Channel: CNBC
Show: Squawk Box
Date: 11/13/2009

Joe Kernen: But Chris Dodd has a bill taking aim at the Fed. The overhaul bill that he proposes would reduce the role of the Federal Reserve. However, Congressman Ron Paul has been on that crusade for some time now, calling for more transparency at the central bank. He joins us this morning.

Congressman, great to see you. Hello.

Ron Paul: Thank you, nice to be with you this morning.

Joe Kernen: Let me start with… you remember Treasury Secretary Geithner and what he wanted to do. He wanted to vastly embolden the Fed in a lot of these areas and give them more power. What was your initial reaction to what he wanted to do?

Ron Paul: Well, it was terrible because I start with the idea that regulations won’t solve our problems. In Washington the only choice is whose going to be the big regulator. So it’s not much of a choice for me. I certainly don’t want to give the Federal Reserve more power, so I don’t like it when Geithner says, “Give the Fed more power”. So I’d much rather have somebody else do it even though I think that’s not going to solve the problem.

Joe Kernen: Really? So the Dodd Bill sets up a lot more different regulators, although there might be a single on, you don’t like that one much more?

Ron Paul: Oh no. See, the problem is that we have a flawed system. We have artificially low interest rates, we have the lender of last resort, we have this horrendous moral hazard in our system. Instead of correcting the problems and changing policy, what we do is we say “We can tinker with the symptoms with regulations” and that even further interferes with the market forces. We need the market to work and we have not allowed the market to work for many, many decades. Interest rates are always artificial, “too big to fail” was always there. There was always the lender of last resort. As long as you have that, regulations will not solve the problem. Take, for instance, after ENRON went down we immediately passed Sarbanes-Oxley saying “we didn’t have enough regulations.” It had nothing to do with it. Where did some of the companies go then? There were too many regulations so they had to leave this country.

So I would say that we’ve embarked on the wrong course and whether you put the regulations in the Fed or outside the Fed, it’s not a whole lot different. But we certainly don’t want to give the Fed more power. It’s much easier for the Congress to assume the responsibility of oversight if it’s outside the Fed. For some reason up until recently the Fed was sacred. You weren’t even allowed to ask questions, let alone get the answers. And now, of course, the momentum is in the direction of “even the Fed ought to be transparent” and I think that, of course, is very important.

Joe Kernen: What’s your bill? You got how many co-sponsors and do you still like your bill, because I saw somewhere that you said it’s already been gutted?

Ron Paul: Well, the intention is that one time they said they would put it into Barney Frank’s bill. It never actually got in there. So the plan now is to get an audit put in to the bill. But it will be a pseudo-audit, it won’t amount to much. We have 309 co-sponsors and we have all the Republicans on the bill as well as about a 130 Democrats. So it’s very, very bipartisan. There has been a national poll – which I’m surprised that there even would be polling on this subject, I would never have dreamt about it a couple of years ago. But 75% American people say, “Yeah, we should know what’s going on with the Fed”. So that 75% of the electorate saying that we should do our job and look at the Fed is the reason why there is well over 2/3rds of members of Congress supporting this bill. This bill would pass tomorrow if we brought it up under suspension, but the powers to be, the Fed, is working frantically, they’re editorializing, they’ve hired a lobbyist. They do not want us to know what they’re doing and they use all kinds of frivolous arguments why the Congress is not allowed to know what they’re up to.

News Anchor: What makes you so confident, Congressman, that the GAO is competent enough to audit the Fed reliably? And what do you make of those who say that Congress already has the right to ask a lot of questions to the Fed; they do it every time the chairman comes to the Hill?

Ron Paul: But they’re not allowed to ask the right questions. You’re not allowed to ask what kind of arrangements they make with a foreign bank or foreign central banks or foreign governments or international financial organizations or the details of the discount window, which companies got their benefits. So no, we’re not really allowed to. Now, the GAO may be far from perfect, but they probably have one of the best reputations in Washington if you’re going to look into something. It’s been bipartisan and somebody asked me once, “Who’s going to regulate the regulator,” you know, who’s going to regulate and check out the GAO. I think that’s a decent question, but under the circumstances there is not much else that we can do. They are the ones that we should look to to looking into the Fed.

News Anchor: Congressman, you said we’re on the wrong course. I wonder if you can tell for us what you feel is the right course. I mean, you’ve written a book called “End the Fed”. So you want to end the Fed, but my guess is when you talk about the market working you also want to end deposit insurance. Is that part of the problem also?

Ron Paul: Oh, sure. I think deposit insurance… immediately people say “Oh, my accounts won’t be insured”. No, they will be insured by private companies and each and every individual bank would be monitored instead of having massive bank failures and financial crises and each and every individual bank…

News Anchor: Can I just ask you this: You’ve seen the pictures of the 1930s when we had runs on banks. Is that something that’s acceptable to you that people should be afraid they would lose money in the event of a bank failure?

Ron Paul: Well, if you had private insurance there wouldn’t be. But the bank runs is a consequences of Fed policy. You know, the Fed has been around since 1913 but their first crisis came from the inflation through World War I and we had the depression of 1920-1921 and it lasted about a year. But back then they didn’t believe that you should bail out everybody and pump more credit in. They allowed the liquidation of the malinvestment, they allowed the debt to be eliminated and then go back to market interest rates and go back to work again.

But today, ever since the depression, Hoover and Roosevelt set the standard along with Keynes. Keynes is really the individual we follow and it’s not a market phenomenon. We don’t have market interest rates. We have guarantees that people are going to make mistakes; we have guarantees that we’re going to have too many houses. But what do we do now? We had a program where both Congress and the Fed encouraged the housing industry. Finally the bubble burst, which so many of us predicted would happen. So what are we trying to do in Congress right now? We’re trying to stimulate housing and to keep prices up. What we need to do is let the prices of houses drop and we don’t want to stimulate anything, we want the prices to adjust, we want these houses that were overly priced to get low enough so poor people can buy houses once again. And now we come up with cash for clunkers and all this silly stuff here. We have no confidence whatsoever in the market economy.

News Anchor: And just one more thing which is that when you talk about the right course, if I am not mistaken, you want to go back to the gold standard? Is that the right way to run monetary policy, in your opinion?

Ron Paul: No, but I’d like to go forward to a commodity standard. There were a lot of always in the old gold standard because there was bimetallism and fixed price between gold and silver. It’s still on the books that gold and silver is legal tender and we ignore it. If you use gold and silver as legal tender today, you go to jail. There is nothing in the law that says a Federal Reserve note equals a dollar. We can’t even define a dollar. No, we should have a definition of a dollar. How can you have a measuring rod which you can’t define? It’s totally foolish.

I really like the idea of allowing the market to determine what backs the currency, make sure there are no-fraud laws, and really look into the matter whether or not we should have fractional reserve banking. Yes, you have the Fed creating money out of this air, but then this is magnified by fractional reserve banking which is really fraudulent. And all it does is build financial bubbles guaranteeing the business cycle and the collapses, and as long as you patch it together, the longer you do that, the bigger the bubble. And now we’re in the midst of a big correction.

News Anchor: So just to be clear, no fractional reserve banking means a dollar loaned out equals a dollar on reserve, right? Or a dollar of capital? Is that what you would do?

Ron Paul: Yeah, if you put a hundred dollars in the bank today, the bank immediately has $190. No, if you put a $100 in today you have to say it has to stay there for 3 months and then you can loan it out for 3 months. But you don’t expand the money supply. The money supply, the Fed creates a trillion and in a few months it’s nine trillion. And that’s where the distortions come from and of course, everybody loves it when it’s going up because the prices of houses are going up and everything’s happening that seems to please a lot until the correction comes. Politicians love it. You can fight wars that you don’t have to pay for, you can run the welfare state that you don’t have to pay for. So if you believe in limited government, you have to look at monetary policy and decide that you just can’t create money out of thin air. That is the culprit and you can’t solve the problem by regulations.

News Anchor: Speaking of policy, Congressman Watt has this amendment that would audit the 13-3 powers of the Fed, the special stuff that allowed them to do so much of what happened over the past year. You’re saying that does not go far enough. Is that right?

Ron Paul: Oh, no, that’s just… the Fed has already agreed to that. The Fed’s position is, “Yeah, we’ll let you look at that. We’re going to wind those programs down anyway”, but the big stuff that is done behind the scenes, the Fed is part of the Plunge Protection Team and they can create the credit and they can make all the deals overseas. And that’s what we need to look at. But I would agree with that bill, because it is more than we’re getting now. This is what got the attention of a lot of people when members of Congress started asking about 13-3 and these extensions of loans and who’s getting the money. That’s very, very important. But that’s still only minor compared to what I’m talking about.

News Anchor: Ron, you’re a doctor too, right?

Ron Paul: Yes, that is correct.

News Anchor: So you got comments on health care, I bet. And how about the dollar, we’re orchestrating a pretty nice decline there, too, aren’t we? That’s interesting. But we’re out of time. Are you ever in this area?

Ron Paul: On occasion, and the dollar is the big issue.

News Anchor: Well, get in here.

Ron Paul: I’d like to come in and talk to you.

News Anchor: Come in here for two hours. We’ll let you just go off.

Ron Paul: I don’t know if I can stand you guys for 2 hours.

News Anchor: You can do the talking. We’ll just let you loose and we’re going to advertise it before we do. Thank you, Congressman. We appreciate it.

Ron Paul: Alright, thank you.

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Show: Glenn Beck Show
Channel: Fox News
Date: 11/06/2009
Host: Judge Andrew Napolitano

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Libertarians and Republicans joined forces this year at the tea parties, town halls and 9/12 rallies to protest big government interfering in our lives. But the parties differ on so many issues. Can the alliance remain or is it now the time for a third party to emerge? Joining us now is Texas Congressman Ron Paul and his son, Rand Paul.

Rand is running for Senate in Kentucky next year. Rand, first to you, you are an unabashed right down the line libertarian, yet you are running in the Republican primary for the United States Senate and leading, I might say, in the latest polls. Why the Republican Party?

Rand Paul: We’re doing quite well, but I’d like to call myself a constitutional conservative and I think that resonates in the Republican primary. I think what we’re finding is as we get our message out is that the message is actually popular. I think there is a disconnect between the Republican primary voter who does believe like myself in limited constitutional government and our leaders who have sometimes let us down.

It’s like the bank bailout. I said I have yet to meet a Republican primary voter who would have voted for it and yet, our leaders did vote for it. So I think there is a disconnect between the leadership and the primary voter. But I think the primary voter and the platform in the Republican Party are very conservative and I think as we get our message out and as we’re rising in the polls, it shows that the message is popular in the Republican primary.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Congressman Paul, we just witnessed a third party candidate running for Congress in Upstate New York. He was a conservative. He had a lot of strong libertarian leanings. The Republican was a moderate. She withdrew from the race and endorsed the Democrat who won. Yet, this conservative/libertarian got 45 percent of the vote. Question, will this spawn… there is his picture, Doug Hoffman. Question, will this spawn more and similar efforts by third party as your son calls them constitutionalist Republicans around the country?

Ron Paul: Well, I think there will be a lot more, but I think it really made Rand’s point that the leadership is at fault so often. It was the leadership that handpicked their candidate that finally dropped out of the race and became a Democrat, so that makes it a very strong point. So hopefully, they’ll get their act together and get the strong candidates that believe in limited government and believe what they say ought to be followed through with policy. That’s where the real problem is. I just don’t see in the near future a third party taking over, not because it wouldn’t be advantageous, but mainly because the laws are so biased and the credibility in the media. It just doesn’t happen. So the two major parties, which very often aren’t a whole lot different, make it very difficult to compete. You can’t get into debates. You can’t participate, so I think the battle will be fought in the big two parties and that means if you’re for limited government, you have to pick and choose and decide which candidate you’re going to support.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Rand, your dad is one of the few people on all of government today who when he says he’s for limited government, truly means it. Are you running for the Republican nomination for the Senate in Kentucky on a similar platform, that your goal is to shrink the federal government back down to the confines that the Constitution put around it?

Rand Paul: Absolutely. I think if we operated under the enumerated powers of the Constitution, we’d have a balanced budget. But I think we need reform. I don’t think the politicians are trustworthy and I think there has to be a rule requiring them to balance the budget because I don’t think they’ll ever do it on their own. In Kentucky, we have to balance the budget by statute. I think we need the same kind of rules in Washington.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: We can’t even get rules in Washington that require members of Congress to read the laws or point to the part of the Constitution that authorizes the laws. Congressman Paul, I’m very disturbed at Lindsey Graham, but it turns out he’s been attacking you for a long time. But last week, he said the following, “I’m going to grow this party. I’m not going to let it be hijacked by Ron Paul.” What is he afraid of, small government, maximum individual liberty, lower taxes?

Ron Paul: Well, I don’t know, but he seems to have given me a lot of credibility as if I have control over growing or shrinking the Republican Party. But maybe he wants to give me more credibility than I have, but certainly, I think he probably wants to grow the Republican Party, I do too and everybody, I assume, who is in the Republican Party would like to be in the majority. But the issue is what do you believe in? You know, do you believe in more government? But if you start off with saying, “Well, we’ll do this by being half of a Democrat. Oh, we don’t want to be a whole Democrat. We’ll be a half of a Democrat. Give up half of what the Republicans believe in.” I don’t buy into that. I can’t work under those conditions and the country has been working under those conditions for a hundred years. They always sacrifice a portion of their liberties thinking it’s a compromise, but it really doesn’t work. It’s a sacrifice of so much liberty and you end up with a mess. You end up with bankruptcy and you end up with a bureaucracy you can’t control and you end up with a financial crisis, so I would say that type of compromise isn’t worthwhile.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Congressman Ron Paul and Dr. Rand Paul, thanks for joining us.

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Show: Morning Meeting
Channel: MSNBC
Date: 11/05/2009

Transcript:

Dylan Ratigan: The bill no longer audits the Fed. In fact, the legislation gives Congress no control over the Fed’s authority to make monetary policy. That, perhaps, is a worthwhile debate, but it does not require any transparency either in the Fed’s secret agreements with foreign central banks, not to mention the monies that are pushed out to our own banks. Committee chair Barnie Frank told his constituents back in August that Congressman Paul’s plan would pass, likely in October. For the record it is now November and there is still no vote and if there were to be a vote it would be on a gutted version of the bill! Thirteen committee Democrats currently signed on to this shell of the Fed audit bill and now we’ll wait up and see if they’ll stand up for real change or just push through more false solutions in Washington DC.

Joining us now is Republican Committee member Ron Paul who originally proposed Audit the Fed. He will present and amendment before the full vote to get real reform back into the legislation. Chrystia Freeland is also here.

Representative Paul, in brief explain to all of us why you think it is so important that the American taxpayer be able to see what is going on inside of the Federal Reserve? Why does that matter, why should we care so much?

Ron Paul: It’s because everybody uses dollars as our currency and it’s an international currency. So it is very, very important, and yet it’s managed by a small group of people really run by the Federal Reserve board chairman and they decide each and every day how much money there should be printed that week and what the interest rates should be. So they are the central economic planners. And since they can create credit out of thin air and take care of their friends and buddies, which means that the burden is placed on the taxpayers… not directly with a tax but indirectly by devaluing their money. And that means that every time a price goes up, whether it’s medical care cost or education, you’re really paying a tax.

But the thing that gripes me most is it’s done secretly and they’re supposed to be like they’re sacred and never have their books opened. But one thing good has come out of this crisis; that the American people are demanding transparency and I think that’s why I’ve gotten so many co-sponsors on this bill. We do have a 130 Democrats on this, 308 total total supporters of this bill. So it will be a shame if we don’t get this through and it is true, it is going through the committee right now and today or tomorrow I might have my chance to offer my amendment and put it into the bill.

Chrystia Freeland: Congressman Paul, who is opposed to your push for transparency, who’s fighting it?

Ron Paul: The Fed. The Fed has actually, I think for the first time in their history, hired a lobbyist and the lobbyist used to work for ENRON. So they’re diligently pumping up the fear. You know, “Oh, if we know what was going on with the Fed it would causes tremendous inflation, it would cause interest rates to go up and all sorts of things. You know, if we knew what was going we might create a financial crisis.” It’s the Fed and the banks and the big corporations and some of the politicians are in the know and getting benefits. But the system depends on the control of money. But this is not new, this is historic.

The king in the old days always had control of the money, they did it in different ways. They clipped coins, diluted the metal, printed money. Today it’s really sophisticated; it’s done secretly with a computer and that’s why it has made it so much more dangerous than ever before.

Dylan Ratigan: Let’s just back away for a second because the Fed lobbyist some of the CEOs, some of the bank CEOs quite honestly might have a point. What if we were to look inside the Federal Reserve as you suspect, I certainly suspect it and I think Christian Freeman suspects it, anybody who understands how our financial system was built over the past 10 years suspects, that all those trillions of dollars that the Federal Reserve… that were collateralized… they’ve taken from the banks, is worth far less than it’s currently been represented as. So let’s say that that the 8 trillion of the Fed may be only worth 4 trillion. And everybody is basically trying to cover up the fact that there is this huge hole, this huge fraud has been perpetrated by the banks and the fraud would reveal itself truthfully if they were to audit the Federal Reserve and that would cause panic. Let’s assume they’re right, let’s assume that you’re right, let’s assume that this is worthless crap at the Fed, how do you deal with that fallout if, in fact, we get what we want and they open the closet. And what do you think is in there is in there, which is nothing?

Ron Paul: But pretending it’s worth 8 trillion is worth 2 trillion or even less doesn’t solve our problems. It just delays the agony. For me it would be like in medicine someone had cancer and we treated him with aspirin and we said, “Oh you don’t want to know the truth, and we don’t give you a real treatment”. You have to know the truth and you have to have a real treatment and today they won’t look at the real truth and the cause of the business cycle and the cause all the financial bubble and then the bursting of that bubble. What they’re doing is they’re saying, “Oh, all we need are more regulations, and what we need to do is prop up all the bad debt. We don’t want liquidation of debt, we don’t want the prices down, let’s stimulate housing” and on and on. So they’re doing everything that caused the bubble before to try to re-inflation the bubble, and believe me, they’re not going to be able to do it this time.

Chrystia Freeland: Congressman Paul, I agree with you that there is a little bit of an irony in the fact that in curing a crisis which was cause by too much money pumped out, one of the cures turns out to have been spending more government money. But don’t you have to agree that that cure has turned out to be pretty effective? We haven’t had a second great depression, the financial crisis has more or less been resolved. Isn’t that better than having a total freezing of the financial system, which it looked as if we might face last fall?

Ron Paul: Not long term. What if it turns out that we’re in 1930 and we have another 15 years of problems ahead of us. So, no. I think we’re still kidding ourselves. They say the GDP is up, but they printed money and they spent the money and when government spends money the GDP goes up.

Chrystia Freeland: Isn’t that better than the alternative of the entire economy just screeching to a halt?

Ron Paul: No, it really isn’t. You have to bite the bullet, you have to admit the truth, you have to make the right corrections. We used to do this. We’ve never had a perfect system; there was always abuse of the gold standard, but when they got out of whack they allowed the correction to occur rather quickly. The best example is the depression of 1920 and 1921. It lasted about a year and people did go bankrupt and it was really tough, but it’s not even an historical event. It was the introduction by Hoover and Roosevelt that the politicians can’t have hands off; you have to, “now that you have this sophisticated Federal Reserve, we’ll never allow recessions to occur.” They took the recessions of the early 1930 and turned it into a depression. So though you can do it is better. It is kind of like getting somebody off drugs. What you’re talking about is you don’t want the withdrawal symptoms, and I admit there will be withdrawal symptoms. But, keeping them on the drug which is easy money, easy spending and huge deficits and all that, that will kill the patient. And the patient remains the dollar and we’re going to be on the verge of killing the patient and when you see gold up at $1100 an ounce, that is a little bit of a warning sign. That might only be the beginning of what we’re going to see.

Dylan Ratigan: But what if you just decided is that you didn’t care about the children? If you don’t care about children, isn’t it better just to ignore it? To heck with the kids, it’s easier for me to just print the money and go out to dinner, don’t you think?

Ron Paul: Well, yea. That is live high on the hog, and maybe the bankers won’t come and get us. But the bankers always come, and in this case it’s the market that is coming. When an individual lives beyond his or means, they must be forced to live below their means. When a country does it, they will be forced to live below their means. And I believe that the lowering of our standard of living actually has been going on for about ten years, because the good jobs have been disappearing. The standard of living isn’t really going up. So we’re holding back the correction and it doesn’t look so bad. So yeah, we didn’t crash into a depression but what we’re doing is preventing the good policies to come back which means free markets, sound money and limited government, balanced budgets. All these things are totally rejected here because this place in Washington DC is run by Keynesians. Keynesians leaning towards socialism now because we’re buying up the companies. No, it cannot solve our problems.

Dylan Ratigan: It’s also easier to print money. You will appreciate this story, Congressman Paul, and then I’m going to let you go. I was talking to a couple of bankers the other day as to why it is that they’re still trying to keep 80% of their swap market, which is the crooked insurance market, in private? And they said, “Well, because if we bring it into public then we’ll have to post collateral, and we don’t have any collateral”. And so it’s easier just to keep it in secret than to bring the entire credit default swap market into public and reveal that there is actually nothing there for the market that is 9 times the size of the global economy.

Ron Paul: But you haven’t learnt the language yet. They’re just illiquid, temporarily illiquid. But if you use ‘worthless’ instead of ‘illiquid’ then why should the taxpayer ever be stuck for something that is worthless, and that is what’s happening.

Dylan Ratigan: Well, listen, keep us posted. I think that the most interesting part in this context and the context of the conversation at MSNBC and the political context, because there is such self-evident aspect to this point is why are our politicians so hesitant to get their hands dirty and do the hard work, as troubling as it may be? And why do they continue to indulge the political expedience of money printing because it’s quite simply an easier road to take?

Ron Paul: I think you got it there.

Dylan Ratigan: Alright Congressman Paul, thank you. Keep us posted.

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Show: White House Brief
Host: Paul Westcott
Date: 11/4/2009 or 11/5/2009

Transcript

Paul Westcott: Congressman Ron Paul, you spoke recently before the House Financial Services Committee during the mark up of what’s being called the Investor Protection Act of 2009. Really, you know, you were explaining the difference between regulation and bureaucracy. Can you explain that for our audience?

Ron Paul: Well, my complaint is that if you argue for the free market, that you don’t care about regulations and that everything is chaotic and that’s not true. There are two ways you regulate the market. If you do it by the free market, you’re regulated by the consumers, their choices and if they choose to bankrupt the company, the company has to go bankrupt, so you have bankruptcies. You have laws against fraud. You have laws against theft and there’s a regulation, but instead we sort of protect some of those things and we bail out the people who make bad decisions. At the same time, since the people who like government regulations don’t understand that the problems come from the Federal Reserve and the manipulation of the money supply that creates the business cycle, so they figure they can compensate. “We’ll just have more regulations.” All these mistakes being made as a consequence of bad monetary policies, “if we just have more bureaucrats checking up on everybody, we’re going to protect everybody.”

And my analogy is that it’s similar to people who would like to prevent any slander or any bad comments in newspapers. They have prior restraint. We don’t go to the government and say, “Well, check everything we say in the media.” Now, that would be preposterous, but you know, there still are restraints on the media and what people say and do, but as soon as it comes to economics’ prior restraint, we have to check everything, check it out and have the bureaucrats look over your shoulder. It causes chaos. It causes the prices to go up and contributes to the mistakes that the Federal Reserve makes.

Paul Westcott: Well, there you go mentioning the Fed. You know, you got a book out now, ‘End the Fed’ and there has been really a lot of discussion recently to grow the size of this organization. What’s latest ramp up looking like and is it just becoming more? Is it getting to a tipping point at this point?

Ron Paul: Yes, it’s getting pretty close. This bill we’re working on now these few more weeks. I don’t think it will be finished before we have our break for Thanksgiving. But it looks like the Fed will end up with more power. They always do. Of course, I’m working hard to go and try and at least get the books out so we’ll know what they’re doing. We don’t even know what all they’re up to. Barney Frank, the chairman, is not interested in the Federal Reserve taking over all this consumer protection bureaucracy. He’ll see that a separate group doing that.

Paul Westcott: Sure.

Ron Paul: But I believe that when we finally finish it all that the Fed would end up with more power, not less.

Paul Westcott: Well, and you know, turning to the health care bill, very hot topic obviously in Washington. As a Congressman and medical doctor, you’ve seen both sides of government-run health care through Medicare and Medicaid, of course. Would you say what we’re seeing right now going to the House and the Senate, are these bills going to benefit Americans in the end? I mean, I’m sort of lumping them all together, so feel free to break one off if you want. But do any of them really help Americans in the end?

Ron Paul: Well, like a lot of government programs, on the short run, some people seem to benefit. On the long run, it’s detrimental even to the people that it’s supposed to help. It is sort of like housing, when we had housing programs and the Fed pumping in the credit, it seemed like a lot of people were benefiting. You know, the prices of houses were going up and poor people had houses and it looked like a Golden Age. But then eventually, they’re the very people who suffered.

That’s the way it is in medicine. You pump in a new program like this, they’ll probably come up and say, “See, we can find these people that didn’t have any insurance and all this,” but ultimately it raises costs and diminishes service and there are shortages. So no, it’s very detrimental on the long run. And I think the real fallacy is they’re basing the need for all this that people are dying in the streets, you know, without medical care.

Paul Westcott: Right.

Ron Paul: But nobody is denied medical care in this country. I practiced medicine before we had government management and that coming in into the seventies and late sixties and nobody was turned away before nor since then. Emergency rooms take care of everybody and it’s just a bunch of scare tactics in order to get the bureaucracy growing and the special interest benefiting because there are too many middlemen in medicine.

Paul Westcott: Right.

Ron Paul: They do all the lobbying up here. The people when they come, the individuals, number-wise, more individuals are opposed to this, but the big companies. You know, whether they’re insurance or drug companies or management companies, they’re the ones. Even the AMA, they’re the ones who are pushing for some of this stuff.

Paul Westcott: Now, we’ve heard a lot of people in the sort of liberal intelligentsia as a word discuss the public option on how potentially you could move that public option to becoming a single-payer type system, government run, total government takeover of health care. From what you’ve seen, is that the direction some of your colleagues on the other side of aisle are leaning towards?

Ron Paul: Yes, that’s their goal and they say, “Oh, no. This would only be an option and a few people can join if they don’t have anything else,” but it would sort of like the public option on prescription drug program that the Republicans pushed through. It was a benefit to the corporations who were having trouble paying these benefits for the retirees, so they were very willing to dump it on the government. And even today, the public option of Medicare is not much of an option if you’re 65 and retired. I mean, you don’t just go out and buy Blue Cross insurance anymore. They don’t even offer it to you and the medical savings account, which was introduced by Republicans, which I think is a good idea, they’re prohibited if you’re over 65. So it’s always pushing you toward the government programs.

Paul Westcott: Sure, and just lastly here, I want to discuss the races in Virginia, New Jersey and in the New York 23rd. We saw a Conservative candidate getting 45 percent of the vote; Republicans take two very big seats. Should these results be taken as… I mean, everyone is talking about, of course, referendum on the President, but really, should this be taken as a warning to a degree to some of those Republicans who may have, shall we say, not been in touch with their conservative side so much over the last few years?

Ron Paul: Oh, I hope so and I hope it’s a sign that there is a trend away from more big government. It looks like that we could interpret that. But you know, it’s still a little bit early to tell and I think the biggest problem why there is this third party or tea party movement is that Republicans have lost so much credibility when they actually had a chance to cut back and they really didn’t do it. But it’s good that the people are unhappy with the status quo, which means that the group that’s running the show now are big government people and they’re very, very aggressive with it. So maybe this election will point out that they’re going too fast.

Paul Westcott: There you go. Congressman Ron Paul, thank you so much for your time.

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Channel: Fox Business
Host: Davis Asman
Date: 11/04/2009

Transcript:

David Asman: Are politicians inside the Beltway aware of the extent to which Americans object to all the recent government spending and government intrusions in our lives? One man who clearly is aware of the discontent is Ron Paul; he’s been fighting against government intrusion for some time now, and he joins us. Good to see you, Congressman. Thanks for being here.

Ron Paul: Thank you, David. Nice to be with you.

David Asman: So do you feel somewhat vindicated by yesterday’s elections?

Ron Paul: Well, in some ways. I mean it’s not exactly that each candidate that won was espousing everything that I’ve said. But I think it makes the point that people are unhappy and they’re punishing the right people; the people who are in charge. Republicans got punished a couple of years ago and I think that’s appropriate. People are very upset, more so now than ever before, and they’re directing their attention to Washington. The party that’s in charge should be penalized and who knows, this will probably spill over to next year. So I think it’s very good, it’s a good trend and hopefully the Republicans have learnt a lesson. So if we do get another chance we do a heck of a lot better job than we did when we got in control before.

David Asman: But frankly, it is business as usually for some politicians. Beyond what Nancy Pelosi said, I understand the senate just passed a bill to extend unemployment insurance, but tucked very secretly inside that bill was an extension of the $8,000 credit for first home buyers, which had some real questionable results couple of months ago. Some people are saying it didn’t do anything except spend more taxpayer money.

Ron Paul: Yeah, I don’t think anything has really changed here. If they had a concern about our problems and think it was related to government spending, why would they offer up all these new programs, you know, this trillion dollar medical package? But I think the absurdity even on the medical package is that the Pelosi crowd tells the people, “We’re going to be able to insure everybody and it’s not going to cost you anything. We’re going to save enough money by cutting waste and fraud.”

When the American people see that, whether they’re conservatives or liberals, I don’t think they buy into that. I think they lose credibility on this. But no, it’s business as usual whether it is spending or borrowing or printing the money. And I’m on the Financial Service Committee and it seems like just on a daily basis the solution is “if we just had more bureaucrats to protect us against all these bad investment.” But never asking the question why are people encouraged to make bad decisions, does it have anything to do with monetary policy? No, that’s not really ever discussed.G

David Asman: Incentives: you know, you put your finger on exactly the point. They don’t understand that if you increase tax rates, people may decide to make less money or hide their money and maybe they won’t get the $400 billion they hope to get from new taxes to fund health care.

Ron Paul: Yeah, there is always an unintended consequence that they haven’t anticipated. They don’t see much past their nose. And whether it’s domestic policy or foreign policy, I think the unintended consequences of government policies are unbelievable. Mises, the great Austrian economist, said, “Every time the government has an intervention in the marketplace for a so-called good reasons, it creates two new problems”. And, of course, I think he would be vindicated now when you look back over the last hundred years, especially since the Depression, at all the interventions that we’ve had in the marketplace. And they have been able to keep themselves in business. They create more problems, more bureaucrats, saying, “Hell yeah, those are good jobs, of course, they’re really productive”.

David Asman: Congressman, I thought that short of a 2 x 4 wacked across their head, an election loss like we saw yesterday in New Jersey, Virginia, does have a tendency to shake politicians up because after all one thing they care about more than anything else is getting re-elected.

Ron Paul: Yeah, that is the case and they’re not seeing the light and instead of maybe backing off a little bit and thinking about the medical package, they’ve speeded it up. So we’ll be here Saturday night; we’re supposed to vote on that bill on Saturday evening. And it’s just more of the same. It will not improve the quality of medical care, it’s going to cost a lot more, there will be unintended consequences. The insurance companies will probably be coming out okay and drug companies will do okay. There will be all kinds of things. Next year the people will be yelling and screaming. But, fortunately, there are a significant number of American people right now who are seeing the handwriting on the wall and they are complaining about the process up here. But so far they haven’t gotten the attention of the leadership.

David Asman: Well, maybe not the leadership, but I was talking to some Blue Dog Democrats today and they said on air in public that they have serious problems with the Pelosi Bill. They had problems with the Bachus bill as well. But the Pelosi Bill is even more costly and it raises taxes more. They suggested they’re not going to vote for it over the weekend. Is there enough of a revolt now among Blue Dog Democrats and, of course, all the Republicans so that Pelosi won’t have the bill passed?

Ron Paul: I guess it’s always possible. I mean, we’ve been led to believe today “Be prepared, be here, start early Saturday, hopefully we will get it done by Saturday evening”. But things do shift, I mean, maybe if in another 24 hours of thinking about the election, maybe they will change their tune. It has happened before. When the American people get really, really outraged, they usually get attention of this place. But unfortunately things get so bad for so long that it’s hard to turn this battleship or this aircraft carrier around. We can make efforts but it is a major problem to reverse the trend. Because, quite frankly, as much as I’m opposed to all the spending and inflating, to stop it in its tracks and turn it around, there are going to be some people who aren’t going to be very happy with this. But if we continue this process, then we’re going to have a bankruptcy which will be manifesting itself in a dollar crisis, and that’s what I’m concerned about: these policies that we’re following are going to lead to the destruction of our dollar, and I think right now today we’ve noticed that even gold is signaling maybe some significant inflation ahead.

David Asman: Oh, it sure is. There are a whole lot of signs of inflation ahead. But one other big spending bill, of course, is Cap and Trade. A little later on in this program we’re going to be talking about Al Gore and how much money he’s making from certain carbon credit deals that’s he’s involved with. But I’m told by some people that Cap and Trade is a dead deal for this year at least. Are you hearing the same thing?

Ron Paul: I haven’t heard that, I hear the conversation and let’s hope that it’s true. But that, of course, again will be a major victory for people who believe in sanity and markets. But there is still a lot of pressure. You know, the greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming. You notice they don’t call it global warming anymore. It’s weather control. [damage control?]

David Asman: No, no, no. Because it’s getting cooler, you can’t call it global warming anymore.

Ron Paul: But it is a monster and sometime they’re going to have to say, “Hey, why hasn’t the economy improved itself? We pumped in all the…” You know, the Krugmans of the world. “Well, you just didn’t do enough. You know, trillions of dollars from the Fed and 800 billion dollars from the Congress, sure it’s working, you just need more.” You know, someday people will come to their senses, but probably not this week yet.

David Asman: Well, I got to ask you one final question because you have had some success in getting transparency – people behind you are voting for transparency in the Federal Reserve. Are there other issues on which you have been sort of the lone voice in the wilderness where people are finally coming in and joining you?

Ron Paul: Well, I think on the fiscal policies of just voting against some of the spending I would hope so. I guess the sentiment is there. But they don’t quite grasp what I am doing on the House floor, because I vote for anything that has money in it; every nickel, unless you pay for it. Not by taxes but by cutting someplace else. So if there is a program that we want to do, we should cut it from someplace else. I get a lot of sympathy for this saying, “You’re right, we should do this”. But I don’t think the votes have changed significantly. I do think the Republicans are voting better and I kid the other Republicans and I said, “Are you guys voting with me now, or am I voting with you?” But we are voting together more so than we did when the Republicans were in charge of spending the money.

David Asman: And you do have some Blue Dog Democrats with you as well. Congressman, Dr. Ron Paul, it’s been great to see you. Thank you very much for being here.

Ron Paul: Thank you, David.

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Show: Freedom Watch
Channel: FoxNews.com
Date: 11/03/2009

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Hello and welcome to Freedom Watch, your daily dose of raw liberty streaming online at FoxNews.com. I’m your host, Judge Andrew Napolitano here defending freedom, depending your natural rights and defending your right to have a government that stays within the confines of the Constitution.

You’ve all heard me state repeatedly that everything the government runs is broke. Social Security is broke. Medicare is broke. Medicaid is broke. Amtrak is broke. The post office is broke. Now, the same bureaucrats that have run the government into the ground want to run healthcare and they also want us to believe that they can fix the economy and repair the damage done to the dollar by recklessly borrowing and ruthlessly printing money and by spending into the trillions. They forget that the government consumes wealth and only the free market can produce wealth. In an upcoming article in Forbes Magazine, Congressman Ron Paul says “be prepared for the worst.” The large scale government intervention in the economy is going to end badly.

It’s now my pleasure to introduce one of America’s great defenders of freedom and liberty today, Congressman Ron Paul joins us from our nation’s capital. He is the author of the New York Times’ bestseller, one of his several bestsellers, “End the Fed”. Congressman Paul, welcome back to Freedom Watch.

Ron Paul: Thank you, Judge. It’s good to be with you.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Why should we expect the worst and what do you warn in this article that we should all expect?

Ron Paul: Well, as you said in your opening statement what has the government done right, and if you were going to turn medical care over to the government, their test was how well they could distribute vaccine for H1N1 and the question of whether it was necessary or not, all that exists. But they did that so poorly and intervene so viciously in our rights and that sent a message. I think that is part of the problem going throughout the society and throughout the markets right now. It’s that the government is just totally inept and the pretense is that the stimulus is working. You hear the liberal writers saying, “Oh, the stimulus has worked. All we need is more of it and it would have really worked.” Well, the trouble is it didn’t work. They took billions and billions, if not trillions of dollars away from the people and gave it to the government and the government spent it, which means they misallocated credit and resources and they make things worse, and so we haven’t changed anything.

This idea that the GDP went up, well, you know, they measure GDP by government spending as well. That’s included in it, so what is this? We either borrow the money from the Chinese or we print the money, we spend the money. It goes in and you buy up clunkers or buy up houses and say that, “Oh, the GDP went up.” Well, it has to be temporary and that’s been my argument. That’s my argument in the article, it’s that if you see economic growth returning, you’re kidding yourself because all the bad policies are in place and unfortunately from the people I deal with here in Washington, there aren’t very many free market economists or believe in the free market. They’ve all been trained and indoctrinated by Keynesian economics and they really don’t believe in freedom and sound money in the sense that I do.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: You point out in your article, Congressman Paul, that we are seeing some little snippets of growth here and there today. You called them some green shoots of growth, just as we saw in 1930 when Hoover and later FDR, of course, were trying to micromanage the economy from Washington D.C. Why do we see these snippets of growth and why should we reject the government’s claims that they are a sign of better things to come?

Ron Paul: Well, I think it is part of human nature because nothing goes down until the very end stages with a currency. The end stage is a currency does fall off a cliff and it goes down, but if you look at the dollar, the dollar has been going down for many, many decades. So all markets go up and down and have blips, but you have to look at trends. So because the market just really was bad a year ago, the fact that the, you know, a lot of money is pumped in and people are trying to stimulate things, even when they are artificial, it will look like there is some growth in the economy, but I think that’s all a delusion. I think it’s a mistake and the worse thing we could do is assume that what we have done here in Washington in the last year has been helpful. That is very, very dangerous because it has all been very damaging.t

Judge Andrew Napolitano: You predict in your article a drop in growth worse than anything we have seen in the past two years. What are you talking about?

Ron Paul: I think the whole economy is going to be much weaker. We’ve had a financial collapse. The financial system was built on a house of cards, which was the fiat dollar standard and it was international because it was the reserve standard, But we haven’t had a dollar crisis. As a matter of fact, the dollar is benefiting to a degree right now because there is still a lot of dollars out there and people don’t even know where to park it, so they park it in Treasury bills, which helps the Fed and it drives down the interest. It helps the government, but that is all temporary.

When the dollar collapses, what happens is the people will recognize what you said earlier on, that everything the government touches is bankrupt and when that comes about… already we saw an early sign of this, the Social Security beneficiaries didn’t get any cost of living increase this year as a pretense that, “Oh, you know, there really wasn’t any inflation and we’re going to straighten up our house.” But eventually everything the government touches and passes out, the dollar will lose its value, so the more dollars they print, the more value it loses.

So far, they have been lucky enough, but they printed dollars and the people have taken it like Goldman Sachs and others keep making more and more. But eventually, this dollar is going to quit working and then everybody is going to know what poverty is all about.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: You and I have talked about this off air, but we keep hearing rumors and snippets in references in the blogs to it. Are you considering running for the nomination of a party for president in 2012?

Ron Paul: Not seriously, but you know, I listen to them and that’s a long way off. I think more about what the dollar is doing today and what we’re going to do with healthcare and a few other things, so my plans aren’t that far out. So no, I’m not giving it serious consideration.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: But you must know that there are millions out there that would ardently desire this. We did Freedom Watch last week before a live student audience at Drexel University in Philadelphia, in the same room where then Senator McCain and then Senator Obama debated in one of the debates a year ago. Everybody was asking me and these are students, “Is Ron Paul going to run for president?”

Ron Paul: Well, Judge, I think it might be your turn this time around. So you and I have to have another private conversation on this.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Congressman Paul, it’s always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us on Freedom Watch.

Ron Paul: Thank you.

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Channel: Russia Today
Date: 11/01/2009

Transcript

Dina Gusovsky: A national emergency is declared in the United States, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the war in Afghanistan, the economic crisis, or nukes in Iran. Instead, it’s H1N1, the swine flu. But is all this media hysteria really justified, and is the threat as dire as some would have us believe?

Joining me to discuss this and other burning issues, both here in the U.S. and abroad, is Congressman Paul. Thank you so much for speaking with me.

So you have called this full vaccination program a failure. Why?

Ron Paul: Well, they have failed to get the vaccine to the people that need it. They’ve been working on it for months and months, they’ve spent a couple of billion of dollars and I have several physicians in my family and they don’t have any vaccine in their office, so even if they wanted to give it they don’t have it. This just demonstrates that when governments decide to do something, they’re pretty inept at doing it even though a lot of money was spent. And yet the American people are indicating that they want federal government to take over medical care, but if they can’t even deliver a vaccine, I don’t see how they can deliver medical care to everybody any more efficiently.

Dina Gusovsky: You have questioned before why Barack Obama doesn’t get his own children vaccinated, and just recently we found out that he, in fact, had Sasha and Melia get the shot. Do you think that this was a response at all to what you might have said?

Ron Paul: I don’t know the exact sequence. I know when I did it I obviously believed he hadn’t because he had announced in a press conference, “Oh no, they have not had a shot”. But I thought he probably figured it was in their best interest politically to do it. But isn’t that sort of sad that if he deep down in his heart didn’t want his kids to have it, that he was willing to do this. Of course, the analogy I made there was, you know, so many of our presidents, Republicans or Democrats, always pushed government education. At the same time our Presidents don’t send their kids to public school here in DC. So they talk big that they’re going to take care of everybody, but they want special treatment for their own children.

Dina Gusovsky: You talk about having the freedom of choice when it comes to this. You know, we’ve seen rallies in New York where doctors and nurses were saying, “We don’t want this to be mandatory”. Do you think that Americans will ever come to a point where they will have to get this vaccine, it won’t be an option anymore?

Ron Paul: Of course, while a lot of Americans are fearful of this – even I’m fearful – I don’t want to do away with the vaccines. I do think that we give too many vaccines and we can overdo it. But I want these choices to be made by patients and doctors, not by government. And the fact that New York is forcing government employees, it might be a sign of the times if it’s not reversed. If the American people go along with it, that’s what’s going to happen. And under these emergency powers that were declared they can actually, you know, quarantine people in large numbers and say, “You either do it or else we’ll put you here and we’ll inoculate everybody”. That is hardly the way I want to accomplish this and solve our problems.

Dina Gusovsky: You’re a doctor and critics of the vaccine itself are coming out and saying that in the long run it’s actually going to do more harm than good. Do you agree with this?

Ron Paul: I think it can do damage and some children can be affected. It is a live virus, it’s attenuated, it’s not supposed to be as virulent. But yes, there are rare cases of people dying from reaction to medication. And if this flu is not so serious, which it doesn’t sound to be… you know, they were yelling and screaming about a 1000 deaths. Well, regular flu kills many, many more than that every year and nobody gets up in arms about it. This whole idea about working so hard on this one vaccine actually makes shortages in the other vaccine as well. So it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Dina Gusovsky: There seems to me so much media uproar regarding this issue. Perhaps even taking precedence over other burning issues, particularly when it comes to foreign policy and the situation in Afghanistan. Because the real crisis seems to be occurring within the White House with that debate to send more troops or change the military strategy completely. What are your thoughts on this?

Ron Paul: My first thought is, “Aren’t they a little bit late?” I mean, this is the good war, we’ve only been there 8 years, and now we have the war and now we have the fighting, now we’re looking for the reason. Why are we in there, what are we doing, what is the result, what is the end point? I think they have it turned around. That’s why I argue for the case that when we go war it should be very, very precise and very, very deliberate under a precise vote of declaration and knowing what the Congress wants and what the people want and stand up for it. But when we got to war under U.N. resolutions or under NATO or because it feels good that we’re doing this to promote democracy, it’s vague, it’s political, there is no endpoint and there is no precise enemy. And, therefore, they keep fighting and we go into these countries and we become occupiers.

The people who live there resent it and they start fighting us. So we call them terrorists and say, “We’ll they’re terrorist there, they’re bad people. We have to send more troops in”. And the citizens die from these bombing raids. They’ve even dying in Pakistan. All that does is incite more people to resent what we’re doing. So it’s a cycle. And here we are at a point of a cycle where few people are questioning it: “Do we really need more”. And, of course, the military wants more, and Obama probably is honestly in a box because he supports the war, he supported it during the campaign, and the military wants more troops, but a lot of Americans don’t, especially the Democratic base. So he has a dilemma. So it would be much better to have a precise position, non-intervention, you know what you’re supposed to do. Just stay out of these places.

Dina Gusovsky: I’m glad you mentioned Pakistan; it’s becoming more and more crucial in this fight. We’ve seen violence increasing. What is the future going to hold?

Ron Paul: More chaos, more killing and more resentment towards Americans and, you know, there is a big fuss because we just voted for more foreign aid, and rightfully so the civilian population sees that as more control. And the Pakistanis have quite frequently [fought] internally over civilian control versus military control. The last thing that we need is us being involved there. But our policy in Afghanistan has spilled over because some of the people we were trying to kill in Afghanistan have gone into Pakistan, so there is much more violence there and I think the resentment will be towards us. It just doesn’t look like there is an easy end to this, unless they change overall policy. And, of course, that’s what I’ve advocated all along: changing overall policy.

Dina Gusovsky: Now, switching gears to Iran. Do you think that the United States in this case is justified to pressure Iran to give up its nuclear program?

Ron Paul: I think we’re completely wrong, because so far our own intelligence reports, NIE in 20 07, said that they haven’t been trying to do anything since 2003. And they’re allowed to have enrichment for peaceful purposes and the United Nations has never written a sanction against the Iranians for breaking the NPT treaty. They’ve never been accused of that. And the new place in Guam; they reported that and they said the IEA could come in and inspect it. And we’re about to put on more sanctions; we had that coming up in our committee today. And they want to prohibit anybody from delivering gasoline, so we’re going to punish the people of Iran. And the people aren’t going to get mad at their Ayatollahs and their radicals, they’re going to get mad at us and they’re going to solidify behind their radical leadership. So it backfires on us and it really helps China, because China will probably go in, sell them oil, develop their oil and they’ll have more influence there because they’re pretty good capitalists these days. And here we are, using aggression to try to control what’s happening in Iran. Our policy makes no sense.

Dina Gusovsky: Even so, some experts are hinting that a military strike might even be possible. That perhaps the United States and Israel are training or might be getting ready to strike Iran militarily. What do you think about this? Is this an option?

Ron Paul: Let’s hope not. I know some people go for the sanctions; they go for the sanctions believing that it is something better than going to war. But sanctions are an act of war. The point I made in the committee today was, “What would we think if somebody said we can’t import any oil”? We’d be furious and it would be an act of war. We wouldn’t put up with it one bit. So yea, it is an act of war. It encourages even more effort by the Chinese to come in there and help the Iranians, both to drill for oil and to refine their oil. And also it gives a real boom to the black market. And the people will suffer, the privileged will benefit, and American foreign policy will suffer another consequence.

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Download the interview as an MP3 file here (27:01 minutes).

Show: King World News
Date: 10/30/2009

Transcript

Eric King: This is King World News, I’m Eric King, and you’re about to hear a tremendous interview with Congressman Ron Paul, author of the Audit The Fed bill and a champion of freedom in this country. Remember to go to our homepage at www.KingWorldNews.com for more interviews. This week we also have popular financial blogger, Mike Shedlock, known as Mish, as well as Rick Rule, one of the most street smart pros in the resource sector.

Joining us now is Congressman Ron Paul, a champion of freedom and the Constitution, and the originator of the Audit The Fed bill. Congressman Paul, I believe like you that the Fed is immoral and needs to be abolished, and we’ll get to that in just a minute. But first talk to listeners about the importance of the need to audit the Federal Reserve to know exactly what they are up to, please.

Ron Paul: I think that is the first step; the American people need to know exactly what the Fed does. And we’ve been denied this information from the very beginning. The Federal Reserve was started in 1913 and has never really been audited. One time they tried to change the law in 1978, but it did more harm than good because it excluded all the important issues that should not be audited. Once again, we’re in a crisis and the bill becomes more appropriate. We have 307 co-sponsors on it, and I believe this is the first step to find out who gets the benefits, who gets the loans, why and what kind of agreements they have around the world, and then go from there. Of course, I would end the Fed, but others would do other things. It seems like a large coalition of both liberals and conservatives agree that the Federal Reserve should be exposed and we should know what they’re doing.

Eric King: Regarding the HR 1207 bill, the Federal Reserve stated that it would make interest rates skyrocket and the dollar would de-value significantly if the audit took place. Did that not strike you as a strange way to react to an audit?

Ron Paul: Yeah, they’re trying to build up fear. What they’re implying is all of a sudden we’re going to have control of monetary policy, which the bill exclusively does not do. That is not the intent because I realized how controversial that would be, and besides, although Barnie Frank is working with me to some degree, he and I wouldn’t agree on monetary policy. But we do agree on transparency and that we should know about it. So the Fed chairman comes back and says, “Oh, with you guys looking over our shoulders we’re going to be pressured not to be lenient with the monetary spigots and you’ll put pressure on us.” But if anything, political pressure – they want lower interest rates, that means there is political pressure on the Fed already. I mean, they accommodate the President, they accommodate the elections, and of course they accommodate the banks, that’s political pressure, they accommodate Goldman Sachs, that’s political pressure. But for him to say that all of a sudden if this bill were to be passed it would raise interest rates, I think he’s striking out and trying to scare the people.

Eric King: A centralized money printing central bank benefits the elite few at the expense of everyone else. When do you think the Fed will be abolished, in what time frame? I know I’m asking you to speculate here, Congressman Paul, but what are your thoughts on that?

Ron Paul: I’m not optimistic that it’s going to be coming soon through legislation. We could pass the bill next week and repeal the Federal Reserve Act which was written in 1913. But that’s not likely to happen, it scares a lot of people and I even argue that if you want to get rid of the Fed under these conditions, you should phase it out. But it’s more likely to end because it quits working, and when they totally destroy the dollar if we have a runaway inflation, and the dollar goes to near zero or something, the Fed will just be out of business because nobody will trust them anymore and something will have to be done; they’ll have to be revived. And I have no guess when that is going to happen.

If we continue to do what we’re doing, which is spending and printing money, eventually people will lose trust in the dollar. Not tomorrow or next week, but it could be next year or two or three or four years, for all we know. Because we’re not hesitant one bit in Washington to back off any spending and any borrowing which puts the pressure on the Fed to monetize the debt and to print this money. But even if we get our audit bill passed there is going to be a lot of resistance to it. If we pass it in the House the bill has got to go through the Senate, the President is still going to have to sign it. Then it’s going to go to the court, just like right now the courts ruled in favor of Bloomberg, looking at some of these records under the Freedom of Information Act. But the Federal Reserve is really, really fighting that hard. And unfortunately the courts, over our history, have always ruled in favor of the government and central banking, and always against sound money.

Eric King: You made this statement in a recent interview: “Fraud is a significant problem, but the government is committing the fraud”, and that was in relation to a different topic that I am about to bring up. But here’s one of the problems I have right now, Congressman Paul: banks’ balance sheets are phony, the books are cooked and the government is encouraging this activity. It’s encouraging and aiding and abating this fraud. And it would otherwise be criminal fraud with regards to the banks accounting in an attempt to hide from the rest of the world the fact that that our banking system is issolvent. Why is our government encouraging this criminal fraud in the name of national security, probably, within the banking system to manufacture a stock market rally. And why has our government become so corrupt do you think?

Ron Paul: Well, I guess they yield to the temptation. Some of them believe through their economic education that this is quite proper Keynesian economics that actually teaches that you should have a government that prints money – which is counterfeit – and you should have fractional reserve banking because it stimulates the economy. And Congress literally creates programs like Medicare and Social Security, and they’re not really funded and yet they pretend that they’re funding it. If a private person did that, they could go to prison. If you printed money you would be a counterfeiter and you could go to prison. But the government gets away with this. So, once the government embarks on this, their friends participate and when they get into trouble, what happens? I mean, the government comes to their rescue and bails out their friends, and the people who are not on the inside tend to lose; they might go bankrupt. But somebody like Goldman Sachs benefits, and some of the people who thought they were getting a great deal not putting any money down lose their houses. So it’s a corrupt system based on the notion that our government can do things that they’re not really able to do. At the same time, I put so much back to the corruption of money, and their inconsistency in their definition of not following what we were told to do, which is to make gold and silver legal tender.

Eric King: You brought up the bailouts there for a minute. What about the bailouts that took place in this country? I know you voted against them, but how immoral is it that those bailouts took place and that in some cases former treasury secretary Paulson, was acting as a wrecking machine saving some firms to the benefit of Goldman Sachs, such as AIG, but then allowing others to go under, such as Lehman Brothers, which Goldman Sachs was the primary beneficiary of Lehman Brothers’ failure. And he had to get an ethics waiver from the White House in order to do that. What are your thoughts on that, Congressman Paul?

Ron Paul: I think that there are two parts of it. First: when government takes the money I think it’s an immoral act, you know, either through taxation or deceitfully through the printing of money. So just that act is bad. But then, when they start passing out the favors, passing out either contracts or bailouts, it becomes even more corrupt. And of course, when the people realize what is going on, they get rather angry about this and I think that’s what is happening. But they’re directing their attention in the right direction, that is up towards Washington, and fortunately they’re looking at what the Fed does and what the treasury has done. The two are contagious, once we start on this people figure out, “Oh well, that’s the way the system works, we better do our very best to get what we can while the going is good.”

Eric King: What about the mountains of debt that the United States has accumulated? Before the Depression started I think the debt to GDP ratio was roughly 260% and I think this time Soros is saying on the cycle it will be 550%. But, Rob [...] is unquestionably one of the great minds in the financial world today, and also a libertarian, calculated our nation’s debt to GDP, including corporate, household, Social Security and Medicare, etc, and came up with a staggering debt to GDP of 850%. And that doesn’t include the off balance sheet stuff or second quarter bench, and stated also that he has never met anyone who owed over 8 times their annual income where the outcome was graceful or smooth.

Ron Paul: If anybody wanted to look at one key factor about where our problems come from, I would say it is debt that represents the growth of government. It’s too bad they didn’t put it in the Constitution, it was unconstitutional to borrow money. But they debated it and talked about it but then they allowed the government to borrow money. And this, to me, is the real problem because this debt won’t be paid for, so the debt eventually gets liquidated. People keep asking, “Oh well, who’s going to have to pay this debt?” Well, it gets liquidated, our grandchildren won’t end up paying for this. If it lasts for a while, like it has already, another generation may suffer. But the debt gets liquidated and when it is discovered that they can’t pay it, they can always send you money. You know, if you own treasury bills they can always send you money or they can always send you a check from Social Security. But what they can’t do is maintain the value. So if you have a 10% inflation rate on prices, you know, the debt is going down 10%. So if there is a 10 trillion dollar national debt, that comes down to 9 trillion dollars of real purchasing power. So the debt is being liquidated, but that’s evil. That’s evil because it’s punishing the people. And they talk about the advantages of having a weaker dollar. There are no advantage to anybody to say, “Oh well, I have money in the bank”. And the government has a policy of deliberately taking the purchasing power away. It’s a tax. Debt represents the need to destroy the money because that’s how they will liquidated the debt.

Eric King: You have consistently voted to lower or abolish federal taxes, spending and regulations and used your House seat to actively promote the return of government to its proper constitutional levels. Talk to listeners about excessive taxation and income tax because you made a comment in a recent interview, which I thought was fascinating, that eventually as the dollar fades the people will just stop sending in their taxes. I suppose that is what you were saying, and that is what happened in Russia, correct?

Ron Paul: Yeah, it happens at times of war or emergencies. Sending the taxes in doesn’t matter because the government doesn’t send anything back, and what they send back to you has no value. I think it is going to be sort of a de facto nullification, you know, a nullification of federal laws by the states. It was something which was debated in our early years, but then it sort of lost the argument. But I think that’s what’s going to happen: the states might not secede from the union literally, but just quit participating because the federal government will lose credibility. And that can’t be all that bad.

Also I think what is closely related to this is that when governments fail, whether it’s the legislative branch or the judicial branch or the executive branch, and the people just keep getting stuck with all these rules and regulations that are an abuse of our liberty. If the system is still functioning, where the court systems are functioning, one of the things that could save us is jury nullification. And I think maybe that will catch on, too. That means that juries have a right and an obligation, under the early understanding of the judiciary system in our history, that the juries have the right to judge the law. Today they are explicitly told that they cannot, and if you bring that up you’re in big trouble. But a jury is supposed to be secret, and if in secrecy they are saying, “You know, some of these tax laws and some of these drug laws and some of these economic laws are not worthwhile. Why should we put somebody in prison because they obeyed a state law, but the federal government comes in and overrules it on a drug charge?” If they had a jury that understood this, they could just never convict these people. So maybe that will happen too, but more likely what is going to happen is the people will just ignore the system, they’ll go into the underground economy, they’ll trade services. It won’t be a very good time because that’s sort of going backwards. People will have to literally go into bartering. But I think that’s also an important reason why people ought to, for security reasons, have gold and silver coins in case of an emergency.

Eric King: There have been rumblings of a secondary police force reportable directly to the President reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s brown shirts, or what eventually became the SS. And now longer school hours are being discussed so the state can more effectively take control of raising the nation’s children, as opposed to parents – a reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s Hitler youth training. How can the people of the United States stop this police state from engulfing them?

Ron Paul: They first have to wake up. A lot of people are, but a lot of people like to be taken care of. You can look at the example of how this inoculation program for H1N1 is going. One group of people are screaming and howling, “Don’t round me up and don’t force me to take this shot. I don’t want one, you don’t have a right to force me.” In another breath they’re lying and begging and pleading, “Give me the shot, give me the shot”. They ‘re scared to death and they’ll wait in long lines for a shot that I think is questionable. So it’s sort of a contest between the ones that want to be taken care of and will be obedient to everything the government tells them versus the people who would like to make their own decisions. But it will be easier for the side that wants to make their own decision to win this when the government becomes so ineffective that people don’t have any trust in the government anymore.

Eric King: Let me ask you about the comment that Charlie Monger made, Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway. He talked about the need to basically remove the banking and Wall Street crowd from running our government and said these people need surgery performed to remove them, but they do not want surgery. But it would be better for the wider civilization if they were removed. Will they be removed from our government, Congressman Paul?

Ron Paul: You mean the banking cartel that might control our government?

Eric King: Yes.

Ron Paul: Well, you’ll have to remove the system, that’s why the system of government is so important and that’s why we have to decide what the role of government ought to be. As long as you have a Federal Reserve system and big government collecting a lot of tax and collecting revenues, you’re always going to have people vying for control and some of them will be out for self defense and they’ll say, “Oh yea, they take all our money. I’m going to Washington, I’m going to try to get some back to build highways in my state too. Because if they’re taking it why just sit back and let somebody else have it”. That will continue but I think the basic question is that we probably need a whole generation to ask the question, “What should the role of government be?”

Eric King: When you look at the dollar debasement and the massive debt the country has, and they keep expanding the balance sheet from the Federal Reserve, do you look at the dollar and say, “There is no real will in Congress to stop this”, so you just see a collapse. Is that what you’re really saying when I see your interview?

Ron Paul: There is no moral restraint. There is no resistance by conservatives or liberals, because they want the spending for different reasons. So if we get only constitutionalist here, even with their shortcomings, if they only did what Article 1 Section A permitted them to do, we wouldn’t have these problems. So it’s a matter of having a different group of people in Washington. But if the people think that they can keep voting themselves largess and all these benefits, that’s who will come to Washington. And hopefully that will shift, but right now Washington is filled with people who obediently try to participate in this game. It’s just very difficult to say that we’re going to end this real quick.

Eric King: You are so much more in touch with this than our listeners because you’re there in Washington, but do you see already some bills that are passed that that have the started the beginnings of what could be capital controls? Because if you have a currency implode or over time greatly devalued, you end up many times with capital controls. Do you see that happening, or signs of that starting to happen?

Ron Paul: It always does, because governments when they get into so much trouble, and right now I think there are signs that less dollars are coming into this country for investments. Our money is flowing in the other direction, so if we start sending our capital out, you know, there will be controls; they inevitably do it. And I imagine that with all the emergency legislation that’s been passed over the years they could use almost anything they want, whether it’s national security or even these financial emergency powers that they have been given. And even if they didn’t have it, they are going to do it. They just have to scare the people and then they worry about whether they’re doing it correctly or not later on. But I definitely think that at the rate we’re going, we will see financial controls, which will only compound our problems.

Eric King: Do you have any idea about a time frame on that, or is it just too early to tell?

Ron Paul: No, I wouldn’t be able to say; I don’t think it’s obviously going to happen this year. But things can shift rather quickly, you know, right now the circulation of money is rather slow and if that would change and people started getting rid of their dollars and having to buy stuff instead of just parting dollars, it could shift rather quickly and in a year or two it’s possible.

Eric King: You are such a student of history, Congressman Paul. Does the U.S. remind you of the latter stages or near the end of an empire where it is been looted? Is the country being looted?

Ron Paul: Well, the people certainly have been looted. And the transition in a time when the money is systematically debased, but you don’t have runaway inflation, actually the middle class gets poorer and the wealthy class gets wealthier. We’re starting to see that. And I think we shifted gears in the year 2000. Most people say the crash and the crisis came in 2008, but I think it really started with the NASDAQ bubble. It’s being going on for a while because our standard of living has been going down. There have been no real new jobs, and the shift has been away from the average middle class because Wall Street, even during that time and even on the bailout, the special privileged were able to get bailed out. So generally this is what happens; the people on the inside get the benefits and the middle class and the poor suffer.

Eric King: You mentioned the poverty right now. The United States is being purposefully de-industrialized. I think its part of the move towards global governance. We already have 10 cities across American, they’re growing in size and poverty is spreading in this country as the elites consolidate their power and wealth and plan to merge America into a global government and remove its sovereignty. Someone like you, Congressman Paul, you never vote for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution. You give the people hope that the elites’ plan to destroy America and its freedoms can be stopped. What chance do we have at this late hour, Congressman Paul?

Ron Paul: That’s a tough one. I guess if I thought there were a zero chance, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t be doing this and working trying to change things. But I don’t work with the assumption that tomorrow or the next day we will have the votes necessary, or that my speeches will convert very many. I work on the assumption that this is a long term process. The only way this can be turned around is to talk to the next generation. That’s where I am the most encouraged, because the college kids are responding most favorably with this message. And, therefore, I have a tint of optimism about this but I think the heartache is yet to come and I think our traditions will serve us well because we have been the freest and the richest and we knew something about sound money and property rights and contracts, and that’s why we did prosper. So it won’t be quite as bad as, say, the Soviet system when they collapsed because they didn’t have the traditions of freedom and personal responsibility that we have. But still, we live in very precarious times. If it goes the other way we’re going to lose lot more of our freedoms.

Eric King: Lord Monckton gave a speech recently about loss sovereignty and the upcoming climate treaty which will give up, I guess, U.S. sovereignty in his words anyway. How disturbing, though, is it? Because I know you didn’t have a chance to see that speech, but how disturbing is it to you when you see this slow evaporation of U.S. sovereignty over time? Because you mentioned to me that it really is piece by piece that you see this happening with various U.N. treaties or whatever it is we have been doing.

Ron Paul: Yeah, it is consistently eroding our sovereignty. I think the most sovereignty should remain with the individual and the family; it should be very, very local. That’s what was intended; the federal government was meant to be very small, and that has obviously changed dramatically. But now, in the last 40 or 50 years it’s been gravitating to international government. Even with this financial crisis going on they’re talking about internationalizing all these regulations as well. If you look at the WTO, the WTO started off regulating all the drugs and nutritional products, and the drug companies were all for this, saying, “This is globalism and this is all good”. So this means it’s giving up responsibility of the individual for dealing with these problems as well as our state and as well as our federal government. But that probably is one of the most serious problems that we have, because right now they know the dollar is ending its supremacy so what are they going to replace it with? And they’re talking with the United Nations and IMF is coming up with some type of a currency, some special drawing right or a basket of currency and replace our Federal Reserve System. As bad as the Federal Reserve System is, at least we have the responsibility to deal with that. But if it goes to an international system, that won’t be good for us.

Eric King: Congress suspended the law, I think it was prohibiting the use of U.S. troops on U.S. soil against U.S. citizens. And they are currently training a rather large force in Texas right now for potential use against U.S. citizens if there is social disorder. Is that something that worries you, Congressman Paul?

Ron Paul: I think they are quite capable of doing that. As a matter of fact that subject came up with this national emergency dealing with the flu because those national powers do give the federal government power to round people up and force inoculations and all. So the potential is there and governments have notoriously done it in the past. Right now, I can’t say that I know of any schedule that they have for really invoking those kinds of controls on the people.

Eric King: When you look at today versus the 1950s, I think we could use less than a dollar of money printing, maybe 66 cents or so and get a dollar of GDP growth in the economy. That was obviously when we were very healthy, very industrialized and there was a very strong economy. But what is it taking today? Because I talk to some of the top people in the financial world each week, as you know Congressman Paul, and I’ve heard some numbers that are very disturbing. Do you have any quantification about how many dollars it takes to create a dollar of GDP?

Ron Paul: No, but it’s a lot more than a dollar. I’ve seen it [...] 5 or 6 dollars, but I don’t know that figure for sure. Maybe it’s difficult to actually calculate. Even the GDP figures I’ve never been too excited about those because government spending is part of GDP. So if you build more airplanes and more tanks and more bullets you’re actually contributing to the GDP, which is a farce, too because it actually should be subtracted because they’re taking money away from people’s livelihood and maybe have them getting good medical care or better education or buying a house. I don’t think that’s a good measurement.

Eric King: In closing let me just ask you, Congressman Paul, the way that we’re headed, obviously it’s a train wreck, it’s a potential collapse of the dollar. And, as you said, we could have the nation fracture, I guess, potentially. You said you didn’t know whether states would secede or not. But what in your mind is going to be the eventual outcome of this? Because as Lord Monckton said, these communists are taking over everything and they’re trying to force one-world communistic government. I mean, it’s almost a fight to enslave the people globally, is it not?

Ron Paul: Yeah. There are at least some that will do it. But I still believe that even like in Europe, as successful as they have been with the European Union, I still think that as times get tougher and the economies gets weaker, there will be a revival of nationalism. I don’t think that the French and the Germans and the British and all will just go along and be one unified government. So I think there will be a natural resistance. Even in this country there are both liberals and conservatives for different reasons who object to some of these international trade agreements. Some are just against trade but others are against the abuse of our sovereignty. So I don’t know, I think there is a good chance that we will wake up and improve things. But I don’t believe it’s going to happen without seeing a lot more poverty and a lot more violence in our cities. The only question is is what will be the prevailing philosophy of our country, should the government be there to protect our liberties or should the government be there to run our lives and run the economy and police the world. If we continue with that, we’re in big, big trouble. But I’m just working on the assumption that we can convert enough people that when we do the rebuilding we’ll make it a much better place.

Eric King: Then are you optimistic in the end, Congressman Paul?

Ron Paul: Yes, I am more optimistic in the long run. In the short term I’m rather pessimistic.

Eric King: And also, I just to make a quick mention of the Campaign for Liberty, and the job that Jesse Bent and others are doing over there. If people wanted to go and make a donation, what is the website for Campaign for Liberty?

Ron Paul: That is CampaignForLiberty.com and we welcome any help.

Eric King: Also, Congressman Paul, your last book “The Revolution” was a number 1 New York Times bestseller. Now you’ve just released “End the Fed”, a highly acclaimed book and we will have a direct link on your interview page to that book “End the Fed” as well.

Ron Paul: Of course, we would welcome any help if anybody gets interested in buying the book, “End the Fed”.

Eric King: What I’ll do is I’ll have a direct link on your interview page for the book and for Campaign for Liberty.

Ron Paul: Wonderful.

Eric King: Alright, well thank you so much for joining us, Congressman Paul.

Ron Paul: Thank you, good to talk with you.

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Show: Larry King Live
Channel: CNN
Date: 10/29/2009

Larry King:… Ron Paul, Republican of Texas. He ran for president this last election. He is here to react to what we’ve just heard. Concerning healthcare, Mr. Moore believes that universal healthcare is everyone’s right. He threatens that the Democrats will lose seats if they don’t support it. What is your stand on it, Congressman?

Ron Paul: I think it’s a fallacy to say that people have a right to somebody else’s services. Now, you have a right to your life and you have a right to your liberty and you have a right to earn a living. You ought to have a right to keep it, but you have a responsibility to take care of yourself because you don’t have a right to get something from government because government has nothing, so the government has to take it from somebody and give it to you, so it’s a failed policy. It is a form of socialism and socialism doesn’t work. It leaves to a big kind of…

Larry King: So if you have no money and you fall down on the street with a heart attack, you have no money and no one should take care of you? The government should not provide an ambulance or treat you?

Ron Paul: Well, no, but we don’t have a history in this country of that happening, even before government started managing healthcare. I practiced medicine in both circumstances in the early sixties. We didn’t have managed care and I worked in a Catholic hospital. I made $3 an hour and nobody was ever turned away and there were many, many church hospitals and you had Shriner’s Hospitals and a lot of free care was given. Today, even with managed care, they complain about, “Oh, somebody doesn’t have health insurance and somebody is going to die because they don’t have health insurance.”

But really, people don’t get turned away. I mean, accidents happen. Man is imperfect, but for the most part, anybody including anybody illegal can go to the emergency room and they always get taken care of. They just don’t get thrown out in the street.

Larry King: Are you saying you like the current system?

Ron Paul: No, I probably dislike it as much as Michael Moore does. But he’s complaining about it being part of capitalism. It has nothing to do with capitalism. This is corporatism, the corporations. I agree with him. Corporations run things; the drug companies’ lobbyists, the insurance companies’ lobbyists and the hospital managements’ lobbyists, the AMA lobbyists and that’s all managed care and we have a system where money and bigness influences the government, but that’s corporatism. That’s not capitalism. But we want our free markets…

Larry King: Okay, how do you change that?

Ron Paul: Allow free markets to work. There is an example of free markets and I might have even heard it on CNN today of the example of somebody that was going to charged $100,000 for surgery and they went to Singapore and got it for $25,000 and the main reason they gave why they could afford to do it was that they didn’t have horrendous malpractice payments to make and there was a market. There was a market necessity. Patients are leaving this country. They’re going to India, but that’s the market working. So we have put our charity hospitals out of business, at the same time, because of inflation and management and all the mischief of government, we have pushed these prices up. Pumping money into a system doesn’t improve quality. It increases prices. Look at our educational system. We pump it with money, prices go up. The quality of education goes up and the quality of medicine has not gone up by just pumping more money in.

Larry King: Lyndon Johnson once said, “The probable answer is that the government is going to have to be half-capitalistic and half-socialistic. You have to have some social security, i.e. socialism. You have to take care of those who don’t have. Pure capitalism can’t work.” Would you agree with that?

Ron Paul: No, not really. It’s sort of like I practice OB-GYN and I never could tell my patients they have a touch of pregnancy and you know, you’re either pregnant or you’re not. You either have government intervention messing up the markets or you don’t. You either believe in freedom and believe in voluntary choices. I mean, just look at this disaster with the swine flu vaccine. They take over the whole project. We pump in billions of dollars and they come up with shortages. Distribution is lousy and they’re talking about forcing people to take them in places like New York and no one has even proved that it’s necessary yet. We have still a lot of deaths from ordinary flu far surpassing swine flu, so managed central economic planning in anything fails and especially in medicine it fails.

Larry King: But Congressman, everyone in line getting it, who is getting it free is not standing there complaining about government involvement.

Ron Paul: Yeah, but I have a daughter that practices medicine and I was just talking to her about it and she says, “Oh, yeah, dad. I can give shots and it’s for free, but we don’t have anything.” So when something is free and you don’t have it, it’s irrelevant and some of the people who don’t want it are being forced to take it. We have lost our faith and confidence and understanding of how free markets work. We turned it upside down by saying anytime corporations get benefits, we call it capitalism and freedom and it is corporatism. It’s the military-industrial complex. It’s all the special interests and this is where Michael Moore gets it all wrong. He works, he believes diligently in free markets because he believes in the First Amendment, he believes in making films. He doesn’t believe in prior restraints, so why should he condemn capitalism?

Larry King: Right.

Ron Paul: Because he is condemning corporatism. I condemn it, too. Special privileges to corporation is a big problem.

Larry King: Maybe it’s semantics. More with Congressman Paul right after the break. Don’t go away.

Michael Moore: I think capitalism as it is defined now has completely failed. Yeah, it hasn’t really failed the rich. It has actually helped them, the wealthiest one percent now have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined, so it’s a really good system for a few people.

Larry King: Hi, Ron, do you disagree with that statistic that Michael Moore just pointed out?

Ron Paul: No, and I’m not complaining about as much as he does, but I think I understand it differently because when a country embarks on deficit financing and inflationism, you wipe out the middle class and wealth is transferred from the middle class and the poor to the rich and when we get into trouble, then the corporations come for their bailout and they get the benefits and the little people don’t.

So yes, there is some truth to that, but it’s the failure of the free market to exist, that is our problem. It isn’t the fact that we don’t have enough government, we have way too much government. The government created this monster. If he doesn’t like what we have, he has to look at what we’ve been doing for 30 or 40 years, it’s called interventionism. It’s called Keynesism. It’s called inflationism. It’s called Big Government. That’s the problem.

Larry King: Here’s what Michael Moore said about Afghanistan. I’ll ask Congressman Paul what he thinks about the war there. Watch.

Michael Moore: Al Qaeda has left there. They booked out of the neighborhood, Larry. They’re long gone, okay? They’re in Pakistan. They’re in parts of Africa. They’re elsewhere in the Middle East. You know, they’re here in the US. I mean there are real Internet operations now as Matthew Hull, the State Department individual who resigned last month over the Afghanistan policy. You should go online and read his letter of resignation. You’ll see he explains it very clearly that for one to deal with Al-Qaeda, the last place we need to be right now is in Afghanistan. That’s just a crazy, crazy making place. It’s unwinnable. It’s immoral. It’s illegal. It’s wrong and what is our CIA doing paying the brother of the president of Afghanistan who is involved in this opium trade that’s funding the Taliban. I mean, where… when does this stop?

Larry King: Congressman, you’re a strong critic of Iraq. Are you a critic of the Afghanistan policy as well?

Ron Paul: Yeah, I sure am. My position is we shouldn’t have gone in and we should just come home, but earlier on, Michael was saying that he was hopeful and sympathetic to what Obama was doing. I don’t think he’s quite willing to criticize Obama like Bush, but I am and yes, there have been a token effort of bringing some troops home from Iraq. Iraq is a mess, but at the same time, we’re sending in contractors to replace the troops and paying them a lot more money, subsidizing the military-industrial complex and Obama ought to be condemned for that. You can’t just pick out, so anytime you support Obama in any of those policies, they’re bombing Pakistan right now, killing civilians and we’re on the verge now of attacking or at least putting on more sanctions on Iran, which will lead to hostilities if we’re not careful because we’re talking about the Iranians just like we used to talk about the Iraqis, putting on tougher and tougher sanctions, making the people suffer, hoping the people are going to overthrow their leaders, and not realizing the tougher the sanctions you put on the people, the more you drive them into supporting their leaders.

Larry King: So you would get out of Afghanistan and Iraq posthaste?

Ron Paul: I would, and my saying during the campaign was “we just marched in, we can just march home.” Nothing good can come of it and it’s an undeclared war. It’s an immoral war. We don’t have any money. The longer we’re there, the worse it’s going to get and we just need to come home. We can’t nation-build and besides, I will win this argument because we are bankrupt and we can’t afford it, so it’s going to end badly if we don’t come to our senses and just say, “Let’s quit this militarism around the world.” I mean, we’re in 130 countries with 700 bases around the world and we cannot sustain these and it is, it’s pumped up by both the Left and the Right in the Congress, “Oh, we can’t do away with this weapon. It will be bad for jobs.” There is conservative Keynesism and Liberal Keynesism, always government management, which always fails and gives us the financial crisis that we’re in.

Larry King: Right. The always thoughtful Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. Thanks. Thanks, Ron.

Ron Paul: Thank you very much.

Larry King: Always good having you with us.

Ron Paul: Thank you.

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Show: Tavis Smiley Show
Channel: PBS
Date: 10/21/2009

Transcript:

Tavis Smiley: Congressman Ron Paul from Texas is serving his 11th term in Congress. In 2008 he mounted a bid for the White House that galvanized an eclectic mix of supporters, including legions of young voters. He’s also a bestselling author whose latest is called “End the Fed”. He joins us tonight from Capitol Hill. Congressman, nice to have you on the program.

Ron Paul: Thank you, nice to be with you.

Tavis Smiley: Before I jump into the text, let me ask you a couple of quick questions about Afghanistan since it’s all over the news. The White House has basically said that we don’t need to send more troops, Rahm Emanuel I’m quoting here now, the chief of staff, to Afghanistan until they have a legitimate and credible government. Two questions: 1) What does “legitimate and credible government” mean to you when you hear that? 2) Even if that were the case, do we need to be sending more troops to Afghanistan?

Ron Paul: No, we don’t need to be sending any more troops over there. We need to be bringing our troops home. And this whole idea of a legitimate government – there is no answer to that. It’s virtually impossible to arrange that and who is going to make the decision? And one thing for sure is that Karzai can’t be legitimate because he is seen as a puppet of ours. And I think this election is basically a fraud. A third of the votes that Karzai was supposed to have gotten were ruled illegal. So, the whole thing is preposterous. I mean, the whole notion of us being there is ridiculous, and the sooner we face up to this, the better off we are going to be. We don’t really have the troops to send. We don’t have the money to spend, and it’s just a part of a foreign policy that I have been talking about for many, many years. It’s deeply flawed. And this is an example of what happens to it. You’re in a place for eight years, and then you start deciding “What are we hear for? What’s the purpose? What’s the endpoint? Who’s the government?” I mean, it is so foolish, I can’t imagine why the people put up with this. And I just wish more people would send a message to their congressmen and said, “We ought to deal with our problems here at a home, maybe we ought to concentrate on getting better medical care than just fighting another war which will continue to expand.” I think the whole thing is foolish.

Tavis Smiley: Much has been said today, as you will know, about the fact that President Karzai has agreed to a runoff election. You’re not buying his plan on that?

Ron Paul: Oh yea, he probably will. That means there is a lot of pressure put on him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s going to be eased out. You know, sometimes we turn on our puppets. Remember back in the Vietnam days, when DM was our puppet and we had our CIA overthrow him, and actually kill him. So who knows what is exactly going on, but Karzai seems to be hard to defend. I am sure we were rooting for him in the election, which means that we were involved in it. And there was so much fraud they got caught at it, so it’s getting pretty hard to defend him. So yes, there has to be an election, but I won’t be surprised if our government quits supporting him. He can’t exist without our support. But the big problem is they don’t have anybody to replace him.

Tavis Smiley: I’m about to ask you this… some people believe that he’s not perfect. I mean, I don’t think the White House would tell you he is perfect, but the argument might be that he is the best of the rest.

Ron Paul: Yeah. Well, I think it will be hard to find anybody that will suit the situation. And whether you put in 20,000 or 40,000 or 80,000 [troops], I think it’s not worth the investment.

Tavis Smiley: So what should the President do then with this tough decision on Afghanistan? What should he do?

Ron Paul: I think they should come home and say that we did our best, we took care of the Al-Qaida, they don’t exist there and the 300 that did exist there are all dead or gone. And we ought to allow the Afghans to decide what kind of government they want. They don’t want a centralized government. They want tribalism. And we just can’t change that. People have been trying to do that for centuries, and it’t just not going to happen.

Tavis Smiley: One last question before I get to your book. The argument though is, as you well know, is if the U.S. were to pull out of Afghanistan or pull out of Iraq, you pull out of that region, the argument is that the whole region collapses and the apocalypse happens if you take Ron Paul’s advice and just pull out.

Ron Paul: Well, I think staying there is going to cause more trouble. I think the fact that we’ve been there for 8 years and destabilized the area… Afghanistan isn’t stable, but now Pakistan is not stable. Now we’re sending our drones over there and innocent people are getting killed and pretty soon we’re going to think about what we have to do to stabilize and get control of the weapons of Pakistan. At the same time they’re planning on expanding the efforts to overthrow the government in Iran. They’re coming up with real strong sanctions against the Iranians, and that’s not going to help us.

It’s just an endless task to continue to try to nation build and police the world. We weren’t meant to do that and we can’t afford it any longer, and it all has ramifications and blowback phenomenons that will be hurtful to us. I think it’s a real threat to our national security to be overly involved in that area.

Tavis Smiley: It’s a great segway to this book that you’ve written now called “End the Fed” which is already on the New York Times bestseller list, I might add. One listens to your answers now in this conversation about Afghanistan, one prepares to go into a conversation now with you about this new book called “End the Fed”. One gets the impression that Ron Paul, although a member of Congress, doesn’t trust government. Is that a fair assessment?

Ron Paul: I wouldn’t say I don’t trust all government at all times. I would say that most Americans, including myself, don’t fully trust that the government’s taking very good care of us. They don’t have a good foreign policy and there is something very untrustworthy about our monetary system. It is very, very untrustworthy and very unfair that it takes care of Wall Street, and at the same time it hurts the people because they end up with the inflation, they end up with the unemployment, they end up with losing their houses.

And yet the Federal Reserve, behind the scenes, in secret, can create trillions of dollars and bail out companies like Goldman Sachs. They can deal with world banks and world central banks, and we’re not even allowed to know. The Congress is so derelict in their responsibility, and this is why I of course want an audit of the Fed, but indeed what will eventually have to happen is ending the Fed because they’re going to destroy our money. We’re in the process of doing that. They set the stage for destroying the financial system and that has collapsed. But now, they’re just embarking on endless inflation, doubling the money supply, running up the debt, and spending and not even worry about it. “We’ll print the money if we need it”. That is a devastation to the average person. In countries where it gets out of control, the middle class gets wiped out. And that’s what I am afraid is going to happen here.

Tavis Smiley: You know, there are those who are watching right now, no doubt, who will say that you got it all wrong. That not only should the Fed not be ended, but if we were to do something like that, the timing couldn’t be worse, because it is the Fed and it’s Congress who you’re saying were derelict in their duty to put the money, pumped the money back into Wall Street that turned this situation around. Now they’re celebrating on Wall Street and passing out bonuses. And of course, the line is that jobs are always the last thing that comes around; that’s the last indicator. But how do you respond to those who say that this will be a bad idea, the wrong time for this idea, and if it weren’t for us pumping money into Wall Street, the economy might not be making a turn right about now?

Ron Paul: Well, there is a half-truth there. The TARP funds did go there to a large degree and we did prop up a lot of those businesses. That’s why some politicians go to Wall Street to raise money for their political campaigns. But the Federal Reserve pumps in trillions, and we’re not even allowed to know. With the TARP funds the people caught on and they demanded from Congress “What’s going on here? Why don’t you find out if there are any strings attached?” So, as bad as the TARP funds are and as bad as what the Congress has done, the Federal Reserve is that much worse.

Now, the answer to other question,that it could it be chaotic to get rid of the Fed – if you read my book carefully, I’ve talked about a transition for many, many years. Even in the foreign policy everything I talk about … how do you get from one stage to the next stage. And what I suggest here is not abolishing the Federal Reserve tomorrow, but legalizing some competition against the Federal Reserve, legalize the Constitution, legalize sound money. Parallel currencies are operating all the time around the world.

Tavis Smiley: What would competition against the Federal Reserve look like? Can you describe that?

Ron Paul: Well, gold coins and gold savings accounts could be used. Today if you use gold and silver as legal tender you go to jail. And yet the law and the Constitution say only gold and silver can be legal tender. But the courts always rule that the only legal tender is what the IRS says, and that’s Federal Reserve notes. But there is no law that says Federal Reserve notes are dollars. So it’s total chaos and that’s why you have the financial system in chaos. But you can legalize competition. For instance, in Mexico the middle class and the poor have been wiped out several times because their peso went to zero, and all their money becomes worthless. But in Mexico now, if you want to save, you can put it in silver and the accounts will be backed by silver, which means that you’re not going to lose. The lower the peso goes, the higher your silver prices go up. You can do that in this country, you can have a transition and if you want to use Federal Reserve notes you could, but other people could get paid for and make payments… with the computer age this is big problem. I mean, if you go to Mexico you can translate dollars into pesos very, very easily. So it could be done, and rather than looking for chaos and closing down the system. But if you continue what we’re doing now, you are going to get chaos because you’re going to have runaway inflation, destruction of the dollar. Now that is real chaos, not what I’m suggesting.

Tavis Smiley: Go back for me real quick and unpack what you were trying to say a moment ago that there are examples around the world where when these issues go unabated and go unaddressed, the middle class gets wiped out. Make the connection between the Fed and the middle class being wiped out.

Ron Paul: Okay, if the Fed continues to inflate the currency, that is to print money, the dollar looses value, which it is doing all the time. Mexico has had runaway inflation, Central American countries have had runaway inflation. We know about the runaway inflation in Germany, the most recent one in Zimbabwe. The money goes to zero value and the people lose out. But the very rich don’t lose out. They get bailed out and they don’t care about the cost of living. Right now they claim the cost of living isn’t going up and the elderly aren’t being heard. But the elderly didn’t get a cost of living increase this year on Social Security. But the cost of living for them is going up. Sometimes it goes up much faster for somebody living on a fixed income than somebody living on Wall Street. But here, instead of helping those people, we help Wall Street. And they’re making billions of dollars, they have a 120 billion dollars in the bank now to hand out in bonuses this year. At the same time, we have a 20% unemployment rate. I mean there is something very unfair about this system.

Tavis Smiley: I couldn’t agree more on that point. Let me ask you a final question here. In the book you talk about the fact, as we’ve been discussing in this conversation, your notion on how this country can prosper by addressing the Fed as it is now structured. But you also make the point that this is also tied to our freedom. I hear the prosperity argument. What’s the freedom argument?

Ron Paul: Well, the freedom argument is this: if you have a secret central bank which has been given the license to counterfeit money, they’re very, very powerful. So when governments grow, I believe when governments grow they always have to do it at the expense of the individual; whether it’s economic liberty or personal liberty or fighting wars that we shouldn’t fight. And there is always a cost to this. So if government grows and undermines personal liberty and passes more laws like the PATRIOT Act and all kinds of things, and you don’t have to pay for it. If everybody had to pay for this through taxes, we wouldn’t have this type of government. So we tax and then we borrow and then we still don’t have enough money so we print the money which then, of course, you accept the economic argument. But at the same time, the bigger the government is, the less personal freedoms we have. And this is a pretty well known fact. The maximum amount of freedom is when the government is smaller and the purpose of government is to protect liberty, protect our civil liberties, to protect our economic liberties, and make sure that we don’t get involved in these wars around the world. Because anytime you’re at war, you’re supposed to sacrifice for the greater cause. And people are more willing to give up on their civil liberties if we’re at war. So it is freedom issue to me.

Tavis Smiley: Ron Paul, of Texas, ran for president, if you recall, the last time around. He had a huge following of young people and made an impact in that campaign. He now has a new book out called “End the Fed”. Congressman Paul, glad to have you on the program. All the best to you sir.

Ron Paul: Thank you very much.

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