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James Clapper: The notion that we’re trolling through everyone’s emails and voyeuristically reading them or listening to everyone’s phone calls is, on its face, absurd. We couldn’t do it even if we wanted to, and I assure you, we don’t want to.

News Anchor: That, of course, was the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, during a sit down exclusive interview with Andrea Mitchell over the weekend, where she pushed back against the notion of a Big Brother government. But, as opponents say, that is exactly what we should be afraid of. Joining me now on the phone is the Chairman for Campaign for Liberty, but he’s more famously known for being a presidential candidate and former Republican member of Congress from Texas, Ron Paul. Congressman Paul, thanks for joining me on the phone this morning.

Ron Paul: Thank you, Chuck, it’s nice to be with you.

News Anchor: I want to start with this issue that you praised Mr. Snowden, and essentially said that he is a hero in this case. You’ve heard that there are a lot of senators, both Democrats and Republicans, who believe what he did was illegal and he should be treated as a traitor. Why shouldn’t he be treated as a traitor?

Ron Paul: Well, it is probably illegal, there are some laws against this, but what about the people who are breaking the law, violating the constitution, even using the PATRIOT Act extensively. According to (?) who wrote the law, said they didn’t act within the law: “Who’s going to punish them, why don’t we talk about those individuals who’re breaking the law”. And which one has the higher order: the constitution and the written law, or the authority of the executive branch who controls the enforcement of laws. So I would say the bigger the government gets, the greater threat the lack of knowing the truth of things is. So, really, my goal in life has always been to try to figure out what is the truth, and I would say individuals who are willing to take a risk and realize the danger of telling the people the truth, are real heroes. For instance, right now we have a CIA agent in prison because he told us the truth about torture. So I would say that we have to sort this out, both, in a moral sense and a legal sense. But to say that only the whistle blowers are the ones who are breaking the law … we should question the people in authority about breaking the law and what recourse we have. Evidently, they feel very frustrated and have to go to the public, because going to the FBI and other agencies to investigate themselves, doesn’t seem to pan out very well.

News Anchor: I had a law-maker say to me yesterday, that you get more protection from the media than perhaps going to an inspector general or the FBI. But I want to ask you this question about these two issues: one is the disclosure of these programs, and the other is whether the programs are themselves a violation of the 4th Amendment? So let’s start with the disclosure aspect and the transparency. Would you be potentially uncomfortably about accepting, for instance, the telephone database program? The idea that they gobble up, they vacuum clean, essentially, all telephone numbers. They collect the American telephone number, what calls they make to who (not necessarily the contents), and put it in a database. If the government was more transparent about that procedure, would you be more accepting of the procedure?

Ron Paul: Being transparent about breaking the law and violating the 4th Amendment doesn’t make me feel any better.

News Anchor: So you believe even the telephone, even that specific instance, is also a violation of the 4th Amendment?

Ron Paul: Yes, the big question is, why should they do it? They say, “We’re not listening, we’re not going to use it, and we’re not going to ever use it”. Well, why do it? And if they’re looking for ten people, why do they have to look at 300 billion people’s activity? So it makes no sense whatsoever, and it’s such a blatant violation of the clear language of the constitution and the 4th Amendment. And the founders knew what this was about, the British did it to them, and they wanted to try to prevent this. And yet now, we have the heroics of the politicians saying, “The persons who are telling us the truth are the ones who are committing the treason”. So it’s been turned on its head. And even the political foolishness of the Republicans running to rescue Obama … the American people are sick and tired of all this snooping and prying and surveillance. So the Republicans run to the rescue saying, “Oh no, we passed those laws, we want to preserve these laws”. So it doesn’t even make political sense, it doesn’t make good moral sense, it doesn’t make good constitutional sense.

News Anchor: And very quickly, do you believe the only way we can resolve this debate is by having the Supreme Court weigh in on the constitutionality of these procedures?

Ron Paul: I think that’s a tool that we have to use, and hopefully it gets there. But I think the ultimate test is education, the people understanding this and the people being determined that they believe in liberty and they want limited government. And when you have big government, you have this kind of abuse, you have big government taxation, you have abuse. So the abuse comes from big government, and the natural tendency of individuals who hold this power to abuse it. So no, the biggest issue is the acceptance by the people of big government to take care of us from cradle to grave and make us safe and secure in our houses by having policemen investigate and have all this surveillance, as well as economic security. If we expect the government to be the nanny state, it will be big, it will be abusive and that, to me, is the most important issue.

News Anchor: Ron Paul, I’m going to leave it there with the Campaign for Liberty, Congressman Paul, thanks for coming on this morning.

Ron Paul: Thank you.

Transcript

News Anchor: Joining me now on the phone is former Republican Congressman, Ron Paul. Congressman, it’s great to have you back on the show. Where do you think he is right now, are you worried about that?

Ron Paul: You have no idea. I’m worried that somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile. We live in a bad time where American citizens don’t even have rights, and they can be killed. But the gentleman is trying to tell the truth about what’s going on, he’s not defecting, there are no signs of that happening. It’s a shame that we’re in an age where people that tell the truth about what the government is doing, get into trouble. We have a CIA agent in prison today because he told us there was torture going on in Guantanamo. So this is not good that the American people are being spied on. The government is secret, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be the other way round, they’re supposed to protect our privacy.

News Anchor: You heard the quote that we played at the very beginning, where he talked about the fact that it would be easy for him to sell secrets to Russia, and that is a major concern as well.

Ron Paul: Yes, but you also heard him say that that wasn’t his intent.

News Anchor: He can say anything, though, you feel confident that he’s not going to do that?

Ron Paul: Absolutely, that would be my assessment. He wouldn’t be doing it this way, he wouldn’t make himself so vulnerable. No, I don’t think for a minute that he’s a traitor. Everybody is worried about him and what they’re going to do and how they’re going to convict him of treason and how they’re going to kill him. But what about the people who destroy our constitution, what kind of penalty is for those individuals who just take the second or fourth amendment and destroy it? What do we think about people who assassinate American citizens without trial and assume that that’s the law of the land? That’s where our problem is. Our problem isn’t with people who’re trying to tell us the truth about what’s happening.

News Anchor: You’re asking how people feel about this. According to the Washington Post Poll, 56% of Americans find the NSA program acceptable, and one of the greatest fears Snowden said in that same interview, was that he was going to go through all this and the America public wasn’t going to care about the fact that the government was spying on them.

Ron Paul: Yes, but you pick and chose. There are some pretty good statistics out there that the American people are sick and tired of this overreach. And yes, the propaganda is out there, that if you’re not for NSA spying on people, then you’re un-American, you’re unpatriotic, and you hate America; that’s all the propaganda. But what if you’re a strict constitutionalist and a civil libertarian, you’d have a different opinion. What about obeying the constitution, what’s so horrible about that?

News Anchor: You think the majority of Americans are disturbed by what they found out, and do you think they will react and do something about it?

Ron Paul: I think the majority are disturbed because they now know that the government knows everything about them, they keep all these records. And also, why can’t this be connected to the IRS? Just think of this overreach with the IRS, AP reports that now they have evidence that they spy on every single American to ‘make us safe’? No, people are starting to realize this.

News Anchor: Your son called for a Class Action Lawsuit against the federal government over this scandal, do you support that, do you think that’s a good idea?

Ron Paul: I think anything like that to call attention to it, is good. I have not been overly confident about the court system, but I emphasize the fact that the most important thing is that the American people wake up and understand what liberty is all about, what the constitution is about. And if they don’t understand that, nothing will change it, because the government is a reflection of education. Whether it’s the courts, whether it’s the presidency, the executive branch or the congressional branch, they reflect the clichés and the teachings that they’ve had for a hundred years. And, unfortunately, it has undermined our system of liberty and the constitution. As I was told once, when I said we should never go to war without a declaration: “That part of the constitution is an (?)”, that’s what we’re facing. So, to me, educating the American people and getting confidence back in their minds and hearts to believe that freedom can work and the government can’t take care of us and we should not depend that the government give us perfect safety and perfect security at the sacrifice of our liberty. It’s a foolish trend, and I think episodes like this do a lot to wake up a lot people.

News Anchor: I hope you’re right, Congressman, thank you so much for coming on, we appreciate your time.

Lew Rockwell: Good morning, this is the Lew Rockwell Show, and what an honor it is to have Dr. Ron Paul as our guest this morning. What do you say about Dr. Paul, he’s the great champion of freedom in the political realm in all of American history. He’s done so much against the Federal Reserve, for the cause of peace against all these horrendous wars, against the police state, against regulation of the economy, against all the terrible things the government does. And, Ron, I noticed one terrible thing the government has done recently, they’re proposing a so called ‘core curriculum’ to try to bring all the public schools much more under the control of the Department of Education, as relates to what they teach and their disciplinary policies and everything else about the schools. Isn’t this another reason, maybe and increased reason, to consider home schooling?

Ron Paul: When you think about this recent case where a German family had came over here just to get freedom in the schools, they’re likely to be sent back to Germany. When you look at that law that prohibits home schooling in Germany, it wasn’t written recently, it was written under the Hitler regime in the 1930s. So there is a reason to not allow competition. When you have no child left behind, which the Republicans love, and now there’s core curriculum … which is being fought, it hasn’t gone all the way, I know in my own area here they’ve been fighting it tooth and nail. But, I don’t think it’s the academicians who say, “How are we going to tell the children to improve their education?”

Some get lowed in to it, I’m sure, and some are naïve, and at least the people who go along might believe it. But ultimately, these programs are designed to get hold of the children very young, and we do know that the young children are easily influenced, and if they are influenced from kinder garden on up by state-run curriculum, that’s very, very dangerous. In many ways, I have been encouraged. We do have the Ron Paul curriculum, which I thought through thoroughly because I figured I just don’t know how well this would work. But I’ve come across so many very, very average people that you would never even dream to think about politics, and they’re not Republicans or Democrats, they just care about their kids, they’re very interested in home schooling. So, hopefully, it stays legal, because it certainly had a very positive effect here in the last 30 years since it was more-or-less authorized and condoned by the courts in the early 1980s. So I think tremendous good has come from it. But, like I tell people, never let your guard down, because whether it’s core curriculum or whatever, I think there are enemies out there that don’t want families to have a choice. But to me it’s a moral issue, because who’s responsible for the children, their education, their safety, and their health? It should be the parents, and I think that’s what’s going on now. They’re arguing between the state being in charge of the children, or the parents being in charge of the children.

Lew Rockwell: Ron, one great thing about the Ron Paul curriculum is that when people who’ve never done home-schooling think about it, it seems intimidating, it seems like just a huge deal. And what this curriculum does is guide you, it explains everything to you, and makes it accessible to every parent who’s concerned about their children’s future and is worried about what they’re being taught in the public schools. And, of course, you have a book coming out explaining why home-schooling is such an important aspect of a free society.

Ron Paul: The people who’ve been advising me on this strongly encourage a system where it isn’t totally dependent on brilliant parents to do this. It’s going to be made easier, the material is going to be made available. You don’t have to buy a lot of books, your children themselves will learn how to help each other and teach themselves. These aren’t brand new ideas, but they’re reviving some ideas that have been used in the past, and are totally opposite of the conditions that exists in our authoritarian public educational system, especially when it’s run by the federal government. I argue that there is no provision in the constitution for a local community having a school, but there’s no authority whatsoever for the federal government to be involved in funding it or regulating it or devising the curriculum. And I think a lot of people are waking up to this fact.

Lew Rockwell: Ron, one of the things I like about your curriculum is it brings back the best of the past. And, of course, whether we think about if eventually this curriculum is going to go right through the first grade, but the best of the past in terms of, say, how to read, as versus the horrible system that really makes almost illiterates out of many children. So we have all that kind of thing, but it’s going to be cutting edge, too, in the sense that it’s going to teach a child how to give a speech, how to have a YouTube channel, how to have your own blog and what you should have in your blog and why that can be such an important contribution to your education.

Ron Paul: Lo and behold, who knows, if the parents are paying enough attention, they might pay attention because they might learn something too, because we all could learn something new. I could learn a bit more about setting up my own YouTube Channel, so that could be wonderful. The kids catch on very quickly, but parents can get a lot interested, too, sort of like what happened in the campaigns with the young people getting very interested in the Federal Reserve and in stopping these wars and they got excited. And that was transmitted to the parents, and the parents felt, “Geez, I love that these kids are at least serious and thinking about it”, and they came around to many of the issues. So maybe home-schooling will work something like that.

Lew Rockwell: Ron, moving to foreign affairs for a little bit, I noticed that the evil John McCain went to celebrate Memorial Day with the so-called rebels, the Al-Qaida types, funded by the U.S. and Turkey and Israel and other places, fighting to overthrow the Assad government. He went there to celebrate Memorial Day with these Al-Qaida gorillas, I thought they were supposed to be bad guys.

Ron Paul: You wonder what the motivation is there , we know what his foreign policy is, and we know his attitude about war, because he believes all problems can be solved with aggression and use of force and telling other countries what to do. I was thinking today about all that mess over there and how Syria has not gone well for the rebels and for the administrators of our foreign policy. Remember the statement back when they were getting ready to go into Iraq and Afghanistan, that the neo-cons were going to remake the Middle East? And it got me thinking, they’re remaking the Middle East, but it’s not what they had planned. All of a sudden, all the old boundaries are going to break down and maybe Kurdistan will exist and maybe that mess needlessly created out of World War I and how they just divvyed up the loot under the Ottoman Empire. I think there’s a remaking of the Middle East, but it’s going to be entirely different.

The only thing I hope for, because there’s always going to be chaos and it’s tragic, but I am convinced that the more foreigners involved in solving these disputes, the worse it is. It’s characteristic that in these countries where Christians, Jews and Muslims have lived together, if there’s no foreign interference, they got along a lot better. They were never perfect, but they got along pretty well. But it’s only when foreigners come in and pick sides and get involved in a minor squabble and turn it into a monster and start designing their borders, is when you get this instability. And instability over the past 70, 80 years is coming to an end, and who knows what will come to it. But I can guarantee you one thing, John McCain is not going to solve the problem by going over there and visiting with the Al-Qaida.

Lew Rockwell: And when you think about your point about people living together, they’ve been successful Christian communities in Iraq and Syria since the time of the Apostles, and they survived with Muslims and every kind of war and horrible social upheaval. But now they’re being driven out, these Christians who’ve been there for 2,000 years are being driven out of Iraq, they’ve been driven out of Syria, so this is an achievement of the neo-cons.

Ron Paul: It isn’t exactly like the Iranians have been bad, either. Christians have lived there, the Jews have lived there, and yet their drumbeat is dissent and hatred going on. They’re bound and determined that they have their way. The people that want to run the oil and the world and the natural resources, have to build these lies. And just compare the democracy in any country which has democratic election of leaders which is far from perfect, to that of Iran or Saudi Arabia. It is absolutely bizarre how people get so misled. On 9/11, there were even a few Saudis involved, 15 out of 19 were Saudis, and yet we invade Iraq. It’s absolutely absurd, people do wake up, but they wake up slowly. And I think the job of all of us who believe in freedom and limited government is to wake up people as quickly as possible, and that’s where I’m become the optimist because of the means by which information spread today through the internet and the various opportunities we have that were never available in the history of mankind. That type of technology that there is today for spreading messages, good messages, to counteract all the bad messages.

Lew Rockwell: You’re certainly taking advantage of it, and it’s why certainly the bad guys would not have predicted, or they predicted the opposite, that you’ve become a bigger public figure since leaving Congress, and it is because of these new methods of communication that you’re taking advantage of.

Ron Paul: Well, I can’t decide that, somebody else will, because every once in a while, I read the bad stuff too, the ones that come down pretty hard on me. But you know what, this is sort of silly, I guess, but we put a picture up on Facebook just recently of me and my grandkids picking potatoes and tomatoes at home. And many people looked at this, and probably 99.9% of what was said was positive, because it was not complicated, it was a simple thing, it was facts of life. There are a lot of good people out there that care about really commonplace things and family. So I try to look at that, and when I look at the 10 or 15 who come down pretty hard on criticizing, they criticize me personally, but I understand what they’re doing. I don’t think they care about me personally, but what they care about is the message that we’re able to get out, because they know how enthusiastic I am about the benefits of a free society and personal liberty and why governments are so abusive to these. How often does the government really protect our liberty? If they protected the 10 amendments, maybe they’d be protecting our liberties, but it seems like the job of our government in the last 100 years has been to undermine the protections the founders had hoped to place in the constitution.

Lew Rockwell: Ron, what about Mr. Bernanke and what’s going on with the Fed, what’s happening, and what do you see ahead for us?

Ron Paul: I don’t see how they can do anything other than more of the same. Early on, I read some free market economists in the 1970s when this happened, and they said every time there’s going to be a recession, to get out of it you will need more government spending, more debt, and more inflation of the money supply. And I believe that prediction has held up. Just think, this has been the worst recession/depression for many since 1971, and look at the spending, look at the deficits, and look at the inflation. And that’s all they know, and this pretence that they’re going to (?) is total nonsense. They even admit it, they say, “Well, when they begin to unwind, it will only be treasury bills”. But they’re not going to instill the mortgages. Of course, the mortgages are worthless that they bought, and who owns a treasury bill when it’s less than 1% a year for 5 years. Nobody invests in that. The banks buy this stuff, and where do the banks get the money from? The Fed creates it out of thin air. It is such a farce, and yet it’s pretty amazing that it’s held together by this delusion that people have and the markets love. So I think it’s going to last a while longer, the Fed is going to keep printing and keep buying, there’ll be a downturn and they’ll keep doing it. But the end stage will come and it will be out of control and they’ll admit that the prices are going up. They are going up, but not enough to the point where that’s the No.1 concern of the people. But we’re seeing housing prices going up rapidly, medical care costs and all these things have had a tremendous amount of inflation. But that’s not the deep concern. And the world is still buying our dollars and selling us stuff. So the Fed will continue to do what’s happening, there will be a market phenomenon when the attitude of the people changes and they lose confidence. Every single day we get closer to this particular date, but it will come and nobody knows when it will come, but I suspect this will go on for several more years and Bernanke will be replaced, maybe with Yellen, and she’s not going to change anything. All central bankers do the same thing, they facilitate big government, they print money and take care of the banks and finance wars and welfare. So there’s no way that’s going to change until the currency is destroyed.

Lew Rockwell: Thinking about inflation, one area of vast inflation has been higher education, and you’re able to work your way through college, something that’s pretty much impossible for kids today because the federal government’s subsidization of education has increased prices so dramatically. And also it’s had the effect that they want to have everybody go to college, which has made the value of a college degree diminished. So more and more kids are thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t go the regular college route, maybe I shouldn’t end up with a big debt”, and maybe you’ll help those kids someday by having a Ron Paul curriculum for college.

Ron Paul: That’s always possible, but it will start with what we have. But I think that is going to be the wave of the future because nobody is going to be able to afford college, and they’re at that point now where the biggest personal debt right now is student debt, approximately a trillion dollars. And they’re not getting very many good jobs. Maybe the jobs have perked up a little bit now, but that’s not going to last. So many are unemployed or underemployed. How many college graduates are working at McDonalds? They say there are a bunch of them.

The liberal believes that if you pump money into something, you get more of it. The hard-money people realize that if you create money out of thin air and you pump it into housing or medical care or education, you don’t get more high quality education, what you get is higher prices and much lower quality.

Lew Rockwell: Well, Ron Paul, thanks for the fight that you continue to wage, and there are even more exciting announcements coming up about things that you’re doing to educate everybody in the ideas of freedom. It’s great to have you on the show today, and all I can say is keep it up.

Ron Paul: Thank you, Lew, it was good to be with you.

Transcript

Alex Jones: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Friday, I’m in “Big D” on a short family get-together. I just happen to be in the same building as Dick Cheney right now, I’ll tell you that story briefly later. We’ve got 5 presidents here in town now. Speaking of who I wish would be our President right now, Ron Paul is scheduled to be calling in any minute now and spend half-an-hour with us today, and I’m going to bring up a cornucopia of issues. And I have the guys come in and co-host even when I’m there, because I enjoy their ideas and banter and it’s thought-provoking, but Jakari Jackson and David Knight are riding shotgun out there also, in case we have any technical difficulties, as we are coming to you via the internet right now. The wonders of the internet. And we do have Congressman Ron Paul joining us today again. I’m on the road, so I have a couple of my infowars nightly news reporters riding shotgun with us over the next 30 minutes, so in case anything cuts out, they’ll be able to ask the former Congressman questions. It’s great to have you on with us today, sir.

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

Alex Jones: So much is happening, I want to get into your home-schooling curriculum, I hope to actually promote it later when you start that affiliate program, I think everybody should get involved in that. But, before we go there, what do you make of Boston and that whole martial law spectacle that we saw?

Ron Paul: Well, it’s rather scary. You know me, I always try to look on the positive side of things and think things can’t be quite as bad, but those pictures really concern me. That is such a visual image when you see these thousands and thousands of troops, and they weren’t your local friendly policemen that were involved. And it was accepted too easily. Can you imagine all these people being locked, they became prisoners. And the military police were allowed to march into any house at any time without a search warrant. It was martial law, so I think it was very, very scary. Let’s just hope it wakes up some people, but, unfortunately, we still hear comments like, “Well, the government has to do something to make us safe”. And I think that’s where the big disconnect is: about what is the purpose of government. Is it to give us perfect safety and perfect economic security, or is it there to allow us to run our own lives and protect our liberties?

Alex Jones: I want to expand on that, because we’re going into a break here in a moment. This is our short segment again, former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul joins us, and he’s very active in the defense of liberty. I want to expand into the next segment on the Boston issue, because some stations Judge Andrew Napolitano us then, and I want to get your full take on that. But clearly, any excuse that the power structure has to grab power, they do it, and it seems like that appetite is getting more and more intense. Why do you think that’s happening?

Ron Paul: Well, the problems are getting bigger. They say that the Congress isn’t doing the job because it’s broke, but it’s the whole system that’s broke, we’re financially broke. But those individuals in Washington, their mentality is different than so many people outside of Washington, because they’ve told me personally that they need to take care of people, and they need to regulate people’s lives, because they can’t trust it to themselves because they may hurt themselves or they may not take care of themselves. And I’ve asked them, “Why is that the case?” and they said, “Well, they’re too stupid”, and inferring, “We (the politicians) know what is best”. That is a mental status that they have and they cling to, and then they don’t do it like, “I’m Hitler, and I’m going to take over, and I’m going to take away liberty”. They feel, “I’m doing the Lord’s work, I care about people”. You’ve heard the liberals say that they care about people, and we don’t. But, of course, if you really care about people, you’ll protect liberty and there’ll be more production and more people taken care of, than the special interests taking over control of our government and the wrong people benefiting. But, anyway, that’s the mess that we have that’s continuing. So every time there’s an opportunity, they think, “If I enhance my power, I can do more good for the world”. Although there’re sinister reasons for us to be going about around the world, most of the people are complacent and they just go along to get along. And they think, “Well, we got to go and help those people, we got to get rid of the terrorists”.

Alex Jones: Absolutely, Congressman. Ron Paul is our guest, and I want to expand and flex that out when we come back, because that is so central. Please stay with us, Ron Paul is our guest.

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Alex Jones: I’m coming to you on the road up here in Dallas, Texas, visiting family. And Congressman Ron Paul joins us as well from Texas via the phone, and we have our reporters riding shotgun with us. And the former Congressman is just popping in with a news and analysis update here with us today, and he’s going to talk about the home-school curriculum he’s got coming out in September. It is truly a revolutionary idea that I’m fully behind. But first off, sir, seeing the images of the lockdown, saying it’s a prison, overriding the bill of rights, that is martial law by definition. Now they’re saying this is the new way in America, and we’ve got to have drones now domestically, and that basically America is a battlefield. We’ve known this centralization was coming along with economic collapse, what can you say about what Americans can do to reverse this, and what’s your take on what you saw in Boston?

Ron Paul: I think what Boston told me is it is a bigger issue and is more difficult to reverse than I might have hoped. I’m always hopeful, I always want to be positive, I get a lot of people who understand, but to overcome the power of the Department of Homeland Security, it looks like they’re going to have all the guns, at least they want to have all the guns. They’re buying up all the ammunition, and, of course, they said they would never use it against American citizens. And then when you witness what went on in Boston, if this is not martial law, I don’t know what martial law is going to look like. But the constitution has been trampled, the American people have to stand up any way they know how to do it, by spreading messages, reading, studying, getting involved in politics. Ultimately, though, it’s education and people have to understand why liberty provides the answers for us. But we’ve been conditioned probably for 30 or 40 years, and you hear it all the time from President: their job is to make us safe. The liberals say, “We want to make you economically safe and secure so nobody falls through the crack and we’re going to take care of everybody”. But then others say, “We want to make you physically safe”. And governments aren’t supposed to do that, governments are supposed to protect our liberties. Once they decide they’re going to make us safe economically and physically, they can only do this by taking away our liberties. And that’s where we are, we seek safety rather than liberty. We were warned about it, and I think we need to re-warn the American people that they have to know what the goals are in order to establish their priorities.

Alex Jones: Again, Dr. Ron Paul joins us. You’re talking about the bullets, we broke that story, www.drudgereport.com forced it into the mainstream media, and they said, “We’re not buying bullets”, and then they said, “Okay, we bought a billion”, and now it’s 2 billion. And then they come out and say, “It’s a hoax that we’re buying bullets, but we did buy bullets”. So their lies and their denials have gotten schizophrenic, where you’re reading a headline and they testify, “This is a hoax, but we did buy the bullets”. And now ‘big sis’ said before Congress today, “The DHS denies ammo-purchases aimed at civilians”, when the targets are of woman and children on record, and the army manuals say they’re training to take on domestic groups. That first document we got 4 years ago said Ron Paul, veterans, gun owners, libertarians, conservatives, Aaron Russo, film owners … it’s just bizarre. And now all that is mainline. So what do you say about the intensified lying, or do you disagree that they are not intensifying their lies?

Ron Paul: They have the major medias on their side, so they paint us as paranoid. And this is our job, whether it’s talk shows like yours or our internet programs or whatever we’re doing, we have to reverse this whole idea that we’re paranoid and just imagining these things. When she gives us an inch and says, “Oh yes, we did purchase them”, they have to pound here and figure out what are you going to do with them, what is the intent, how much money was spent? You think Congress should have more of a backbone to stand up and demand this, that’s their responsibility. But the Congress goes along with it, they give up their prerogatives to the executive branch so easily. And if we don’t do it, the people eventually have to do it. Members of Congress go along to get along, they’ve been doing that for years, and we only have a dozen or two up there that are trying. What we need to do is wake up more and more people to hound their congressman and say, “Find out why, and what are they up to”. Because it’s only information that they have that can wake the people up. If they don’t get the information, they’re going to be too complacent and then it will be too late. After Boston, I worry more on where we are. But, then again, when I go to the college campuses, I get good responses. All the young people are saying, “We know what you’re talking about, and we don’t like it. We’re going to be stuck with a big bill and we don’t have a job”. So there’s a receptive ear out there, so it’s a battle, it’s a battle for the hearts and minds of people to decide which they think is correct: are they going to go along with the status quo and the Federal Reserve and the income tax system and the government taking care of us and making us safe and secure, or are we going to say, “It’s time we defended our position, we want our freedoms back and just get the government out of the way”.

Alex Jones: As you said earlier, the government claims it’s here to help us, but everywhere government gets involved, it creates dependencies and a wrecked society. We’ve sent our reporters out not just in Texas, but also in California, and most people signed petitions to confiscate all the guns, to not just ban carbon dioxide, but hydrogen monoxide or water. And it seems like we’ve got two things happening, either people are getting more awake, or they’re getting even more dumbed down, and they’re saying, “Hey, we’re a democracy, if 51% vote to make the other 49% slaves, we’re going to do it”. In a republic, that actually works, but the federal government is moving forward like it’s a democracy and they can do whatever they want. Do you see a collision, a clash of civilizations, of informed, high-IQ productive, good people who haven’t succumbed to cultural collectivism and Marxism and globalism, versus the zombie hoards? This is getting bad, that’s my point.

Ron Paul: I think there will be this collision, mainly because our country is bankrupt, but also because there are more and more people waking up, which I think is very good and beneficial. But one thing is, though, individuals like myself who want to look on the positive side of things, shouldn’t ever get so naïve as to think that we’re up against an enemy that’s a rather soft enemy. The worse things get, the harder they’ll work and the more they’ll do to cling to power under the pretence, of course, of always helping people. They’ve been powerful because they’ve always been able to get to the moral high ground, saying, “We’re doing good. When we go over to these countries, we only get rid of the bad dictators. Yes, we have deficits, but we take care of poor people”. But now they’re running out of money and they can’t do it and they make these false promises, so the only thing left for them, since their promises aren’t believed anymore, is they’re going to use power. And that’s why you see the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI invoking martial laws in a major city. So I think it’s going to get worse, I’ve always said it’s going to get worse before it gets better, because we haven’t even had the pre-economic crisis that I think is coming, and then you wonder how complacent the American people will be. So the more people we can alert to being prepared for this so they can handle some of the emergencies to get by, the better off we’ll be. We want everybody to be protected, as many as possible, so they don’t have to depend on the government. But when the government is broke, they have very little to promise except our might to try to restore order.

Alex Jones: Absolutely. So it’s a sign of their weakness that they’re trying to flex their muscles and using any excuse to try and take over and plant the flag of authoritarianism on our once great republic, b ecause they understand and they’re scared and they know they’ve mismanaged things. Now, shifting gears to a subject that so many callers in the last few days wanted me to ask you when they heard you were coming on. Just as a layman here, and talking about a gold and silver company like Midas Resources, they’re having trouble getting the gold that’s being bought so quick. Places are sold out everywhere, the Mint can’t even make enough, but they’re using paper money to drive down the price, while elites are buying it as fast as they can. What do you make of what’s happening with the war on gold?

Ron Paul: I think there is, and governments always have a war on gold, because they want their paper to last as long as possible. How much gold do you think we dumped in the 1950s and 1960s at $35/ounce trying to prove that point? Markets, though, eventually win out, though I think that they very well could be involved in all this dumping of gold. That one day the gold prices went down so much, there were 53,000 contracts sold by one individual. I’m just wondering how close the treasury department was to that. But the market number that best tells you about this disconnect, is the premium on the coin. You and I might hear, “Oh yes, gold prices are crashing, maybe we ought to buy some more”, so we go out to buy gold. Evidently there were more than just a couple of us doing that, quite a few people went out to buy gold, so the premium goes up, which is natural because that’s the way the market works. The prices are not supposed to be going up, because the prices are ‘fixed’ by these traders in the paper market. But the premium is part of the price, and I don’t know what the premium has done in the last day or two, but I know when the price of gold was going down rapidly, the premiums went up.

Alex Jones: Sure, but isn’t that like Nixonian price fixing, where you’re sure you can fix the price, but then you can’t find the things they fix the price on. What I’m saying is, I’m getting reports from everywhere that the people, the shops, can’t get the gold, that there’s a major shortage at this lower price. So doesn’t that right there prove that the market is saying that gold is really worth a lot more? And, as you said, they can’t suppress it forever. Shifting gears, what about bitcoin? I’ve been [weary] since day one, because if this wasn’t something globalists were involved in, they would have destroyed it. Now they’re not all-powerful, but I just have a bad feeling.

Ron Paul: I don’t know exactly what’s going on there, I have deep reservations about it, because my understanding of money is a little bit different than something that comes out of a computer. And I don’t understand how it’s calculated, and I don’t think anybody else does, either. But, if we have a truly free society, and the people are doing this and they’re not committing fraud and it actually becomes a means of exchange and people can transfer and measure things in a bitcoin, then I’m not going to object to that. But I don’t think that is the answer, I think money has to be something that has been established in the marketplace. And there’s been a pretty good test on gold and silver for thousands of years, so I’m very reluctant to get involved. Even with the bitcoin, when you make a sale or a purchase with the bitcoin, you have to do the mathematical changes and figure out how many dollars you’re getting. But, I hope it’s a method where they’re challenging, because that’s been one of my position: that if we would just have a legal competition with the Federal Reserve in place, that would be helpful. But I’m thinking more along the lines of somebody who’s out there using gold and silver as legal tender as advocated under the constitution. But you know what happens to people who do that, you can go to prison for that and you’re called a counterfeiter. But the Federal Reserve should be the one to be held responsible for counterfeiting.

Alex Jones: Alright, I want to get into home-schooling, and then let you get out of here, but the last question before we get to that. I want to bring up Boston again, because the government locked down the city and then couldn’t find the guy, and then as soon as they lifted the lockdown, which was totally illegal, then a citizen smoking a cigarette at the back of his house saw the guy was in a boat. Not only did this not protect us, it’s totally unconstitutional, but it’s just all a giant fraud. What would you do, now that you live in South Texas on the coast, if they said, “Don’t come out of your house today, or we’ll arrest you”? What would you do if you drove up and they had your family with their hands up? This is a big deal, they need to get in trouble. Do you have any ideas, as a constitutionalist and a pretty smart guy, how we can take action against this precedent-setting garbage?

Ron Paul: That’s a tough one, because they’re the ones who are using violence illegally against the people. And if you resist it, of course, that’s armed conflict, and it’s about how much of a stomach you have for the confrontation. But, what we have to do is intellectually argue against and expose those people who have these lockdowns and have martial law declared. Three people were killed, which was tragic, but I think every day there are about 48 murders, sometimes in a weekend there will be 10 murders in one city. They never lockdown a city. This is unprecedented, it’s very, very dangerous, and we have to expose them at every chance we get.

Alex Jones: Sure, they’ve had a lone gunman out all the time, you don’t lock down a whole city, and they said, “Hey, please stay in your homes in this block, we think he’s in one of your houses”. That would be a probable cause or something of reasonable suspicion. But if you’re all locked in your house and now they’re going to aim guns at you, they aimed guns at little kids in yards. I can’t wait to get you on in September, because this is a revolutionary idea to get after the government training camps. Spend a few minutes, sir, in the time we’ve got left here, telling us the best websites to visit, where we should go to find out about this, hopefully you’ll get your site www.ronpaul.com back soon. But what are the best sites to visit, and why have you launched this home-schooling initiative?

Ron Paul: Of course, home-schooling is something I’ve been very sympathetic with for many, many years, more so over this year, because I think the public educational system is deteriorating. I’ve talked about it before, but in Congress you can’t really do a whole lot. Even 20, 30 years ago I often thought to myself, “It would be neat to have a school when I’m out of Congress”, but I always thought about a brick-and-motor school. But technology has changed, and all of a sudden, there’s a much bigger opportunity to have more students at a much cheaper price, have good education, have it where it’s not very expensive. So I’ve had some help with this, Don Woods and Gary North have been working with me on this, and they are great at teaching, and we’re going to have math and science and history and English courses. And, also, the first 6 grades are going to be free, you can go in and get on there after September and get education up to the 6th grade for free. And for the later grades, there will but tuition charges. But one other unique thing that we’ve come up with on this … there are a lot of other home-schooling programs and a lot of them are very decent, but ours will be somewhat unique. But there’s going to be a lot of interplay between students and self-teaching, and also it means that the cost will go down because we’re not going to have people buying books. They can if they want, but [inaudible]. So if we have a course on the constitution, it’s going to be done by reading the constitution and the paper, and then having a teacher giving a lecture, and the students writing. So it would be a little bit different approach. We think we can give everybody a better education at a much better price than anything that’s out there right now.

Alex Jones: Again, what are the best sits, other than www.CampaignForLiberty.org, for people to visit right now to find out everything about Ron Paul?

Ron Paul: One in particular is www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/ and there’s a preliminary course you can sign up for $25 to help you get into preparing for high school. But the curriculum really gets started in September. But there is a webpage now that gives you some information, and it will keep you up-to-date. There is a question-and-answer section there where people call in and ask their questions.

Alex Jones: It’s excellent. Let me just say this, and then I’ll let you get out of here as you got to go. When I first talked to you before you went live on air, we were talking about promoting it and how important it is, and you were talking about how it’s free for the first 6 grades, and then almost apologizing for selling it. Listen, we have gotten the liberty movement to fund each other and to vote with our dollars, and we’ll take the economy back, as you know, through markets. It’s time. The media and the establishment, that lives off our tax money and corporate welfare, attacks us, that if you sell a book or I sell a film. Ladies or gentlemen, you either spend your money with websites like www.drudgereport.com by clicking on the sponsors, Ron Paul’s sites, my sites. You spread the word about us, or we’re done. Okay, this is war bonds, Ron Paul lives in a modest house and can set off in the sunset, he’s 76 years old, fighting everyday because he has a passion for liberty against the authoritarians. And this is a revolutionary act of taking our kids back from these scums. So, sir, I’m going to get behind your curriculum, and I salute you. When it comes out in September, everybody should buy it and give it to their family members if they won’t buy it. Everybody should support this 110%, Congressman.

Ron Paul: Wonderful, and it’s good being with you today.

Alex Jones: Thank you so much, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Ron Paul: Thank you.

Alex Jones: Alright, there is goes, ladies and gentlemen. Bottom line, I’m ready to die for freedom, I’m in the globalist’ faces saying, “I want you going down 110%”. I’ll tell you why I like the oblivion so much, because that’s what it’s all about, that archetype of giving your life up for liberty. And I don’t want to die, because I love liberty so much, I’m not afraid of them, even though I know how horrible they are and I know the things they can do. Every time I look at my children, I know they can come after them, and they threaten my family. I just look at them and I commit. I’m a slob on air half the time, I’m burned out, ladies and gentlemen, I cannot unplug. I dream about this stuff, I can’t play or go fishing with my kids. All I’m thinking about is the news and the new world order, and then I do so much research, I get on air and I can’t even talk about it all, because I just know too much. It’s like the Gnarles Barkley song, I want to come back and have a break with our guests: I’m not crazy because I know enough, it is because I know too much. And I was just talking to Ron Paul during the break and he was like, “Yes, we’re selling it because we have to pay for it and everything”. And I said, “Man, don’t apologize because you’re selling it”. The globalists have taken over the control and issuance of currency and credit, we’re doing this because we love liberty and we want to be free. And then they create this idea like he said that they have the moral authority, like they can sell stuff, they can make us give them our money, to then use it against us, and that’s moral. I had the Austin police chief in, and he said, “Oh, Alex Jones is selling stuff, Alex Jones has got a 50 caliber riffle”. Yea, and I’ll sell my house, and a little bit of real estate I’ve got and all my guns if I ever have to, to keep www.infowars.com going. I will live in a rat-infested trailer before I ever stop spending my money on fighting the New World Order. But yes, I like nice things, I like being comfortable, but that’s not my God. My God is God, is liberty, is life, and is freedom. That’s why I take the money you give us by buying the great products we promote, and hire more reporters and get better equipment and build studios. I have dream to bring these people down. I’m a builder, I want to build things, I want to construct things, I want to build an architecture of freedom, I want to lead the way out of this, with you right beside me and in front of me and behind me. I have a dream of liberty, I have a dream of freedom, I have a dream of my children not being slaves. And I am sick of the globalist having the moral high ground, while they use our tax money against us that we’re not allowed to sell stuff. I skipped this network commercial, you know how much money that costs the network? There’s nothing they can do, because I just won’t be on the network if they try to stop me, and it’s bad that I do it. I don’t even plug products on here like I should by saying, “Buy everything at www.infowarsstore.com, buy the water filters, buy the seeds, buy that t-shirts, buy the videos. It’s all about warfare against evil, warfare against death. We’re about life, period! That’s what we stand for. I have a dream: life, enlightenment, liberty, freedom.

Transcript

Lew Rockwell: Good morning, this is the Lew Rockwell Show, and what an honor it is to have Dr. Ron Paul as our guest. What do we say about Dr. Paul, I can take up the entire podcast just describing his qualifications and his achievements. And I’ll not even begin to go over them, I’ll just simply say he’s the great leader for liberty, free markets and Austrian Economics, he has influenced millions of people all over the world, especially the young people. Ron, it’s great to have you with us, and I thought we’d get started by talking about your wonderful last column where you discussed the neo-cons, the people who seem to want perpetual war, the role Will Kristol and similar intellectuals are playing in promoting the warfare state and the empire.

Ron Paul: Yes, Kristol had written this recent article and he was lamenting the fact that the problem with Americans is they get war-weary after ten years or more and many, after many deaths and hundreds of thousands of people suffering, and an epidemic of suicides. And people get sick and tired of it, and he’s crying about it. But he goes in and tries to expand on this that we didn’t end the World War II right, we didn’t fight Vietnam long enough, 60,000 lives lost weren’t enough, so he goes on and on. But, hopefully, he’ll lose credibility. Unfortunately, the neo-cons have a lot to say about the war propaganda that gets out and converts the people into a pro-war stance. But maybe he went over the top this time, but I’m not holding my breath, because, so often, the American people start off being quite opposed to war. Just look at the Iraqi war, 60% – 70% people were opposed to it then the neo-cons came in with the war propaganda and changed that. Even before World War II, most Americans were opposed to us getting involved until things were orchestrated in a certain way that the people more or less had to join in. But no, I think the neo-cons should lose credibility, which means that he doesn’t want us to ever leave Iraq, ever leave Afghanistan, he wants us to continue to build up in Syria, and he’s the kind of guy that anxious for us to march on to Iran. It is scary, and I wish the people would wake up, but I’m sort of subtly optimistic that this will have to end, and, in a sad sort of way in one sense, in that this country we will be bankrupt and we will have to quit, more of less how the soviets had to give up their empire. So, maybe some good could come out of a bit of a financial crisis that will come, and we have to admit that this financial crisis has been perpetuated and extenuated by the fact that we spend all this money on the military and on all these useless wars.

Lew Rockwell: It’s interesting that the Kristols of earlier times used to complain about war-weariness, too, but it began much earlier before the Federal Reserve, because people were simply being taxed. So they got sick and tired of the high taxes for wars as well as all the other reasons, and of course they should have been against the wars. So it was very difficult for governments to maintain these long term wars, but with the coming of the Fed, they can just print up the money for the defense budget. I remember when they were going to war against Iraq or whatever, except for you, nobody was raising the question of costs: how much is this thing going to cost in addition to the moral and other issues having to do with war. Because they just phoned Greenspan, and he turned on the printing presses.

Ron Paul: That’s what’s so sinister about the Federal Reserve accommodating the warmongers: the payment is delayed. There’s no doubt it’s a benefit to those who want to perpetuate and promote big government, whether it’s for welfare or warfare. A direct tax to make people pay for these wars would bring it to a halt lot sooner. But it’s very convenient to put it off, then, nobody knows exactly who the victims are. Even the victims don’t realize it that their cost of living is going up, and they’re convinced, “Oh, it serves the rich people, it’s the oil-people that are gouging us, everybody is gouging us with high prices. It’s never the government’s fault, nor is it the fault of the mentality that supports these endless wars and endless spending and the printing of money, so they’re interconnected. And you know me well enough to know that when I first started, I talked a lot more economics, economics motivated me during the 1970s, with the Bretton-Woods Agreement and that sort of thing. But as the years went on, I became more and more convinced of the inter-relationship with financing these wars and how it’s related to the financial system. Not only because of the taxes, and that every penny spent on militarism comes out of the people’s hide here at home and it hurts the economy, but at the same time, the ability to do this and hide the cost is what’s been so detrimental to this country. But it’s all interconnected, and that’s why I think the philosophy of liberty and the things that I talk about brings us all together. Whether it’s personal liberty on how people should run their lives, or allowing other countries to solve their own problems, it all comes together once an individual understands what the concept of personal liberty is all about.

Lew Rockwell: Ron, don’t you think – at least it’s certainly my impression – that the young people you’ve attracted to these ideas don’t like the wars? They don’t like the Fed and they don’t like other things, too, but they don’t like the wars. And maybe they’re realizing, as you’re explaining it to them, that in addition to everything else wrong, they’re being ripped off.

Ron Paul: I think that is the case, but, at times I get praise for doing such-and-such with young people and all. But one thing that I hope I’ve contributed to, is to get conservatives and limited government people and libertarians and people who like the military and supporters of America in general, have been taught that we should not feel guilty about not being pro-war. And I think this is what the propagandas achieve, how many times have they accused me of being ‘un-American’ and unpatriotic and of not supporting the troops and these sort of things. But there’s no reason in the world why we can’t feel good about taking this position, and the young people seem to be very receptive to that. Their instincts, like the instincts of most people initially, is against the war. And then they’re told that if you’re not for the war, you’re not a good person. I think if they hear the truth, they might feel differently. It’s sort of like when I discovered Austrian economics and I naturally thought free markets were good, I kept hearing the story that it’s not good, you got to have a fair society and you got to have redistribution and all that. So I was delighted when I came across Mises and Hayek and Rothbard, because they were able to explain this to me that there’s nothing to feel guilty about if you believe in freedom. And they’d say, “Oh no, you’re just a selfish person, you don’t care about other people”, and this sort of thing. But I finally came around to the point that if you do have an instinct to care about other people, you ought to care about freedom, because that will help the maximum number of people and it’s the best chance for us to achieve peace and prosperity.

Lew Rockwell: Ron, do you think that the whole drone-warfare business with Obama’s and the Pentagon’s plans to eventually have thousands of drone bases around the world, is the way that they’re attempting to counter the fact that Americans don’t like all the American casualties? Unfortunately they tend to care nothing about the foreign casualties, but they don’t like the American casualties, and this is a way for some guy in a basement in Virginia sending in a drone to Pakistan, he’s not going to get hurt.

Ron Paul: I think what they’re trying to have is a neat little system that promotes the empire without getting their hands dirty. But it’s not going to work, because we’re in a different system, we’re not fighting World War II, we’re in a fourth generational warfare time where wars are fought differently. And they’re fought differently because it’s not going to be government against government. So what could incite people more to rebel against certain individuals than being hit with a drone by somebody who, in many ways in their eyes, don’t even have the guts to look at them in the face? They do it in secret from thousands of miles away, and when individuals are killed and there are collateral killings and families are killed … tens of thousands, if not millions of people, are affected like that. The torture goes on, the pictures have been there, and this just builds up the enemy. So the wars with the drones will not solve the problems of the neo-cons who want this world occupation. In many ways, it’s just going to bury the issue, in the sense that it’s going to be more terrorism and more tax. And I also predict that these individuals who run the drones, will not be able to avoid some of the backlash on them. Like we now have a suicide epidemic because the people going over and doing wars realize they were killing kids and doing a lot of other things they shouldn’t be doing. I think the operators of the drones will suffer in a similar way. I don’t know if there are any statistics to bail that out yet, but I think eventually if they’re a human being, and they know, “Well, I did shoot that missile and it killed 10 extra people”, it can’t help but eventually bum these people. And they bury these thoughts into their minds, and they’re told its okay, they’ve been conditioned that war is wonderful and good. But deep down inside, there’s a conflict, and I think that’s why people are struggling and they’re suicidal.

Lew Rockwell: Ron, in support of your position, there was a recent item that the drone command, or whatever it’s called within the Pentagon, was assigning chaplains specifically to counsel the drone-killers and to convince them that everything they’re doing was perfectly okay. So obviously, as you say, if they have consciousness, if they’re human beings, they can’t feel good about this, unless you’re a serial killer or a monster.

Ron Paul: I don’t know if it’s true, but they say about 5% of the people who go into the military are psychopathic to begin with, because they just like guns and shooting and it’s excitement and all this. Most people go in for different reasons, but if they’re exposed to battle and these kinds of conditions of killing, after a while, some theorize that they all become psychopathic in a way. It’s very difficult to handle their emotions. But I think it’s much more difficult when you’re trying to adjust to an aggressive war, when we’re the aggressors and not the defender. I think it would be a lot easier to adopt to some of the horrors of World War II because Pearl Harbor and this sort of thing, and they adjusted better. I think people are starting to realize that we don’t have a noble cause over there, it’s just not noble to send our young people 6,000 miles away. And, quite frankly, I’m convinced some of these young people who didn’t get very far in school and for economic reasons resort to going to the military, and they probably don’t even know their geography that well. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them end up in some of these countries they probably never heard of or exactly knew what was going on. And they’re sent there to kill all these people, and then we wonder why there’s a downside to this.

Lew Rockwell: Ron, speaking of downsides, tell us what you think the effects of the whole Cyprus situation is going to be from the standpoint of the banking industry in Europe, and governments and banking systems in this country, too?

Ron Paul: In a way, it’s hard to take it and say, “That’s exactly what’s going to happen to us”, but something similar to that will happen to us, we don’t know how it will evolve. But in Cyprus, they didn’t do what they did in Iceland. Iceland allowed a lot of bankruptcies to occur, and evidently they’re back on their feet again, so they liquidated debt, which is what the goal of the correction should be. In Cyprus, there were a lot of bailouts and they were not allowing the real liquidation, so it looks like some of the big guys are going to get bailed out and the bond-holders of Greek bonds will get the bailout. There was still some liquidation of debt and confiscation of wealth, but my prediction will be that when you work all that out, it will be unfair, it will be just like our bailouts occurred. There was some liquidation of our debt in 2008 and 2009, and some people did lose some money, and it usually was people who might have had a mortgage and lost their job and they got the bad part of the deal. And yet the wealthy were bailed out. So I think this is going to continue, I think the pyramid of debt is still huge, and there is no stomach for allowing the liquidation of debt to occur. Politically, it just won’t be acceptable, it’s always going to be more acceptable to keep the printing presses running, and as long as the world takes our dollars, we’re going to keep printing them until the trust is lost. And when that day arrives, and nobody knows exactly when, I see no foundation to our system. And each day steadily undermines confidence, and one day that’s going to happen worldwide with the dollar and it’s going to be really bad news for a lot of us.

Lew Rockwell: Well, that was interesting when that European official announced that there’d be similar “(?) cuts” as they put it, for big depositors in Italy and Spain. And then they were shocked to find out that people were taking their money out of the banks, and then he backtracked, saying he didn’t really mean it. But it’s probably not smart to keep huge amounts of money in a bank account, whether you’re an American or a Spaniard or an Italian or anything else.

Ron Paul: Weren’t there some reports also in Cyprus that a few of the big depositors were tipped off a little bit early and they got their money out, and that always seems to happen. But it’s a very, very fragile system, and anybody who understands Austrian Economics, understands that permanent prosperity cannot be achieved by inflating a currency and pyramiding debt. And once it happens, and it quits functioning and producing anything, then you have to clear the market of that, and you have to get rid of this bad debt so you can start building again. And that has not been permitted. I guess the last that that has truly happened on any significant downturn, was probably in 1920 – 1921 here in this country where we allowed the liquidation to occur, and it wasn’t a prolonged depression. It’s only been since the Keynesian-type mentality has taken over, that has prolonged these depressions and recessions. And for so long it’s being going on in Japan, and right now they still believe, “If we just print more money, it’s going to happen”. But, if that were the case, we wouldn’t have to really work for a living, we could just print dollars and export dollars. So, right now, that’s our best export.

Lew Rockwell: Ron Paul, thanks so much for coming on the show today and sharing your wisdom, and it was great to hear from you.

Ron Paul: It was great to talk to you, Lew.

Lew Rockwell: Bye, bye. Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts, they’ve been hundreds of them. There’s a link on the upper right hand corner of the LRC front-page. Thank you.

Transcript

David Asman: Well, the Fed announced it will continue pumping money into the economy, while the leaders in Washington still can’t balance the budget. Our next guest spent years battling policies like these when he was a Congressman, will his legacy live on? Joining me now on a Fox Business exclusive is the man, the legend, former Congressman Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul, it’s great to hear from you, how are you and what have you been doing with your time since you left Congress.

Ron Paul: Just waiting on your call. I’m delighted to hear from you.

David Asman: We’re going to call everyday from now, you’re going to get sick of it.

Ron Paul: I’ve been pretty busy travelling and talking about … what are the things I talk about? I talk about the Fed, the economy, the fixing of the interest rates and all of the bizarre things that we’ve been living with, and why the Fed helped us run up that deficit and all those kinds of things that I think you’ve heard about.

David Asman: One thing that you haven’t been doing, unfortunately, is grilling Ben Bernanke like you used to do when you were a House member. And there was one classic exchange between you and Ben Bernanke, let’s just play the exchange and then I want to get you to it and current events. Play the exchange.

Ron Paul: Do you think gold is money?

Ben Bernanke: No, it’s a precious metal.

Ron Paul: It’s been money for 6,000 years, somebody reversed that and eliminated that economic law.

Ben Bernanke: Well, it’s an asset. Would you say treasury bills are money, I don’t think they’re money, either.

David Asman: So Ben Bernanke doesn’t think gold is money or a currency. But when you look at what happened in Cyprus, where the government was considering – and it still may do it, to some extent – going into your bank accounts and literally confiscating money that you have already earned and already paid taxes on, don’t you think that more people in the world are going to think of gold as money?

Ron Paul: Absolutely, and that’s the nature of government. When they get into trouble, they try to raise taxes, which is confiscation, but this is a little bit more blatant in the way they were doing it. But I’m just wondering what’s going to happen, whether they’re even going to open up those banks again. Instead of arguing whether they’re going to take 6% or 10%, they might be arguing, “When are we ever going to not open up these banks again”. So I’m sure it will happen, but I’m not amused by these kinds of things, it happened in the depression and at different times. In the ultimate test gold is money, not because I say its money, but because history has proven that. And if you really want to know the ultimate money, think of the countries that get into trouble and people try to leave their borders. You think you can give a paper dollar or a paper currency to bribe somebody at the border? No, you need gold, because gold is the ultimate money.

David Asman: Today, Ben Bernanke was been questioned a lot about QE2 and bond purchasing, about printing money to purchase government bonds, which, of course, helps the politician to pay for things he doesn’t have money for. But that idea of Quantitative Easing is running out of juice, and even people who have been supportertive of Bernanke are saying so now. Do you think that that policy might change in the coming months??

Ron Paul: It’s going to change, but not because they want to do it deliberately. Because, let’s say if today he would have announced, “We have a new policy. We think we have overdone it and we are going to gradually withdraw, we’re only going to buy 80 next month and 50 the next month”. I think that would have panicked the stock market. What we’re witnessing now is the result of this wild Quantitative Easing, pumping all the money into the bonds and the stocks, and at the same time we have 50,000 people in New York City that are homeless, we have 48 million people on food stamps. And free market economists claim, and I tend to believe them, that the real unemployment rate is probably close to 22%. So this pumping and Quantitative Easing has not solved our problems.

David Asman: Well, you mentioned the stock market, obviously it has helped the stock market go to greater heights, because if you feed free money to the stock market, they love it, they can borrow at no interest rates and make more money on deals, etc. But sometimes a company’s stock will go higher when they fire people, that happened recently with American Express, they fired thousands of people and their stock went up 5% – 6% in one day. Doesn’t trying to prop up the stock market contradict Ben Bernanke’s policy of keeping unemployment down?

Ron Paul: Yes, and I think there are two reasons for stocks to go up, one might be because the company is cleaning up its act and maybe firing people they don’t need, or there’s just a lot of money there participating in a bubble, such as with houses or with stocks, especially like the NASDAQ bubble. But that’s where the money is going, and fixing the price of money is the big deal. Many a times I watch these press releases and am fascinated with them where they go down second by second, and what is the announcement? On probably the most important price in the whole world, and most economist declare, “We don’t believe in price fixing”, but this is price fixing at its worse and everybody hangs on that, Wall Street hangs on it, and yet it’s completely foreign to the free market.

David Asman: Dr. Paul, we only have about 20 seconds, but as I said, people around the world realize the currency is not where they want to put their trust anymore. When you can look at Cyprus and you can look at what’s happening here, do you think the voters might turn back to a gold standard or something where the currency used is worth its weight in gold?

Ron Paul: I really think so, because that’s what history has shown, that ultimately once the government destroys its currency, they have to go back to something more trustworthy than a politician’s promise. And I go to a lot of campuses, and the younger generation are very much attuned to this, because I think they understand monetary policy a lot better than my generation did when we were in college.

David Asman: Dr. Ron Paul, it’s always great to have you, we will call you more frequently. By the way, how’s your son doing, is there anything you disagree with him on?

Ron Paul: I think he’s catching on pretty well, I think he’s doing great.

David Asman: Are you for his immigration policy?

Ron Paul: I haven’t got a hold of that yet, I’ve written my policy up, and I think it does pick up a lot from my book “Liberty defined”, I have a whole chapter in that. It’s not an easy subject for anybody to deal with, but it will be interesting to see how that shapes out.

David Asman: It’s a tough nut. Dr. Ron Paul, good to see you, thanks a lot.

Transcript

Bill Gates: I’m a little bit concerned about the uncertainty, and am speaking up so that as we make tradeoffs, hopefully we don’t cut things that really have great humanitarian and security benefits.

Neil Cavuto: Alright, billionaire Bill Gates is all out for foreign aid, and not-so-billionaire Ron Paul is all out on stopping foreign aid. The good Congressman and former presidential candidate is joining us on the phone right now. Congressman, Bill Gates, maybe for all the right and good reasons, wants to continue it because he says it does more to feed the poor and help those who really need it, even outweighing some of the abuse and waste that comes with that. What do you say?

Ron Paul: Well, I would say, instead of what? If you cut out the warmongering and cut some of the deficit down and gave some away with humanitarian reasons, I’m not going to fight it, even though I don’t have any confidence in that. Because I think foreign aid too often gets in the hands of the politicians and they get into warring factions and they fight over it. And I don’t think the record is very good that it helps people. But we spent a lot of time on how this money is being spent, but we never talk about where the money comes from. If you take Bill Gates, he has a lot of money in his foundation, but he doesn’t get taxed on that. But poor people get taxed, whether it’s the inflation tax or the income tax or whatever, so they end up paying. And my argument for foreign aid is that you take money from poor people in this country and it ends up in the pockets of the rich people in poor countries.

Neil Cavuto: I guess he’s getting beyond all that, and this is the issue I want to raise with you … and I’m paraphrasing and I hope I’ve got it right, Congressman, bear with me … for all of the waste and abuse and sometimes getting in the wrong hands and sometimes getting into no hands, we still have, since foreign aid started in this country, fewer starving people, more educated people across the globe. And that, he says, is a testament to generous Americans over the years whose money has been put to more good than it has harm. What say you?

Ron Paul: Well, that’s an opinion, I don’t happen to agree with it, because there are other things that happened around the world. Economies do change, and the breakdown of the Soviet System had a lot to do with increasing prosperity. But if it was prosperity that we had to concentrate on, we might think of what’s happening in New York City right now. There are 50,000 people sleeping out on the streets every night while the rich get richer. If you worry about education, I can’t even believe this statistic, but it says that 80% of those graduating from high school in New York City can’t read. So why do we have to gamble on taking money from people and going overseas. Although I did put it in prospective when we started by saying “instead of what”. If you can save some money by cutting out drone missiles, looking for trouble bombing people and invading countries and fighting useless wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, I would say yes, save some money, cut back on the deficit, and try the humanitarian thing. That would be much better. But I still don’t endorse it morally, and I don’t believe it’s practical. But since I’m such a practical guy, and I’m willing to bend a little bit, I would say do that. But just by taking more money from poor people or inflating the currency, you’re undermining production and you’re going to have more people sleeping on the streets in New York, and their education will not get any better.

Neil Cavuto: Ron Paul, thank you very much.

Ron Paul: Thank you.

Transcript

Preston Manning: I’d like to get on to a couple of the issues that are probably of mutual concern to everyone one here, but maybe we’ll start a little bit with your background. Tell us how did you personally come to hold these views? I assume this occurred when you were younger, and there are a lot of young people here who are endeavoring to formulate their own views. How did you come to this libertarian position?

Ron Paul: I think people have a natural tendency to be curious. I feel lucky that I was very curious and I wanted to know what makes the world work. Some people suppress that curiosity, and some people accept it and say, “Well, my school and my government told me this”. So not only have I been curious, but I’ve also been skeptical, and I want to do my best to seek out what is true. But I did come across Hayek’s book, “The Road to Serfdom”.

Preston Manning: How old were you when you read that?

Ron Paul: I probably got to reading a little bit, I remember one of the first novels I read was a book my mother gave me when I was still in medical school, and that was “Doctor Zhivago”, and it was huge and it was sort of dramatic about the Soviet System in its story. But then I came across Hayek and Mises (?), so there was money through economic policy. And when the predictions made in 1971 came true, I became much more fascinated. That motivated me to at least say a few words in 1974 during my first campaign. When I told my wife I was going to run, she said, “Why are you going to do that?”, and I said, “I want to just talk about this and get it off my chest, because I just feel like somebody needs to tell them about this”. And she said, “It could be very dangerous”, and I asked, “How could this be dangerous?”, and she said, “You might end up getting elected”. But I assured her she didn’t know anything about politics, she didn’t know what she was talking about.

Preston Manning: Was there any particular political figure at that time that attracted you?

Ron Paul: No, not one, mine were more attuned to, say, Mises and Hayek’s economic theory, and I felt like there were a lot of instincts. I think a lot of us have instincts without having read economic theory, to say, Freedom is pretty commonsensical”. So I look to the economist, but I would say politically, I was interested in the Goldwater campaign, that was one of the earlier campaigns. But, generally speaking, even in my congressional office, I essentially had a lot more pictures of economists than presidents. I had pictures of two Presidents, one was Jefferson and the other was Grover Cleveland.

Preston Manning: The Republican Party particularly in the last elections, and throughout the years, I guess, has had difficulty in attracting the support of younger people. And that’s, to some extent, been a worry for conservatives in Canada. And yet, you seem to be able to attract a lot of young people, to what do you attribute that?

Ron Paul: You know, when I’m in a flipping mood I say, “Ask them, ask them”, and I have.

Preston Manning: We asked a lot of them at the reception last night, “Why are you here?” and they kept mentioning you.

Ron Paul: I talk to them, because if you’re campaigning … I enjoy talking to them and I ask them that question a lot, and I had a lot of students and young people come to my office. When I was first in Congress in the 1970s and 1980s, (then I went home and practiced medicine again through the 1980s and early 1990s), parents would come in with their teenagers and give them civics lessons and say, “This is your congressman”, and that sort of thing, and they were sort of dragged in. But in the second go-around in 2008, when the revolution was going on, they came in and the parents would admit, “We’re only here because he wants to meet you”. And they weren’t like 18 years old, they were younger, they were 15 and 16 years old in 2008. There would be like a 14 year old coming in, and before I knew it, in the next campaign he was voting and campaigning and everything else. The answers they give are different, but I think if I had to say one thing that was repeated more often, it was, “I like what you said because you’re telling the truth”. And I said, “Well, others will say something very close to what I’m saying on this, they’ll say, ‘We have to follow the constitution”, and I say, “Why don’t you believe them?”, and they say, “They’re not telling the truth”, and they seem to sense that. On monetary policy, I was amazed by how many people have been introduced to monetary theory, and I don’t believe that politicians are worth all that much, sorry about that. But politicians reflect prevailing attitudes, so what the President is doing with the [center] is, to me, so significant, because it changes people’s minds, and this is the difference. But when the people’s minds change, it makes it easier for the politician to do it. So the politicians reflect the people’s attitudes, and that’s why young people now are starting to reflect an intellectual revolution, too, which has been rather peaceful, like the Cato Institute and the Mises Institute and these other groups, they have been teaching a lot.

In the 1950s, when I first got interested, I think we had one group, and it was called the Foundation for Economic Education run by Leonard Read in New York, and he sort of held things together for us. But now there are a lot of institutions, there are a lot more professors and the Mises Institute is designed to get young people interested enough to become professors and teach, and that is what changes it. It wasn’t so much that I, all of a sudden, went out there and gave a great speech and the young people responded. They responded because they were getting introduced to these ideas as some sort of a confirmation. And I think that’s what’s happening. But I think probably the reason why people respond is because the need is evident, I think there is a consensus, even those who are still able to manipulate the system are realizing that something’s not quite right with the system.

Preston Manning: In your address you mentioned the income disparities in New York between what Wall Street is making and 50,000 people being homeless in one night in government shelters. But what is the libertarian answer to income inequality that the Occupy Movement was trying to draw attention to, I assume?

Ron Paul: It’s liberty.

Preston Manning: I kind of thought you might say that, you want to elaborate on that a little bit?

Ron Paul: If you ask, “Does that eliminate all income inequality?” no, there will always be income inequality. Matter of fact, income inequality is okay. But, like I mentioned in my talk, if you want to look for the system that gives the maximum amount of prosperity and the most distribution and creates the largest middle class, … we always enjoyed the largest middle class ever, but we don’t have that now, we have a shrinking middle class. And if we go broke, or when the bankruptcy is declared, everybody who’s living off the government is going to be very poor. The systems of total socialism were designed to get rid of the income inequality, and in many ways, they achieved this, and they have an equality of poverty. So I like the other method, I like to see people who get rich, and it spins off and there’s a bigger middle class. And one place where I think we as conservatives and libertarians get into a little trouble with the Left and Right business, is that the Left right now says, “Well, there’s an income disparity, the solution is to soak the rich and raise the taxes on the rich”. And I complain about some of the rich. If the rich are getting rich because they have a super-good contract and protectionism or subsidies and they’re part of that system, then you want to get rid of that system that’s doing it. But if you are a Bill Gates or somebody and they can produce a product that we like on their own and they drive the price down and the consumer rewards that company and they become really wealthy … if they do that, and they serve the consumer and they do it honestly, we don’t even have to worry about what they do with their money. We don’t have to worry about, “Well, did you donate 10% or 5% last years?” I believe in charity and helping people, but it won’t matter, because they provide such a great service in getting rid of this income inequality. But this notion that it can be done with force and intimidation and central economic planning and low-interest loans, is a fiction. But the problem is, it helps in the short run. If you take it and say, “Well, we give free housing, free medical care and free education, and we just did this for 5 years”, and you say, “Well, it’s not a very good system”, then they say, “What do you mean, what are you going to do with all these good things that we’ve done?” Well, what is it going to do in the long term, in the long term not many people want to look at that, but the long-term is here, that’s the point I’m making. It’s here now, and we have to reassess it.

Preston Manning: We have some media people that want to talk to you, so this will be the last question, maybe the last question is more political. I think we Canadians observe the American political culture, and we notice that you tend to polarize on issues, you go to your corner and you fight it out, which often clarifies the issues more. We in Canada tend to compromise even before we get to the compromise, so it’s sometimes not quite as clear as it is in the United States.

Ron Paul: You mean you don’t have to fight?

Preston Manning: That’s right, we’re kind of gentle. But then, usually, in the longer term in the United States, there’s some kind of coming together on a course of action to do something. I think a lot of us looking at the current Congress in relation to the Congress and President, don’t see this coming together. So I guess my last question to you would be, how do you see this impasse between the Democrats and the Republicans, between the presidency and the Congress, over issues of taxation and spending cuts coming to some resolution? Do you see that happening?

Ron Paul: No, and for one reason, and for one reason, they’re not admitting the truth, they’re still in total denial. They still think they can have the welfare system, we can fight endless wars and we can keep printing money and there’s nothing wrong with borrowing?

Preston Manning: But does that come to an end at some time?

Ron Paul: Yes, it does. They’ve lost the confidence in the economy, it will end when the world loses confidence in our great export, the paper dollars. And then the dollar goes down in value, not so much all of a sudden by other currencies, but they’ll start buying stuff. And they’re starting to do that already, like farmlands and other commodities. Prices will go up and that will be the litmus test of what will happen. But, no, they’re not going to come to an understanding, they got along quite well when it seemed like wealth was endless and our credit was endless and there were no limitations. But they’re in total denial about how serious the financial crisis is. Now, if you and I were in a business together, and our cash flow all of a sudden dried up, and we knew that in two months the bankers will call, we would straighten up. But that doesn’t happen with the government. They’re in that denial, and they think they can do it. It’s not just the Democrats, both sides believe in that, because Republicans don’t think you can stop any weapons, and that’s one point I’ve made that I just think that the coming together has to be the coalitions that I try to build with conservatives and liberals by saying, “Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much money on going around the world telling other people how to live”. That doesn’t mean we should be a closed society and it doesn’t mean we should have protectionism. Matter of fact, some people call me a protectionist, but I’m not. I want free trade, I want low tariffs, but I don’t want to tell other people what to do. The people who call me an isolationist, are the ones the very first ones who want to put on sanctions on all these countries. Free markets help, I love it since we’ve been trading with China, because I remember the Korean War. Believe me, the difficulties with trade are minor compared to us killing each other. So I think free trade is wonderful, and those are the answers. The answers can be found in the cause of liberty.

Transcript

Melissa Lee: If you want honest talk about what Washington needs to do to get its fiscal house in order, there is no better person to talk to than our next guest, the always outspoken and insightful former Congressman, Ron Paul joins us now on the phone. Dr. Paul, it’s great to have you back on Money in Motion.

Ron Paul: Thank you, it’s nice to be with you.

Melissa Lee: We are market watchers, and this is what the market is telling us: the S&P 500 and the DOW were marching up towards new highs, and the U.S. dollar is also getting stronger. At the end of the day, could this sequester actually be a good thing for the U.S. economy?

Ron Paul: Well, if they really had some cuts in there, it would be a good thing, but there aren’t any cuts, so I wouldn’t give that any credit. But income is going down, it was a bad month in January, and it had to do with the fact that taxes went up. But the President is laying the groundwork for saying that if there’s any problem within the next year, it’s all because of the sequester. But the whole thing is, the sequester isn’t there, it’s just a fear tactic in order to raise taxes, that’s what they’re doing. If there’s a crisis, believe me, the Congress will spend the money. If it’s a financial or a war crisis, they’ll spend the money and there’ll be no hesitation. The Fed spends 85 billion dollars a month, and they’re questioning this whole thing about this nickel and dime. The proposed increase in spending in the next 10 years is 2.5 trillion dollars, and if the sequester goes through, they’re only going to spend 2.4 trillion dollars in additional funds, it means nothing.

The budget is going up automatically at about 7% per year, if the sequester goes through, it will go up at 6.9% per year. I’d like to challenge the people who think this is a big deal by saying, “Okay, you don’t want any cuts? I won’t cut anything, let’s just freeze the budget and give everybody what they had last year”, and see what they say then, because they wouldn’t accept that. But I say just have the budget the way you had it one year ago, and then you can’t complain that you had any cuts.

Andy Busch: Dr. Paul, it’s Andy Busch here, we missed you this week with Bernanke testifying at Capitol Hill, we would have loved to have had your insights then. But isn’t this really a tempest in the teapot? I think, at the end of the month, the big battle is with the continuing resolution. What’s your view on the potential shutdown of the U.S. government over that spending fight?

Ron Paul: I don’t think so, I think they’re afraid of it. A big argument goes on and there’s the pretence that one party wants to cut and the other one doesn’t. But both parties are against having anything in the military budget, so they’re not going to shut down the government, that would be my opinion. And they’re not going to really ever cut anything. As long as this world and the people accept dollars, which they continue to accept, they’re going to keep printing the money, Bernanke is going to keep printing 85 billion dollars a month. And that’s what they’re going to do until the confidence is lost, there are going to be no cuts, there’s not going to be any move towards cutting any budget or balancing the budget, there will be no move in that direction. So I don’t believe for a minute they’re going to close the government down for anytime at all.

Brian Kelly: Dr. Paul, it’s Brian Kelly. I guess what we’re seeing is just this massive disconnect between Wall Street and Washington about what’s the rational path forward. As somebody who was in Washington, is Washington’s definition of ‘rational path’ different than Wall Street’s and Main Street’s? Are we just seeing huge disconnects?

Ron Paul: Oh, there is, and I don’t want to say too much against Wall Street, but I think Main Street has a pretty good feel about this. Wall Street certainly, from my opinion, has a good feel about it on the short run, they know what markets do on the short run, and they know that this is not a calamity. I think at the grassroots, though, Main Street knows that on the long run, this is a disaster. And I think this is why a lot of young people are interested in what I’m saying, because they’re inheriting this mess, and they know what it means on the long run. But the people in Wall Street are pretty good at figuring this out in the short term, and I think they have it correct: this is not a financial disaster. But I think the long term process of spending, huge deficits, not cutting anything, and printing up money, is a disaster, and there are a lot of people who are starting to understand that.

Melissa Lee: Dr. Paul, it’s always great to speak with you, thank you for your time.

Ron Paul: Thanks for having me.

Transcript

Lew Rockwell: Good morning. This is the Lew Rockwell Show, and what an honor it is to have Dr. Ron Paul as our guest this morning. What can we say about Ron Paul, he’s the leader of freedom not only in the United States, but also all over the world. Millions of young people, and some of us older-than-young people, look to him for clarity and truth in all kinds of areas involving economics, war and peace, the role of government, the economy, what the Fed is doing, and just a 101 different areas. But, Ron, I wanted to start off today to talk about some frustration. If we listen to the media, which impresses me as sort of a Soviet-like media because of the way they repeat this kind of stuff about why the world might come to an end if there’s a cut in the projected spending increases for the government.

Ron Paul: Yes, there have been statistics out, and nobody seems to agree on them. But I think on the principle, those of us who want honesty realize that there are no cuts. And this whole idea that there’s going to be a slash in the budget is nothing more than a farce. One side wants to increase the budget over the next ten years by 2.5 trillion dollars, the other side wants to increase it by 2.4 trillion dollars. So it’s a hundred billion dollars cut over ten years, and they’re hysterical over the whole thing. This frenzy is built with the media and the demagoguing by everybody who wants to spend. And you know darn well that the so-called conservatives on the Republican side won’t cut one penny out of the military. It’s just amazing how far this can go. But I think in one way you might look for more sanity in the marketplace. Not that that’s the final test, but the markets aren’t hysterical about this. On the short run, the markets are still saying the end of the world is not coming, and it’s a non-event. In the long term, the endless spending is a big event, I understand that. But as far as the end of the week comes, it’s not like everything is going to be slashed. I’m just amazed at how gullible the people are, but hopefully we’ll get to a lot more than we have over the years, and that’s where I am optimistic that more people are opening up their eyes and their ears.

Lew Rockwell: I noticed that Obama is making a trip to Israel where Netanyahu will be demanding that the U.S. attack Iran. Does that seem to you that that’s slightly less likely than it used to be, or is it more likely, or what do you see happening there?

Ron Paul: I think it’s less likely, and it might just be the economics of it all. Although there aren’t any real cuts, people actually realize that this isn’t going to last forever, so I’ve always argued that we’ll quit the nonsense overseas not because we have wised up and we have wise leaders, but because we won’t be able to afford it. So I think right now, I would say it’s less likely than it had been in the past, and let’s hope we move in that direction. But there is still a powerful influence by the neo-conservatives, they’re still ranting and raving about Hagel been appointed as the Secretary of Defense. But that in itself isn’t going to make a lot of difference, the spending is going to continue. There’s still going to be an influence, but the answer I would say is I think it’s a little less likely now that they’re about to, because they know they can’t really afford it nor run it. I think that our capabilities just aren’t there, because the type of war that would have to be fought would be completely different. They’re building more F-35s, and this is one thing that I hopefully can write something on. Because they talk about all this budgeting, but then when you look at the F-35s, if it lasted throughout its theoretical lifespan, according to the Pentagon, it would cost 1.5 trillion dollars to run these airplanes that have no use. And then they wonder, “How can we ever slash this defense”. Of course, there is no defense, this is just militarism at it’s worse, I think that everybody should refresh their memory about the warning that Eisenhower gave about building weapons like this and then worrying about the budget. I really get upset with conservatives who consider themselves free market people and condemn the liberals for Keynesian economics, and at the same time, they say they can’t cut the F-35S because there are some 40 states that make parts for it, and it would hurt those jobs. So it’s rather disgusting on how they look at it and pretend that they’re free market people

Lew Rockwell: Ron, I noticed that Obama opened up a new drone base in Niger the other day, and the U.S. has expanded its military footprint in some 35 countries in Africa, which is a huge number of countries. So that’s going on, even though they may be pulling back a little bit from wanting to murder everybody in Iran.

Ron Paul: Yea, they’re just moving about, and they’re moving further east into the Pacific and the Philippines, and they’re more likely to get involved in a squabble between Japan and China. They’re certainly not giving up. But you think we’d learn a lesson or be totally embarrassed that we’re going bankrupt, and we’re going over there, we have plans to get more involved in 35 countries in Africa because we have to protect our natural resources. We live in the old age of mercantilism, and we think that we have to have our military to protect the supply of natural resources. That’s what we’ve been doing in the Middle East as well. But who annoyed us the most at the official level? It’s the Chinese, because “they have a weak currency”, as though Americans have a real strong currency with 0% interest rates, and they get away with economic murder in the sense that they can pass this stuff out and the people still take it.

So the Chinese work hard and they save their money and they invest in these countries. They’re investing in Africa, investing in Iran and these different places. Before you know it, they can become more capitalistic than we are at the rate we’re going, it doesn’t make any sense for us to think that we’re an exceptional nation and we have this obligation to use force to promote our goodness around the world, and we’re not even good capitalist anymore. So it’s a sad story, but fortunately there are a lot of people waking up due to the work the Mises Institute is doing and due to the interest the young people have. So I do believe we live in transitional times and revolutionary times, where these views are changing. And the best news as far as I’m concerned, and I hope I’m right, is that Keynesianism isn’t dead, but it’s dying quickly, and it has to be replaced by something.

Lew Rockwell: Well, there’s no question about that, you’ve attracted millions of young people around the world to question Keynesianism and be interested in Austrian Economics, to question the role of the Fed. And right now there’s a little bit of debate about this alleged exit strategy when the Fed will stop keeping interest rates at 0%. Is there a little bit of dissent within the Fed, and what about the markets and the people in Wall Street and the banking system, because we know the Fed exists to especially promote them, as well as the government? What’s happening in those areas?

Ron Paul: I think there’s a little more dissent because they realized how insane the policy is and they can’t go on forever. But I don’t believe that anybody except Bernanke has any call, and what he says counts. A lot of people ask me about it, and they get their directions from conspiracy theories and they say they’re going to do this to create chaos and buy up the world. But I see it slightly differently. I think the Bernankes of the world are very similar to the Paul Krugmans of the world. They believe this stuff, they really truly believe that they can print money for ever and it’s going to work, because, in a way, they survived it since the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods Agreement with a lot of ups and down, so they believe they can pull this out again. And if things don’t do well, they just print more and more, so I think the dissent is outside, I don’t think the other members of the board have much to do about it, but I think there are a few who are absolute Keynesians in that they can regulate the economy through central economic policy and monetary policy. They’re still very much in charge, but I think the reality of the economy will stop them, and not because all of a sudden we’re going to get a wise Federal Reserve board chairman, or because Bernanke is going to say that we have to wind down. Because he must know, he cannot be naive enough to think that he can start withdrawing some of those funds, or even slow up on buying some of these. They buy 85 million dollars a month with mortgage securities and treasury securities, you think they’d slow up. It’s going to panic the whole country. It’s an addiction, and they can’t live without it. The patient, which is the economy, is going to collapse, and they’re not going to save the patient. I often use the analogy with drugs, the drug addict or alcoholic doesn’t like to leave that stuff, and the political alcoholic is much more difficult to treat than an ordinary alcoholic. Some of them can finally get the motivation to get off that stuff.

Lew Rockwell: Ron, you’ve been the pioneer in asking what gold is there in Fort Knox, or what gold is there in the vaults of the New York Fed, and who owns it? Are you encouraged by the fact that there seems to be and international movement now, with the people in Germany forcing the German government to ask for some of their gold back, and Mexico, Austria and many other countries asking not to have the bank of England, or especially the New York Fed, hold their gold? Do you think we’ll ever get an audit of what’s exactly there and how owns it?

Ron Paul: Probably indirectly. If the Germans want their gold and they can’t get it back, then that will be the audit that will count, I don’t think the politicians will actually do it. I heard somebody on a business station this week talking about this whole mess. He was claiming that it will come to an end, he was defending it, but he was making fun. He said the central banks were actually buying gold at this terrible time. And, interestingly enough, he compared it to the stupidity of the bank of England selling gold when it Washington 250 dollars/ounce. Now there are some central banks buying gold, which are actually in the Far East, and I don’t think they’re stupid. I think for Russia and these other countries, buying gold and putting it in a central bank … he said, “Well, they sold when it was too low, and now they’re buying when it’s too high”. But I guess time will tell which is correct. But fortunately the markets even work with tyrants, there’s always a market out there to tell us what’s going on. Even in the soviet system they had the true market, and sometimes they called it the black market, but there’s always a market out there. So I think that’s what’s going to happen with gold. And you actually helped me many years ago in trying to get an audit, you even backed me with the Gold Commission. And they wouldn’t even accept this, so I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I’m looking for the day when there’ll be more foreign countries saying, “Hey, we want our gold back”. And we do not know whether our gold has been committed or whether it’s there or whatever. So it will probably take runaway inflation for us to all wake up.

Lew Rockwell: I’m assuming it’s not a bunch of wooden bricks painted in gold, maybe we’ll find out some day.

Ron Paul: Yes, that’s for sure. People say, “Why don’t you go and look at it?” What good would me walking down and looking at the do, that’s not an analysis, although it might be entertaining. But if you could have a true analysis, it’s going to be a lot different than a commitment, has the gold been loaned out, who actually has ownership. But we shouldn’t worry about this, Lew, we have been assured by the top money-guy that gold is not money, so why do we really care about this, this is just a useless commodity. If we had the true marketplace, remember it was going to go down to $5/ounce.

Lew Rockwell: It’s just a “barbarous relic”, as Keynes pretended to give us a judgment. Ron, I noticed some of it the other day, and I think this is typical of the mainstream media: they referred to you as ‘retired’. Now maybe they’re just mistaken, or maybe they’re attempting to do damage. Not only are you not retired, but it seems to me that you’ve stepped up your work, thank goodness, since you left Congress. You retired from the world of politics, but you’re not retired. You’ve got this new radio show you’re doing with Charles Goyette, you’ve got your website that you’re building, you’re going to continue working in the areas that you’ve always worked in, whether it’s question of war and peace or the Federal Reserve and all other related areas. You’re talking about how you’re going to be working in communications and reaching out to people in all kinds of new and different ways that accord with what young people are interested in, because they’re not interested in a lot of dinosaur media, they’re interested in the new media. You’ve always had a special connection to young people, so I must say I’m opposed to retirement anyway, it’s an invention of Bismarck and FDR and, I think economically and in every other way it’s a bad idea. But you’re not retired, you’re working a lot harder, you’re working longer days than when you were in Congress.

Ron Paul: The opportunities are fantastic, I never believed there would be so much available that I could do. But I don’t think the word ‘retired’ is right, I think they got it mixed up, they must has misheard. I think it was ‘tired of DC’, not ‘retired’. I do go back and forth on occasions, and I especially go to George Washington University, so I will go in to that area for special reasons, but I was sort of tired of it. But I have been fascinated about how much opportunity has been available, there are so many opportunities, I can’t even take advantage of them all. But it allows me to do the things I have been trying to do for so many years, but it’s more or less on my time and my picking and choosing and. Like I’ve told so many people in the speeches that I give – and I guess I say this to reassure myself as well – if we’re doing this and it’s not a labor of love and it’s not much fun, why even do it. And I enjoy it and I think it’s important and I get satisfaction from it and I’m sure you’ve had the same experience keeping the Mises Institute going, getting the satisfaction of seeing so much good come from it. So I look forward to all the opportunities and I’m going to enjoy it.

Lew Rockwell: Well, you are, and of course, you’re continuing to be very much in demand in college campuses, you’re writing books, and there’s an exciting new era of Ron Paul coming up for all the people who follow you. So, folks, wait for the big announcements. Thank you, Ron, very much for coming on the show today.

Ron Paul: Thank you, Lew.

Lew Rockwell: Bye, bye. Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts, they’ve been hundreds of them. There’s a link on the upper right-hand corner of the LRC front page. Thank you.