Transcript

Ron Paul: It’s very nice to be here and see so much enthusiasm, because I think we live in very important times. And it’s an American issue or a Canadian issue or a European issue, it is a worldwide issue. Because the times that we live in are different in many, many ways, from my viewpoint, because I believe we’re in a transition, we’re in a transition from a system of economics and politics that’s ending. The biggest event in my lifetime was the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, it came to an end. As early as 1912, it was predicted by Mises that it’s not viable; you can’t have socialism, you have to have a pricing system. And it came down, but it wasn’t replaced by the concept of liberty, it was replaced by what we call ‘interventionism’, and that’s what we’re been living with. Interventionism is government planning, welfarism, inflationism, central banking, and believing that deficits are alright. And this type of a system comes to an end, too, and that’s what we’re facing today.

In almost every country in the West, it’s debt. Debt is the big problem because it was taught for many, many years. The Keynesian theory of economics says that deficits don’t matter, and if you come up short, you keep taxing the people till the point where they can’t be taxed anymore, and then you keep borrowing till you can’t borrow anymore. Then they think, “It’s magic, all you have to do is print the money, and it’s going to work out”, and you can do that for a while. My approach to all this is that that’s all completely wrong, and it’s coming to an end, and there is a replacement and it can be found in the cause of liberty.

One thing I want to talk about for a minute or two is the labels. This is a conservative group, and I’m seen as conservative, but even the term ‘conservative’ has relative terms. If you were in the Soviet Union when it was starting to come apart, the conservatives were the ones who wanted to conserve Marxism, and the liberals were the ones who wanted to believe in liberty. The founders of the United States called themselves liberals, and that term was, in many ways, destroyed and undermined. One of the terms that I always used to have sympathy for, because it sounds good … sure we’ve all been progressives, sure we want to look into the future and see new things, but I don’t know how the word ‘ progressive’ is used up here, but in the United States, it’s a bad term if you’re a conservative. And maybe that’s true here, too. But then the term ‘libertarian’ comes up, and that has a controversial connotation. So you have moderates and libertarians and conservatives and liberals and progressives and socialists, so the terminology is very tricky. So I’ve simplified my terminology for what I’ve believe in to a simple term, and that is ‘interventionism’. If you believe in interventionism across the board, that means you want the government to tell us what to do with our personal lives, you want the government to tell us what to do with our economic activity, and you allow the government to tell other people around the world what to do. So guess what, I’ve come down on the side of saying, “I am a non-interventionist”.

And that’s what freedom is all about. The term ‘freedom’ has been around for a long time, ever since the Magna Carta, there has been bits and pieces coming about. But, right now, in the United States, I would say that we’ve been going backwards in the last 100 years. We have undermined our monetary system, our free market system, our personal liberties, we have become interventionist overseas, we endorse the idea of central banking, we don’t believe in sound money. So, in the last 100 years, we have gone in the wrong direction, and it’s coming to an end, and the limitation is the debt. And yet, the far Left will say that debt doesn’t matter. When you get into a problem, what you want to do is to spend more money. So we get into trouble economically, governments spend too much money, they borrow too much money, they print too much money, the interest rates are too low for too long, and then they say, “Well, now we’re in a recession, and it’s very serious”. So what is their solution? “Spend more money, borrow more money, print more money, have more intervention”. And then they wonder, “Why hasn’t the recession ended?”

So that’s really where we are today, so I don’t see an end to the recession coming. Yet, today, there were very good statistics on the unemployment rates in the United States, that there were more jobs made than there has been for quite a few years and the unemployment rate has dropped. But just as labels can be tricky, we have different statistics. We have government statistics, and we have real statistics. But I’m sure that doesn’t occur in Canada, because you’re all very honest and friendly people, and your governments would never want to deceive you in anything. This past week, I happened to have had a quick visit to New York City, although they have to really talk me into going to New York City after living Texas. But there was news this week from New York City, and the stock market hit new highs in nominal terms, not in real terms. If the price is in dollars, it’s a disaster, the price of the stocks are way, way down. But nominally, there was excitement on Wall Street, and people who do the trading made a lot of money, there were historic highs, over 14, 000, it was exciting. At the same time, it was announced in New York City that there were 50,000 homeless people looking for a place to sleep. Now, isn’t that astounding? But it fits in to this understanding of Austrian economics that some people thrive and some people suffer. Our school system in the states is in a bad shape in the United States, there was this statistic this morning that said 80% of our graduates from high school in New York City can’t read. This is a big serious problem. If you look at the superficial, you might say, “Well, we’re coming out of this”, but you need to look at what the reality is. There is an Austrian free market economist by the name of John Williams, and John Williams does what you call ‘shadowstats’. He measures most of the government’s statistics by the old method. Say unemployment, what’s the real unemployment according to the old statistics? He say it’s 22%, and that explains why the people feel worse than what the headlines are saying. He says our inflation rate, the prices going up, is 10%. So, this, in a way, explains the discrepancy between the way people feel and people are actually going. There’s a simple solution to all this: don’t send anybody to your legislature and to your government unless they tell you the truth all the time, that’s what we need.

But that’s been happening for quite a few centuries, because it’s supposed to be a ‘noble lie’. The government tell lies because the people can handle the truth, and I don’t accept that. I don’t accept it in foreign policy; we in America have been deceived too many times about the threats that we have around the world, we are deceived by our financial threats. And therefore, politicians and the people capitulate to the point where they want the government to do more, people become fearful and they say, “Yes, do whatever is necessary”. This has been especially true in the last 12 years since 9/11. And when people become fearful, they are more willing to give up their liberties, and, unfortunately, that’s what’s been going on. And when I talk about ‘our civil liberties’, I want to make it clear and put it in the disclaimer that I’m not talking about anybody other than the United States, because our civil liberties in the United States are threatened. This whole idea that our President now believes that he can actually assassinate individuals that have assassinated Americans without due process. That, to me, is very dangerous to be arrested by the military, these are attacks on civil liberties that cannot persist. And yet, people say, “They’re terrorists”. Well, they’re not terrorists, they’re suspects. If you have due process, you don’t handle it that way. So we’ve had an undermining of our civil liberties. But I think the solution only comes if we have a clear understanding of what liberty is all about. To me, I don’t see people in groups, I don’t see rights as designated as women’s rights or gay rights or minority rights. There’s individual rights, everybody has an individual right to their life and they should be treated equally under the law. And this is not because government says so, my belief is that it’s a natural God-given right to your life and your liberty.

Now, what would be the consequence of this if our governments did this? Well, if it’s your life and your liberty, wouldn’t it be correct to assume that the fruits of your labor are also yours to keep? My goodness, that would be a challenging thought, what does that mean, there wouldn’t be an income tax? That is right, we wouldn’t have income taxes, because it would be your money. And then they start worrying, “Well, how do you pay for the government?” Well, why don’t we have a lot less government, and then we wouldn’t have to worry about that, that’s what I’d like. The best thing to try to work into this structure is to try to have a rule of law. In the United States, it’s the constitution, all of us take the oath to follow the constitution. But, low and behold, everybody takes the same oath and everybody has a different interpretation of the constitution, and they don’t lose any sleep over it. So the rule of law doesn’t work. So you have to have a rule of law, but you have to have quality people and people of character who will actually follow it. But restraints have to be placed. Our constitution was written not to restraint the people. If you read it carefully, it was written to restraint the government. It said, “The government, thou shall not do this, this and this … and stay out of the personal business and economic business of all individuals”. One issue that I’ve addressed quite frequently, and I think it’s important, because what has happened, probably over the past 100 years, is we’ve taken this concept of liberty, which I think our founders understood pretty well while writing the constitution, that liberty was life, liberty was a right to your life, a right to keep what you earn. But somehow, a while ago, it turned out that people took liberty and chopped it into two. They talked about personal liberty, your lifestyle, your religious values, your personal values, your sexual values and all these social things, and they said, “Oh, we can’t allow you to just do what you want, you might do dumb things”. And the other group says, “Yes, but we can’t have economic liberty because somebody is always going to suffer, people will suffer, and we have to make sure that there’s equal distribution”. So some people will object to that and protect economic liberty, and some will protect personal liberty. My belief is that if you believe in liberty, you will protect economic liberty and personal liberty, and they’re all one and the same.

This also offers a political opportunity, because, generally, from my viewpoint from the United States, I feel the Left is a little bit better, but not really all that good in protecting personal lifestyles. And the Right is generally better, even though we have conservatives in the United States that aren’t all that conservative, but they generally are known to protect economic liberty as well. But if there is an appeal for liberty to bring people together, why shouldn’t we be able to get people of all persuasions to come together to defend liberty. It’s not so much that everybody will use their liberty in the same manner, but they want their liberty because of their personal use. The big challenge, though, economically and socially, is if you get your personal liberty and you get your economic liberty and if you don’t do well, or if you do harm to yourself or you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t go bugging your neighbors through your member of parliament and say, “Well, I didn’t do so well, so I want you to go to my neighbor and get something and take care of me”. You have to assume responsibility for all your actions if you expect to assume the benefits of all your actions.

What I’ve come across in the United States in these last 5 years is a dramatic change in attitude, it’s an exciting change, and especially with so many young people as I go to our college campuses. And that is, there’s a recognition that what I’m saying is true, that there is a disconnect between many who are making a lot of money and doing well and getting the bailouts, and those that are suffering. Our housing programs were designed to make sure everybody had a home, and it was magic. Buy a home for $100,000, and in a few years it’s worth a $150,000, its magic, it’s a cure-all. And everybody qualified for credit. Now, Austrian economics teaches that if you create a lot of credit and have artificially low interest rates and have overbuilding, you have a bubble, and the bubble will burst. So the programs were designed to make sure all poor people had a house, and they would get rich because the value of the house would go up. The truth is, you can’t create wealth out of nothing, and it will end, and it did end. So what happened to the poor people? They lost their jobs and they lost their houses. And guess who got bailed out, the people who were doing all the speculating and making billions and billions of dollars got bailed out. And then the poor and the middle class get upset.

I think we as libertarians and conservatives come up short in identifying with the people who get messed up with this economic policy, and we lose the moral high ground because those who want to use force to take from productive people and give to the non-productive, win by saying, “We really care”. But if we really care, and if we have humanitarian instincts and we want to help people, we’ll argue for the cause of liberty, sound money, and free market economics.

But the recognition is there today, and most people are starting to realize it’s not sustainable. Even those who are able to work in the system and trade the stocks and make money know it’s coming to an end and that these debts are unsustainable. Our cities and our counties and our federal government are all at that point where they can’t reverse the tide. Now, the one advantage that we have in the states is the fact that since World War II, we have been the economic and military powerhouse. Economic wealth and military power conveys confidence in the system, it conveys confidence in the currency, and it was designated that the U.S. dollar would be the reserve currency of the world after World War II. And this gave us a great privilege, so we immediately abused that privilege from 1945 up until 1971. And as predicted, when I was starting to read economics and the predictions were made in the 1950s and 1960s, this can’t work, you just can’t print dollars and pretend that if any foreigner (Americans weren’t even allowed to own gold), comes and puts down $35, he can get an ounce of gold. We went from 700 ounces of gold to less than three hundred million ounces of gold, and it had to end, and it did, the market ended it. So it broke down, and it was eye-opener for me on august 15th, 1971. And I thought at the time, “This is a big, big moment, where is it going to lead to?” And I thought it would lead to a lot of trouble, and we’re still suffering from that problem. But I never dreamed that the confidence worldwide would last so long, that there would be such a trust in the dollar. Today, we’re suffering from a severe inflation, there’s no confidence in the economy, and that’s why real investors worry. We’re not rebuilding our steel plants and all, we’re not productive. The only thing that we’re capable of producing that the world is still willing to take, are the dollars.

And I don’t understand for how long or why they will, but they keep doing it. But there is an interest in protecting the dollar. Even if the Chinese became unhappy with this, and they could bring us down because they have 1.3 trillion dollars, they can mess up the markets pretty well. But why would they want to ruin their dollar holdings? So, in a way, we’re holding people hostage. And as long as there’s trust in the dollar and confidence in the dollar and confidence in us, this thing is going to continue. But what it does is it builds a bigger and bigger distortion, a bubble, and the biggest bubble from my estimation today is in the bonds, because you’re getting negative interest rates and people are still buying them. And some day that will come to an end, and things will have to change.

So we still have prosperity, you see it here and you see it in the United States, but the prosperity too often is based on debt, and that is where the limitation is. So we have seen the consequences in some of the European countries, like in Greece and Spain and Italy and these other places. But it will come and it will affect all of us, and when it affects the dollar, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. And this is why I believe that a revolutionary spirit and a change of things, the acceptance of the fact that we’re working with a failed system … the Keynesian system doesn’t work, it’s not socialism in the sense of government controlling wages and prices and supply and demand. There’s no way, because the most important thing in a free market are prices.

If you’re in business, and you have to decide something, if your competition is giving the same product at a better price, you better do better. Because, in a free market, the real determining factor is the consumer, the consumer is King. It’s not the labor union, it’s not labor, it’s not the businessman, and the businessman should never be protected. But, today, what’s happening is we protect our businessmen all the time; we bail them out, and we have a military-industrial complex way out of proportion to what it should be. And, for this reason, the people have allowed this to go on for so long that now it will come to an end once this debt is recognized.

Now you can say, “Well, if you don’t have wage and price controls, why do we have such distortion?” It has to do with the monetary system. It’s the fixing of interest rates. They say, “Oh yes, isn’t that wonderful that interest rates are 0%?” Greenspan was doing this for a long time, and most people can see that Greenspan had interest rates too low for too long and he created this distortion. So Bernanke says, “That is true”, so what does he do, he lowers them even more and he even prints more money. So it just goes on and on. But the big point there is the fixing of interest rates lower than the market value. You cannot run a sound, growing economic market without savings rates that are honest. The government today has a system with central banking where they are the central economic planners, and they come in and we get into a recession, which is essentially what happened here, and they say, “We can get out of the recession by printing more money and lowering interest rates”. And then we’ll wait and see what they’ll say what happens if prices start to rise, which they will, and they’ll say, “Oh, then we have to slow the economy”. So a booming economy with growth is corrected by causing a slower economy. Now, if you have a free market and the economy is booming and there’s economic growth of 25%, nobody wants to turn it off. We purposely turn it off to crash the economy to manipulate the prices. So they’re price fixers, they’re worried about the prices of commodities, and they’re going to fix it always with central economic planning.

We had that debate at the time of writing our constitution between Hamilton and Jefferson. Jefferson was a hard-money, he was against the central bank, Hamilton argued for the central bank, and they had the first national bank. So we’ve been arguing this case for a long time. Guess which side I come down on? I say no central banking and no Federal Reserve System. But that could be designed not by ending the Fed in one day, we’ll give him a week or two to just introduce competition, allow competition to exist. Today, in the United States we have a gentleman that instituted the Liberty Dollar and let the people use their own silver dollar, and the constitution said only silver and gold can be legal tender. Well, he was immediately arrested, his gold and silver to the tune of millions of dollars was confiscated. He never committed a crime, never committed fraud, never told a lie, and he was charged with counterfeiting and terrorism. So I would say that’s overstepping the bounds and abuse of liberty and common sense.

One reason why a lot of people object to giving too much freedom of choice to the individual is that if you have your social liberties to make your decisions about your own lifestyles, you might do things that others might not think appropriate. They say, “Well, we have to take care of people and guide them”. And I think what has to happen and what is the problem there, is if people do things that they don’t approve of, they become more intolerant. But, if you legalize freedom of choice in personal behavior, it doesn’t mean you endorse the behavior. If we have legalization of religious freedom, some people have this religion and some people have another religion and some people have no religion, but most people will accept that, and that’s rather tolerant. In the last 30, 40 years we’ve spent about 5 to 6 trillion dollars enforcing laws which I think make no sense whatsoever, they have caused our prisons to have more prisoners than China, and that is the irrationality of the drug laws that tell people what they can put in their mouths and what they can put in their bodies. I think the drug wars needs to be repealed.

But, at the same time, I have children and grandchildren, I’m a physician, and I say drugs are very, very dangerous. But, if you compare the so-called illegal drugs to prescription drugs, a lot more people die from the prescription drug abuse. Right now we’re suffering from an epidemic of suicide in some of our veterans, and we have a lot of violence in our schools. And somebody just did a study in which they took the last ten episodes of violence where young people went and took guns and irrationally shot people, and all then of them were on psychotropic drugs. So this is a different problem than some people might think.

Transcript

Ron Paul: Thank you very much. Thank you, Lew, I appreciate that very much, I appreciate what the Mises Institute does. There was a time when the Mises Institute was just starting, and I helped a little bit in the early years. Our crowds were much smaller, though. I think the future looks bright, and that, to me, is very encouraging. I also want to especially thank the host for this luncheon today, and that’s Carl Davis, and he’s, of course, at our table, and he’s hosting this lunch. But Carl is a good friend of liberty, but he’s also a good friend of Carol and me, I’ll tell you that. Because back in the old days, I represented the 22nd district, which was a different part of the Harris County area, and he was a constituent then. But he’s been a strong supporter of everything I’ve done, so I appreciate that very much, Carl, and I’m glad to see you here today. Also, Lew mentioned that I would be continuing to work on foreign policy, and we’ve organized a group which will be called The Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and it will be run under the Free Foundation. But I was fortunate in these last few years in Washington to have an individual who was a real expert in that area, and he will be heading that up, and Lew will also be advising us on that: and that’s Daniel McAdams, who will be on that board and running it. Thank you, Daniel.

It is great to be here, and over the years, it’s always been great just to get out of DC, let me tell you, because the atmosphere is so different. One of the things that people often talk about and bring up to me is, ‘When in Congress, or even now, how do you ever put up with it, how did you stand it?’ Because when they look at it and listen to it and see what’s happening and try to change the direction, they say, “Didn’t you become frustrated and annoyed and didn’t it drive you nuts?” And I said, “Really, it didn’t do it, because I think I went there with the proper expectations, I didn’t expect that I would change the world. Matter of fact, I’ve been surprised on the upside that we’ve gotten as much attention as we’ve had. But I think I was talking to myself to probably rationalize being there, saying it wasn’t quite so bad. But let me tell you, now that I’ve been home for a couple of weeks, I say, “How did I ever put up with that stuff up there?” But there have been some good things happening in Washington. When I see 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5, literally change the direction of how they’ve been thinking. And one of my closest friends in Washington happens to be a close friend of Carl Davis, too, and that’s the Congressman from North Carolina, Walter Jones. Now, Walter Jones was a typical neo-con, and he represented many, many military personnel, and he just felt like he had to do this-and-this-and-this. And he was the individual that, when the Iraq war broke out, he voted and supported it, and then he was the one that introduced this resolution to change French Fries to Freedom Fries, because he was annoyed at the French because they weren’t joining in the battle. Of course, the French are making up for that right now in Algeria, but that’s how annoyed he was. But shortly after that – and we visited quite often – it finally dawned on him that he was for the war because of one thing: they lied to him, flat out lied to him. He went to all the briefings and listened to all the experts and the CIA and the administration and the president on down, and he believed what they were saying. But it didn’t take him too long to find out they were lying, they were lying through their teeth about it. And then he started seeing the troops come back, the ones that were wounded, the ones that were killed, and he saw all the harm done, and he knew about the problems on the military bases. So now, he’s one of the strongest anti-war opponents, and this, to me, is a significant thing, because that’s what we have to change, we have to change people’s minds and understanding. And it became an important issue for our campaign as well, because as I travelled around the country so often, the neo-con average Republican would come up and many of them were, at least to my face, very courteous and polite. And they’d say, “Ron, we really love what you’re doing, you are such a good conservative, you always vote against all that spending and everything else, and we really like that. But we can support you, if you would only change your foreign policy”. So I tried to explain to them: where would the people on the college campuses and the young people and crowds like this be if the foreign policy was that of military adventurism. This is a major part of our philosophy, and is very, very important. So I would say, if we give up our foreign policy and accept the policy of intervention, we’ve given up way too much and we should never give an inch on that.

Washington has not changed a whole lot, and if you measure what’s happening in the country with what’s happening in Washington, you could become a little bit depressed. If you watch only the major networks on TV, you might even end up throwing things at the TV. But we live in a different era, and today, you don’t have to get your news off the TV. So if you look only at Washington and not at what’s happening elsewhere, we would be in a lot of trouble. But today, a whole generation is coming of age that don’t get their information from the TV, they get it elsewhere. And so, life is changing, I’ve been interested in these ideas for a long time, and many of you, I know, share this. It wasn’t so easy to get information. In the 1950s and the 1960s when I became fascinated with these studies, it was hard to find the information. I was so delighted when I discovered the foundation for economic education, the Leonard Read’s Group. It was fantastic that this was available, you could actually get a book and study and write off a book. Today, you can get a book instantaneously with a couple of clicks on your computer. So we live in the most miraculous of times. Victor Hugo said that you can stop an invasion of an army, but you cannot stop an invasion of ideas. And when I first heard that, I was so excited about that, because I’m really sort of a chicken at heart, I don’t like fighting and shooting and killing people. And if I thought I had to try to change anything by becoming violent, I didn’t want any part of it. So I decided that ideas are more powerful than armies, why not join the position of changing ideas and confront the people who have the military power, so we have the greatest weapon in our hands for fighting.

Washington, right now, is not much interested in some of the very important issues that are dear to our heart. They claim there is a lot of partisanship going on in Washington, and if you turn on the TV, there is a lot of partisanship. They yell and scream and fuss and fume and shriek and holler, and it’s not all fake, it’s real, because there’s always an argument over who has the power. Murray Rothbard used to write about the banking industry and how the Rockefellers would be fighting with each other, but when it came to endorsing the Fed, they endorsed the Fed. And this is sort of the way it still is, the Republicans and Democrats fight with each other, but when it comes down to the important issues, there’s way too much compromise, too much bipartisanship. We got into this mess because of the bipartisanship, but it was easy when the country was wealthy and growing and the prosperity and the momentum was there. We had a relatively good economy and a free society and sound money, and in spite of its imperfection, it created the most massive amount of wealth known to mankind. And this momentum continued, and even as the underpinnings of that system was occurring, there was still a lot of wealth to divvy up. And so, it was easy to compromise, like, “Okay, you want milk, we’ll give you tobacco subsidies”, and vice-versa. So there were no arguments. Now it’s a true argument because even our opposition realizes that there’s a limit to this, except for Paul Krguman, I don’t think Paul Krugman thinks there’s a limit. Because [according to him] if you’re out of money, the most important thing is people spend more money, and that would solve everybody’s problem. So if you don’t have enough money and the Fed wouldn’t print enough, or the treasury won’t borrow enough, just create a trillion dollar platinum coin, and cash it in for a trillion dollars, and it will be miraculous and all our problems will be solved. But guess what, a whole generation of people today, not only the individuals in this room, but a whole generation of young people on college campuses, know that it’s all a fraud and it’s not going to work, and they’re reading about the Fed and they know there will be a day when the Fed will be ended.

You know, I’ve been criticized on occasions for not calling an end to the Fed. Of course, I wrote a book called ‘End the Fed’, but they don’t like it because it sounds softer because my goal isn’t to send the troops down there and get rid of the Fed, I’m just waiting for them to self-destruct, is what I’m waiting for. But the Fed will end, we shouldn’t have the Fed, but my thoughts are that we should work more on just legalizing the constitution, and if we did that, they’d say, “Oh, that’s radicalism”. Just legalize the constitution, and then you wouldn’t go to jail if we used silver for legal tender, today you go to jail for that. I suggest that we look at the coinage act of 1792 to find out what the penalty was for; it was for counterfeiting money. We who use silver today aren’t the counterfeiters, it’s the Fed that’s the counterfeiters, and we should hold them accountable. But both sides support the Fed, both sides support the military-industrial complex, both sides support the welfare state and, therefore, the arguments are very superficial and distracting. Do you think the bankers and the military-industrial complex and others really worried a whole lot during this last election after it was narrowed down to two? Well, which one won, would it have made much difference? I don’t believe there would have been any difference, but there’s still this whole fanfare of beating the drums of this competition. But I think that’s our important job, to make sure that people know there’s an alternative, and that we’re not part of that system. And I think that’s what’s happening. For some very special reason, those young people in college campuses, as well as all of you – because I don’t see one person here over 30, so I think that is great – are open to these ideas, and are now studying. It just sort of bewilders me when I have young people come to me … matter of fact, today I had somebody come up to me and say, “I started reading about this because of you when I was 14″. I have people come up to my office in Washington and they say, “I started reading Murray Rothbard when I was 13″, and they’re reading it now. But, believe me, if what victor Hugo said is true, which I believe that ideas do have these consequences, we’re on a roll, as far as I’m concerned, I think it’s going great. And a lot of people deserve credit. Sometimes it’s an individual talking to a family friend or a neighbor, and sometimes it’s a teacher in a particular school, and sometimes it’s an organization or an institute like the Mises Institute that changes people’s minds. And this is what’s been happening.

And I’m impressed with the growth of the numbers. I remember in 2007, when somebody wrote to me about thinking about running for office, I said, “Yea, yea, I guess I’ll do it, but I can’t see much coming out of it”, and I gave him all those arguments. And this information was leaked out, it got out before I made the announcement that I would run in the presidential race. So it got out, and before I knew it, it got on the internet; and before I knew it, a lot of people knew about it. And I said, “What’s going on here?” and they said, “Well, it went viral”, and I asked, “Viral? I never even studied viruses of this sort in medical school”. So that, to me, was remarkable, but even what’s happen since 5 years ago [is remarkable]. But yes, the campaign was important, and I helped some, but believe me, a lot of people were involved planting the seeds. And when you see the exponential growth that is before us today, this, to me, is so impressive. And it’s not like it’s the 14th district in Texas, it’s not it’s in Texas, it’s not like it’s in the United States; with the communications that happen today … You know, the other day somebody called me up and they said, “When are you coming to Canada, we have a Mises Institute branch up here”, and they’re all over the place. So, this is what’s happening, and I have to tell you, I’ve had a little bit of personal delight in that time when Romney went to Poland. Anybody remember what happened when he went to Poland?

Crowd: Yea.

Ron Paul: And I don’t even speak Polish, so maybe someday I’ll go to Poland and meet those two people that were holding that sign. No, there are more than two people here and there, and I think there’re two reasons for that. I’ve talked a lot about the internet and the young people, but I think there’s another reason why this is happening, and it has to do with where we are in the scheme of things. The evidence of the 20th century is so overwhelming, that it can’t be ignored anymore: the overwhelming failure of socialism, the overwhelming literal liquidation of this communism, as Marx and Lennon proposed. I mean, it died, and we didn’t have to fight them, we didn’t have to go in with armies, we went in with ideas and the failure of theirs. So I think it’s the spreading of our ideas, but it’s also the failure of theirs. And I think this is what’s happening; it’s the failure of our foreign policy that changes the minds of people like Walter Jones, and it’s the failure of government’s credibility. The other day I was on a college campus and we had a nice crowd out, and I asked them, “How many here believe the government leaders when they make announcements from Washington, how many believe these things?” I didn’t see any hands up. I know I don’t think I’ll get any hands up in here, but at the college campuses, nobody believes the government. I would say that’s a healthy start.

You know, we all know the story about the policy of: the government shouldn’t be able to do anything that you or I cannot do. If we can’t steal and rob and all, the government shouldn’t be able to do it; if we can’t counterfeit, the government shouldn’t be able to counterfeit; if we’re not allowed to use violence, the government shouldn’t be allowed to use violence. I don’t know, this might be a radical idea, but maybe we can do it the other way. Anything the government assumes they have a right to do to us, we should assume we have the right to do that to them. Now, would it be too radical to say that if the government lies to us, we have the right to lie to the government? Do have a gun in your house, how many guns do you have? Do you have government in your house, how much gold do you have in your house? So, I think it makes a point, if nothing else. The government has assumed a role that was never intended for it in this country, but it’s been assumed that way, to one degree or the other, for literally centuries, if not millennium. And most people say, “Well, that’s the way it’s going to be, it’s been that way for thousands of years, governments are always too big, and they fight the wars and make innocent young people die. And therefore you can’t expect anything different to happen. And I am so optimistic, that I believe we can change that, or at least introduce this whole notion that it doesn’t have to be that way. If Switzerland can go for 300, 400 years without actively fighting a war, why can’t a lot more of us do the same thing? That’s what I think we ought to do. And that doesn’t mean you become passivist and give up defense, no, you put an ak47 in everybody’s house. Some people say, “Well, it’s Switzerland because they’re surrounded by mountains and it’s a special situation and nobody ever wanted to invade them and they didn’t have to participate. Well, didn’t we have a pretty special situation, and still do, even in this modern age? There’s a lot of water between us and any individual that might invade us right now, but I don’t think there’s anybody planning on invading us. I remember back in the early 1980s when they were planning to build these huge tanks, and we were building more tanks. And I asked and I said, “Why do we need more tanks, are we expecting the Russians to come across the barren sea and invade us with their tanks?” I mean, it just goes on and on, and I don’t think it’s too over the top to think that attitudes can change. I think two things have to happen, though, to get it; I think we need more resistance from young people to say, “We’re sick and tired of it all, we don’t want to fight more wars, and we’re not going to go and be cannon fodder, we need more resistance to these wars”. But we need more individuals in Washington who have different ideas and different programs, and I think that would be worthwhile, but I don’t think that would answer the question, because I think people abuse power when they get it. So if they’re able to, and they believe they can use this power to get into those positions, and it is thought by the people that government ought to have this monopoly of power, then I think they will always be abused. I think we have to get to the point where we tell anybody in Washington, “You don’t have this authority, you don’t have this authority to run our lives, you don’t have authority to run the economy, and you don’t have authority to tax us and fight wars that we don’t need to be in. And we don’t even want you in office if that is the case, because you don’t have the legal right to do it”.

You know, one of the biggest problems, of course, is trust in Washington, and most of that lack of trust is justified. But there was a commentator the other day talking to a senator about his promises in his oath, and the senator was changing his mind on his pledge to not raise taxes, and he more or less said, “I care much more about my country than I do about some (he didn’t use the word stupid, but he meant it) pledge I took 20 years ago not to raise taxes. And I think that is the attitude, because most of them either distort what the constitution is, or they figure, “That’s old fashioned”, they just say it, they don’t take it seriously. But then he just said, “My oath and my promise doesn’t mean anything”, and that, of course, would have to change. Another commentator asked a senator, because he was taking a position which, for us, wouldn’t be too much of a step to take, but he was a conservative and wanted to cut back a little bit. And the commentator said to him, “Isn’t this overly idealistic, why don’t you live with reality”. Well, the position of so many who are considered over-the-top and overly idealistic and not living up to reality, what do they mean by this? Because, in truth, if we were concerned about that, wouldn’t the budget not be something over the top, isn’t that extreme, isn’t that excessive? I mean, budgets and deficits of trillions and trillions of dollars, printing trillions and trillions of dollars of money, and they’re doing it in secret, and then they say to somebody who wants to cut something by a nickel is an extremist and over the top and radical. I think what we need to do is turn that around and show that the radicals and the extremist, those who believe bizarrely in ideas that we don’t agree with, have been in charge, and it’s time to change those individuals and change our attitude about what the role of government ought to be. Many years ago, when I was in Congress in my first go-around, I remember a conversation that I overheard. A bill had been on the Floor, and the Democrats were strongly in charge and Michel was a Republican leader. And yet there was a vote that was relatively close, and I don’t even remember what the bill was, but it was relatively close because I guess some Democrats were defecting. And Jim Right and Bob Michael worked out a deal where Bob Michel was able to gather together some moderate Republicans, and they came up and passed the bill. And I remember it, because as soon as it was passed, Jim Wright came over to Bob Michel on the floor, and he said, “I want to really thank you for doing what you did, because that was so statesman-like for to do what you did”. That is so statesman like to sell out. I think there should be a different definition for ‘statesmanship’. But I thought this really is the attitude, and what is the meaning of co-operation and compromise. I look at it as what we need is not more compromise, what we need is coalition-building. We’re not going to have everything we want as fast as we want in government. If you’re in politics, I think if you’re not a 100%, you’re wasting your time. If you’re in politics to move up the ladder, that’s a different story. But I think you should work with different groups, like on foreign policy and civil liberties.

You know, when I first went to Washington, if my decision had been that I wanted to have influence in the typical fashion, that meant I had to move up the ladder, and that meant I had to vote the way leadership told me to, etc. I was always amazed that when individuals who might be voting pretty well and were conservative, get a position in leadership … I remember one time going up to the individual and we were just having a vote and he was voting the wrong way, and I said, “What are you doing, you’re not voting with us today”. And he said, “Well, I can’t do it anymore, I’m in leadership”. He was in leadership, so he had to do what he was told. But if you work your way up the ladder, I guess if I would have stayed on and had done that, I could have become a chairman. But then the other concession you have to make, not only on all your principles, is you also have to raise a lot of money. I think the chairman said, “Each committee has a different amount”, it’s like ways and means, you might have to raise 10 or 15 million dollars for the club, for the Republicans. And if you don’t raise the money, you are never considered. So unlike Walter Jones and 3 or 4 others who got kicked off their committee because they didn’t bow to the leadership, I was never kicked off a committee, because I think the problem there was, and I heard Gingrich say this one time, “Well, we didn’t do this because we didn’t want to get too many emails from Ron Paul’s friends”. So working up the ladder is really the job that they have to worry about, but I believe that we’re facing tremendous opportunities that we have, and I think what’s happening today is so beneficial that we can’t let up. So often I get asked the question, “What should I do?” and I say, “Just do what you want to do”.

Everybody has a different job, but everybody has a job. And some people can do one thing and not the other. A lot of young people will come up and they’ll be 18 – 20 years old and they’ll say, “I like what you did, and I’d like to do what you did. How do I get into Congress, how can I run for Congress?” and say, “Don’t do it, don’t set that as your goal. That shouldn’t be your goal, you might end up doing it someday”. But you don’t want to set the goal of running for Congress. If somebody wants to get you into Congress because of your beliefs, that’s a different story. But if you set a goal to move up the political ladder, I think that’s very dangerous. Leonard Read was great on this, he said, “Educate yourself, learn and study and know the issues”. I still believe I try very hard to understand all the issues and learn how to explain the issues, and that is very important. Mises talked about that in “Human Action”, and he talks about how some people are inclined on writing and studying and on ideas and issues and are pure academicians; and others are responsible for making those ideas palatable. And I feel like I’m sort of in that category, I like being the education, I have an educational foundation, and I promote it. But it seems like I’ve listened carefully to what he said about taking ideas and making them palatable to yourself so you understand them. Then it makes it so easy for you to get your friends and neighbors. And now, how many people in this group might have a Facebook account? A few. So literally, in a room like this, if everybody had a Facebook account, we’re talking about tens of thousands of people. It could be a new definition for ‘viral’, who knows what happens on how ideas are spread. So this is a wonderful time to have a wonderful philosophy, it’s not complicated, it’s based very fundamentally on what life is all about. I think life is precious, and I think life comes from our creator, and if we think we can defend all other kinds of liberties without respect for life and the protection of all life, I don’t think we can spread these ideas of liberty that well.

But those who expect to defend liberty, most likely undergo the fatigue of supporting liberty. And people who come to groups like this have already invested a lot of time and money in these ideas, and I only encourage you, I thank all of you for coming, I thank Lew for the invitation. And, believe me, I’m very encouraged, and, in many ways, I feel the most released in a way because I don’t have to go through TSA quite as often. But I won’t stop arguing the case about why we need to get rid of the TSA as soon as possible. But let me just close, because I want to make one important point that I think so many respond favorably to on college campuses. And that is, what is concept of liberty all about? I’m convinced that a 100 yrs ago or so, for some reason, we went off track and we took the principles of liberty and cut them in pieces. And we have personal liberties and civil liberties, and then we have the foreign policy sitting out there, and then we have economic liberties. And people who don’t quite understand this, put them into categories and different groups. But if you believe in the individual as possessing liberty, and not as a group; and you don’t have group rights, you don’t have gay rights, and you don’t have women’s rights or minority rights and all these things, you just have individual rights and everybody deserves equal protection from the law, regardless. But if we have that liberty, this means the individual is in control, control of one’s own life. But it also means that what you do with that life, is your own business; you reap the benefits, but you also have to assume the responsibility and the consequences of your actions. Now, on most college campuses, left or moderate or whatever, the young people understand this. More challenging is when you go to Berkeley campus and you get a nice crowd out and you say, “Well, this is exactly the reason you have to believe in economic liberty. If you have a right to your life, you have a right to keep the fruits of your labor”. And, of course, if we have economic liberty and personal liberty and we understand the foreign policy, then we’ll have a totally different foreign policy, we’ll have a foreign policy of peace and prosperity. We cannot have prosperity with the perpetual wars. They claim that we’re involved in war all the time, and they act like it because they’re undermining our liberties all the time, and they call it a ‘global war on terrorism’. I think it’s a domestic war on our liberties, and that’s where the real problem is. So I chastise myself and others for not having done a better job, because we have a philosophy that I believe sincerely is the correct philosophy, which is the philosophy of liberty. But, how do we get painted? We get painted as uncaring, as if we don’t care about the troops, we’re unpatriotic, we don’t care about the poor, and we need welfare and all these things. And we lose the argument about humanitarianism, that we don’t have a concern for our fellow man. You know, if somebody accepts the libertarian position, and does it in a selfish manner and does a very good job of taking care of themselves and never give a penny away, they are no enemy of ours, they’re not an enemy.

But, the whole thing is that the nature of most people is that they’re very generous with helping people and taking care of their families and all these things. But if you want a prosperous society, and a society where people can promote their own excellence and virtue, you want a free society. If you want wealth, you want a free society. And we lose this argument all the time, that we don’t care about people, and that’s why the poor people need more help and we get more socialism. But, I believe the argument has gotten easier, it has gotten easier for me, because if you give the society welfare, you get Republicans and Democrats to endorse it because they don’t want us to be seen or called selfish or unpatriotic. But then when the crisis hits, when the thing collapses, as it did in 2008 …

Transcript

Ron Paul: The title to my special order tonight is ‘Current Conditions or Just a Bad Dream’.

Could it all be a bad dream or a nightmare? Is it my imagination or have we lost our minds?

It’s surreal, it’s just not believable.

A grand absurdity, a great deception, a delusion of momentous proportions based on preposterous notions and on ideas whose time should never have come.

Simplicity, grossly distorted and complicated.

Insanity, passed off as logic.

Grandiose schemes built on falsehoods with the morality of Ponzi and Madoff.

Evil described as virtue.

Ignorance pawned off as wisdom.

Destruction and impoverishment in the name of humanitarianism.

Violence, the tool of change.

Preventive wars used as the road to peace.

Tolerance delivered by government guns.

Reactionary views in the guise of progress.

An empire replacing the republic.

Slavery sold as liberty.

Excellence and virtue traded for mediocrity.

Socialism to save capitalism.

A government out of control, unrestrained by the constitution, the rule of law or morality. Bickering over petty politics as we descend into chaos. The philosophy that destroys us is not even defined.

We have broken from reality a psychotic nation. Ignorance with a pretense of knowledge replacing wisdom. Money does not grow on trees, nor does prosperity come from a government printing press or escalating deficits.

We are now in the midst of unlimited spending of the people’s money. Exorbitant taxation, deficits of trillions of dollars spent on a failed welfare-warfare system. An epidemic of cronyism. Unlimited supplies of paper money equated with wealth. A central bank that deliberately destroys the value of the currency in secrecy, without restraint, without nary a whimper, yet cheered on by the pseudo-capitalists of Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and Detroit.

We police our world empire with troops on 700 bases and in 130 countries around the world. A dangerous war now spreads throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Thousands of innocent people being killed as we become known as the torturers of the 21st century.

We assume that by keeping the already known torture pictures from the public’s eye, we will be remembered only as a generous and good people. If our enemies want to attack us only because we are free and rich, proof of torture would be irrelevant.

The sad part of all this is that we have forgotten what made America great, good and prosperous. We need to quickly refresh our memories and once again reinvigorate our love, understanding and confidence in liberty.

The status quo cannot be maintained considering the current conditions. Violence and lost liberty will result without some revolutionary thinking. We must escape from the madness of crowds now gathering.

The good news is that reversal is achievable through peaceful and intellectual means, and fortunately the number of those who care are growing exponentially.

Of course it could all be a bad dream, a nightmare, and that I’m seriously mistaken, overreacting, and that my worries are unfounded. I hope so. But just in case, we ought to prepare ourselves for revolutionary changes in the not-too-distant future.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Alex Jones and his team took the time to illustrate and document some of the facts presented in Ron Paul’s speech. The impressive result is this outstanding video:

Download [PDF Transcript] – [MP3] – [MP4] – [FLV]
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Ron Paul: This may well be the last time I speak on the House Floor.  At the end of the year I’ll leave Congress after 23 years in office over a 36 year period.  My goals in 1976 were the same as they are today:  promote peace and prosperity by a strict adherence to the principles of individual liberty.

It was my opinion, that the course the U.S. embarked on in the latter part of the 20^th Century would bring us a major financial crisis and engulf us in a foreign policy that would overextend us and undermine our national security.

To achieve the goals I sought, government would have had to shrink in size and scope, reduce spending, change the monetary system, and reject the unsustainable costs of policing the world and expanding the American Empire.

The problems seemed to be overwhelming and impossible to solve, yet from my view point, just following the constraints placed on the federal government by the Constitution would have been a good place to start.

How Much Did I Accomplish?

In many ways, according to conventional wisdom, my off-and-on career in Congress, from 1976 to 2012, accomplished very little.  No named legislation, no named federal buildings or highways—thank goodness.  In spite of my efforts, the government has grown exponentially, taxes remain excessive, and the prolific increase of incomprehensible regulations continues.  Wars are constant and pursued without Congressional declaration, deficits rise to the sky, poverty is rampant and dependency on the federal government is now worse than any time in our history.

All this with minimal concerns for the deficits and unfunded liabilities that common sense tells us cannot go on much longer.  A grand, but never mentioned, bipartisan agreement allows for the well-kept secret that keeps the spending going.  One side doesn’t give up one penny on military spending, the other side doesn’t give up one penny on welfare spending, while both sides support the bailouts and subsidies for the banking and  corporate elite.  And the spending continues as the economy weakens and the downward spiral continues.   As the government continues fiddling around, our liberties and our wealth burn in the flames of a foreign policy that makes us less safe.

The major stumbling block to real change in Washington is the total resistance to admitting that the country is broke. This has made compromising, just to agree to increase spending, inevitable since neither side has any intention of cutting spending.

The country and the Congress will remain divisive since there’s no “loot left to divvy up.”

Without this recognition the spenders in Washington will continue the march toward a fiscal cliff much bigger than the one anticipated this coming January.

I have thought a lot about why those of us who believe in liberty, as a solution, have done so poorly in convincing others of its benefits.  If liberty is what we claim it is- the principle that protects all personal, social and economic decisions necessary for maximum prosperity and the best chance for peace- it should be an easy sell.  Yet, history has shown that the masses have been quite receptive to the promises of authoritarians which are rarely if ever fulfilled.

Authoritarianism vs. Liberty

If authoritarianism leads to poverty and war and less freedom for all individuals and is controlled by rich special interests, the people should be begging for liberty.  There certainly was a strong enough sentiment for more freedom at the time of our founding that motivated those who were willing to fight in the revolution against the powerful British government.

During my time in Congress the appetite for liberty has been quite weak; the understanding of its significance negligible.  Yet the good news is that compared to 1976 when I first came to Congress, the desire for more freedom and less government in 2012 is much greater and growing, especially in grassroots America. Tens of thousands of teenagers and college age students are, with great enthusiasm, welcoming the message of liberty.

I have a few thoughts as to why the people of a country like ours, once the freest and most prosperous, allowed the conditions to deteriorate to the degree that they have.

Freedom, private property, and enforceable voluntary contracts, generate wealth.  In our early history we were very much aware of this.  But in the early part of the 20^th century our politicians promoted the notion that the tax and monetary systems had to change if we were to involve ourselves in excessive domestic and military spending. That is why Congress gave us the Federal Reserve and the income tax.  The majority of Americans and many government officials agreed that sacrificing some liberty was necessary to carry out what some claimed to be “progressive” ideas. Pure democracy became acceptable.

They failed to recognized that what they were doing was exactly opposite of what the colonists were seeking when they broke away from the British.

Some complain that my arguments makes no sense, since great wealth and the standard of living improved  for many Americans over the last 100 years, even with these new policies.

But the damage to the market economy, and the currency, has been insidious and steady.  It took a long time to consume our wealth, destroy the currency and undermine productivity and get our financial obligations to a point of no return. Confidence sometimes lasts longer than deserved. Most of our wealth today depends on debt.

The wealth that we enjoyed and seemed to be endless, allowed concern for the principle of a free society to be neglected.  As long as most people believed the material abundance would last forever, worrying about protecting a competitive productive economy and individual liberty seemed unnecessary.

The Age of Redistribution

This neglect ushered in an age of redistribution of wealth by government kowtowing to any and all special interests, except for those who just wanted to left alone.  That is why today money in politics far surpasses money currently going into research and development and productive entrepreneurial efforts.

The material benefits became more important than the understanding and promoting the principles of liberty and a free market.  It is good that material abundance is a result of liberty but if materialism is all that we care about, problems are guaranteed.

The crisis arrived because the illusion that wealth and prosperity would last forever has ended. Since it was based on debt and a pretense that debt can be papered over by an out-of-control fiat monetary system, it was doomed to fail.  We have ended up with a system that doesn’t produce enough even to finance the debt and no fundamental understanding of why a free society is crucial to reversing these trends.

If this is not recognized, the recovery will linger for a long time.  Bigger government, more spending, more debt, more poverty for the middle class, and a more intense scramble by the elite special interests will continue.

We Need an Intellectual Awakening

Without an intellectual awakening, the turning point will be driven by economic law.  A dollar crisis will bring the current out-of-control system to its knees.

If it’s not accepted that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our crisis we can expect a continuous and dangerous march toward corporatism and even fascism with even more loss of our liberties.  Prosperity for a large middle class though will become an abstract dream.

This continuous move is no different than what we have seen in how our financial crisis of 2008 was handled.  Congress first directed, with bipartisan support, bailouts for the wealthy.  Then it was the Federal Reserve with its endless quantitative easing. If at first it doesn’t succeed try again; QE1, QE2, and QE3 and with no results we try QE indefinitely—that is until it too fails.  There’s a cost to all of this and let me assure you delaying the payment is no longer an option.  The rules of the market will extract its pound of flesh and it won’t be pretty.

The current crisis elicits a lot of pessimism.  And the pessimism adds to less confidence in the future.  The two feed on themselves, making our situation worse.

If the underlying cause of the crisis is not understood we cannot solve our problems. The issues of warfare, welfare, deficits, inflationism, corporatism, bailouts and authoritarianism cannot be ignored.  By only expanding these policies we cannot expect good results.

Everyone claims support for freedom.  But too often it’s for one’s own freedom and not for others.  Too many believe that there must be limits on freedom. They argue that freedom must be directed and managed to achieve fairness and equality thus making it acceptable to curtail, through force, certain liberties.

Some decide what and whose freedoms are to be limited.  These are the politicians whose goal in life is power. Their success depends on gaining support from special interests.

No More ‘isms’

The great news is the answer is not to be found in more “isms.”  The answers are to be found in more liberty which cost so much less.  Under these circumstances spending goes down, wealth production goes up, and the quality of life improves.

Just this recognition—especially if we move in this direction—increases optimism which in itself is beneficial.  The follow through with sound policies are required which must be understood and supported by the people.

But there is good evidence that the generation coming of age at the present time is supportive of moving in the direction of more liberty and self-reliance. The more this change in direction and the solutions become known, the quicker will be the return of optimism.

Our job, for those of us who believe that a different system than the  one that we have  had for the  last 100 years, has driven us to this unsustainable crisis, is to be more convincing that there is a wonderful, uncomplicated, and moral system that provides the answers.  We had a taste of it in our early history. We need not give up on the notion of advancing this cause.

It worked, but we allowed our leaders to concentrate on the material abundance that freedom generates, while ignoring freedom itself.  Now we have neither, but the door is open, out of necessity, for an answer.  The answer available is based on the Constitution, individual liberty and prohibiting the use of government force to provide privileges and benefits to all special interests.

After over 100 years we face a society quite different from the one that was intended by the Founders.  In many ways their efforts to protect future generations with the Constitution from this danger has failed.  Skeptics, at the time the Constitution was written in 1787, warned us of today’s possible outcome.  The insidious nature of the erosion of our liberties and the reassurance our great abundance gave us, allowed the process to evolve into the dangerous period in which we now live.

Dependency on Government Largesse

Today we face a dependency on government largesse for almost every need.  Our liberties are restricted and government operates outside the rule of law, protecting and rewarding those who buy or coerce government into satisfying their demands. Here are a few examples:

• Undeclared wars are commonplace.

• Welfare for the rich and poor is considered an entitlement.

• The economy is overregulated, overtaxed and grossly distorted by a deeply flawed monetary system.

• Debt is growing exponentially.

• The Patriot Act and FISA legislation passed without much debate have resulted in a steady erosion of our 4^th Amendment rights.

• Tragically our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.

• The drone warfare we are pursuing worldwide is destined to end badly for us as the hatred builds for innocent lives lost and the international laws flaunted. Once we are financially weakened and militarily challenged, there will be a lot resentment thrown our way.

• It’s now the law of the land that the military can arrest American citizens, hold them indefinitely, without charges or a trial.

• Rampant hostility toward free trade is supported by a large number in Washington.

• Supporters of sanctions, currency manipulation and WTO trade retaliation, call the true free traders “isolationists.”

• Sanctions are used to punish countries that don’t follow our orders.

• Bailouts and guarantees for all kinds of misbehavior are routine.

• Central economic planning through monetary policy, regulations and legislative mandates has been an acceptable policy.

Questions

Excessive government has created such a mess it prompts many questions:

• Why are sick people who use medical marijuana put in prison?

• Why does the federal government restrict the drinking of raw milk?

• Why can’t Americans manufacture rope and other products from hemp?

• Why are Americans not allowed to use gold and silver as legal tender as mandated by the Constitution?

• Why is Germany concerned enough to consider repatriating their gold held by the FED for her in New York?  Is it that the trust in the U.S. and dollar supremacy beginning to wane?

• Why do our political leaders believe it’s unnecessary to thoroughly audit our own gold?

• Why can’t Americans decide which type of light bulbs they can buy?

• Why is the TSA permitted to abuse the rights of any American traveling by air?

• Why should there be mandatory sentences—even up to life for crimes without victims—as our drug laws require?

• Why have we allowed the federal government to regulate commodes in our homes?

• Why is it political suicide for anyone to criticize AIPAC ?

• Why haven’t we given up on the drug war since it’s an obvious failure and violates the people’s rights? Has nobody noticed that the authorities can’t even keep drugs out of the prisons? How can making our entire society a prison solve the problem?

• Why do we sacrifice so much getting needlessly involved in border disputes and civil strife around the world and ignore the root cause of the most deadly border in the world -the one between Mexico and the US?

• Why does Congress willingly give up its prerogatives to the Executive Branch?

• Why does changing the party in power never change policy? Could it be that the views of both parties are essentially the same?

• Why did the big banks, the large corporations, and foreign banks and foreign central banks get bailed out in 2008 and the middle class lost their jobs and their homes?

• Why do so many in the government and the federal officials believe that creating money out of thin air creates wealth?

• Why do so many accept the deeply flawed principle that government bureaucrats and politicians can protect us from ourselves without totally destroying the principle of liberty?

• Why can’t people understand that war always destroys wealth and liberty?

• Why is there so little concern for the Executive Order that gives the President authority to establish a “kill list,” including American citizens, of those targeted for assassination?

• Why is patriotism thought to be blind loyalty to the government and the politicians who run it, rather than loyalty to the principles of liberty and support for the people? Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong.

• Why is it is claimed that if people won’t  or can’t take care of their own needs, that people in government can do it for them?

• Why did we ever give the government a safe haven for initiating violence against the people?

• Why do some members defend free markets, but not civil liberties?

• Why do some members defend civil liberties but not free markets? Aren’t they the same?

• Why don’t more defend both economic liberty and personal liberty?

• Why are there not more individuals who seek to intellectually influence others to bring about positive changes than those who seek power to force others to obey their commands?

• Why does the use of religion to support a social gospel and preemptive wars, both of which requires authoritarians to use violence, or the threat of violence, go unchallenged? Aggression and forced redistribution of wealth has nothing to do with the teachings of the world’s great religions.

• Why do we allow the government and the Federal Reserve to disseminate false information dealing with both economic and  foreign policy?

• Why is democracy held in such high esteem when it’s the enemy of the minority and makes all rights relative to the dictates of the majority?

• Why should anyone be surprised that Congress has no credibility, since there’s such a disconnect between what politicians say and what they do?

Is there any explanation for all the deception, the unhappiness, the fear of the future, the loss of confidence in our leaders, the distrust, the anger and frustration?   Yes there is, and there’s a way to reverse these attitudes.  The negative perceptions are logical and a consequence of bad policies bringing about our problems.  Identification of the problems and recognizing the cause allow the proper changes to come easy.

Trust Yourself, Not the Government

Too many people have for too long placed too much confidence and trust in government and not enough in themselves.  Fortunately, many are now becoming aware of the seriousness of the gross mistakes of the past several decades.  The blame is shared by both political parties.  Many Americans now are demanding to hear the plain truth of things and want the demagoguing to stop.  Without this first step, solutions are impossible.

Seeking the truth and finding the answers in liberty and self-reliance promotes the optimism necessary for restoring prosperity.  The task is not that difficult if politics doesn’t get in the way.

We have allowed ourselves to get into such a mess for various reasons.

Politicians deceive themselves as to how wealth is produced.  Excessive confidence is placed in the judgment of politicians and bureaucrats.  This replaces the confidence in a free society.  Too many in high places of authority became convinced that only they,   armed with arbitrary government power, can bring about fairness, while facilitating wealth production.  This always proves to be a utopian dream and destroys wealth and liberty.  It impoverishes the people and rewards the special interests who end up controlling both political parties.

It’s no surprise then that much of what goes on in Washington is driven by aggressive partisanship and power seeking, with philosophic differences being minor.

Economic Ignorance

Economic ignorance is commonplace.  Keynesianism continues to thrive, although today it is facing healthy and enthusiastic rebuttals.  Believers in military Keynesianism and domestic Keynesianism continue to desperately promote their failed policies, as the economy languishes in a deep slumber.

Supporters of all government edicts use humanitarian arguments to justify them.

Humanitarian arguments are always used to justify government mandates related to the economy, monetary policy, foreign policy, and personal liberty.  This is on purpose to make it more difficult to challenge.  But, initiating violence for humanitarian reasons is still violence.  Good intentions are no excuse and are just as harmful as when people use force with bad intentions.  The results are always negative.

The immoral use of force is the source of man’s political problems.  Sadly, many religious groups, secular organizations, and psychopathic authoritarians endorse government initiated force to change the world.  Even when the desired goals are well-intentioned—or especially when well-intentioned—the results are dismal.  The good results sought never materialize.  The new problems created require even more government force as a solution.  The net result is institutionalizing government initiated violence and morally justifying it on humanitarian grounds.

This is the same fundamental reason our government  uses force  for invading other countries at will, central economic planning at home, and the regulation of personal liberty and habits of our citizens.

It is rather strange, that unless one has a criminal mind and no respect for other people and their property, no one claims it’s permissible to go into one’s neighbor’s house and tell them how to behave, what they can eat, smoke and drink or how to spend their money.

Yet, rarely is it asked why it is morally acceptable that a stranger with a badge and a gun can do the same thing in the name of law and order.  Any resistance is met with brute force, fines, taxes, arrests, and even imprisonment. This is done more frequently every day without a proper search warrant.

No Government Monopoly over Initiating Violence

Restraining aggressive behavior is one thing, but legalizing a government monopoly for initiating aggression can only lead to exhausting liberty associated with chaos, anger and the breakdown of civil society.  Permitting such authority and expecting saintly behavior from the bureaucrats and the politicians is a pipe dream.  We now have a standing army of armed bureaucrats in the TSA, CIA, FBI, Fish and Wildlife, FEMA, IRS, Corp of Engineers, etc. numbering over 100,000.  Citizens are guilty until proven innocent in the unconstitutional administrative courts.

Government in a free society should have no authority to meddle in social activities or the economic transactions of individuals. Nor should government meddle in the affairs of other nations. All things peaceful, even when controversial, should be permitted.

We must reject the notion of prior restraint in economic activity just we do in the area of free speech and religious liberty. But even in these areas government is starting to use a backdoor approach of political correctness to regulate speech-a dangerous trend. Since 9/11 monitoring speech on the internet is now a problem since warrants are no longer required.

The Proliferation of Federal Crimes

The Constitution established four federal crimes.  Today the experts can’t even agree on how many federal crimes are now on the books—they number into the thousands.  No one person can comprehend the enormity of the legal system—especially the tax code.  Due to the ill-advised drug war and the endless federal expansion of the criminal code we have over 6 million people under correctional suspension, more than the Soviets ever had, and more than any other nation today, including China.  I don’t understand the complacency of the Congress and the willingness to continue their obsession with passing more Federal laws.  Mandatory sentencing laws associated with drug laws have compounded our prison problems.

The federal register is now 75,000 pages long and the tax code has 72,000 pages, and expands every year.  When will the people start shouting, “enough is enough,” and demand Congress cease and desist.

Achieving Liberty

Liberty can only be achieved when government is denied the aggressive use of force.  If one seeks liberty, a precise type of government is needed.  To achieve it, more than lip service is required.

Two choices are available.

1. A government designed to protect liberty—a natural right—as its sole objective.  The people are expected to care for themselves and reject the use of any force for interfering with another person’s liberty.  Government is given a strictly limited authority to enforce contracts, property ownership, settle disputes, and defend against foreign aggression.
2. A government that pretends to protect liberty but is granted power to arbitrarily use force over the people and foreign nations.  Though the grant of power many times is meant to be small and limited, it inevitably metastasizes into an omnipotent political cancer.  This is the problem for which the world has suffered throughout the ages.  Though meant to be limited it nevertheless is a 100% sacrifice of a principle that would-be-tyrants find irresistible.  It is used vigorously—though incrementally and insidiously.  Granting power to government officials always proves the adage that:  “power corrupts.”

Once government gets a limited concession for the use of force to mold people habits and plan the economy, it causes a steady move toward tyrannical government.  Only a revolutionary spirit can reverse the process and deny to the government this arbitrary use of aggression.  There’s no in-between.  Sacrificing a little liberty for imaginary safety always ends badly.

Today’s mess is a result of Americans accepting option #2, even though the Founders attempted to give us Option #1.

The results are not good.  As our liberties have been eroded our wealth has been consumed.  The wealth we see today is based on debt and a foolish willingness on the part of foreigners to take our dollars for goods and services. They then loan them back to us to perpetuate our debt system.  It’s amazing that it has worked for this long but the impasse in Washington, in solving our problems indicate that many are starting to understand the seriousness of the world -wide debt crisis and the dangers we face. The longer this process continues the harsher the outcome will be.

The Financial Crisis Is a Moral Crisis

Many are now acknowledging that a financial crisis looms but few understand it’s, in reality, a moral crisis.  It’s the moral crisis that has allowed our liberties to be undermined and permits the exponential growth of illegal government power.  Without a clear understanding of the nature of the crisis it will be difficult to prevent a steady march toward tyranny and the poverty that will accompany it.

Ultimately, the people have to decide which form of government they want; option #1 or option #2.  There is no other choice.  Claiming there is a choice of a “little” tyranny is like describing pregnancy as a “touch of pregnancy.”  It is a myth to believe that a mixture of free markets and government central economic planning is a worthy compromise.  What we see today is a result of that type of thinking.  And the results speak for themselves.

A Culture of Violence

American now suffers from a culture of violence.  It’s easy to reject the initiation of violence against one’s neighbor but it’s ironic that the people arbitrarily and freely anoint government officials with monopoly power to initiate violence against the American people—practically at will.

Because it’s the government that initiates force, most people accept it as being legitimate.  Those who exert the force have no sense of guilt.  It is believed by too many that governments are morally justified in initiating force supposedly to “do good.”  They incorrectly believe that this authority has come from the “consent of the people.”  The minority, or victims of government violence never consented to suffer the abuse of government mandates, even when dictated by the majority.  Victims of TSA excesses never consented to this abuse.

This attitude has given us a policy of initiating war to “do good,” as well. It is claimed that war, to prevent war for noble purposes, is justified.  This is similar to what we were once told that:  “destroying a village to save a village” was justified.  It was said by a US Secretary of State that the loss of 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, in the 1990s, as a result of American bombs and sanctions, was “worth it” to achieve the “good” we brought to the Iraqi people.  And look at the mess that Iraq is in today.

Government use of force to mold social and economic behavior at home and abroad has justified individuals using force on their own terms.  The fact that violence by government is seen as morally justified, is the reason why violence will increase when the big financial crisis hits and becomes a political crisis as well.

First, we recognize that individuals shouldn’t initiate violence, then we give the authority to government.   Eventually, the immoral use of government violence, when things goes badly, will be used to justify an individual’s “right” to do the same thing. Neither the government nor individuals have the moral right to initiate violence against another yet we are moving toward the day when both will claim this authority.  If this cycle is not reversed society will break down.

When needs are pressing, conditions deteriorate and rights become relative to the demands and the whims of the majority.  It’s then not a great leap for individuals to take it upon themselves to use violence to get what they claim is theirs.  As the economy deteriorates and the wealth discrepancies increase—as are already occurring— violence increases as those in need take it in their own hands to get what they believe is theirs.  They will not wait for a government rescue program.

When government officials wield power over others to bail out the special interests, even with disastrous results to the average citizen, they feel no guilt for the harm they do. Those who take us into undeclared wars with many casualties resulting, never lose sleep over the death and destruction their bad decisions caused. They are convinced that what they do is morally justified, and the fact that many suffer   just can’t be helped.

When the street criminals do the same thing, they too have no remorse, believing they are only taking what is rightfully theirs.  All moral standards become relative.  Whether it’s bailouts, privileges, government subsidies or benefits for some from inflating a currency, it’s all part of a process justified by a philosophy of forced redistribution of wealth.  Violence, or a threat of such, is the instrument required and unfortunately is of little concern of most members of Congress.

Some argue it’s only a matter of “fairness” that those in need are cared for. There are two problems with this. First, the principle is used to provide a greater amount of benefits to the rich than the poor. Second, no one seems to be concerned about whether or not it’s fair to those who end up paying for the benefits. The costs are usually placed on the backs of the middle class and are hidden from the public eye. Too many people believe government handouts are free, like printing money out of thin air, and there is no cost. That deception is coming to an end. The bills are coming due and that’s what the economic slowdown is all about.

Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.  It is the tool for telling the people how to live, what to eat and drink, what to read and how to spend their money.

To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.  Granting to government even a small amount of force is a dangerous concession.

Limiting Government Excesses vs. a Virtuous Moral People

Our Constitution, which was intended to limit government power and abuse, has failed.  The Founders warned that a free society depends on a virtuous and moral people.  The current crisis reflects that their concerns were justified.

Most politicians and pundits are aware of the problems we face but spend all their time in trying to reform government.  The sad part is that the suggested reforms almost always lead to less freedom and the importance of a virtuous and moral people is either ignored, or not understood. The new reforms serve only to further undermine liberty.  The compounding effect has given us this steady erosion of liberty and the massive expansion of debt.  The real question is: if it is liberty we seek, should most of the emphasis be placed on government reform or trying to understand what “a virtuous and moral people” means and how to promote it. The Constitution has not prevented the people from demanding handouts for both rich and poor in their efforts to reform the government, while ignoring the principles of a free society. All branches of our government today are controlled by individuals who use their power to undermine liberty and enhance the welfare/warfare state-and frequently their own wealth and power.

If the people are unhappy with the government performance it must be recognized that government is merely a reflection of an immoral society that rejected a moral government of constitutional limitations of power and love of freedom.

If this is the problem all the tinkering with thousands of pages of new laws and regulations will do nothing to solve the problem.

It is self-evident that our freedoms have been severely limited and the apparent prosperity we still have, is nothing more than leftover wealth from a previous time.  This fictitious wealth based on debt and benefits from a false trust in our currency and credit, will play havoc with our society when the bills come due.  This means that the full consequence of our lost liberties is yet to be felt.

But that illusion is now ending.  Reversing a downward spiral depends on accepting a new approach.

Expect the rapidly expanding homeschooling movement to play a significant role in the revolutionary reforms needed to build a free society with Constitutional protections. We cannot expect a Federal government controlled school system to provide the intellectual ammunition to combat the dangerous growth of government that threatens our liberties.

The internet will provide the alternative to the government/media complex that controls the news and most political propaganda. This is why it’s essential that the internet remains free of government regulation.

Many of our religious institutions and secular organizations support greater dependency on the state by supporting war, welfare and corporatism and ignore the need for a virtuous people.

I never believed that the world or our country could be made more free by politicians, if the people had no desire for freedom.

Under the current circumstances the most we can hope to achieve in the political process is to use it as a podium to reach the people to alert them of the nature of the crisis and the importance of their need to assume responsibility for themselves, if it is liberty that they truly seek.  Without this, a constitutionally protected free society is impossible.

If this is true, our individual goal in life ought to be for us to seek virtue and excellence and recognize that self-esteem and happiness only comes from using one’s natural ability, in the most productive manner possible, according to one’s own talents.

Productivity and creativity are the true source of personal satisfaction. Freedom, and not dependency, provides the environment needed to achieve these goals. Government cannot do this for us; it only gets in the way. When the government gets involved, the goal becomes a bailout or a subsidy and these cannot provide a sense of  personal achievement.

Achieving legislative power and political influence should not be our goal. Most of the change, if it is to come, will not come from the politicians, but rather from individuals, family, friends, intellectual leaders and our religious institutions.  The solution can only come from rejecting the use of coercion, compulsion, government commands, and aggressive force, to mold social and economic behavior.  Without accepting these restraints, inevitably the consensus will be to allow the government to mandate economic equality and obedience to the politicians who gain power and promote an environment that smothers the freedoms of everyone. It is then that the responsible individuals who seek excellence and self-esteem by being self-reliance and productive, become the true victims.

Conclusion                                                                                                                                                    

What are the greatest dangers that the American people face today and impede the goal of a free society? There are five.

1. The continuous attack on our civil liberties which threatens the rule of law and our ability to resist the onrush of tyranny.               

2. Violent anti-Americanism that has engulfed the world. Because the phenomenon of “blow-back” is not understood or denied, our foreign policy is destined to keep us involved in many wars that we have no business being in. National bankruptcy and a greater threat to our national security will result.                                                         

3. The ease in which we go to war, without a declaration by Congress, but accepting international authority from the UN or NATO even for preemptive wars, otherwise known as aggression.                                        

4. A financial political crisis as a consequence of excessive debt, unfunded liabilities, spending, bailouts, and gross discrepancy in wealth distribution going from the middle class to the rich. The danger of central economic planning, by the Federal Reserve must be understood.                                               

 5. World government taking over  local and US sovereignty by getting involved in the issues of war, welfare, trade, banking,  a world currency, taxes, property ownership, and private ownership of guns.

Happily, there is an answer for these very dangerous trends.                                                     

What a wonderful world it would be if everyone accepted the simple moral premise of rejecting all acts of aggression.  The retort to such a suggestion is always:  it’s too simplistic, too idealistic, impractical, naïve, utopian, dangerous, and unrealistic to strive for such an ideal.

The answer to that is that for thousands of years the acceptance of government force, to rule over the people, at the sacrifice of liberty, was considered moral and the only available option for achieving peace and prosperity.

What could be more utopian than that myth—considering the results especially looking at the state sponsored killing, by nearly every government during the 20^th Century, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.  It’s time to reconsider this grant of authority to the state.

No good has ever come from granting monopoly power to the state to use aggression against the people to arbitrarily mold human behavior.  Such power, when left unchecked, becomes the seed of an ugly tyranny.  This method of governance has been adequately tested, and the results are in: reality dictates we try liberty.

The idealism of non-aggression and rejecting all offensive use of force should be tried.  The idealism of government sanctioned violence has been abused throughout history and is the primary source of poverty and war.  The theory of a society being based on individual freedom has been around for a long time.  It’s time to take a bold step and actually permit it by advancing this cause, rather than taking a step backwards as some would like us to do.

Today the principle of habeas corpus, established when King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, is under attack. There’s every reason to believe that a renewed effort with the use of the internet that we can instead advance the cause of liberty by spreading an uncensored message that will serve to rein in government authority and challenge the obsession with war and welfare.

What I’m talking about is a system of government guided by the moral principles of peace and tolerance.

The Founders were convinced that a free society could not exist without a moral people.  Just writing rules won’t work if the people choose to ignore them.  Today the rule of law written in the Constitution has little meaning for most Americans, especially those who work in Washington DC.

Benjamin Franklin claimed “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”  John Adams concurred:  “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

A moral people must reject all violence in an effort to mold people’s beliefs or habits.

A society that boos or ridicules the Golden Rule is not a moral society.  All great religions endorse the Golden Rule.  The same moral standards that individuals are required to follow should apply to all government officials.  They cannot be exempt.

The ultimate solution is not in the hands of the government.

The solution falls on each and every individual, with guidance from family, friends and community.

The #1 responsibility for each of us is to change ourselves with hope that others will follow.  This is of greater importance than working on changing the government; that is secondary to promoting a virtuous society.  If we can achieve this, then the government will change.

It doesn’t mean that political action or holding office has no value. At times it does nudge policy in the right direction. But what is true is that when seeking office is done for personal aggrandizement, money or power, it becomes useless if not harmful. When political action is taken for the right reasons it’s easy to understand why compromise should be avoided. It also becomes clear why progress is best achieved by working with coalitions, which bring people together, without anyone sacrificing his principles.

Political action, to be truly beneficial, must be directed toward changing the hearts and minds of the people, recognizing that it’s the virtue and morality of the people that allow liberty to flourish.

The Constitution or more laws per se, have no value if the people’s attitudes aren’t changed.

To achieve liberty and peace, two powerful human emotions have to be overcome.  Number one is “envy” which leads to hate and class warfare.  Number two is “intolerance” which leads to bigoted and judgmental policies.  These emotions must be replaced with a much better understanding of love, compassion, tolerance and free market economics. Freedom, when understood, brings people together. When tried, freedom is popular.

The problem we have faced over the years has been that economic interventionists are swayed by envy, whereas social interventionists are swayed by intolerance of habits and lifestyles. The misunderstanding that tolerance is an endorsement of certain activities, motivates many to legislate moral standards which should only be set by individuals making their own choices. Both sides use force to deal with these misplaced emotions. Both are authoritarians. Neither endorses voluntarism.  Both views ought to be rejected.

I have come to one firm conviction after these many years of trying to figure out “the plain truth of things.”  The best chance for achieving peace and prosperity, for the maximum number of people world-wide, is to pursue the cause of LIBERTY.

If you find this to be a worthwhile message, spread it throughout the land.

Transcript

Ron Paul: Thank you, thank you very much, what a delight. And thank you, Lew, for the introduction, and congratulations to the Mises institute for 30 great years. You know, it was mentioned about me being in Washington and being a good congressman, and even this evening someone came up and said, “You know, you’re the best congressman in Washington DC”, and I said, “Yea, that’s nice, but the competition isn’t all that great, you know”. So, it’s a relative term, but it is wonderful to be here and it is wonderful to celebrate such an important event. And, I’m delighted to be here with so many friends, colleagues, and supporters. The one thing that I have admonished so many on the campaign trail and in the crowds that we would get out is: this fighting for liberty is very serious business. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and if you dwell on the problems, you can get pretty depressed over this. So I think it’s important. I think what we should really do is continue to do it, but what I advice people is that you got to have some fun doing it, because if you dwell on all the negatives, you can get burned out pretty fast. But Lew has learned this lesson, he puts things together and he has fun and enjoyment, because you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow. And I think dealing and associating with like minded people is a great way to do it, and that is the reason why these events are so good; you get to meet people that have the same interests and the same goals even though you’re not dwelling on exactly what is going to happen tomorrow or the next day. Now, the other question that a lot of people ask me about being in Washington – I’ve been in the Congress, off and on, for 23 years – is, “How did you survive, isn’t it very frustrating, how do you put up with these people?” And I said, “I’ve never been frustrated, I just have real low expectations when I go to Washington”.

You know, you just can’t expect to change the world in a day two, but, quite frankly, I’ve been modestly pleased with what has happened. I never dreamed that anybody would pay any attention to what I ever said. I figured that maybe it was in the cards for me to go to Congress, although that was never my goal. I never decided one day I want to run for Congress, and I’m going to go to Congress. Matter of fact, when I told Carol that I was going to run for Congress, she said, “What in the world would you want to do that for?” and, of course, I said, “I need to talk about these things and I need to express all these views, I’ve heard about this monetary policy”. And she said, “Yea, but this is dangerous stuff, you could end up getting elected”. She didn’t know anything about politics so I assured her and said, “I’m not going to get elected, people are not going to be interested in what I tell them”. But her assessment, even back then in the 1970s, was that “People want hear the truth, and they’re going to be impressed and they’re going to end up electing you”. So that was a bit of a disruption, it disrupted my career in medicine. Although, I wasn’t satisfied to stay in Washington for long periods of time, earn credit and seniority and become a chairman of a committee and this sort of thing, so after 7 years of being there, I decided to go back to medicine. Now, you know, there have been a few things in the media that can become pretty disturbing when you’re in politics. Sometimes the media doesn’t treat you all that fairly, you ever noticed that, every once in a while? But it is a real mixed bag out there, some supporters get over the top at times, they almost paint me as a saint. Well, let me tell, I’m not a saint. But on the other side of the point, that article that came out said I was the most corrupt individual in Washington DC, and that’s not true either. So, it is somewhere in between there that counts. But I do have to make a confession: I have contributed to some corruption. Matter of fact, there are two individuals in this audience that participated in this corruption. I got 3 individuals that are really hardcore and they don’t think a whole lot about the government, and they ended up working for the government because I asked them to work on my staff, they took a federal check and were part of the system. But I won’t even name names, one of them runs the Mises Institute, but I won’t mention his name, and the other person used to have this thing called The Remnant Review or something, and nobody knows who he is either. I wouldn’t pick on anybody like that but, of course, there are some rationalizations on how we can do that. I have to do that myself, so that’s obvious. Of course, if I had my way about the kind of congressmen we would have, I would be up there 3 months out of the year, the pay would be about 1/10th of what we get, we could still keep our job, I could have still practiced medicine and still gone to Congress. And that’s the kind of Congress we ought to have.

You know, the last several years, I would say 5 years, my life has changed and I think the freedom movement has changed. And I hope I contributed a little bit, but it took a lot more than that, it took groups like the Mises Institute and many others, it took so many of you who have participated, either directly by teaching and participating in the Mises Institute and contributing money. And this has all been so important. But this campaign for liberty and this whole issue took a dramatic change 5 years ago. And when I meet so many young people, or new people I had not met before, I frequently ask, “When did you get interested, when did you get concerned and pay attention to the campaign?” And, you know, one of the instances that they mentioned the most, if there was one moment, they bring up this subject of this little confrontation with the former mayor of New York City, Giuliani. Does anybody remember that guy? So, Giuliani, who made it into the news the other day, is around but not that much. He still owes a million and a half dollars on his debt from that campaign before, as other candidates that have run for the presidency. But not only did something happen back then in 2008, but as that campaign wound down and it became evident that there was a recession – that so many in this audience knew there really was a recession going on even before it was announced officially by the government that there was a recession going on. But that was dramatic, that was a big event. Although I believe our downturn in the economy started sooner, I believe it started ten years ago. If you look at some pretty good statistics about real income and even real wealth in the stock market, if you want to, you can take it and look at the gold price as a reflection of something very significant going on for 10 years. But it wasn’t recognized by a large number of people until 2008. And that is when something really happened that was different, after that campaign was over, it was the first time I started getting phone calls from so many in the media. They didn’t have to worry about the campaign going on, but there ought to be a very special interests in the Austrian Economics and, also, the many individuals who were able to talk about the bubble formation and why. So there was a lot more credibility gained by all of us by that recession coming and lingering. But it’s dangerous, but it’s also a wonderful opportunity for us to present our case. One of the most common things that I heard during the campaign, especially in this go-around, because we did a little bit better this time because our numbers kept growing and we used to talk about tens of thousands or hundred thousand, but we literally can document millions of people now knowing the Republican primary outside the primary.

But I do get a lot of advice, believe it or not, from various sources. And I get advice from those individuals who are much more conventional Republicans than many of you in this audience, and they’ll come up and they’ll have a smile on their face and they’ll say, “Ron, you know I really like what you do and you’re on the right track to cut this spending and balance this budget, that’s what we really need. But you could do so much better if you would just change your foreign policy”. I mentioned that one time in a college audience and I said, “You know, if I would have changed my foreign policy, how many of you would be here today?” So where the conventional wisdom of the ordinary Republican was that the foreign policy was a disaster, it really has opened up the doors to bring so many more people into our camp. Now we can document the primaries where we probably generated about 1.8 million dollars in the Republican primary, and, quite frankly, the toughest places to sell some of our issues would be in the Republican primary when it comes to the PATRIOT Act, civil liberties and the war position. But, if you go outside the Republican primary, all of a sudden you see a tremendous amount of support. When Carol and I walk through the airports, most of the time people who stop us are not what we would look at and say, “Yea, he looks like a Republican businessman”, we don’t see that. It’s working class people, many times it’s the minorities, and they are very enthusiastic. And usually they come from a different group, and I don’t think the Republican Party has any idea about how attractive the freedom philosophy is, and if they did, it would be wise for them to change their way and appeal to more people with the freedom philosophy. You know, I don’t come down too hard on the media, a lot of people say I should come down hard on the media. But I sort of ignore them, I figure what’s complaining about them going to do. And, besides, there are alternatives, we have educational opportunities, we have the internet and so many other things. But the media really wasn’t quite fair, to tell you the truth.

The other day, they came out and they said that the current Republican team were getting large audiences of 7000 to 9000 people out, and that was great news that they finally got up to those amounts. But just think that when we were in Philadelphia in 2008 in Independence Hall, we had over 5000 people there, young people yelling and screaming in the cold weather, and nobody reported it. This year we went back to Philadelphia and we had a nice turnout. We were expecting a bigger one but it wasn’t bigger this time. But if you think its cold tonight, you should have seen what they had there, it was cold and pouring down and raining, and they still came out because there’s a starvation for the message of liberty, and we should all be enthusiastic about the changes that are occurring in this country and to keep this thing going. The one time I probably should have done a little bit more complaining about the debates was where I was a non-existent person. Somebody added it up when I said, “You know, I don’t think I had that much time tonight”, and he said, “No, you didn’t, you had 89 seconds”. But we were able to turn that around, those 89 seconds probably got more play than the 20 minutes that everybody else got. And, also, I think that got me on a couple of shows, there were two people in the media that generally wanted more fair play, and one was Jay Leno. I think in the in the last 5 years he had me on 4 or 5 times, I think it was 3 times in the last year-and-a-half. And, he is a very nice, decent person, and I do not know exactly where his politics are, but he is one that just thinks that it’s not nice to not treat people fairly. So I always liked him.

But, also, from another spectrum, is Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart did the same thing, he thought about fairness and he was a little bit more honest in his approach. So this is beneficial to be able to turn some of these things around. One of the things that I’ve talked about so much, has been the reception by the young people, the young generation: going to the campuses and getting nice crowds out. And this was not automatic, it took some work and effort and promotion, and I thought the staff did an excellent job. But I had one week where I was at Texas A&M University, which is considered pretty conventional, conservative Republican, and we had a very nice turnout. It wasn’t one of our biggest, but it was good. We were satisfied with 4 to 5 thousand people. But, within that same week, or shortly thereafter, we went to Berkley, and people asked, “What are you going to Berkeley for”. Well, it turned out that was our biggest turnout, 8,500 people came out in Berkeley. And a lot of people made the point about that and said, “Wouldn’t have happened in the 1960s, Berkeley was a different place then”. But this is a different world, this is a different system, we’re seeing the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. We’re seeing the ends of Keynesianism and the beginning of the Austrian School of Economic Thought; that’s what we’re getting to. There was one show where I mentioned Austrian Economics, and I think it was Chris Wallace that had me on that Sunday. And he gave me a nice interview, he was challenging, he first pressed me really good. It was probably the first 20 minutes or so, which was pretty good for Sunday morning. And he challenged me on the hurricane funding; we had just heard that there was a big hurricane in Texas, and we had a big vote to save everybody in Texas from this hurricane, and I voted against the funding. And he said, “What in the world were you doing?”, and actually he gave me time to explain it and he looked at that for not too long and he said, “That sounds like a pretty good explanation, I think I agree with that”. But then he went on to ask, “What’s this business about Austrian Economics?” So he gave me a chance to say a little bit about Austrian Economics, so the message is getting out. Now, even in 2007, or maybe in the beginning of 2008, we were at the University of Michigan, which is not exactly a conservative university. But that was the place I told the story where the young people were out there they had already heard about the Fed and they were yelling and screaming. But that was the place where they started burning Federal Reserve notes, so I thought, “Well, we’re making progress here”. I would throw names out if I mentioned Austrian Economics, and they’d start clapping and cheering. And I mentioned Mises and Mises would draw a cheer, and Rothbard would draw a cheer. But then it got really over the top: one time I mentioned Lew Rockwell and they started cheering “Lew Rockwell”; I mean, what was going on here. Yea, it is a new world, and it’s changing and we should be very pleased with it. But I think the message is so wonderful. I have my limitations, and I know what they are and I get my critics who say, “Why don’t you do it this way, why don’t you say it this way?” and all kinds of suggestions. But the one place where I am very, very confident is the message of liberty, the ones that we have put together and the ones that we generally agree with. That is the correct message, that is the road to peace and prosperity, and nobody can take that away from us.

When I first went to Congress, I spent most of my interest, at the beginning at least, on monetary policy. And so many times I told the story about how the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods Agreement was predicted by the Austrian economist, and it happened. And that was a big event that I got involved in speaking out. But, over the years, I became much more interested in the foreign policy, and I could see how this all came together: why the Federal Reserve is key to the runaway welfare spending and also the war spending. They can’t fight these wars without a Federal Reserve, it’s such a fake and a fraud, and we have to talk about it. But the foreign policy is so devastating to us, it’s devastating to our economy, it’s devastating to the debt, it’s devastating to our civil liberties. And, believe me, these young people are interested in this issue. On the college campuses, that might be the issue. There are several issues that we get loud applauses for, but the anti-war message is applauded by the young people and let’s hope this country wakes up and continues to applaud that issue. But the applause is loud for the Federal Reserve and the Fed and to go after the Fed. But, also, the next thing that we get a lot of response from, is on the privacy issue. It’s your privacy, it’s government secrecy that we have to attack, we have to return your privacy and we have to deal with making sure that this internet isn’t overtaken and regulated by our federal government.

The students have responded in a very favorable manner, and this is what we should be really excited about, because I see there’s a transition going on. But the groundwork has been laid, not by me, I observed and I had called attention to it. But this has being done by institutions like the Mises Institute and other groups and other teachers, there are so many teachers here. How many people here have been participating in lecturing and teaching, and this has being going on for a long time. I frequently mentioned Leonard Read, because Leonard Read had a lot of influence on me when I was trying to find out what was going on. He, at least, could provide the books and the literature for me. But we obviously didn’t have the internet, and certainly the universities weren’t teaching us the right kind of economics. But, today, it is so much more available to us. I felt fortunate in my life to be able to practice medicine for a long time, and sometimes I wished I did a little bit more, but anyway I feel blessed that was able to do this and maintain a family life and participate in medicine as well as in politics. But, over these years I was able to hear what was probably close to Mises’ last lecture, and it was on socialism at the University of Houston. Then, of course, I one time had dinner with Hayek and I got to know Murray Rothbard along with Lew getting to know Murray so well, and I became a good friend of Leonard Reads. So I really feel like I had this opportunity to visit people that maybe today not everybody in the country knows about. But the people in the universities and the young people, in spite of their teachers in many ways, are starting to know these names. And I keep thinking when I would read back and read about Adam Smith and Ricardo and other economist in the past, I feel so lucky that I was able to spend some time with them and to enjoy this. So this is one thing where I believe we are making great progress. You know, when we did our campaigning, there were many times when we believed we were doing better than the reports showed. I don’t know if you would agree, but every once in a while it didn’t look like they always counted the votes. But the votes were important, it was a measuring rod. But let’s say we actually did a lot better than we got credit for, you know what, in the long run it probably doesn’t matter that much. It matters that we know about it and it matters that we’re winning something a lot more important than a single primary where they cheated us out of some votes. Where we’re winning is we are winning the hearts and minds of a whole new generations and that’s why we should celebrate.

Our foreign policy, though, is something that we should be dealing with. That is one issue about which I will be doing various things next year, I have not made any firm decisions, but I’ve had a lot of people talking to me about the different opportunities. But one thing that I will be working on is trying to continue to get information out about what’s really going on in the foreign policy, because I think it is so important and it’s a time bomb waiting. I think our government, including both parties, obviously, has an obsessive compulsive disorder when it comes to Iran. It is literally, to me, like a sickness that they’re able to just well on this bomb that Iran doesn’t have. But just think of what’s happened since 9/11 on the change in policy, now Washington accepts and the American people accept pre-emptive war. It is technically our policy that we can start a war anytime we want, and not only that, but without congressional approval. And what do we have now, what else has happened. The Congress voted and gave approval to the president to use the military to arrest American citizens and hold them indefinitely and never have a trial. This is really, really bad. And in these wonderful, wonderful debates they have had recently, do they ever bring it up, do you ever have a commentator say, “Hey, what do you think about some of these things, what do you think about Obama’s kill-list?”? They’d say, “Oh, there’s a policy now where the President has a kill-list and he can assassinate anybody he wants, including American citizens”, there’s no discussion like that whatsoever. So this, to me, is a dangerous, dangerous step. Although I see so much good progress, I see also danger on the horizon and it makes it even more crucial that we’re successful in what we’re trying to do. Fortunately, we still have a little bit time, but that time may run out quickly; it may run out in a month, it may run out in a year, it may run out in 5 years. So the more time we have to persuade more people to our side, the better. I do not work on the assumption that all of a sudden we’re going to have a new Congress and we’re going to start repealing, I’ve never believed that for a minute. But that doesn’t mean that things can’t change, things are going to breakdown and then there’s going to be opportunities. And the best thing that probably can happen is when the government totally loses credibility and their money doesn’t work and everybody goes on their own and people become independent and there will be de facto nullification and they will just flat-out ignore the Feds.

And that is a possibility, but the real danger is, they will cling to power, because that is all that they know: clinging to the power and using that power to suppress the people. But I am convinced that we do live in a new era, something different and better than ever before. And, in the history of mankind, I’ve seen things that are different. And it has to do with a better understanding. I think we understand economics now better than they did in the 19th century. In the 20th century, as bad as it was for war, there was economic advancement by the intellectuals on their understanding of economic policy, so we have advanced in economic understanding. One thing that I would like to see in the new era, and this would change everything, and that is, just think of the scientific achievement of man.

Whatever period you go back to, there’s been steady progress, but nothing super. The industrial revolution has been a fantastic stimulus to new developments (scientific and technological developments). And actually the standard of living has gone up for many, not everybody because there are still a lot of people throughout the 20th century who have suffered, and they still do, and more people are starting to suffer. But although technology and science helped in many ways to improve our standard of living, just think of the misuse of technology. The misuse of technology and the science has been taken in the 20th century to become a century of murder and killing and war like we had never seen before. It wasn’t hundreds of thousands, it wasn’t millions, its hundreds of millions of people that we kill each other with all this advancement. So is the human race really improving, or are we stagnating, what has happened to us? Because we’ve never once taken technology and used it to promote peace, and that is what I think is going to be different. We need to do two things, we need to deny one thing to governments – and this needs to be a message spread around the world – and that is to never grant any government the authority to initiate violence against anybody; their own people, or anybody else. If we have that principle, then how do we spread this message and how do we use technology and science? We use the internet, and that is the way to spread the message. And, for once, we will be able, hopefully, to get around the control of the message: the lying and the conniving by the cohesion between those who give us our news and information and the government and the government schools. And this is going to change. Just think of what could happen if we had a magnificent revolution and the magnification of a very healthy movement in this country. Already today, we have the home schooling movement and the private school movement to circumvent what’s going on in our public education. So there’s reason to believe that this is a special time, it is a new era, it is different, but it will not be easy. But it’s going to be better and easier than ever before, because now it isn’t so difficult to talk to people. Lew was telling me that there are quite a few pilot groups of the Mises Institute around the world, and they do communicate with us and we get a lot of messages and a lot of invitations. So this is something that has never happened before, and it is so quick. The one thing that I did get a little personal charge about, I have to admit, was when Romney was campaigning in Poland. I don’t know if anybody saw that, but here’s Romney campaigning in Poland and there’s a big Ron Paul sign out there in Poland. And the Romney people were out there with umbrellas trying to hide it from him, like if he doesn’t see it, everything is going to be okay. As long as he doesn’t see it, it’s okay. But I hope he saw it, to tell you the truth, and I hope he said to himself, “Damn, can I ever get away from that Ron Paul guy?” But there is a lot of good activity going on, and I think this is all so wonderful. But we do have to change our attitude, we need to understand what freedom is all about and what a free society is about.

I am convinced that when people hear the true explanation about what liberty is all about and why you don’t compromise on it, that it is the only message that can bring people together, it is the only message that can bring different people of different persuasions and different personal attitudes and different religious values together. The smaller the government, the better the chance for people to get along. Even in a religious sense, some of the countries where the governments weren’t that strong, there’s many times in our history where Jews and Christians and Muslims actually lived together, until outsiders come in. And right now, we are the outsiders, and that is why it’s our responsibility to do something about these outsiders and change people’s minds and say, “Enough of this, enough of these wars, get our people home and get our troops home. If we want to change the world, set a good example for the world”. But the principle, for me, is non-interventionist. Stay out of intervening. There’s one word, and if I’m not mistaken, I think I had a disagreement with Murray Rothbard on this, and that is because he liked the world “isolationism”. And some people still like it, and I understand why they might like it. But I can tell you, politically, it doesn’t help anybody. Because I am not an isolationist. If you believe in free markets, you don’t want to isolate yourself from the world, you want to engage with the world. It’s just that you want to isolate our weapons and bring our weapons home; that’s what you want to isolate. So that is one area that we should look into and apply these principles. If you apply the principles of liberty and non-interventions, we don’t need to intervene. And our founders understood this: don’t get involved in entangling alliances, don’t get involved in the internal affairs of other nations, mind our own business, trade with people. But, that’s not isolationism to trade and communicate. We have a foreign policy today that is so sad. What we do is, because we are the powerhouse of the world and everybody is intimidated, we go to countries and we tell them, “Look, you do this, and if you do it, we’ll give you a lot of money. And if you don’t, we’re going to bomb you”. And sometimes you take a country like Pakistan, we do both to them, we give them money and we bomb them. And, also, to be tough. See, I didn’t win the presidency because I wasn’t tough enough, I didn’t say, “I will never take anything off the table when it comes to dealing with the Iranians”. Well, they’re lying, because what they’re saying is they’re not going to take a nuclear weapon off the table. But guess what, they take diplomacy off the table. So it makes no sense. But this whole idea about liberty and how it brings people together is wonderful, because it’s the use of liberty. If people who have different lifestyles and different religions and different intellectual pursuits want their liberty, then that brings them together. And I think it answers so many questions. It’s the same way with economic policy, we have had a nation now for over a hundred years where we think there’s two kinds of freedom. You have personal freedom so you can go to your own church and have some civil liberties, and then somebody else defends economic liberty, and they’re usually two different groups. But why do they have to, why shouldn’t liberty be all one thing, why shouldn’t economic liberty and personal liberty be the same thing, and why shouldn’t that give us a sensible foreign policy. It would solve so many problems and it wouldn’t cost us very much money, either. And that is what we should set our goals for.

So, my suggestion for Lew Rockwell is to continue to do exactly what he’s doing, with your help, and for everybody to assume responsibility. When I talk to the young people at campuses, they ask, “What should I do, what should I do?” And I use a lot of clichés from Leonard Reed, I say, “Study and learn and know what’s going on”. But I do put a little bit of a burden on people, and this is a good crowd to put a burden on as well. Because the world isn’t run by a large majority of people, the world has always been run by a small number of people. But if you become knowledgeable enough to come up to a Mises Institute dinner and sit out in the cold and listen to a former member of Congress, I mean, the burden has to be very great on your shoulders. You have more responsibility than the average person that never thinks about these things. Maybe they don’t vote, sometimes they do vote, but they don’t really know what’s going on. And they haven’t figured out that the government’s lying to them, so they listen to this stuff and they feel, “Oh yea, there’s Al-Qaida in Iraq and we have to go to war and we have to do all these things”. So they listen to all this. But our job is to make sure that people seek out the truth. If you take 100% of the people, I don’t think 100% of the people are evil, I think most people are basically inclined to not want to go fight wars. If you’d take a vote even before the Persian Gulf War and these other wars, the large majority of the people say, “No, we don’t want to do it”, but they change their mind because of war propaganda. And this is one healthy thing that’s happening, and this is one healthy thing I see with the young people. They don’t believe their government, they question everything, and they are not going to be bamboozled into believing all this.

So we have this wonderful opportunity if they do not believe the government. And the 5% who are really the evil people, get into position and they want power. Libertarians have a more difficult time because there’s no natural way where we want to have power over people. But those who see the vacuum, want the power over the people, and then they grab it and they get in these positions of authoritarianism and they’re the ones who promote the war and then they lie. And the problem is there are too many people who are naive and gullible. So what we need are our 5% or our 10%, and that’s where we’re gaining on now. You know, we’re living in a time when our time has come and people are willing to listen. It’s a message that’s going to be acceptable. So what we need to do is work on that. And how do you do it, however you know how to do it. You do it on your own, you participate anyway you want, you support the Mises Institute, you start another one. And this is what’s neat about what’s going on, there are so many groups. There have been a couple of groups that are an outgrowth of our campaign, the one group that I really thing is doing a great job is the Young Americans for Liberty group, and these are on campuses. We have now 315 chapters on campuses around the country and they are energizing a lot of people. Now, I don’t know what the number is, but my guess is that YAL is getting close to maybe where the Young Americans for Freedom probably peeked out, and they’re gone. And I think YAL is going to continue to grow. They’ve been instrumental in trying to get young people out. I had made one trip to a campus since the election, and I was a little bit personally curious about what the response would be like since I’m not a candidate and people do like politics and it’s easier to raise money for. And I was wondering what’s it going to be like. So I had a business group invite me to go out to Salt Lake City and I said, “Yea, I’ll come if you can get me on a college campus”. There was a Utah Valley University and that was not too far from where the speaking arrangement was. So we had a rally there and the YAL and different groups got out, and the turnout was great. I mean, we had over 4,000 young people who came out and they were wildly enthusiastic about this message. And, believe me, I don’t talk to them about government loans and government anything, and they still hear my message. And I’ve always been sort-of baffled. I talk about the problems that are serious and unemployment and inflation and the loss of liberties and how we have the federal government arresting American citizens and starting all these wars. And yet so many people will become more optimistic. I can’t tell you how many young people come up and say, “You know, I feel like there’s hope now, I’m optimistic, I never was before. I never wanted to pay attention”, and I think it much be that they want to hear the truth. I think even the bad news is good news in that there is an answer, and that answer is the answer of liberty and that is what we can present. We can do it, we’re on the precipice of a great change into a new era. If we just can get that message out and turn it around and say technology is going to be used not to kill people in a massive way, but to stop these wars and to present the case for liberty.

Thank you very much.

Madame Speaker,

I have a few questions for my colleagues.

What if our foreign policy of the past century is deeply flawed and has not served our national security interests?

What if we wake up one day and realize that the terrorist threat is a predictable consequence of our meddling in the affairs of others? (and has nothing to do with us being free and prosperous)

What if propping up repressive regimes in the Middle East endangers both the United States and Israel?

What if occupying countries like Iraq and Afghanistan – and bombing Pakistan – is directly related to the hatred directed toward us?

What if someday it dawns on us that losing over 5,000 American military personnel in the Middle East since 9/11 is not a fair trade-off for the loss of nearly 3,000 American citizens, no matter how many Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghan people are killed or displaced?

What if we finally decide that torture, even if called enhanced interrogation techniques, is self-destructive and produces no useful information – and that contracting it out to a third world nation is just as evil?

What if it is finally realized that war and military spending is always destructive to the economy?

What if all wartime spending is paid for through the deceitful and evil process of inflating and borrowing?

What if we finally see that wartime conditions always undermine personal liberty?

What if conservatives, who preach small government, wake up and realize that our interventionist foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?

What if conservatives understood once again that their only logical position is to reject military intervention and managing an empire throughout the world?

What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?

What if we as a nation came to realize that the quest for empire eventually destroys all great nations?

What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq?

What if a military draft is being planned for the wars that will spread if our foreign policy is not changed?

What if the American people learn the truth: that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security and that it never changes from one administration to the next?

What if war and preparation for war is a racket serving the special interests?

What if President Obama is completely wrong about Afghanistan and it turns out worse than Iraq and Vietnam put together?

What if Christianity actually teaches peace and not preventive wars of aggression?

What if diplomacy is found to be superior to bombs and bribes in protecting America?

What happens if my concerns are completely unfounded – nothing!

What happens if my concerns are justified and ignored – nothing good!

Transcript

Ron Paul: Thank you very much, thank you, thank you. Looks like the revolution is alive and well. We may be just getting started, it’s a delight to see so many of you here today. That’s wonderful. Now this an important year for us, there’s an election coming up, I don’t know, did anybody notice there was, something going on in Tampa, a few weeks ago. Though, there is a lot of excitement right now because we are dealing with a lot of important issues and they’re especially important for young people to be thinking about because some of these things are falling on your shoulders, this is the reason I like so often to come to the universities, and did this a few times in the last couple of years, matter of fact in the last four years, so I am so pleased that when I get a chance, the response is so favorable, because I don’t come promising and saying that all we need to do is go to the government to solve the problem, what I would like to do is deliver back to you, your God given right to your life.

The whole questions is who is responsible, you know, for the economy, for your personal behavior and how the world is run and quite frankly I don’t think the government is responsible for your personal behavior nor for the economy, it’s your responsibility.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the fiscal cliff, the fiscal cliff is that event coming up at the beginning of the year, they’re terrified that there might be some cuts for the sequestering of funds, but the whole thing is that there aren’t any cuts in sequestered of funds there is only cuts on proposed increases, so there aren’t any actual cuts but both sides are hysterical that maybe the increases won’t be as big as they were planned to be, but also the taxes will go up significantly if they don’t do something in Washington before the end of the year, my prediction is they will, they’ll wait until the last minute, they will delay it, they’ll postpone it but it will be such a disaster to see the taxes dramatically increased on the first part of the year, but my suggestion is rather simple, it is not complicated at all, their so- called minor cuts, let the cuts come, don’t put the money back in and stop, you know, don’t cut, don’t raise any taxes, what we need are a lot less taxes and a lot less spending would solve most of our problems.

One of the problems that America faces up to and especially in the next generation, that is, Washington right now is in total denial, they’re in denial of the seriousness of the problem, and the problem is that we’re bankrupt, this country is bankrupt, $16 trillion dollars in debt and obligations, that’s minor, it’s $222 trillion dollars of obligations, you know, for our future pay outs, for the entitlement system, there’s not enough of you out there, there aren’t enough jobs, you can’t work hard enough, so, Washington is in denial. If they thought it was half as bad as I think it is, they’d cut some spending and that’s what they would have to do, but how do you cut spending if you endorse a system that nobody wants to give up on? Are they going to give up on the welfare state? Oh no, he can’t do that, they consider that immoral. I happen to think that the welfare system is immoral because it doesn’t work. The last thing in the welfare system is volunteerism, has not to do with volunteerism, I believe in volunteerism, I believe in charity, I believe in helping people but I don’t believe the government is capable of doing that without hurting people so therefore I reject that whole thing. The welfare system works on the notion that the government has this moral responsibility to take from one group to give to another group, and the argument is always for humanitarian reasons, there are poor people, there’re people falling through the cracks and they need some help and it’s a pretty powerful argument because too often conservatism and libertarianism have a hard time answering that, what do you do, you don’t care about people if you don’t steal from this group to give to the people who need or want something or people who don’t work? Well, you have to be able to answer that or we won’t be able to solve this problem because it is not only is it immoral to steal from one group, if poor people or people who are down on their luck need something and you have something, you don’t endorse the idea that they can march in your house and take something. Why should we be able to send the congressman there to march at the house with the IRS and take and transfer it over there? That’s not right!

Now, another argument that would make it tough, let’s say that the welfare system worked, that prosperity persisted forever, we’re all doing well and there were no poor, you say, “well, it’s pretty hard” you might argue this theoretical thing about using force and transferring money to help the poor, the whole thing is, you end up with more poor, just think of all the spending we have and then the economy turns down because their shortcomings and understand of economics, now we have 46 million people on bread lines, now they call it food stamps, but those are bread lines, it’s just totally out of control, so it doesn’t help the poor people, once you endorse the principle of welfareism, guess what? The poor get poorer and the rich get richer. So if you understand free market economics, understand the business cycle, we do know that there’s down turns and there are bubbles, we’ve gone through this and we’re in the middle of this right now, so the whole system was set to make sure that poor wouldn’t fall through the cracks, so the crisis come, which is predictable because of the deficits run up to try to satisfy all these special interests, so we get into the crisis so the commerce and the federal reserve just come rushing to the rescue and guess who receives the benefit? The big banks and the big corporations and foreign governments and foreign central banks, they get the bailouts and what happens to the poor people that we’re supposed to help in the middle class? Middle class individuals lose their jobs and they lose their houses so it’s a totally failed system and we can’t be intimidated by those who argue that if you don’t support the welfare transfer system, you’re not a humanitarian, if you’re a true humanitarian what you want to defend is liberty and responsibility and a limited government and balanced budgets and honest money.

There is something special happening today, and we’re in the time we recognize the end of a particular era, probably a 100 year era where we accepted the idea that government should expand, our government should be the policeman of the world, we should have an income tax, and we should have a federal reserve that print money when we need money, but guess what? It hasn’t worked and what this crisis is talking about right now is a failure of the Keynesian theory of economic policy and therefore we have an opportunity to replace Keynesian interventions, you know big government involved in economy, and replace it with free market, sound money and the gold standard, that’s what will solve the problem.

In 1913, of course, dramatic changes, Woodrow Wilson changed our foreign policy, you know, in a wonderful, you know, idealistic thought that we the people of the United States have this moral responsibility to make the world safe for democracy, just think of what’s happened since 1913, I mean we’ve been in a lot of wars and they’re pretty persistent but and he also knew in the progressive era ship knew that we can’t do that, we can’t usher in the welfare state, in the warfare state without a lot of money so they had to have the income tax, and of course that has grown, at the same time he had to have the backup, which is the federal reserve, and the printing of money, which means that a major two step policy that we could have if you really your freedoms back and a limited government: you get rid of the federal reserve, you get rid of the income tax! A lot of people, a lot of people say: “but that’s crazy talk, how could we live without the income tax, how are going to pay for the government?” Why don’t you become your own government, govern your own lives and let you keep your own money and let you spend it the way you want to spend it? That’s a good goal, was getting rid of the taxing system… but I’ll tell you what, taxes and the IRS and all the abuse, that’s a symptom, it’s a symptom of a changed attitude of the American people of what the role of the government ought to be, the founders had a precise role of what they thought of the government should be, it was very limited, read article 1 section 8, very little authority for the congress and the federal government to do the things that they’ve been doing, so what they have done though is they’ve changed their attitude, they changed their attitude about our responsibilities around the world, I believe very strongly in a strong national defense, but I don’t believe in preemptive war, I don’t believe in starting wars against countries that haven’t done anything to us. So in order to have a different monetary system, a different tax system, we as a people have to decide whether or not we should be doing it, now one thing is, even when I go to crowds that are less sympathetic than this crowd, I’ll say: “even if we disagree with me about changing our foreign policy”, I say, we win this argument because we’re going broke, this is how the soviet system collapsed, guess what, the soviets were so foolish, they got bogged down in Afghanistan, so I would say: “let say let’s get home from Afghanistan, and bring our troops home.”

If we can change our attitude about the foreign policy, we can have a strong national defense, change our attitude about a welfare system that has failed, change our attitude about free market economics and a sound monetary system and honest money, get rid of the business cycle under those conditions, we wouldn’t need all these collection agencies up in Washington, all this invasion of our privacy and into our lives, but if that would happen, believe me, this country would change, right now we’re still a pretty fortunate country, we’re pretty wealthy still, but the wealth is depended on debt and continuous inflation and trust in the currency that doesn’t deserve the trust and we now are seeing a dramatic change, after this 100 years there’s been a big change and now we’re facing this bankruptcy, we’re facing a crisis time which can change dramatically in a short period of time now because the foundations of our liberties have eroded, the foundations of our monetary system has eroded, the foundations of our economic system, the foundation of a sound foreign policy have eroded, so things can get out of control rather quickly, matter of fact I consider the most dangerous spot in the world right now is probably over the middle East with Syria, I mean, all these things going on over there and we’re continuing… look, just think of how much we the American people spent on propping up the Egyptians and having this artificial peace with Israel, “oh this was for the benefit of Israel, the benefit of us” who knows what… but it was like $45 billion dollars we gave to Egypt and it ended badly, the people turned against the government that we propped up, we prop up dictators around the world, so there’s a revolution going on over there, so we support the revolutionaries, and they happen to be a bunch of bad guys, and they have Al-Qaida now in these countries, Libya is the same thing, Libya is a mess now and we thru NATO, now through Congress… you know that would be one thing that we could do to slow things up, don’t let our government go to war without a declaration of war by the American people. We’ve been told, our presidents have told us that they can get the authority from NATO and the United Nations, they don’t have to come to the Congress, but it is up to us to change that, government is a reflection of the people, if we want a welfare war for our state and it happens, it’s our fault, if they’re doing things that you don’t like, it is up to us to do something about it, the individuals who participate in that, I don’t believe in preemptive war, I believe in you only declare war and you do it in defense of this country and not that we go in and change other governments around the world.

Not only are these wars very costly financially, think of the cost of life and limb, not only… you know, since then, for the last past 10 years over 8000 Americans have died, you know, counting the contractors and all, and 45000 come back severely injured or sick and requiring care, we have an epidemic of veterans coming back committing suicide, so this is a big cost, but the cost financially has been in at $4 trillion of dollars of debt to us in these past 10 years, and it hasn’t worked, the foreign policy doesn’t work any better than the welfare system works, so here we go in, yes we went into Iraq, still a bunch of Americans believe that we went into Iraq because Iraq had something to do with 9/11, absolutely false, it had nothing to do with 9/11, and guess what, the American people were told that Al-Qaida was there we had to go get them, Al-Qaida wasn’t there, weapons of mass destruction, nothing there, but then some people say, well the real reason is the oil, the real reason is we have to really build up so that we can go after the Iranians and overthrow their government as well but now the government is in charge of Iraq is now a closer ally to Iran than they are with us, it didn’t work, it backfired, the Kurds are very independent now and there is still a lot of chaos, a lot of killing going on over there, so there is no evidence what so ever that foreign policy has helped us, it makes us less secure, and we’re in a bigger threat, of course, that challenge us financially, so what we need, of course, is an re-assessment, you know a good place to start, whether is monetary policy, or whether is welfare system, or property rights or civil liberties or the foreign policy, you know, a good place to start, maybe even stop there to improve things, is why don’t we make sure that everybody in Washington actually reads the Constitution and obeys the Constitution.

A lot of people make that the problem up in Washington is that we don’t have anybody who want to compromise and work together, and I was on a TV program the other night and they asked me that question, I think that’s the wrong word, I think that for too long we’ve had too much compromise in Washington, they compromise in all their principles, whether is left or right, they get together because they, both sides… I mean, have you ever noticed that when we change administrations and one promises to cut, do we get the cuts? Do we get a balanced budget? Does the government shrink? No, there is always this compromise, “well, we’ll raise this for you if you raise this for us, raise this welfare over here, raise this for the corporate welfare over here” so it continues, I think the answer is more in building coalitions, because the freedom philosophy appeals to a lot of people, it isn’t like it’s a narrow group of conservatives within the Republican party and we have to take over the Republican party to show that we believe in certain things, no, there is a coalition, when you look at the Constitution, if you look at civil liberties, if you look at foreign policies, if you look at economic policies, all of the sudden you have people who consider themselves liberal, they’ll say: “you’re right about civil liberties, this is one of the things that happens under war”, essentially civil liberties are attacked, so you can appeal to liberals on civil liberties, you can appeal to liberals who say: “Yes, we’re fighting too many wars” and come together and have agreements, that I think is the way, I think that freedom brings people together, I think that is the best thing. Of course the freedom message on foreign policy is that, yes, there are a lot of problems around the world, is just that we don’t impose those on American citizens and tax the American citizens or send our children over there to be killed, trying to solve all those problems, but what we do is we recognize that, that we can at least work towards a more peaceful arrangement by following what our founders said, that is, you know, try diplomacy once in a while, try being friends, try trading with people, quit putting sanctions on everybody that we disapprove of, we’ve had sanctions on Cuba for 50 years and it hasn’t done any good, I say, it’s time we trade and visit with Cuba again!

But we certainly see how working across the political spectrum, how freedom for the individual brings people together and a lot of people think that if you endorse freedom for the individual, that they might do things that you don’t approve of, and quite frankly, they might, but is that our business, if they’re not hurting anybody, you know, it’s up to the individual, in a free society the responsibility for each and every one of us is on us, us the individual to make a decision for our personal lives, and our economic lives and, our family lives, and not give that responsibility to the government because they’ll mess that up too. So understanding civil liberties and most of us understand civil liberties rather well when it comes to religious liberty because there are a lot of different religions in this country and we even, you know, tolerate people who don’t want to have a religion and we shouldn’t be… we can be personally, you know, critical, or want to teach our children a certain way, but we don’t tell other people what they have to believe in, we recognize this, and intellectual freedom is pretty good, and that is we allow people to read books, even controversial books – that’s getting a little bit more difficult – but we generally have respected intellectual freedom and religious freedom, if we allow people to make their own decisions about their eternity and what they put into their brain, why is it that we have not adapted and accepted that same principle on what people do with their personal habits and with what they put into their bodies? There certainly are some bad habits that can hurt some people and they should assume a responsibility, if you want your freedoms and you want to abuse your freedoms, you should suffer the consequences, but think of history on how many people over the many centuries have suffered from bad intellectual ideas, authoritarianism and communism and all these things, millions and millions of people died from this, think of the abuse under religion, people take religions and distort religions and they do evil things in the name of religion but we don’t throw that out, but so often we throw out this responsibility of being individual, we got to the point now where our federal government tells us that you’re not allowed to drink raw milk if you want to, and of course as a physician, and as a father and grandfather I think that there is way too much abuse of drugs in this country, I think that the biggest problem with the drug abuse in this country are prescription drugs and when it comes what they call the illegal drugs, that’s a big problem too, but for me it’s the war on the illegal drugs that’s the big problem, it’s an excuse to violate civil liberties, it’s an excuse to spend trillions of dollars, since the early 1970’s since the war on drugs really got busy, since then trillions of dollars were spent… and once again, can we show success? Are there no drug addicts out there anymore? Is it just a wonderful, a wonderful thing that’s happened?

No, that responsibility, if we live in a moral and a virtuous society, you don’t need the government to tell us it’s dangerous to do certain things and that is the problem we’re living now with the law. This is one of the things that we were warned about this early on, Benjamin Franklin said that the Constitution freedom doesn’t work unless you have a virtuous society and John Adams said the similar thing, he said you have to have a moral society and a religious society for the Constitution and for freedom to work, so if we decide that if the people aren’t behaving like they should, just giving more power to the politicians to makes us moral and virtuous, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work any better than making the economy work better or the wealth being redistributed or more peace throughout the world, it just compounds it, so what we have done over the many, many years is shift too much authority, the founders understood this, and they tried to prevent it, and said “look it should be a very limited government, if you want government, it should be local government” and yet I think right now, unfortunately, what you’re getting as a generation, is looking at it and a lot of people can come to the conclusion, the Constitution hasn’t worked that well, I mean, when you look at the votes, just go look at the votes, look at the last 100 votes that we’ve had in the House of Representatives, you’d probably say “Why are they voting on this stuff for? Why are they spending all this money?”, so the Constitution hasn’t worked, so that means it’s really up to the people, the politicians don’t sit back and think “Well, one more politician will make a difference”, it won’t, people have to change. Right now there’s an opportunity for that, the economic policies have failed, the foreign policies have failed, it’s not gonna work anymore, so we have the chance to offer something different, something better, it’s not brand new, we’ve talked about freedom and limited government for a long time, but it’s really pretty new, when you think about how much time we’ve really spent in a really free society, we probably have the best example in our early history, but most history is filled with totalitarians, and most of the countries in the world today are still run by totalitarians, so it’s been tested so little, what seems like such a shame is when we had the maximum amount of freedom we had the greatest amount of prosperity ever in the largest middle class and if we don’t do anything we’d be giving up on this, so the opportunity now is, since this is the key to continue, is when the time comes when we really have to change policy, let’s hope there is enough of us, enough of us there to influence intellectually, you know, what is happening in Washington, intellectual changes have to come before revolutionary changes come to a government, there was an intellectual ground work for our revolution in the early days and they set the standards that led to the revolution of the writing of the Constitution, but right now the most optimistic thing is what happening in the country, there truly is a revolution going on in this country and people’s attitudes are changing.

If you go get the record of mankind, they claim that recorded histories probably, you know, are about 5000 years, would you think how long the universe has been around and the world has been around and that’s a very short period of time, but it was very primitive, up until when, just in recent history, I mean, 1000 years ago, we were still very primitive, even 200 years ago, wasn’t society rather primitive before the event of the steam engine? And then 100 years ago, just think of what it was like, you know, I recall my dad tell me that the most dramatic thing in his life was seeing the gasoline engine come, he delivered milk, had a little dairy, and he delivered milk in a horse and buggy, he went to trucks, ended up with a small dairy with 20 trucks, what a dramatic difference! In my life time the thing that fascinated me most was the first time I saw a TV set and today though, with the ending of an era, we’re going to see a new era, now, the philosophy is there, the opportunity is there, you know what it’s available to us now? It’s the spreading of this information like never before because we live in the information age, we have an internet, and what we’re talking about here today is not something that is narrow in the Republican enclave, this is across the world, believe me, there are groups of people, even in these countries that you think “no, they’re terrible”…, there’s always a pocket there, starting to understand they’re different, so there is reason to be optimistic about what is happening today. Now, in this last 100 years or so, as technology improved, just think of the scientific improvements in the last 100 years, it’s fantastic, you know, all the conveniences, and yet what hasn’t progressed in that last 100 years? And that is, a peaceful solution to mankind’s problems, it seems that we’ve made no progress, the more that has been scientific advancement, they’ve used those advancements just to learn how to kill more people, it’s been 2 or 300 million people killed in the 20th century, so all this technology that give us all some wonderful things, so where has the progress, why has the progress not occurred outside of, you know, some materialist benefits and outside of knowing how to fight and kill each other at the same time we have made essentially no progress in knowing how to avoid war, I think that a new era is here, I think right now we can expect that this message is going to be new and different, because in the past, we only had little bits and pieces of it, but today is more available to all of us, it’s out there and we can communicate and it’s changing just rapidly in the last 4 or 5 years, it’s dramatically changed, and one great threat to hear is, once again, government. If government sees that the internet and communication as a threat is what they’ll wanna do, they’ll want to crack down on the internet. This is one reason why I have done my very best to always oppose any legislation that would curtail your freedom to use the internet.

We’re all on the verge of this new era, and it’s up to you, it’s up to you to participate, everybody has a personal responsibility, the personal responsibility is to educate oneself, sure, go to universities, do your best, but it’s really falls on own your shoulders, then your family and friends, you have both responsibilities. We have to be responsible for ourselves and to change ourselves, if each and every one of us would change ourselves and each and every one of us believed this, why would governments do the opposite? Franklin and Adams was right, if the country is immoral the government is going to be immoral. So it is… politics is very important but politics is secondary to this, what I’m talking about, the most important thing is for us to assume this responsibility, we have this free will, we have this moral agency, we’re concerned how we run our own lives, and we cannot deliver that to the government. We have to seek to try to make ourselves more virtuous and work for excellence. That should be the goal. If we turn that responsibility over to the government, to say “oh they’re going to make us virtuous”, you know, that lends itself to a Theocracy, you know, that they get involved in social and personal matters, so the only thing that counts is how we take care of ourselves and why I’m excited about what’s happening is the interest shown in this individual responsibility rather than collectivism, which saturated the 20th century, that it is the individual’s who then, as they improve themselves, that they can work together with other people. I think this is where we have seen so much progress, you know, it’s been said during the campaigns that I’ve had for the last several years, there’s a good response from young people, and I think that is wonderful, because I think this makes all the difference in the world, and a lot of people used to say, “well, what we need to do is quit the spending because we’re going to dump this debt on the next generation”, I don’t say that anymore, it’s dumped on us, right now, each and every one of us, we’re paying the bills right now that’s why we’re gonna be forced to do something about it. Sometimes it’s discouraging because people say but you’re talking about the individual, we need 51% of the people, have to be converted, not necessarily, it’s never happened that way, 51% of the people didn’t endorse our revolution against the British, but there was a small group of people, probably, 6,7, 8% who were determined, who were leaders, who were thought leaders and others came along. So that’s the way it’s been for a long time, the majority of people go along and they don’t worry too much and I bet you had people a day or two before the election “who are you going to vote for, I gotta decide what I am going to do”, they wait and yet anybody who would come to a meeting like this to listen to me, you have to be a little bit different.

It also means that if you’re in the 8% the responsibility that’s heavier on your shoulders and you have a lot more influence, you say “but that’s too much work for me”, but I’ll tell you what, if you do it because you have a moral responsibility, that’s one reason, you do it because it’s for your family, but you also can do it because it’s fun! Because we don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow or the next week or the next day, I mean, all kinds of things can happen in our lives, but you know, working together with like minded people, especially when we’re talking about something very important like liberty, that can be a lot of fun and that’s what should happen, you should have fun fighting for this cause. One thing that happened approximately 100 years ago, about the same time when we had the progressive era, they divided us, they divided the country, they wanted to talk about economic freedom and personal freedom, and freedom isn’t to be broken up, freedom is personal, is individual, is God given, is natural to you and you don’t have half of us sitting over here who have economic freedom, how to spend your money and somebody else has the other half and say “Well, at least I can do my thing, and go to the church I want to and I can practice the habits as I please and if I hurt myself I’ll take care of myself”, no, it’s one of the same! If you have economic freedom you should be able to have an incentive to work hard, keep what you earn, take care of yourself and your family. On the account on social liberty, you have the responsibility to enjoy yourself, if you take risks, just as in economics, if you take risks, and you fail you should suffer the consequences and rip the rewards.

People will say: “Well, there will still be too many poor people”, but guess what in a free and prosperous society, which we had a taste of, the generosity is going to be there. A lot of people worry a lot about that people wouldn’t be taken care of and when I finished medical school, I spent a couple of years practicing medicine before there was Medicare or Medicaid, and I worked at a county hospital and I was paid the astounding salary of $3 dollars an hour, and I was still learning and I was glad to do it and, but even then, back then, $3 dollars was a lot, you know, it was a lot more money than $3 dollars will get you today, that’s for sure, but nobody was turned away! Everybody had care, it wasn’t like people were lying up on the streets and dying without medical care, now, today, it seems to be more difficult, and will get more difficult as we get more and more government involved, so it is a system that I have trouble understanding why we haven’t done a better job, why haven’t we been able to convince the masses of people and the large majority and all the Congress to say “that makes sense, peace is better than war, free markets are better than socialism, balanced budgets are better than spending”, why do we lose this argument? Because it seems like it’s so attractive, I think they don’t understand liberty but they also, the people in this country have been tempted to think there was something as a free lunch and that’s what has changed, more and more people know now there is no such a thing as a free lunch and that the system is biased, even if you just look at the monetary system without looking at the welfare system biased toward the wealthy, it’s estimated the wealthy get twice as many benefits from government than the poor but if you just look at the monetary system, when you take money and debase the currency and you just print money and the value goes down, there is a natural tendency according to monetary history that you will undermine the middle class. When we had sound money and more freedom, we always bragged about our middle class, the largest and the richest middle class in the history of the world, but that not so true anymore, you know, we’re not the most capitalistic country in the world today. It’s pretty sad when we see countries like China become our banker, what’s the matter with us? When you have a system like the federal reserve printing money, they pass out the money, they bail out certain people versus the other, but money goes to governments and banks, money goes to banks, money goes to big corporations, they get to spend it early on and it has more value when the money circulates for 1, 2, 3 years the value of that money goes down and even if you don’t pay any income tax, you pay the inflation tax and the inflation tax is truly a tax, but if you want reassurance all you have to do is listen to our government, our bureau of labor statistics and our federal reserve say “Oh there is no inflation, prices last year went up 2% so you’re not suffering and the people on social security, they get just a little bit of increase because prices really aren’t going up”, but prices are going up! There is some private sources that measures the CPI according to the old method and they claim your prices, all prices are going up at the rate of 9%, also the private sources tell us that the unemployed rate is closer to 22%, so have you noticed in this last couple of weeks how great the statistics has been? Every government report that comes out, sounds like, “oh there is no problem in this country, houses are being build, the unemployment rate is going down, there is no inflation, it’s wonderful” let’s hope so but quite frankly I don’t think we should put our hand in the sand, we have to believe what is happening, we have to look at the real figures, what real inflation is, what the dangers are around the world, how our civil liberties are being undermined and then we should wake up and do something about it.

There are a few things that I would hope that would come with the change of the administration and I will continue to argue the case for these changes. For one I would like to see the repeal of the National Defense Authorization Act. This whole idea that not only we’ll have our presidents assume some of these responsibilities, or assume these powers, such as drawing up kill lists, assassinating American citizens. Congress is going along with this, Congress actually passed the National Defense Authorization Act, that gives the president the authority to use the military to arrest anybody they want to, including American citizens, put them in prisons, without even a trial and held indefinitely, but, you know their argument is “it hasn’t been used all that much”, but you know, like, welfare, starts a little bit, like the income tax, starts a little bit, but it’s the authority and the principle is 100% and someday it’s just liable to grow as conditions, you know, when economic conditions get worse, what’s happening in other countries as economic conditions deteriorate? There is a little bit of disturbance in the streets and we won’t be immune from that. That is why our job is so important because we do have some time, we do have the method, it is up to us to understand what freedom is all about, how to answer these questions and not be, you know, not succumb to this temptation to say, “oh you know, a little bit of government is ok to take care of so and so” but if it leads to what we have today we have to challenge it, so we have at least 2 tugs of war going on, one, those in charge probably know they’re in trouble but they’re also quite capable of using the National Defense Authorization Act and other things to suppress our civil liberties, to me, to fight this battle, the most important thing we protect is out civil liberties to speak out. You know the real hero in our society should be the whistle blowers, the people willing to tell us the truth, we passed laws to protect our whistle blowers but they generally aren’t protected, and they can get put in prison and abused, but what we need to know is what’s happening, what’s happening in our country though over these last several decades is that you lost your privacy and the government has become more secret and it should be the other way around, the government should be open and your privacy should be protected.

So we have this struggle going on with authoritarianism which in this country would probably look more like a fascist system if it continues to go this way or are going to promote our ideas and win this intellectual fight and it’s still up for grabs but I quite frankly am convinced that we live in a really great period of times, it’s a grand time to be alive, because I think the opportunities are different than ever before, so if you’re for peace, if you’re for prosperity and freedom and if you understand it and you have access, everybody now, you know, 5 years ago or so, I didn’t know exactly what, I only knew one type of viruses, it was a medical viruses then I found out what viruses were when things went viral on the internet, and send out notices that everyone of you have friends out there, so I can’t imagine how many people in this audience would reach, how many more people, you might even have 100 people in your list or 200 people in your list so it is, we now live in this wonderful era because we’re further along but I have to warn you, one thing, true freedom has never been tried, we just talked about it, off and on, it always seem that when we make some progress, we have this scientific progress but the interpersonal relationship of the human being hasn’t progressed, I am optimistic enough that us as human beings can make progress morally and spiritually as well, and we ought to apply this technology for that effort so it would be a grand thing to live in a society that is promoting peace and prosperity and I welcome you to the fight. Thank you very much.

Thanks to Aldo Tavares for the transcript!