit www.yaliberty.org

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Channel: Russia Today
Date: July 14, 2009

Reporter: Something is stirring on the U.S. politican scene: a libertarian group with real change on their minds, and the FreedomFest convention in Los Vegas is the perfect place to find them.

Ron Paul: You decide what’s good for you and what’s not.

Reporter: Including their fearless leader, Congressman Ron Paul.

Ron Paul: You belong to a unique group and you might feel frustrated at times as you say “well, we’re not 51% of the population”. And yet the effort and the value of a group like we have, that believe in liberty and understand it and is willing to work for it, it is like an army.

Reporter: Their demand is for the government to back off. Not right wing or left wing politics, but both economic and social freedom. An idea that’s inspiring many young people.

Ethan Czahor: This is the start of something that could be a great movement in 2012, 2016 down the road, and I want to be here at the beginning and want to just get the ball rolling.

Participant: A few years ago I had no views whatsoever, and I didn’t care about politics or economics. I became interested and found myself aligned with this group.

Alexander McCobin: We need to have students in the next generation of leaders stepping up to really take charge of their own lives and be able to protect their rights.

Reporter: One of the next generation leaders just could be Adam Kokesh, an Iraq veteran against the war, and a new congressional candidate from New Mexico. The power lies in his ideals and not in choosing a political party.

Adam Kokesh: We have a Democratic Party in charge that ran on a platform that they are not enacting. We had a government that’s out of control and totally out of balance with the Constitution. We believe that’s what it’s about; bringing us back to the agreed upon rules for society, just for starters.

Reporter: Washington better look out. Las Vegas is giving freedom a chance to breath. Call them freedom fighters or a bunch of angry people trying to bring down the system, one thing is for sure: this event is gaining momentum. And unless they see a drastic change in the way things are run here in America they will be back again next year for another FreedomFest. Linda Mayhosky, RT, Las Vegas.

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Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_3wZ7jVUHc (Anthony Gregory, John Tate)
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_9zcF-2Tgk (John Tate, Katja Delavar)
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owmCTfHhdf4 (Katja Delavar, Gary Condotta, Matt Shea, Tom Woods)
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f88D82Eskhc (Tom Woods)
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpV4sUDVaCg (Tom Woods)
Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5TXszdOonQ (Tom Woods, Katja Delavar, Anthony Gregory)

Part 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLI3GzTeZ5s (Ron Paul)

Part 8: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc04RRJOcgU (Ron Paul)

Part 9: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G07YmbTEolM (Ron Paul)

Part 10: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQyCDKfw2kI (Ron Paul)

Part 11: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8MNHH3oNT0 (Ron Paul)

High resolution torrent: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4917388 (1.84 GB)

Audio only:

Download MP3 file

(More videos from the conference after the transcript)

Transcript of Ron Paul’s speech

Anthony Gregory: In the history of the struggle for liberty there are few people who stand out as giants. There are few who not just for their dedication to principle and their consistency and integrity, but their impact and their willingness to commit so much of their time to fight for what they believe to be right, to fight for a free country.

You know, in the 1970s when Ron Paul was first in Congress he warned about this stuff. He wasn’t just warning people since a few years ago or ten years ago, but for decades. And he was warning about the U.S. Empire, how our interventionist foreign policy would lead to blow back. And when he was vindicated on 9-11 he kept telling the truth. He kept opposing preventive war and torture and destruction of our Bill of Rights. He stood up to Rudy Giuiliani in that great debate in South Carolina, sending shock waves through the country. He did not back down, and it turns out he was right and even though more and more people realize this about Iraq, it doesn’t seem to matter even though we have a new President.

Likewise, for decades he took to a cause, along with all the other causes of individual freedom and civil liberty and constitutionally limited government, a cause that was seen as obscure, as Tom has mentioned, for probably about a century now; he stood for sound money. He stood for the idea that the Central Bank, inflating away the currency, was empowering an unconstitutional government and impoverishing the American people, especially the poor and middle class. And he warned, just as he warned about U.S. foreign policy was going to lead to destruction of American lives and liberty, he warned about how this Central Bank inflation was also going to have its day of reckoning.

And again, they laughed at him in those 2008 debates. Practically all of the other Republicans were saying, ‘Of course, the fundamentals of the economy are sound’ I mean, how could they not be? We’ve, had a Republican President and a Republican Congress for so long, right? But they didn’t want to look at the Central Bank, and lo-and-behold, in the last year he has been vindicated once again.

Now, along with being right and dedicated to principle for all this time, he has a special place in the history of the ideas of liberty, because he didn’t just bring a lot of people together, he has also exposed and revealed how many of us there actually are. And he has shown that the future can be much brighter as thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of Americans have become receptive to this message that many of them have been instinctually holding on to for all this time, but they just wanted to hear someone say it. Now I think there is far more of us than many of us could have ever dreamt of.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my tremendous honor to introduce one of the greatest Americans in the history of political life and the ideas of freedom. I really mean that. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Ron Paul.

Ron Paul: Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Sounds like there is a campaign going on or something like that, thank you. Before I start I want to introduce the one granddaughter that came with me. Not too many people came with me from Texas, but Valery, my granddaughter, with her husband Jesse, is over here.

I’m sure I should go down the list and thank all the special people here who have worked so hard to put his together, but I think everybody needs to be thanked, and I thank everybody for joining this effort because it’s starting to pay off and I’m starting to get excited about what’s happening.

It used to be I thought it was a lonely fight, but I don’t think it’s so lonely any more. As a matter of fact, I think you were out there all the time, I just hadn’t heard from you. But it’s been wonderful, things are changing in Washington. I’m not the speaker yet, but you know… but they know you are out there and they’re starting to pay attention. It came out of the Presidential campaign along with the Campaign for Liberty. Numbers do make a difference. Politicians in Washington look at numbers, they look at who can raise some money and who can find some people and then all of a sudden they say, “Those views must be pretty important then”.

So, they know we exist and it isn’t just Republicans or just Democrats, it’s both. Specially those who are in marginal districts, they think, “Oh boy, we got to support your bills” and they come around and they’re very supportive. Our numbers are growing and you’ve heard the numbers.

HR 1207 – Audit the Federal Reserve

You know, that little bill we’ve introduced to just do that little trick to find out a little bit more about the Federal Reserve, HR 1207, think about 174 people right now that we have signed on to that.

Actually things have come together on that. The effort has been there for a long time before I started. You can go back to Wright Patman and Henry Gonzales and others who have talked about looking into the Federal Reserve, they knew there were problems with the Federal Reserve. And they never got anywhere because the pressure wasn’t all that great and a lot of people didn’t understand it, but the conditions are a lot different today.

Since the campaign along with the collapsing of the economy, people are looking for answers. I think what really got their attention was when the Congress immediately responded, like they usually do in any emergency, by passing legislation. The bigger the better, the less they read it it seems like it’s supposed to be better. You know, like after 9-11 they said, “Let’s pass the PATRIOT Act, we’re all patriots now, so we’ll pass the PATRIOT Act”. So, of course, there were many bills passed, but the TARP was the big one with 700 million dollars. And all of a sudden the people, the voters started asking, “Where did the money go?” Oh yea, a couple of big shots got some bonuses and then they went and retired. Tens of millions, if not billions of dollars down the drain and nobody knew where they went. So they said, “You know, you ought to find out where they spent the money”. So the idea of oversight and transparency came up, but then we were able to get their attention and say, “You know, the Federal Reserve has something to do with this too. They don’t deal in 100s of billions, they deal in trillions of dollars. It’s about time the American people find out what they are doing behind the scenes”. And this came together and that’s how it came about.

But if you had not been active it wouldn’t have happened because by my nature I’m not one to badger my colleagues and go and say, “Will you sing on this, will you sign on that” because the general tradition is ‘you sign on this and I’ll sign on this’ and there is always this tradeoff. I had to have the motivation to do it and the people have motivated me. And I understand that in this state I think you have motivated 7 out of 9 [congressmen who co-sponsored HR 1207]. That sounds pretty good to me.

The Financial Crisis

But the economy has obviously been a big issue that we’ve been dealing with in Washington these last few months. And I think there are some good things coming out of the debate. It’s similar in some ways to what happened after the crash in 1929 when we had the Depression. It was a tragedy then because Keynesianism was just coming into vogue and the challenge there was, “Well, there’s too much capitalism, too much freedom and too much gold-standard. And that is the cause.” They more or less won that argument. They dispensed with the gold standard and they went welfareism and interventionism and pseudo-socialism and that’s what we’ve been living with all these times.

So, we have another crisis, a predictable crisis. Most of us expected it would come, we couldn’t name the date it did come on. And now they’re doing the same thing all over again. But this is the intellectual fight once again. Who is going to get blamed? That is going to be the key. Who brought on this crisis, and you can listen to the news on a nightly basis and generally they say it’s because there’s not enough regulation, too much freedom, too much capitalism. But we know that it was too much cronyism, too much special interests, too much corporatism, too much inflatism and too much Federal Reserve.

And this time we have the upper edge. They can’t blame the gold standard this time. We can blame the paper standard, that’s where the problem came from and it was the abuse of the gold standard back in the 1920s and before that. Because you know, it really didn’t take too long for the Federal Reserve to show its true colors. It was established in 1913; they inflated for World War I and then we had the depression of 1921, but at least back in 1921 we had the sense not to overdo it.

But, a lot has happened, a lot has transpired. The conditions are ripe and conditions are more different than they have ever been in the history of the world. This has been the biggest financial bubble ever recorded and the origination of the bubble came from this country with the dollar because we had the dollar as the reserve standard. We had the privilege of printing the gold, and printing the money where other countries took it and they monetized our debt. It looked like magic for us. We were getting away with economic murder, so to speak, because we were living way beyond our means and we had a great deal of wealth and everybody looked at their 401ks and thought, “Boy, I’m wealthy, I’m retiring next year”. Now, a lot of them aren’t retiring next year because that wealth was fictitious and it was based on a lot of debt and a lot of foolishness that they came to light.

And now it will not be a country here and a country there, it is worldwide. Since we are the biggest debtor of the world and it originated with the dollar we will probably suffer the most because we benefitted the most. The people who had the greatest degree of the bubble right now in this country are suffering the most. If there is a bigger bubble in California and Nevada for housing than there was in Texas… Florida was big… and they of course are suffering the biggest changes. I think we as a country will probably suffer more because I believe the next leg in the economic crisis will be the credibility of the dollar. And even this very week we have seen some sharp rises in interest rates. It’s nothing like what we’re going to see, but there are some significant changes. They just can’t sell.

You know, it used to be a million, billion, 100 million, 100 billion, 100s of billions, but now it’s trillions. Trillions of dollars. Even though I am sort of attuned to this stuff it still shocks me to think that they continue to do it. But what really is shocking is that the people I know in Washington hardly blink an eye. Behind the scenes they will express a little bit of concern, but not really. But the people who come to Washington, those who are lobbying, it seems like they don’t quite grasp it. Instead of saying, “Oh you’ve run out of money, the debt is out of control, there’s two trillion dollars worth of debt this year, we better not ask for any money”. No, they come more aggressively than ever before because I think they sense it’s coming to an end. They’re all out there grabbing to see what they can get. But it’s going to go on and on.

Do you think this country is going to let California go broke? They’ll bail out California. If they can bail out car dealers and banks and AIG, they’ll bail out California. Today the President announced, or yesterday, or whenever, he announced… he announced [applause]… That wasn’t even in my speech. He announced that we, the taxpayer, are going to give the IMF a hundred billion dollars. Where is he going to get it? “Oh okay, that’s right, we have a Federal Reserve.” But he doesn’t realize that the Federal Reserve is on its last legs and he has a problem.

Now, as important as HR 1207 is in reforming and getting rid of the Fed, is the possibility of the Fed just self destructing. Probably there is a greater chance of that, but that doesn’t diminish the need for us to do what we are doing. But you know, right now even though we’re getting a lot of co-sponsors, to go through a transition and first open up the books and study the books and then have a logical transition from the system we have to a gold standard, that’s a pretty tough job. But, nevertheless, it will end. There is a big difference between what we have now and what we had after the Civil War. During the civil war we went off the gold standard and the gold prices soared up a couple of hundred dollars. And then in 1875 with the Resumption Act they announced we’re going back to the gold standard. They quit printing greenbacks, they balanced the budget, they started withdrawing some of the greenbacks and lo-and-behold, the people actually believed their government back then, and then they went and overspent. But today if we announced in Washington today that we’re going to balance the budget next year, we’re going to take all the pressure on the Federal Reserve to monetize debt. I mean, how many people would believe that. Nobody would believe it.

So that’s why I anticipate that when we have to sort all this out it’s going to quite possibly be under dire circumstances. But regardless, you work for the transition, you work for the most peaceful and graceful transition that you can have and I’ve talked about that a lot over the years about how and where you could cut if you get the political stamina to do that. And do it without necessarily hurting people, but I think it’s going to happen in a different way.

I think just as they could not predict and they could not prevent the collapse of the financial house of cards and it went quickly. And that is what happens to currencies. If you look at the history of currencies you will find that currencies go quickly at the end. Although people know they’re inflating and the currency maybe dropping and dropping, but when confidence is gone in the system, it drops off. And as I said, since this dollar system is so huge, and so worldwide, it’s going to be a big event. The real challenge then is how much of our freedoms we have, how do we pick up the pieces? And that’s what campaigning for liberty is all about.

I’m convinced that if we lost all our wealth and we had the crisis, but if we maintained and retained our liberty and had a very, very small government. A government that guaranteed property rights and contract rights and guaranteed that the money could not be counterfeited and that there would be no IRS and there would be incentives, we would be all back on our feet within a short period of time.

As a matter of fact, a good test of this… A lot of times I get asked this question, “Well, if you would happen to be the President what would you have done?” Well, I couldn’t have done too much at all unless we convince the Congress what to do, but this is what I would have asked them to do: instead of passing all these bailout packages, all these appropriations, all that inflation and more deficit, I’d say let’s just do one thing. It’s going to reduce the amount of income to the government but we’re going to have to cut spending as well. But what I would have done is just immediately repeal the income tax and just let everybody keep everything that they have.

And that probably would have been a fraction of what we spend, so it would have made a lot more sense to have the money in the hands of the people who have the incentive to go out and work. But instead what are they doing? They’re raising taxes, regulating the economy, inflating the currency, running up these deficits. And of course, the place where I have always suggested to be the first place to cut spending and come back to our senses would be the overseas spending.

But what do we do instead? We have these 100 billion dollars, it’s going to go to the IMF. Did we get a cut in the military like we were supposed to get? No. The first thing done by the President was increase the military budget by 10%. Oh sure, we’re going to bring all the troops home. Well, as soon as things get settled in Iraq I think maybe a couple dozen will come home. But I believe they are going to be there because the chaos and the violence is escalating. But more troops in Afghanistan and invading and bombing Pakistan, and that was the peace candidate? Holy man. So nothing is being cut.

I think the Senate just yesterday passed the supplemental bill. The President asked for 84 billion dollars for the supplemental war budget. We weren’t supposed to have a supplemental war budget anymore, but we did and by the time it came to the House the Democrats in the House added 12 billion dollars so it went up to 94-95 billion dollars. I think the Senate passed a little less to go to conference.

But it was a closed rule, which means the fiscal conservatives didn’t have a chance to amend it. And the talk went on and on and Republicans were just condemning those Democrats for spending all this money and it was just terrible what they were doing. The Republicans had one amendment, that is the re-committal amendment. Sending it back to the committee, they had once chance to amend the bill, and they asked to increase it by 3 billion dollars. And you wonder where they’re coming from, but it also demonstrates so clearly why we’re in such a mess. But let me tell you that you’re way ahead of the Congress, the people are ahead of the Congress, and it takes them a long time to catch up.

War on Drugs

I’ve always thought that the Congress was way behind the people on this war on drugs. I have been convinced that the people are way ahead on that. I always thought that if the people weren’t way ahead, I would have never been re-elected to Congress a long time ago, because I had been out for 12 years and went back in 1996 and they knew by that exactly what my position on the war on drugs was. And that is that the war on drugs is worthless, it’s a war on the people, it’s a war on our liberties.

And I have a Bible Belt district, it’s very, very conservative, it’s very religious and people detest drugs as I do. I think the use of drugs are horrible. Even as a physician I think most of the drugs the doctors prescribe are horrible too. I understand there is a radio talk show host… can’t think of his name… he got into trouble with some of those prescription drugs too. But my suspicion about why that never hurt is because both Republicans and Democrats spent a lot of money… that’s been ten years ago… against me on this drug issue. And it never seemed to stick. Because I think a lot of people, some kid or some relative you’ve known or somebody that got into drugs and ended up in prison and all kinds of stories. And besides, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that maybe we should think about treating somebody who is addicted to a drug. Maybe it’s something like being addicted to alcohol. What if we put all our alcoholics in prison? The trouble is that when I say that stuff in Washington there is always somebody who popped up and said, “Yea, that’s what we ought to do”.

And you know, I thought this administration would be a little bit better on that issue but so far they have not been. But it’s one area where I tend to be optimistic. I keep thinking that the country might be like they did after the prohibition of alcohol when they sort of woke up and said, “Hey, this was a dumb experiment”. And then, of course, they repealed prohibition.

But isn’t it remarkable… and that’s not so long ago that they figured they wanted to go into social engineering and tell people what to do and what they can drink, they actually thought they had to amend the constitution to tell people about that. So they amended the constitution and then they amended it again to get rid of it. Now, they don’t have anything to do with it, they just go and do these things without even considering the constitution. But you know, the drug issue has been an interesting one that I have been able to use against many liberals who might not be sympathetic with some of the things, especially if you talk about states’ rights and states’ sovereignty, that’s a turn off. That means you’re really out of it if you talk about that.

States’ Rights and Individual Freedom

But if I get on a show that I know has a liberal audience and I say, “I think that California deserves to have some states’ rights.” Maybe they’d pay their own bills, that would be one thing. But if they had enough compassionate conservatives in California that say that sick people, people who have cancer or AIDS, would be permitted to use their own marijuana and maybe get some relief, maybe the state of California ought to have the right to say that instead of the federal government coming down hard on the state and telling them what to do. And they understand that argument.

As a matter of fact, the left understands the argument about environment regulations. Some states are much stricter on what they want done and under the constitution that might not be a wise choice, but under the constitution Washington shouldn’t be telling the state of Washington or California or any state exactly what they want to do. And the previous administration was always in favor of nationalizing regulations. And they tended to even have national regulation overtake state regulation which would be stricter. Now, there is a shift where there is a recognition. But that should be used as a principle, you know. If it’s good on marijuana and good on environmental regulations, why isn’t it good for all the other issues? Maybe someday that will sink in and we’ll have this principle that local government is best.

Our problem though isn’t so much that we have to explain and show them how the federal government messes up so much. They, the opposition who likes government wants bigger government and they want world government. This is what will likely come out of this economic crisis if we don’t win this fight. They want to have another international bank, they want the United Nations and the IMF running it, they want these Special Drawing Rights, this stuff they used to called ‘paper gold’ to be the money of the world. And they want all the financial regulations to be internationalized. They’ve already started that. When you talk about the regulations of vitamins and nutritional substances, the drug companies want to regulate that under the WTO. So, that is a big problem for us too. So we not only have to deal with what we have in Washington, we also have to deal with those would have an even bigger government.

If you’re looking for advantages and opportunities in the midst of a crisis, if it’s really major, which I am expecting it to be, there’s been a lot of these resolutions passed by the states. States’ rights, 10th amendment issues and states’ sovereignty issues, and a lot of people who have no understanding of that whatsoever are coming to rallies because they know there are enough people now who are demanding this. And yet if there is a total collapse of the dollar, you know what I think will happen? I don’t think there will be secession, I think that people will just ignore Washington. I suggested to one audience that that could be possible, I know it wouldn’t be in this audience, but some of them said, “There are few who already just ignore Washington”.

We should use it as an opportunity, but the groundwork has to be laid, and that is the intellectual fight has to be won. People have to know how to defend sound money and they have to understand how to defend the free market. The biggest challenge in defending the free market is that we are always said to be the ones that have no compassion whatsoever. We don’t care for our fellow man. A bleeding heart liberal really cares. And there are a lot of bleeding hearts liberals that I know and like and I work with.

And one I talked to on the floor the other day and we were talking about the credit card bill, and the credit card bill is designed to make sure that the credit card company doesn’t gouge you with interest rates. Sounds very good, but that means that people who pay their bills have to pay more and people that don’t pay their bills get a lower interest rate. And I said, it’s like price fixing, and besides, those people borrow too much money. They shouldn’t be borrowing that money if they can’t pay it back. He said, “Yeah, but a lot of people out there are real dumb”. So he was smart and then he knew how, so that means that they have the assumption that people are dumb and therefore we’re going to tell you what you can read, what you can ingest, what you can smoke, what kind of habits you can have, what sexual preferences are and on and on because “people are dumb”. And then maybe they’ll talk about intellectual curiosity and other things that the government should regulate.

Right now we still have a fair respect for intellectual and religious freedom, but when it comes to what we put into our bodies, all of a sudden the country for a hundred years has accepted the idea that people are dumb and the government has to tell us what to do. Besides, don’t you know if you didn’t have… I think this Mr. Ed guy said the other day that if we didn’t have the Department of Agriculture, none of the food would be safe. And I was working with somebody from the left on the marijuana and hemp issue and I thought he would automatically be with me on the raw milk issue. But instead he said, “No, no. You can’t legalize raw milk because somebody might drink raw milk that isn’t safe.” So, the rationale is amazing.

But I believe the philosophy of liberty and the constitution and the principle that we take care of ourselves and help our fellow men voluntarily makes so much sense that it’s the most humanitarian system and the most viable system. It can produce the greatest amount of abundance and the fairest distribution. There is no reason why we can’t win this argument.

Car Companies, Cap & Trade, Budget Deficit

Of course we’ve had a lot of debates about the car companies. They’re getting a couple of our dollars and I guess they will still go into bankruptcy. Just think if General Motors had gone bankrupt a year ago, it probably would have been all ironed out and we might have thought it may be safe to buy General Motors’ cars again if the good part of the company was salvaged. But anyway, we pumped in some money already, they will go through bankruptcy and the company [...] will have to pay higher taxes. But the new administration will put more emission standards on the car, make the car smaller and less safe, more people will die from accidents, and on and on.

And this whole idea of cap and trade, they’ll be well motivated, “Oh yes, we’re going to purify the air for ever”, but what this is going to do is it is going to liquidate your wallet forever. That’s what this is going to do. It is just a huge tax, it’s been tested in other countries and it hasn’t worked. It cost a lot of money and it didn’t change the environment in any way, and that of course is being proposed right now.

So there’s a lot of attempts to raise taxes, but you know the budget is soaring, the deficit is soaring. But we were told not too long ago by our President that we had to get control of the budget. And he proposed a 17 billion dollar cut. You know, 2 trillion dollar increase, and a 17 billion dollar cut. And it was only a cut in what was already increased. And they put that stuff out there like we are supposed to believe this, “I guess they are doing the best they can”, but that is all ending. That is all ending.

People Are Ready For Change

What is happening today is that people are losing confidence in the droves. And the one place that I have been encouraged is that the people who aren’t buying into this are the young people who are inheriting this. So that’s where I’ve been encouraged and I still go to campuses and we get large crowds out. We get young people to crowds like this and I have a lot of young people coming through my office in Washington. High school kids and college kids interested in the constitution, interested in monetary policy, interested in freedom and responsibility. So I believe that the young people will be able to figure it out and that’s what we really have to do. We really have to help people understand this because it will not come quickly, you do have to educate.

Now, the surprise to me if I would have been asked this before the campaign started last year, what kind or response I would expected, I would say probably about average like I generally have. I get 30 people out here and there. But there were a lot of people out there that had already heard about Austrian economics and sound money. It was unbelievable to see people and hear people talking about it and they knew about Mises and Hayek and all these wonderful books that have been around. The information has been out there and it is so much easier, and this is probably the reason, it is so much easier to get access to it through the Internet.

I struggled. I was curious enough and I think that’s the main thing we all ought to have because we don’t have all the answers and that’s what is wonderful about freedom: since we don’t have all the answers we don’t impose it on other people. But information is important to understand the system. But we have to be curious to try to figure it out, because I think there are some serious things to consider in environment. But you know, the marketplace… good principles of the market handles a lot of that as well because you don’t have a right to pollute your neighbor’s property. You can’t dump your garbage in your neighbor’s property, you can’t pollute people’s water, you shouldn’t pollute people’s air. But this is done with property rights, it’s not by international regulations and taxations and doing silly things and then not figuring out, is the earth is really warming or is it warming in one spot and getting cold in another spot? Or is this just part of natural occurrences.

And for people in Washington especially, if you challenge the status quo, the conventional wisdom about global warming, boy you are painted as somebody from the very, very dark ages. But the truth is that it does deserve a lot of attention and a lot of study. But that is our job, to make sure that we can answer these questions. But I don’t have any hope at all with the economic bailout programs, the recovery programs. They only know one thing, they did diagnose it, they figured the deficits were too high and there was too much debt, so they came in, “Well let’s spend more money and they run up the deficits even more and print even more money and regulate more”. So they might have sensed that there is a problem but they are just doing more of the same things that I don’t have any confidence at all other than the fact that they will contribute to the demise of the dollar.

Torture

This past week we had some major conversations on the House floor dealing with torture. Now you think maybe the issue ought to be, “Has our country been involved with torture?” and I think if you saw some pictures a few years ago it looked like we were involved in torture. And it looked like it didn’t do us any good at all around the world. It did us a lot of harm and I believe those individuals who have assessed it and said that is a strong motivation for people to join the Al-Qaida. Us being over there, us bombing their country, killing civilians, causing a lot of refugees and then also torturing people. So, if that is the case, the question is, is it legal? Well, no it’s not legal. It’s illegal under our laws, it’s illegal under international law. Is it moral? Well, from my view point it think it’s immoral. And does it do any good? There is no evidence that it does any good whatsoever. Even though there are some that would say, “Oh no, you can’t imagine how many terrorists that we have saved from coming here because we tortured people and got information”.

I had somebody, I have a little group in Washington that comes to my office, it’s called the Liberty Congress of other members, and we had a speaker a couple of weeks ago named Matthew Alexander. He’s written a book and it’s called, “How to Break a Terrorist” and he has experience. He was in the air force but he was trained in interrogation and he did over three hundred interrogations in Iraq. He was asked on numerous occasions by his superiors to torture, and he absolutely refused to do it.

And he wrote a book and talked about this, and he says – and I believe him – that he got more information than any other of our people that tortured the so called suspects and terrorists. So, that I do believe and there is every reason in the world. But is that what we were discussing this week about whether we should have an investigation to find out why we tortured and put this behind us? No, the debate was on what the CIA told Nancy Pelosi four years ago and who said what and what, and was in her notes. So the Republicans said, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to demand an investigation of Pelosi’s conversations and the CIA”. Now to that I wouldn’t have been invited to because that was just for the leadership, but we do get invited for top secret briefings about what’s going on around the world. And I have a rule; I never go.

There’s two reasons I never go. First, you never learn a thing and second, if you do go all you hear is propaganda. So why go and listen to them. And of course a lot of our members and some on our side were very sincere. They went to all this and listened to so many of their briefings and they were convinced that Saddam Hussein was about to drop a nuclear weapon on Washington DC. It was that kind of scare tactics. But that’s what they want to do instead of maybe looking into it.

So what happens in Washington when they deal with these subjects is that it becomes very, very partisan and there are days when I think it’s almost deliberate. Because policies don’t change. Here we are concentrating on this so it diverts the attention from Guantanamo. You know, all of a sudden Democrats say, “Oh, we don’t have enough money to close down Guantanamo”. They have enough money to send troops over into Afghanistan. No money was appropriated to go into Iraq. But the President didn’t wait for the appropriation, he went and sent the troops into Iraq… like there is not enough money to close down Guantanamo without a special appropriation? I mean just a maintenance fees that you run you could use it. So it’s just a distraction. I do think there is a real fight for power and control, but it is also a distracting from the real issue.

Foreign Policy

Have we really talked about a change in our foreign policy? There is no change in our foreign policy. More money than ever, more threats to more people and we’re in every bit as much trouble as ever before. So, there is a lot more that we should and could do, but under today’s circumstances I think we can’t hold our breath. The fact that we’re wondering about whether we should be over there… the argument they make is “if we fight them over there we won’t have to fight them over here”. But the whole thing is that doesn’t add up at all. They were over here. They came over here and 3,000 of our people were killed which is a terrible, terrible thing to happen, and yet the real job should be “why and what were their motivations and what’s going on”. So we go over there with the argument, “We got to go over there and fight them.” When we went over there we lost 5,000 more American and we had 30,000 severe injuries with people losing arms and legs and eyes. A million people have died, 2.5 million people were displaced.

And there are people who have long memories. I say Americans remember nothing and the people in the Middle East forget nothing. They remember everything. So, you know, those memories go for a long time. So this whole idea that all we did is make it easier for them to get us. As a matter of fact, Osama Bin Laden actually that; “we’re going to get you over here, where it is easier”. But then he said, “We’re going to bankrupt you. We’re going to bog you down just like you helped us bog down the Soviet Union.” Once time that’s we were doing as his allies, the same think. You think they would learn but they never do and that is why I anticipated that the bankruptcy will be coming.

Optimism, Honesty and the Future

This whole idea about whether or not we should be optimistic or pessimistic… Ronald Reagan had an upbeat and he was optimistic, and politicians sort of like to follow. Everybody likes to be optimistic and tell you things are okay, things are doing good. But I think that we have to understand that a little bit better. I think the optimism doesn’t come from just talking about a good time tomorrow and everything is going to be okay. I think optimism comes from telling the truth, having transparency, and no secrecy in government and letting the people know where we stand.

Then, if we’re confident with our ideas and we have traditions that we can return to and we have a document that we might follow, then there are reasons to be optimistic. On the other side of the coin, if there is total denial, if they won’t admit the truth, if there is secrecy and all we hear are the lies… You know if I can’t go to a briefing because I don’t expect to get any information, I mean, the people, you, you must think, “Who am I going to listen to, who do we believe in Washington?”

Then they can turn around and say, “It’s okay, we’re going to take care of you. Your kids need education, we’re going to give you money, oh you need healthcare, we’re going to give you free healthcare. Oh you need a house, we’re going to give you a house. Well we own the car companies now, we’re going to make sure your car companies are safe and sound. Insurance companies, we own the banks, we’ll bail you out. We have all the insurance in the world”. And eventually the people will not believe, and that’s what is happening now. They no longer believe and that is justifiable. It is going to be that this is going to spread. It’s here in this room, but it’s going to spread. There are still a lot of people. Like I said, a lot of people still come to Washington and think, “If we just get there and start lobbying and grabbing our share then we’re going to get more and we’re going to be taken care of”. But in time it’s going to change.

This is why I am so convinced that it is important that you continue to do what you are doing in the Campaign for Liberty because it isn’t what I do so much in Washington. I help along but I can’t change Washington. It’s impossible. I give a speech, sometimes somebody listens and sometimes not. A few of you might hear of it. But the solution comes from you, at the grassroots level. People so often ask me, “Well, what should I do?” Well, do what you want to do. Everybody has a different job. The most important thing is we understand the issue, the concept, our history, understand the morality of freedom, the importance of the rule of law.

The constitution is not perfect, and yet the rule of law is very important. And if we can do in the Congress whatever we want with ignoring the constitution, then the President can go to war without a declaration and the courts can do whatever they want, what’s left? All you have to do is have one or two or three things you ignore and you ruin the whole principle. So the rule of law is crucial.

They say, “Well, this is old fashioned, it’s a developing document that has to be modernized”. Well, sure, fine. Amend the constitution as necessary. But fortunately it hasn’t been amended too much, unfortunately it’s been too often ignored. So we do have the tools, we need the energy, we need the people to study and understand, and that’s why I am encouraged because I think there are a lot more now than ever before. There were so many people out there that weren’t so young that knew about this and understood it and have been studying about it, but then the attractiveness of these views to young people really should encourage all of us. Because this will make all the difference.

Have you ever watched television when there are attempts at overthrows or revolutions taking place in other countries? It’s usually on campuses. Just think about Tiananmen square, you know even though that ended badly, China changed to some degree. But it was the young people who get energized and that’s why it is so important. So when I see young people and when they tell me why they are interested in this, and this is not just 5 or 10 people, it’s literally hundreds, and not one comes in and say, “Well, we want a Pell grant. It isn’t that, so this whole idea. Really, enjoyment in life comes from self reliance and the idea that we can take care of yourselves, and only liberty can provide that for us.

In life we should strive for excellence and virtue. If we live in a free society we have a reasonable chance to have a fulfilled life doing that. If you allow government to seek out and decide what is virtuous for us and what is good for us economically, they can only do it by taking away our liberty. So that is the key to it. It is our liberty that is key to all our solutions and belief in that and conviction of that.

And believe me, I’m optimistic we can work our way out of this.

Thank you very much.

Here are more videos from the event:

Transcript of interview:

Michael Delavar: I’m Michael Delavar with “Campaign for Liberty” and I’m sitting with Texas Congressman Ron Paul, and he’s also the champion of the constitution and the founder of the Campaign for Liberty. Dr. Paul, would you describe exactly what “Campaign for Liberty” is?

Ron Paul: “Campaign for Liberty” is a group that was a follow-up from the presidential campaign to continue to spread this message of liberty. It’s a grassroots organization, it’s technically a C4 organization, but it’s mainly to educated and be involved in promoting certain types of legislation.

Michael Delavar: I think we can all agree that there is a lot of work to be done at the federal level to return to our constitutional limited government roots. Your “Audit the Fed” bill HR1207 has received about 170 co-sponsors, including 7 of our 9 representatives here in Washington State. Would you talk for a moment about how we can make real progress with non-partisan, common sense bills, and the limitations of partisanship?

Ron Paul: Well, I don’t think you will ever get rid of the partisanship, because they’re always struggling to have power. Sometimes they don’t even argue over the issues as much as just partisanship, they just want to know who’s going to be in charge.

But there are certain pieces of legislation that will cross party lines and they have to be timed right. The reason the HR1207, the transparency bill of the Fed, is so popular is because it happens to be a time when we’re in a midst of an economic crisis and people are trying to figure out what’s wrong and they know Congress is spending money like crazy and they know that it’s being done irresponsibly and they appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars and they don’t know where it goes and it ends up into some of the companies that are bankrupt and are paying these exorbitant retirement benefits.

Then when they hear that the Federal Reserve gets involved in trillions of dollars, the people become outraged too. So that’s why the Democrats have joined a lot of us in the Republican Party to ask for opening up the books to find out exactly what they have done. We’ve never known exactly what the Fed has done, but as long as the economy was perking along they figured, “Well, they’re taking care of things”. But now that we’re in trouble and we’re calling attention to the fact that the Federal Reserve has contributed to this problem, then there is a clamor now at the grassroots level.

It makes a big difference and that’s where the Campaign for Liberty has comes in, because they’ve been able to spread that message and get people at the grass roots level to ask their members of Congress to support the bill. So, it is a reflection that the system can work. If people are energized enough and the people are concerned enough, they will bring about changes.

Michael Delavar: I’ve noticed that you lead by example, and one of the examples that I’ve noticed is that you don’t speak badly about people publicly. Have you found that you have gained allies in Congress by not talking negatively in public in a negative partisan fashion? And what suggestions do you have for your supporters as they begin their grassroots activist careers?

Ron Paul: Yeah, and sometimes it’s not easy because I never liked a foreign policy in the last eight years and it’s hard to talk about foreign policy and not personalize it with a President or a Vice President. But usually I would rather talk about the administration or the president rather than using names. Because I want it to be a philosophical argument and an issue argument, and I think it does help.

I think what helps me get along with the Democrats as well as the Republicans is always voting on a set of principles. Everybody knows what my principles are and if the chips fall where even though I am a Republican supporting the Democratic side, you get some respect from them at least. But sometimes, of course, it works both ways. Sometimes it will annoy the Republicans if you don’t just stand on the party line. But I think overall in the long term people will respect the positions that you take if you do it on principle.

Michael Delavar: Many lobbying organizations attempt to activate their members to pressure Congress to vote against bills. And while this is important, it’s only half the battle. In order to have limited constitutional government we also have to actual legislations to undo regulations, if you will. And having HR 1207, the Audit the Federal Reserve bill, as a flagship activity of Campaign for Liberty, is this a taste of the positive actions to come? In other words, not just negative pressure but positive solutions?

Ron Paul: Well, I think partially so. I mean it doesn’t give the answer but it’s working towards an answer because we are opposing the secrecy. So almost everything that is positive is negative as well. So if you’re against the government intrusion in our privacy, you are for personal liberties.

I think it should lead to the stage where you’re have to decide what you’re going to replace this system with. We think the Federal Reserve is bad, we think paper money is bad, then we have to have a substitute. Of course, you don’t have to come up with anything totally creative about that, maybe just read the constitution and we might find the answer.

But there will be a challenge. We just can’t go from where we are and snap your fingers and have the Federal Reserve System undone. There are ways you can work transitions, so I think the first step was to get attention of as many people as possible to say that there is something wrong with the Federal Reserve, we need to look into the policy. And the responsible position is for Congress to have oversight.

Michael Delavar: Dr. Paul, on behalf of Washington State Campaign for Liberty members, I thank you for your service to your nation and also I thank you for taking the time to speak with us.

Ron Paul: Thank you very much.

Related posts:

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2. C4L’s Liberty Forum at CPAC 2009 Here’s a collection of videos of supporter-made videos documenting the...
3. Ron Paul at CPAC 2009 Watch Ron Paul and others live on C-SPAN. 02/27/2009 4:00...

On December 16, 2007, during the first political Tea Party in modern history, supporters of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign came together and raised over $6 million online in one day. That event is documented here.

Below is a promotional video for the Ron Paul Tea Party of 2007:

As activists across the country hold national tea parties today, April 15, 2009, Campaign for Liberty president John Tate issued the following statement:

“The concept of the modern day Tea Party began on December 16, 2007 when supporters of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign came together and raised over $6 million online in one day. The tremendous success of that event led activists in the freedom movement and members of the Campaign for Liberty to begin planning today’s Tax Day Tea Parties.

“Success always brings company, and it is very positive that so many conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, constitutionalists and even progressives have come together and joined our efforts. All Americans who are sincere about cutting out of control government spending are welcome to stand with Dr. Paul and the Campaign for Liberty as we fight to take our country back.”

Congressman Ron Paul is the honorary chairman of Campaign for Liberty. For more information, visit www.campaignforliberty.com

Other related websites worth a visit:

• Daily Paul
• Liberty Maven
• Ron Paul Forums
• Young Americans for Liberty
• Tax Day Coalition
• LewRockwell.com
• Mises.org

If you have a blog or website and are reporting on today’s tax day tea parties, post your URL in the comments.

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3. Tea Parties and the Role of Government Show: Montel Across America Date: 4/14/2009 Transcript: Montel Williams:...

Tickets are $200 each and there will be no more than 30 individuals at the event.

Get your tickets at the Campaign for Liberty website.

Related posts:

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2. Ron Paul to visit Iowa and South Carolina Ron Paul’s speech is now over. A video will be...
3. Ron Paul visits South Carolina and Iowa Tonight, Congressman Ron Paul delivered a lecture on “The Politics...

Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Federal Reserve is an excellent demonstration of this principle. A few thousand of us can make a real difference by continuing to urge our representatives to support HR 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009.

More videos from the conference

Event: Campaign for Liberty Regional Conference – St. Louis, Missouri
Date: 3/27/2009

Transcript:

Ron Paul: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Looks like the campaign goes on. I really want to thank you for coming, because I understand you took great risks in coming here. Your name may be on a list, you may have your picture taken. So, I realize you had to take that type of risk to make it here, but I greatly appreciate that, it’s very nice you came. But, hopefully we will remain patriotic and peaceful and eventually show that the opposition… those who would like to curtail our activities, are a really big problem that we face in this country.

In one of the debates, the subject of torture came up and some of you may recall that they wouldn’t call it torture. They said that it was “enhanced interrogation techniques” and I remember referring to it and saying, “Well, that’s sort of sounds like 1984 newspeak”, when you might call something else.

The new administration has a new term too, it’s a new term that they have come up with: “Overseas Contingency Operation”. That’s what is war, that is what they call war. Another newspeak term. So this is the kind of thing that we have to put up with. If they can change words, they try to change our values as well.

But you know, I think it’s so interesting that so many of these banks and mortgage companies and credit card companies are all going bankrupt. But have you ever thought about it? Guess who has been ruling the day on your credit score. These are the people who have been writing all these credit scores for all of us, and they’re the ones that have the greatest deal of trouble and, of course, those people who write the credit scores have never made a mistake or confused anybody’s credit. So, eventually we have to get people back thinking about what is true and proper.

And I, matter of fact, have become more encouraged. I, of course, haven’t been on a speaking engagement like this since last September when we had that little rally up in Minneapolis where twelve thousand people showed up. Many of you were there. So this to me is a continuation. Somebody asked me, “When did you start the Campaign for Liberty?” Well, the Campaign for Liberty Organization was started last summer. But, the campaign for liberty, as far as I am concerned, for myself, started in 1974, the first time I ran for Congress.

That campaign will continue, as it has been for so many of you. But, I think that there is no doubt that the momentum is picking up. We haven’t reformed Washington yet, but our time is coming. We will reform Washington. That is our goal.

There is no doubt that there is a different atmosphere. My life has changed because I never realized how many of you are out there. When it comes to TV interviews, and even in the House and on the floor and other places, there is more credibility. The credibility comes from two reasons. Because I believe, absolutely, that the views are correct, and because of you, because there are enough people now to show that we are a significant number and we will play a role in what is happening in this country.

Now, it may get discouraging because there will be elections and we won’t have the 51%, but if you understand what true revolutions are all about, you don’t have to deal in those precise numbers because true revolutions come about by a small number of people, a dedicated number of people, people who understand and believe in something. Then, 3 or 5 or 6 percent of the country can change it because others are willing to come, and the time is ripe because we are in big trouble with our foreign policy, big trouble financially, monetarily and people now are looking for the answers and I am totally convinced that we can find our answers in what we are doing and in just following the United States Constitution.

Our economy currently is in shambles. And it was, as you saw [...], many had predicted it. It was not only I who was talking about it. It was a predictable event, because of the nature of the monetary system. We have a financial house of cards and we knew that house of cards would come down. That house of cards is being built since 1971. Major events in our recent history were the formulation of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, and that was a pseudo gold-exchange standard where the dollar was supposed to be gold and it would always be exchangable for $35 an ounce. It didn’t take too long for the Federal Reserve to get ahead of itself and print too much money where it was obviously unbacked anymore at $35 an ounce.

That, as was predicted even when it was established in 1944, came to an end percipitously on August 15, 1971. And the world at that time was willing to accept the idea that maybe just the paper dollar would work. And at that time many predicted that it wouldn’t work. It probably worked longer than a lot of us believed it would work. But because it lasted longer than we expected, the bubble got bigger and that, of course, is why this huge international, worldwide house of cards, the financial system, came crashing down.

If you look at the statistics now, the statistics are overwhelming how rapidly this has come. But you know about building a fragile house on an unsound foundation. Well, the foundation isn’t very good either. The house has come down and the only foundation they built on was sand, and that sand was the U.S. dollar. And the dollar is doomed. The dollar can’t be revived unless all of a sudden we come to our senses, stop spending, balance the budget, bring our troops home and pay down our debt, get rid of the income tax and let people go back to work.

In the past, when countries have suffered with inflation… and with what most people refer to as inflation, is somewhat incorrect because they think about prices going up. That is a consequence of inflation. Inflation is when the government or Federal Reserve System or Central Bank increases the money supply.

When the prices go up, the people respond and they say, “There’s not enough money”. Even in this pseudo deflationary period… we don’t have deflation because it makes prices skyrocket… it’s just that there is deflation in the financial instruments because the stock values have gone down and house values have gown down. But even under those conditions, the cry is always for, “There’s not enough money”. And what have we done? Essentially, in these last two years, we have just literally pumped the money out there, (and there was way too much inflation before that anyway), to try to hold this bubble together. But it hasn’t come back.

Now, this situation is very risky not only financially for all of us. How do you survive with a financial system breakdown? How many people have lost in the stock market and with the value of their houses? That is very dangerous. But the real reason that I get concerned about it, is the economic chaos that generally comes with a financial crisis and a monetary crisis, is the threat to our liberties. And that is what we should be concerned about. We want a sound monetary system, a sound economic system, because we want to protect every single one of us, our individual liberty. That is our goal.

I am of the conviction that the dollar cannot be patched together again. They are frantically working on coming up with an international system. You know, in the old days we used to hear talk and rumors of devaluations. When it was $35 an ounce, “When are they doing to devaluate”? And our government would incessantly deny it and say, “There will not be a devaluation”. It was a big event in 1971 when the dollar was devalued by 8%. It was devalued by changing the price of gold from $35 to $38. But it was always denial, always denial. And then later on they went and made a significant denial and said, “No, there will not be any more devaluations”, and then they devalued from $38 and took it up to $42.

Now, of course, it floats and the price of gold floats. But, now the denial is when you hear it on the news. Tonight they were ridiculing anybody who would suggest that there may be some international discussions going on with the banks about a new international currency. I believe they are doing it, and the more they deny it, the more you want to be perking your heads up and keep paying attention because they are probably going to do it.

Now the only thing that is keeping them from doing that is they’re under the gun too, because Mises taught that currencies can’t be created out of thin air. If you just move on to an island and decide, “Well, this is what we’re going to use as money and we’ll print these pieces of paper”. It never worked. The only reason the dollar words, even though i’ts fiat money, is because it was linked to gold at one time, and that’s how it came into existence.

So they will have a lot of trouble having a new currency. Even though I’m sure they are working diligently in doing that. But, once again, this is an attack on us as a nation and on us as a people. Because you don’t need a Federal Government, you don’t need a Federal Reserve System, you don’t need a U.S. Congress to have sound money. All you have to do is legalize the constitution and allow gold and silver to be legal tender and you don’t need the dollar reserve system.

The Federal Reserve was brought into existence in 1913 because they said they needed a “lender of last resort” and they needed a “stable currency”. Now, I don’t think it is a lender of last resort, I think it’s become a spender of first resort.

We talk about the hundreds of billions of dollars the Congress appropriates… and sometimes I just think that’s a distraction, because the big event is occurring at the Federal Reserve System. This is where the power is and this is where the control is. Whether it’s international what they do… and it was described to you earlier… all those things that they do that we’re not allowed to know anything about.

I now call the Federal Reserve System the Fourth Branch of Government. It, essentially, is equivalent to, if not superior to, the other three branches. Now, it seems to be a hopeless task, but if we remember how the Federal Reserve came into existence, we should remember how we can get rid of it. The Federal Reserve was created by a Congressional act, and we can get rid of it by a Congressional act, and we should.

Most people write to me saying, “It makes so much sense”. Most people understand that if you print a lot of money it’s going to lose its value. Why is it that the members of Congress and everybody go along with this? It’s an interesting question because it’s for different reasons. A lot them never even thought about it, you know, and they were never taught about it. During the bubble phase, they are not too worried about it, because there is an appearance of wealth. But what they don’t realize is that the wealth is really based on borrowed money, and an illusion about the value of the currency. So, the value of their house goes up and they claim that that’s a lot of capital, which it is not. When stocks go up they think they have a lot of wealth, which they do not because that can disappear rather quickly.

So, the Federal Reserve then only has about one thing to do; they have to keep the whole thing going over and over again. But the members of Congress are paying more attention, and that s good. But those who are in charge, those who are in leadership of the Republican and the Democrats… I think they know, generally, what’s going on.

But there’s only two groups that we have to worry about in Washington that want to continue this process. And that tends to be the Liberals and the Conservatives. They get along quite well. They pretend not to get along, but they get along pretty well, because Liberals like to spend for one thing, they like the welfare state, and the Conservatives like it because they like the warfare state. So they get together and they compromise and we have both. So now we’ve suffered from the welfare-warfare state, which is what we need to repeal.

Because if we were taxed for what we need to balance the budget, obviously, the economy even would be in a lot worse shape, but it would have stopped a little bit sooner. But this is a way you delay the payment. You run up the bills, you write treasury bills, the Fed monetizes this, the pain and suffering goes to some unknown person. They say that poor people don’t pay income taxes, but believe me, they pay a lot of penalties. They pay for the higher prices and they lose their jobs first, and eventually it moves up the ladder and the inflation ends up wiping out the middle class for a long time. The process is designed to transfer wealth from the middle class to the rich.

And they’re still working at it. Just look at all these bailouts. Is the money coming to your pocket, are they sending it to you? Have they accepted our solution to some of this? Yes. What we could have done, we needed to get some money into your pockets, we just would have gotten rid of the income tax.

But instead, we do the bailouts, we further transfer the wealth, but that will eventually come to and end. It has to, it can’t last. But the goal, of course, is to build big government for different reasons and hope they can keep it together, and that they have done for a while. But we live in historic times. This bubble was not just huge. It was, in my estimation, the largest in the history of the world. It has been pervasive because we issued the dollar and it was the reserve currency, a lot of countries took it and they put it in their funds and used it as reserve, so that was even a relief from us, because we didn’t have to deal with as much price inflation here.

What’s going to happen when they lose confidence in the dollar? And they’re starting to. They’re starting to get nervous. The Chinese are getting nervous with this. They’re talking about the new currency. We live in big times. Very, very important times and that is why we must pay attention. And that is why our campaign, that we are in the middle of right now, has to win. Because our country is threatened if we don’t understand what liberty really means and how it is connected to the financial system and how it is connected to the Federal Reserve.

But on the other side there’s a lot of spending in Washington to pursue our adventures overseas. Just think of the wonderful opportunity that we had in 1989. It probably was even a bigger opportunity than what came after World War II. The depression came, World War II was there. Some people say that Roosevelt ended the depression, that is not true. Some people say that the war ended the depression. Can you imagine the depressed times being ended by sending a million or two million people over to be exposed to gunfire and getting killed and having rationing… that didn’t end it.

But household debt was finally eliminated after World War II. But our government did something else after World War II. They cut spending by two-thirds and they cut taxes by one-third and then there was growth in the consumer demands, and then the depression finally ended.

So that is what was available to us in 1989 when the Cold War ended, when the Soviet system collapsed. Not because we had a lot of nuclear weapons, not because we attacked them and they had lost a military battle. What did they do? They did exactly what Mises predicted they would do. They would fail for economic reasons because it was a flawed system. Then, of course, they overextended themselves overseas and guess where? They went and over extended themselves in a place called Afghanistan.

And of course, that ended their empire. Fifteen of their satellite countries were broken up. What an opportunity we had and still do. We have so many weapons. We probably could defend ourselves for the next 100 years with six submarines. You know, we have so much nuclear power that if anybody touched us, we are a very powerful nation. The only thing that threatens us is internally and our financial system and our moral fiber. That’s what threatens us.

We had everything. We went on a rampage. We continue to spend and build up weapons. They have been working… I don’t know how many years, it might have been a couple of decades… on this F-22. And if you study that you can’t believe, well I imagine you could believe, how many cost overruns there were, how many cover-ups there have been, and how little need there is.

You know, we can put people on the moon, and then they’re worried about how many planes we can fly around. We build aircraft carriers and all these surface vessels to defend ourselves, when if we really got into a war, these things are sitting ducks out there. But you know, you got to keep the conservative Keynesians going because they say it’s good for jobs. And all you have to do is talk about cutting something. Then you go into a town that builds the airplane or builds the ship… The Conservatives can be just as Keynesian as the Liberals are because it’s job making, because they don’t believe and understand that freedom really works, and we wouldn’t have to have the government stimulus like this. We need to just get the government out of our way.

It’s a shame that we haven’t learnt from our own history and it’s a shame that we don’t learn from other’s history. Sometimes we look back at ancient history and try to learn from it but, you know, the Soviet failure is not all that ancient and yet where are we? We’re in Afghanistan.

So, we’ve had a recent election, and I think that fellow that won the Republican nomination, I can’t remember his name, he was construed as the war candidate, and the other guy was the peace candidate because he’s said, “I’m going to bring all the troops home in 16 months from Iraq”. Well, that’s good and he sounds better and he has peaceful sayings and he looks like he would negotiate and talk and have a more sensible foreign policy. Not quite the foreign policy I would like to see. I would like to see a constitutional, non-interventionist foreign policy and bring all the troops home from Korea and Japan and Europe and the Middle East.

One thing we have to give the president credit for is that during the campaign he did say that he would send more troops to Afghanistan. That’s one promise I wish he wouldn’t keep. There are a lot of other ones he won’t keep now. I at least hope he would keep the one in which he said he would bring the troops home from Iraq in sixteen months, but let me tell you, if anybody wants to do any betting, I would take the side of the bet that says our troops are going to be in Iraq for a long, long time until we’re flat-out broke and we’ll have to come home.

You know, in 1964 there was a peace candidate and a war candidate. Remember, Goldwater was the war candidate, and we didn’t want him, because he would expand the war. So we voted for the peace candidate, and that was LBJ and look at what happened there, he went on and on. So, for some reason there are times when you just can almost never trust what those politicians say when they are campaigning. Very difficult.

But the mess we have over there is going to continue. You know, just the Iraq situation… I mean, nobody knows exactly how many billions of dollars have been spent here, because they have war budgets that are off budget and there is all this spending within the DOD budget, but it’s hundreds of billions of dollars that we have spent. And you know, that might have just helped us if we had either been given tax rebates or cut spending or spending here at home. I’m really willing to compromise at times, and I say that you’re getting ready to spend money and you waste it oversees, I say spend it at home, you might as well waste it here at home rather than wasting it oversees.

What we have done is spend these hundreds of billions of dollars oversees, but just think of the other tragedy, the tragedy of life-loss. We don’t really add in to the number of army personnel or military personnel killed in Iraq, that’s over 4,000, 4,200 and some. We don’t count the civilians, and half of the people over there have been civilians. So when they say 150,000 Americans are over there, we might as well have 300,000 over there because of all these contractors who are making twice as much money as the military is making. Because they are all lining up deals and who knows what.

And then there is the issue that these numbers are rising. Our men and woman are being killed in Afghanistan, it’s still less than a thousand but, you know, if it’s your son or daughter, it’s a lot of people, and that is the tragedy. And what is it all for? Why in the world we do this I don’t know. You think we would learn something and yet we do it endlessly.

But what about… and you’re not really allowed to talk this way because you might get your name put on a list. Who knows. But if you express any concern that an Iraqi civilian – you know, those people that died from collateral damage – you’re not even supposed to speak about them. And, you know, we even have some Christian groups that talk like that, like they’re not real people, and therefore we have to go over there as our Christian duty and fight these battles, because of the geography over there.

Well, I have little trouble with that because I understand there are probably well over a million Iraqis that have been killed. But, those who disagree with us will say, “They were all Al Qaida, they were all terrorists”. They were probably freedom fighters in a way, because they probably were fighting because they had foreign occupiers on their land.

One half million refugees. The Christians that were there… I think 600,000 or so… more than half of them ran out of the country, and they’re in danger and even those who would work secular… unbelievably that we were more tolerating. Christianity and secularism was more tolerated under Saddam Hussein that there’s lesser doubt… I mean if you don’t follow strict Muslim customs you could be in trouble over there. There are one-and-a-half million widows over there, over five million orphans in Iraq and we call this a victory for democracy. They call this an achievement, and they’re bragging about it.

And what do we do? We insist on democracy so we ask them to have a vote in Gaza and in Lebanon, so they elect their leaders and we say, “Oh, you’ve elected the wrong ones, we don’t like those leaders so we’re not going to accept them. We won’t recognize them”. How hypocritical can that be, and then we wonder why we are losing credibility around the world. And it would be so nice to have a time when we as Americans could follow the advice of the founding fathers and just say, “Look, no entangling alliances, no nation building, no war mongering”.

And, some of them might say, “We can’t talk to these people, these are terrible people”. In one of the debates… well, it happened in more than one that I got booed and hissed… but I knew you were out there and you weren’t doing it, so that kept me going.

Sometimes I suggested, in Miami, of course, that we should talk to the Cubans, talk to Castro, open up the doors, travel and trade with them. We’ve had sanctions now for 40 years, and they keep blaming us for all their problems, and what have we achieved? We have been taught economically and historically that if you trade and talk with people then you’re less likely to fight with them.

And yet, because of the animosity these people say, “No wait, you can’t do that”. But, didn’t we talk to Kruchev, and didn’t we talk to Gorbachev and we went to China. I feel better about China even though there’s a lot of problems over there. And we have resolutions on the House floor condemning the violations of human rights in China, and I might be the only one that votes against it. Not that I don’t think they have violations. They’ll come and say, “Why aren’t you voting for this? Don’t you think they don’t violate human rights over there and individual rights”. And I say, “No I believe that. When our house is clean and when our plate is clean and when we don’t violate human rights, then I will vote for it.”

Does anybody remember the incident with that ex-mayor from New York? I remember that a little bit, too, and it took me a couple of minutes to wonder what it really meant. Because, immediately to be there… it was one of the early debates on a national stage, and the audience was obviously not on our side. So, I walked off and at the time Ken Snyder, our campaign manager came up to me and within minutes after the debate was over he came over and he said, “Guess what? You’re winning the post-debate polling”. So he was there to urge me on but, in a way, I think I should send him a thank you note because I think he probably did more good for our movement than anything else by spreading out the troops.

I believe the point is very clear. I simplified that night by saying, “They’re over here because we’re over there”. I don’t think it’s any more complicated than that. Even then, I believe I mentioned at that time Robert Pape’s book “Dying to Win” and he studied this. He convinced me because before I started reading his book I was convinced, as so many others have been convinced, that it’s that religion, they teach hatred and it’s a hateful religion and that’s why they come. When I read his book and studied it, he convinced me that the prevailing reason why people are willing to sacrifice their life is because they get so outraged by the destruction of their homeland, because foreigners come and occupy their land. And we need to understand that.

The example I use to try and make that point is, how we would feel as Americans if another country that didn’t look like us, like maybe the Chinese, got so strong that they come over and they put their navy in the Gulf of Mexico to protect their oil. And what if they get so strong that they decide to put a couple of military bases on our land. Do you think that we would be outraged? We would be unified, and we would be making good use of the second amendment.

It need not be this way. We have drifted for probably a hundred years or so in this direction. We have accepted the notion that we can regulate economic transactions, that it is necessary and purposeful, and that if we didn’t regulate every economic transaction from [...] wages, like they started to do in the depression, and not protecting every transaction and interfering in every contract, then there would be no prosperity. Of course, the opposite is true. We as a nation have come to understand pretty well, even though we see violations all the time, that the first amendment means that the press should be regulated. I understand today there was a proposal to start bailing out the newspapers, I don’t know what that’s going to mean. I think that’s a lost cause, I think the internet is going to win that fight.

The whole thing is that we do have a responsibility in what we do. We have to understand that liberty is what we are working for, and liberty is all messed up. I mean, the concept of liberty has been messed up because of what’s happened the last hundred years. The depression played a major role in this, because they blamed the depression, as they are trying to blame this depression, on the same things, which are freedom, free markets and not the Federal Reserve. “It was capitalism that brought us to this.” They did that on the depression and blamed the gold standard and too much freedom as the cause.

So they ushered in this age of 75 or 100 years where economic liberty had to be regulated. And yet we still respect the idea that we shouldn’t practice prior restraint and fortunately, to some degree we practice and believe that we should not regulate personal behavior. That’s up to the individuals, not the government.

To me it’s rather simple. If people want to have social relationships, and they are not hurting other people, and they are doing things that I don’t like, and I don’t approve of, I have to accept that. I have an opportunity to deal with those relationships with myself, my family, my children, my grandchildren, my friends, my church and I might work on that. But I have no legal authority to use the force of government to try to tell you what you should do with your personal life.

Some people say, well you might do bad things. That is true, some people might. But the only way that is going to work is if people make mistakes, you the individual suffers the consequences and you can’t go to the government to get taken care of because you made bad mistakes and bad judgments.

We are generally tolerant, except political correctness sometimes affects us on our freedom of speech. But generally we have libel laws. I mean, they say now this means anarchy and you can say and do anything. No, there are limits to personal behavior, you can’t hurt people, you can’t libel people. But it’s rather standoffish and you allow people a pretty good leeway in what they can do, but not in economics. In economics it has to be regulated because of “fairness”. They don’t believe that the people will be prosperous if we don’t do this. And the opposite is true. Why have we been a prosperous nation? Because we were the freest nation, that’s why we became prosperous.

And yet, today what have we done? We have undermined that freedom. We have some people defending economic freedom and some people defending personal freedom, but we don’t have enough people defending individual liberty. That is what has to be defended. Our liberties, of course, do not come from our government. The government, hopefully, can help protect those liberties, but it does more to undermine those liberties.

You know, one responsibility we might say, as a matter of fact, is in the constitution, that we’re not allowed to counterfeit. Well, what do we have? We have the biggest counterfeiting machine in the history of the world in Washington. The government is supposed to protect property rights. Well, what does it mean? Do we really own our property? We’re paying rent, then we ask the government for what we can use it. So, we have the government so involved in what we do economically, and then we wonder why the country is getting poorer.

And the worst part of the story, at least for now, is that we’re a lot poorer than it appears right now, because almost everybody is poorer now than they were a year ago. But believe me, the country can get a lot poorer. Now do I worry about this? Yes, I do because it was so unnecessary that we should have had to go through this. The one thing I don’t worry about is that if we did the right thing, if we restored constitutional law, understood what private property was, understood what honest money was all about, had our personal liberties, didn’t have an income tax, and we we’re all broke, we could all go out tomorrow and start working, I wouldn’t worry about you for one minute.

Erosion of that foundation which is built of sand, and that is the dollar system, is that we continue this for a while longer, but that there is no hesitation now in Washington DC to hold up. If we can bailout Wall Street, we can bail out every other person. I mean the budget has been presented. It’s 3.6 trillion dollars, 1.8 trillion dollars of debt, the deficit this year is going to be bigger than that, spending will be bigger, and the militarism will spread. But, all that is putting pressure on the dollar. Now, when the dollar starts losing value rapidly, just as the house of cards came down rapidly, if you study monetary history, the end stages of the destruction of a currency comes rapidly too. There will be gradual inflation, but then skyrocketing, runaway inflation comes quickly. That’s dangerous. That’s dangerous because we can send all the checks out that we want to from Washington DC, but we won’t be able to send them out fast enough.

And yes, nobody is going to be short in their Social Security check, but the big question is, “What will it buy?” They’ll say, “Well, it won’t matter because the government is going to give us our medical care, and they’ll give us our food stamps”. It won’t work that way. So this is what we have to be prepared for. And, of course, that’s why we have a campaign for liberty and that’s why we are here.

And because you are here, because you have responded, because you have supported this campaign and other campaigns and you’re doing a lot on your own, I am encouraged, I am enthusiastic about this because I know you’re there. There was a long time during which I didn’t know how many of you were there, and you know, there’s no way you can count a remnant, there’s always a few… but the great thing is that there sure is a remnant. There are a number of people out there that knew and studied this. What about the young people that have joined us? That’s what is exiting about this.

Every time some young people stop at my office, more so now than it used to be, like it’s very frequent in Washington, they come by and they come in and if I am there, I’ll talk with them and speak with them and probably sign a constitution and probably tell them, “Well, one thing I know is that you probably know this constitution a lot better than the people over in the house floor. I wish I could pass them out over there”. I always asked them, “How long have you been interested?” and very often the young people bring their parents, they introduce their parents to me, and that’s always interesting. Then I’ll ask, “What was it? Was it the whole message of freedom, or what was it that got your attention?” Yes, they like the message of freedom, but when they get to the specifics, the two things that they mention the most are the constitution; they know I defend the constitution, that’s what got their attention, and the other one is sound money, the Federal Reserve and honest money.

So, that is the thing that that generation will do with us, and hopefully it will be soon. The first step was described to you a little while ago: before we end the Fed, we’re going to audit the Fed. Once it’s revealed what they do, I think the American people will be with us. And, you know, it’s going to be real hard. No matter who you talk to about transparency now of Treasury and the Fed and where this money is going… Republican and Democrats, and Liberals and Conservatives and Populists and Libertarians all say, “Yea, Yea. We have to know what’s going on”. I think if that bill ever came to the floor, I don’t believe there would be one person that would vote to say, “No, we want a totally secret Federal Reserve System”. Their job will be to get it there. But they deal in trillions of dollars, and they don’t have to tell us a word. I mean, they are more powerful than the other three branches of government, but the positive side of this is that we do have the authority. We not only have the authority, but we also have the responsibility. Congress has the responsibility, but we have the responsibility that we get Congress off their duffs and make sure that they look into this and take care of this. It’s up to us.

Freedom needs to be put back together. We need to think of it as a union, that the individual is important and that governing comes locally. We must govern our own lives. We must govern within our families and our local community and our churches. It’s not that people want to call us anarchism, we don’t want to break any rules or regulations. I was on a radio station just two nights ago, and it was a very liberal ratio station. They were very nice to me and let me explain, but they just couldn’t understand this economic issue, they just had to have these regulations. They couldn’t get it into their mind, because they do care about poor people. I think most of them have humanitarian concerns, but if they would only look at the statistics that show what happens when people allow the government to make the decisions…

If you have somebody with central economic planning, they make this decision, usually wrong, that hurts all of us. Now, if we make individual choices, or local government choices, they’re not always going to be right, we live in an imperfect world. We’re all imperfect, so we make mistakes. So that means we want to limit the damage done by those mistakes, and the market is so wonderful in sorting all this out. We don’t like to use the word “democracy” because there’s a wrong connotation to that, but the market is democratic in the sense that it’s the ultimate vote. The free market is designed not to protect big labor, not to protect big business, not to protect big government, not to protect the banks or international companies. The most important purpose for which the free market is designed is taking care of the consumer. And everybody is a consumer, and every time you spend a penny… it used to be said “a penny”, now I guess you have to spend a dollar to count it… every time you spend any money at all, you’re voting. And if you have a free market, it’s a tough business. Because if you’re in business and they don’t like your product, or your cost is too high, you will go out of business instead of everybody being propped up and deluded into low interest rates and guarantees and all this moral risk and moral hazard that we create through the monetary system, that step would be individualized and companies would come and go and there would be individual places where this would happen, but overall, the consumer would always be protected. Just as we protect individual liberty, the market protects the consumer and this is where prosperity would come from.

Freedom is something that has only been tried recently in the history of the world, because through the thousands and thousands of years of recorded history, true freedom has only been tried for several hundred years in a serious way, and the prosperity has been unbelievable. And here we are, about to reject this experiment with liberty, yet this is where the prosperity came from. But the main part about the recognition of individual freedom… and this is not only economic…what it does is it allows the release of all creative energy that man has. He then becomes a creative person, and all this creativity comes together and meshes together. No economic planner could do that, and that is what is so wonderful about that. And the recognition that this is a God given right to your liberties… and it sort of reminds me of the parable that you really don’t have to fret and that we will be taken care of. That little parable doesn’t say that we can’t and shouldn’t work. But, if we do the right things, we really don’t have to fret about it. And that’s why I was saying that if we had our liberties and sound money, I wouldn’t worry about tomorrow. I think we could take care of ourselves, and we could take care of our planet as well too.

Under these circumstances, it’s a tremendous environmental thing as well. Because you have no right to pollute your neighbor’s property. People who own their property always take better care of their property, than when the government owns the property.

[...] socialism was communism, and the environmental protection was atrocious. All you have to do is compare what government land looks with privately owned land. So, there are so many arguments for this, and I really don’t need to sell you on this, because you already know this. But what we need to be energized for is the activity. The activity that has been coming about, although I have been motivated to push the Campaign for Liberty organization… it actually for legal and other reasons is run by other people.

And John Tate and Debby Parker and the people doing all this work and all of you who have al participated… and every day I hear of spontaneous things that people are doing. This is like a wildfire spreading. This is a wonderful, positive wildfire and it is spreading around the country and it is growing and we will have an influence.

So, it is up to us to remain totally energized and continue to do this. And we can’t be discouraged because Congress is going to vote for another stimulus bill next week. Because when the time comes, they will come to us and ask us… they have to because they don’t have the answers. They can’t come up with a new paper currency and they have done this in the past and had to resort to sound money.

They will come if we appear to have the answers, so the recommendation is that we study hard. I study every single day. I still read Mises and Rothbard, trying to understand better explanations of the market place. Because a lot of people do ask me questions, and I want to learn it and understand it. If you learn and study and make yourself available to solve these problems, somebody will use you. There will be a guiding hand. People are asking me every day, they’ll come to my office and young kids will say, “Oh, I love what you say, this is great, great. I wonder what you did. Tell me how to be a Congressman.”

I tell them one thing, “Don’t set your goal to be a Congressman”. It may end up that way, and I always tell the story about when I first decided to run for Congress many, many years ago. I was in a very busy medical practice, but I was really energized by the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement. So, in 1974 I told my wife I was going to run for Congress. And she asked me, “Why in the world would you want to do that for?” I said, “Well, I just want to talk about things, you know”. In 1974 what Republican would rather want to run in the Watergate year. She said, “It would be dangerous”. I said, “How in the world could it be dangerous? All I have to do is go and talk about it”. She said, “No, it’s dangerous because you could end up getting elected”. But I guaranteed her that wouldn’t happen, I’m staying here at home.

You know, just the other day one of my sons… he is now a physician… told me, “Dad, I don’t think I ever told you this, but I was really worried when you ran for Congress. I thought you would leave and I would never see you again and we’d have to move to Washington” and all these things which never even crossed my mind.

But the goal shouldn’t be…. you don’t know what the exact goal is… somebody might end up running for Congress and that’s okay. But I don’t want people thinking at the age of 18 that their goal is to be in Congress. Their goal ought to be to understand what freedom is all about, what our history is all about, and what our constitution means.

I have, over the years, been criticized for not being aggressive enough. I’ve been hearing people say, “This is it, grab the other members of the Congress and do this, do this”, but I don’t believe that works. What does work though is waiting for them to ask the question and I feel very good that they are asking more questions. And they will want to ask you more questions as time goes on.

I had one member several years back, he’d been in Congress and I went back in 1996, he was a young guy and would come down, he would come and sit beside me and ask, “Ron, why did you vote that way?” and I would explain it to him. It was usually one of those votes where I was voting by myself.

So it was a little seem strange and he would feel, “Whose this crazy new guy who just came back in Congress?” So he did that 3, 4, 5 times, and all of a sudden he started voting up there, we’re two of us. He was an original member of the Liberty Caucus in Congress, and now he is the governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford.

Lately I have had more people come in a quiet moment because they wouldn’t want anybody else to know that they are asking me questions. One person asked me, “How does the Federal Reserve work like?” One person on the banking committee came up to me a month or two ago and asked, “You mean, our dollar is not backed by gold?”

But I also get more coming now and asking questions like, “What should I do with my money? Where do you buy gold?” Things are changing, the conditions are ripe for us, although they’re very dangerous. But one other thing is with doing this it is very important that we have fun doing it, because we don’t know exactly what happens today, tomorrow, the next day. People will ask, “Well, when is the big crash coming?” Well, a big portion of the crash has already happened. The financial system has come and blew, but the big one with the dollar… I don’t know… two, three years.

But I don’t think so much about the exact date because we don’t know, but what I do think about is, “Do I understand it right? Do I know the issues as best I can and am I doing as much as I can and have as much fun? Being with people who are like minded should be a lot of fun, this could be energizing. This can do a lot for us in what we are doing because we have allies. And just remember, we don’t have to wait for the 51%. We just need people like you who are part of that 3% or 4% or 5% who will lead this country, just as there were 3% or 4% or 5% of the people who led us in the original revolution, let us emulate the original revolution and win.

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