Venue: Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing
Date: 10/28/2009

Ron Paul: Mr. Chairman, thank you and I oppose this legislation [HR 2194: Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act of 2009]. I do not challenge the motivation of those who support this legislation, but I think it’s deeply flawed and I think it’s going to do a lot more harm than good. It reminds of all the talk that preceded us going into Iraq; all the wonderful things that could come by putting more pressure on a particular country starting first with sanctions. Sanctions are an act of war.

It was suggested that Venezuela may be going to send oil over there and that means intercepts on the high sea, but the best way for others to look at this to see my point is, how would we react if somebody closed down our oil imports. I mean, we would be pretty unhappy about that. To think that this is not a serious matter, I think it’s being rather naive.

First off, the Iranians have a right to enrich for peaceful purposes. They have never been found in violations of NPT treaty, not once. Our NIE report says they haven’t been working on weapons since 2003 and just because you disagree with it, you just can’t dismiss that report out of hand. So there is a lot of distortion on this information that we get.

When we went into Iraq, there were unintended consequences. There is still no stability there, but one thing for certain, is Iraq is a much closer ally of Iran right now. We drove the Iraqis into the hands of the Iranians and there has been an expression here that this is good [...], but we still should be concerned about China. Well, if you’re concerned about China, this is the best thing in the world for China. They are motivated. They have already invested in Iran. The production of petroleum products has gone up significantly in Iran, so this is a big motivation for the Iranians to do exactly what you don’t want them to do.

Now, the theory is that if we really punish the people, take their gasoline from them and they’re going to get angry – and they will. They’re going to get angry at us. They’re not going to get angry at the Ayatollah. What you are doing is you’re deliberately undermining the dissidents there. They will lose all credibility and people when they attack from the outside as we were on 9/11… we come together, so all we do is we keep pounding on people like this and we ruin the dissenting views that are operating in that country.

So I just think this is all going to backfire and we need to think in terms of the principle of free trade. You know, the more you put on sanctions, the more likely you will be fighting with them. We put on sanctions and we knew we were destined, at least for a lot of us, we were destined to go to war in Iraq and this means that we are willing to take on armed conflict. But you know what? What I don’t understand is your willingness to sort of disrupt what the President is trying to do. I mean, the President is trying to negotiate and talk. He said he wanted to do it; he should be allowed to do this. This just, I think, disrupts what the President is trying to do.

Recently, the President spoke at the United Nations and under his pressure and leadership he had UN Resolution 1887 passed. He is working multilaterally to try to bring peace to that area by having a non-nuclear Middle East. So if that’s the administration’s position to have a non-nuclear Middle East, then why do we do this to disrupt some of the things that he is trying to do, and I just am disturbed by us not looking through and looking at the ramifications, looking at the unintended consequences and this pretense that we can just do this and everything is going to come out all right because I really believe in the long run we will suffer, the people will suffer, and there will not be more stability.

How can we get terrified of a threat from the Iranians? You know, they are a Third World nation, up until recently, they couldn’t even make their own gasoline. But because of our pressure so far, they’re getting quite capable of doing it. We’re driving them into the hands of the Chinese. They have our money. They can control us through the dollar and yet, we’re driving the Chinese into taking over just as we drove the Iraqis to become close allies of the Iranians. I think our policies are deeply flawed. I say your motivations are fine and dandy, but motivations aren’t the answer; we have to think of the consequences.

Related posts:

1. Ron Paul: Leave Iran Alone! In his latest video update, Ron Paul exposes the latest...
2. Ron Paul on Russia Today: H1N1, Quarantine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran Channel: Russia Today Date: 11/01/2009 Transcript Dina Gusovsky: A...
3. Ron Paul: It’s Been A Busy Week In Washington In his latest video update, Ron Paul reports on a...

Venue: Joint Economic Committee Hearing
Date: 10/22/2009

Transcript

Ron Paul: Thank you, Madam Chairman and welcome, Dr. Brummer. I appreciate this opportunity to attend this hearing. I’m sorry I have to leave shortly to do some votes, but I did want to make a couple of points and maybe you can follow upon this later on.

In the several years that I have been here I have never met anybody that is not for a sound economy, everybody is for the economy. Everybody debates the issues and what we should do. We have a Federal Reserve that dictates the money supply and what the interest rates should be. And they want a sound economy and then the Congress rates the regulations. We have regulating agencies that are supposed to give us a sound economy, and yet we have probably real unemployment close to 20% and still a lot of problems.

Although I find that everybody wants a sound economy, nobody talks about a sound dollar. And I know you’re interested and have worked in the monetary field. But we don’t talk about what sound money is, and I don’t know how you can have a sound economy without a sound dollar. As a matter of fact, we talk too often about a weak dollar. We allow the Fed to devalue the dollar by printing too much money to accommodate the Congress. At the same time, we say that the secretary of treasury has the job of maintaining a strong a dollar, at the same time the dollar keeps going down.

And this has a lot to do without our imbalance of payments and all the problems that we face. But a lot of people say this is great, you know, a weak dollar is good for exports. Well, you know if you look at it from an individual level and you’re a saver, who wants a weak dollar? Who wants to have their dollar lose their purchasing power? And yet we actually say “Yeah, we should”. And I hear comments that come across that say, “Well, it’s okay to have a weaker dollar as long as it’s orderly”. Well, if a weak dollar is bad, if it goes down suddenly or orderly, you’re still hurt and you’re paralyzed. There should be no [...] in economics that argues the case it is good to have a weakening dollar and see your purchasing power dried up.

So my concern is that we don’t talk about the value of money. On the books still, and the Constitution still say that there is a definition for a dollar in terms of a weight for something that governments can’t create… precious metals. But at the same time, under the law… and the laws says that the Federal Reserve notes are legal tender and everybody has to obey all he laws doing it, because a Federal Reserve note is a dollar. If you’re asking, “What is a dollar?”. Well, we don’t know what a dollar is, but there is nothing on the books that says that a Federal Reserve note is a dollar. This is like building a building with a measuring rod that constantly changes. I cannot see how you can ever have a sound economy without a sound dollar and getting back to defining what a dollar really is. Our founders knew about this, they advised us and we have ignored it and we’re in a mess.

I yield back.

Related posts:

1. Ron Paul: A “Strong” Dollar? The Real Policy is Constant Devaluation Date: 11/12/2009 Ron Paul: I’d like to talk about...
2. Ron Paul and Paul Volcker Discuss Fiat Currencies In the “Hearing on Restoring the Economy: Strategies for Short-term...
3. Ron Paul: End The Fed, Stop Inflation, Restore Sound Money In a speech to the Mises Circle in Houston, Ron...

Venue: U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs
Date: 10/15/2009

Transcript:

Ron Paul: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In the last months, we have had a pretense of having a debate about Afghanistan, but unfortunately, it’s not much of a debate. We’re deciding whether or not to send 40,000 or 80,000 troops over to Afghanistan and we can’t even decide where the frontlines are. But the worst part of this is this is just déjà vu again, all about going to war needlessly. The same arguments were used in going into war against Iraq and that is “weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda, scare the people, it’s in our national security interest to go there” and we continue.

The Taliban never did a thing to us. The Taliban, we were paying them money up until May of 2001. They’re not capable, even if they wanted to, they’re not capable of touching us. So we’re over there, pursuing a war, spreading the war, and going into Pakistan. The American people don’t want it. We’re out of money. We can’t afford medical education here and we’re demanding that we send 80,000 or 40,000 troops to Afghanistan and expand the war. It’s time to end the whole mess.

Chairman Howard L. Berman: The time of the gentleman has expired.

The time has expired and the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Paul, is through.

Ron Paul: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It seems like we’ve had now a war going on for eight years, into the ninth year, and from the discussion, it looks like we’re searching for a justification for it; what is the reason we are there? I think we got that cart before the horse. We’ve been fighting all this time and it means that it isn’t a management problem. It’s a policy problem of how we got there, why we’re there, and what we’re doing, and besides, this type of debate about management, I can’t imagine this type of debate going on in World War II. You know, we knew who the enemy was; we declared war. The President said he’s the commander in chief and told the Congress what he needed. Now, that isn’t an argument for the Congress not paying attention. It’s an argument against the way we go to war and it looks like we have accepted this notion that perpetual war leads to perpetual peace, and we satisfy the military-industrial complex and the special interests and all these motivations just to stay in war endlessly.

But even these eight years, I don’t see where the success is. Men die, thousands of Afghanis are displaced and die. It cost a quarter trillion dollars and we’re still finding out, you know, what are we there for? Oh, well, “if the Taliban takes over” – whom we used to, you know, get along with quite well = “if they take over all of a sudden, al-Qaeda is going to be there and there’s going to another 9/11.”

This is making the assumption that 9/11 couldn’t have occurred without these training camps in Afghanistan. Do you think those nineteen guys went over there and did push-ups in those camps? There is no way. There is no way they were there doing those things. The report, when they studied 9/11, they said, “Well, there is a lot of planning going on in Germany. A lot of planning going on in Spain and there were 15 of them and were Afghans [Saudis]. I mean, if somebody really wanted to, I bet they could have talked the American people into bombing Saudi Arabia. I mean, 15 of them are Saudis. I imagine under those circumstances, the American people and the Congress could have been talked into bombing Saudi Arabia under those conditions.

So I just don’t see how we could continue to do this and come up with any sensible policy because we never challenge, we never question whether preemptive war is a good strategy and this is what this is all about: preemptive wars, starting wars, saying it’s preventative. But this is a completely un-American approach to fighting wars because under the original system, the people got behind the war, declared the war, knew who the enemy was and we didn’t come up with these strategies; “Do we need 40,000 or 80,000 people and who should we give the money to? Should we give it to this group?”

Why don’t we ever ask the question and this will be the question I’ll leave with you. Why don’t we as a Congress and the administrations, former administrations as well as this one, why don’t we ask the question, what is the motivation for somebody to attack us? And I don’t think it’s ever really asked because I think there is a different answer than then if some say, “Oh, they hate us. They hate us for our freedoms and our wealth.”

And I don’t believe that for a minute. I think the people in Afghanistan, the large majority, no matter what the reports are from the administration, our puppet administration, most people want us out of there. They don’t want us in Pakistan. The people in Pakistan don’t want us there. People in Iraq don’t want us there. It’s occupation. So my question is this, why is that never talked about, or why is it dismissed so easily if indeed you study and you find out that people who are willing to sacrifice their life to make a point is because we are seen as foreign occupiers. Just as the Soviets were seen as foreign occupiers, just as we joined those individuals who wanted to throw out the foreign occupiers in the past, and yet now, we are. We learn nothing from history, both ancient history or even recent history. Why don’t we pay more attention to the true motivations behind somebody who wants to commit suicide terrorism against us. Anybody care to answer?

Chairman Howard L. Berman: In 20 seconds.

Unidentified Male Speaker: In twenty seconds. (Laughs).

Robert Kagan: Congressman, I think in 20 seconds, I can only tell you that some of us do pay a great deal of attention to what the ideology is that drives al-Qaeda and affiliated groups to try to attack us. It’s been articulated in tremendous detail on multiple books. It goes beyond not liking us because of our wealth and a variety of other things and it has to do with the struggle within Islam that they see us participating in whether we are present there or not. It is a very, very sophisticated strategy. It is a very, very sophisticated ideology and it is extremely clear on what their intentions are and why.

Chairman Howard L. Berman: The time of the gentleman has expired.

Related posts:

1. Ron Paul: Afghanistan Will Be Obama’s War Source: Campaign for Liberty Date: 1/25/2009 Transcript: Thanks for...
2. Ron Paul: Saving Face in Afghanistan Download the column as an MP3 file here (3:21...
3. Ron Paul on Afghanistan Ron Paul discusses U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan and growing...

Location: University of Minnesota
Date: 9/25/2009

Related posts:

1. Student Town Hall with Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann A student town hall discussion at the University of...
2. Michelle Bachmann: We need to pull back the curtain and take a look at the Fed Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann comments on Ron Paul’s Bill to Audit...
3. Ron Paul at Wake Forest University On April 20, the Wake Forest University chapter of Young...

Venue: House of Representatives
Date: 9/23/2009

Transcript:

Government has been mismanaging medical care for more than 45 years; for every problem it has created it has responded by exponentially expanding the role of government.

Points to consider:

1. No one has a right to medical care. If one assumes such a right, it endorses the notion that some individuals have a right to someone else’s life and property. This totally contradicts the principles of liberty.
2. If medical care is provided by government, this can only be achieved by an authoritarian government unconcerned about the rights of the individual.
3. Economic fallacies accepted for more than 100 years in the United States has deceived policy makers into believing that quality medical care can only be achieved by government force, taxation, regulations, and bowing to a system of special interests that creates a system of corporatism.
4. More dollars into any monopoly run by government never increases quality but it always results in higher costs and prices.
5. Government does have an important role to play in facilitating the delivery of all goods and services in an ethical and efficient manner.
6. First, government should do no harm. It should get out of the way and repeal all the laws that have contributed to the mess we have.
7. The costs are obviously too high but in solving this problem one cannot ignore the debasement of the currency as a major factor.
8. Bureaucrats and other third parties must never be allowed to interfere in the doctor/patient relationship.
9. The tax code, including the ERISA laws, must be changed to give everyone equal treatment by allowing a 100% tax credit for all medical expenses.
   Laws dealing with bad outcomes and prohibiting doctors from entering into voluntary agreements with their patients must be repealed. Tort laws play a significant role in pushing costs higher, prompting unnecessary treatment and excessive testing. Patients deserve the compensation; the attorneys do not.
10. Insurance sales should be legalized nationally across state lines to increase competition among the insurance companies.
11. Long-term insurance policies should be available to young people similar to term-life insurances that offer fixed prices for long periods of time.
12. The principle of insurance should be remembered. Its purpose in a free market is to measure risk, not to be used synonymously with social welfare programs. Any program that provides for first-dollar payment is no longer insurance. This would be similar to giving coverage for gasoline and repair bills to those who buy car insurance or providing food insurance for people to go to the grocery store. Obviously, that could not work.
13. The cozy relationship between organized medicine and government must be reversed.
    Early on medical insurance was promoted by the medical community in order to boost re-imbursements to doctors and hospitals. That partnership has morphed into the government/insurance industry still being promoted by the current administration.
14. Threatening individuals with huge fines by forcing them to buy insurance is a boon to the insurance companies.
15. There must be more competition for individuals entering into the medical field. Licensing strictly limits the number of individuals who can provide patient care. A lot of problems were created in 20th century as a consequence the Flexner Report (1910), which was financed by the Carnegie Foundation and strongly supported by the AMA. Many medical schools were closed and the number of doctors was drastically reduced. The motivation was to close down medical schools that catered to women, minorities and especially homeopathy. We continue to suffer from these changes which were designed to protect physician’s income and promote allopathic medicine over the more natural cures and prevention of homeopathic medicine.
16. We must remove any obstacles for people seeking holistic and nutritional alternatives to current medical care. We must remove the threat of further regulations pushed by the drug companies now working worldwide to limit these alternatives.

True competition in the delivery of medical care is what is needed, not more government meddling.

Related posts:

1. Ron Paul: How To Solve The Healthcare Crisis Having practiced medicine for over 30 years, Ron Paul gives...
2. Ron Paul: Obama’s Healthcare Plan Will Make Things Much Worse Channel: CNN Show: American Morning Host: Kiran Chetry Date:...
3. Swine Flu: Is The Cure Worse Than The Illness? In his latest column Ron Paul points out that fears...

Date: 9/18/2009

Related posts:

1. The Time Has Come: Let’s End The Fed! Ron Paul addresses Congress Channel: C-SPAN Date: 2/25/2008 Transcript:...
2. Ron Paul to Congress: End the Fed Statement of Congressman Ron Paul United States House of Representatives...
3. Ron Paul on the Glenn Beck Program Show: Glenn Beck Program Host: Glenn Beck Date: 9/29/2009 Transcript...

Event: John Birch Society Luncheon
Location: Houston, TX
Date: August 21, 2009

Transcript

Part 1: Even Welfare State Supporters Realize That The System Isn’t Viable

Ron Paul: Mr. Ron Paul: Thank you. Hi, I appreciate that very much. I’m delighted to be here. We were hectic in getting here. We were up in Dallas yesterday evening. There was a little fundraiser for our middle son and his name is Rand Paul and it looks like he has a crack at winning the Senate seat up in Kentucky.

I tried to explain to him that he was risking a very good medical practice and why would he want to get into politics and he told me I had no credibility in that part. I cautioned him, so there’s always a mixed blessing on what we do in life, and you give up something and you go on to do something else, but I actually feel very, very fortunate that I’ve been able to work both; be a medical doctor and deliver a lot of babies, at the same time participate in an active way in political change, so I feel fortunate that I can do that.

Now, Carol is sitting over here. She was with me yesterday and we came in this morning. [...]

But I would like to sort of update you today on where, I think, the freedom movement is because that, of course, is what we all work in and been working for for a long time and most of the time it’s been rather quiescent. Especially in most of my lifetime, it’s been very difficult to even recognize in a public way what the freedom movement was all about, but I think things are definitely changing. I think we live in a different era right now.

But I got interested in the subject back in the 1950s and early 1960s actually as a medical student, as a medical resident when I started reading and studying Austrian economics. But it was very difficult to find the information back then and the group that provided most of the information for me was the group called the Foundation for Economic Education on Irvington on Hudson with Leonard Read.

No Internet and no professors in our colleges, nobody in the media talking about it, nobody in the government talking about it, but there was that remnant out there that did talk about it. Because no matter how bad things get, there’s always somebody available to try to hold things together and hold the true beliefs and our true values regardless of what the government is doing and this is historic. This is the way it’s always been and yet today I’ve come to the conclusion that that group of people was much, much larger than I ever dreamed because as I campaigned for the presidency the last couple of years, I discovered so many more people than I ever thought there would be.

So there were a lot of people like you. I know members and associates, people associated with the Birch Society are well informed and know about it and that wasn’t the great discovery because you’ve been working at this for a long time, but there were a lot more, a lot more people who had just been turned off with the system, had dropped out of the system. They weren’t voting, some never voted and they were just disgusted with it and they knew there was no difference between the Republican and the Democratic Party and that number was much, much larger.

But the other magnificent thing that I discovered in these past two years has been the reception of a new generation of young people who listen to this and are coming our way and accept this wholeheartedly and enthusiastically. So often now when young people come to my office in Washington, teenagers, maybe a 14-year old, 16-year old, college kids are coming in and I always ask them, you know, “How did you get interested? How long have you been interested? And what was it?”

Many, many times, almost inevitably, they will say, “Well, you talk about the Constitution and following the Constitution.” So they’re fascinated with that and young people tend to have an inclination toward principle more so than those individuals who are in the business community, who have lived with the system and they sort of figured, well, you have to go along to get along and they accept it.

But young people are more idealistic. They tell me that, but they also, very frequently, bring up the subject of the Federal Reserve, which is so fascinating today because, “Oh, I like what you talk about on money and the importance of this.” They’ve never heard of the Federal Reserve and they’re reading and studying now about the Federal Reserve System and how significant the monetary issue is.

As a matter of fact, it was the monetary issue that probably got me interested in politics early on because I was very much aware what was happening prior to August 15th, 1971. The Austrian economists, even as early as 1945, when the Bretton Woods system was set up, which was a pseudo-gold standard and Henry Hazlitt, who was a financial writer, a libertarian writer, he said it will fail and he was absolutely right and it failed in 1971.

When that happened, it just sort of hit me inside, they’re absolutely correct on their analysis of what’s wrong and what’s going to happen and predicting the future, even through Austrian economics, you cannot predict precisely. I can’t tell you tomorrow what the stock market is going to do, but I can tell you that in time the dollar is going to continue to weaken and eventually probably self-destruct, and that was predicted by Mises as early as 1912 and sure enough in 1913, we allowed our government to give us the Federal Reserve system.

Now, we have a 4-cent dollar compared to the dollar we had in 1913 and what are we doing now? That system of government, the system of government that runs the post office and they run Amtrak and they were in charge of $700 billion of TARP funds, all wasteful, corrupt spending. Now, the ones who believe that they represent the people who need help and the people who need taking care of and they grab the moral high ground and say, “That’s what we want to do: turn over the control of medical care to the people that have destroyed our country.”

Washington is still a mess. They haven’t gotten the message about this new generation has endorsed and what another group of people have been encouraged to get more engaged in, and yet we’re in the middle of big changes. All you have to do is watch the television and there’s a great deal of significance about the anger expressed at these townhall meetings.

Some of it might be orchestrated. The other day, last night, as a matter of fact, I was on Cooper, Anderson Cooper Show, and he asked me, “Oh, is this all a plan? Was the Republican Party able to set this up and conspire to do this?” I said, “You’re giving them too much credit. They’re probably not capable of doing that.”

But I think what’s happening is that the welfare state is alive and well. There is still a lot of people out there, but even those who are on the receiving end realize this is coming to an end. They know what we know, that it’s not a viable system, and they’re getting concerned. Who is going to get it? Will the big guys get all of it like they’ve been getting right now? People getting bailed out, the huge salaries, retirement benefits, banks being bailed out and Goldman Sachs being benefited by and they see that, so when they think about food stamps and housing programs and free education and free medical care, they get worried and concerned and yet the people who are still working for other things who understand it that this can’t continue. It has to end. Those two are in conflict and they’re fighting with each other and that is what’s going to change things because it is not sustainable.

This is not sustainable and that’s why the freedom movement is so important to explain this economically, morally, constitutionally in a practical sense. We have all those arguments on our side and yet we seem to continue to lose this fight. We’ve lost it for the last 70-80 years, especially since the Depression.

But the seeds were planted before that. 1913 was a horrible year. The income tax, the Federal Reserve and then also the change in the way they were electing senators and then at that period of time, significant change in our foreign policy where we became the policeman of the world, “make the world safe for democracy.” In here, what we were doing was nothing more than developing a foreign policy designed as a police force and a protectorate for some of the corporate interests around the world and then all those seeds were planted but the Depression really brought it on. There has been continued growth of that at the expense of liberty.

Part 2: The Elite Wants A Global Paper Currency run by the UN and IMF

But now we’re at the crisis point because we are out of money and not only that, we’re out of wealth too. We’re not producing the wealth. The jobs have gone overseas and the debt is still with us.

We will this year raise the national debt at over $2 trillion. In the last 12 months, the national debt went up $2.2 trillion and that will probably expand because the one thing they can’t do is really project those numbers accurately because they don’t know how many people are going to be employed next year. I mean, unemployment might be 11 percent for all they know and therefore the revenues go down. So part of the reason that the deficit is exploding is that there are less revenues.

But the other part is the expenditures haven’t slowed up. You know, if you or I got into trouble, with too many credit cards and too much debt and we felt somewhat responsible to get our house in order, what we would do is stop spending and take a second job and start paying down the debt, which some people are capable of doing. That’s what needs to be done in the economy. We’re doing everything, at the Washington level, to do exactly the opposite. We’re not cutting any spending. We’re not paying down debt. What we are doing is transferring the debt from the people who made billions to the taxpayers.

You take the derivatives, those financial assets they call illiquid. Well, they are in the Federal Reserve now and even the treasury bills, which is a weak backing to a currency, they’ve been given to the banks, to Goldman Sachs, so they’re holding the treasury bills and we, the taxpayers, are holding mortgage securities and derivatives in order to prop the system up and so it’s a powder keg. In many ways, there has been no correction.

When an economy gets out of whack due to the inflationary conditions of what the Federal Reserve does and all the anticipation and the false information they have, it gets to the point where you need a correction. You can temporarily keep the correction from coming, but you can’t prevent it forever.

So since 1971, we’ve had six or eight significant recessions. That’s the market always saying, “You’re overdoing it. It’s out of kilter,” but we kept piling on the debt, consuming our wealth until finally, the big correction had to come and we’re in the midst of it. But we’re doing everything possible to prevent the correction and if you’re doing something to yourself harming yourself, the correction is to stop doing it. If you drink too much or smoke too much, the correction is stopping. But in our case, the correction means that we have to cut spending, cut taxes, cut regulations, cut the deficit, and cut printing money and we’re doing everything more so and it make things worse, so we do more and more and it will stop the economy, but the next sign will be the dollar.

The financial structure is done. I don’t think they can rebuild the international financial system on the dollar standard, the paper dollar standard and the opposition, those who are really in charge of our Federal Reserve and our Treasury and our government, they know that and they’re are already working in collusion with the central banks of the world to come up with the alternative.

And they want a worldwide paper currency run by the United Nations and the IMF and the SDRs and that is what they’re working on and I would say that it shouldn’t be difficult for us to say, “Absolutely not. We don’t need that.”

But they do not want to accept the restraints of honest money and the Constitution and morality and that’s where the problem comes with the Federal Reserve. It is immoral. It’s unconstitutional. It’s bad economic policy and it gives us the economic crisis and so it’s something that has to be addressed. The Federal Reserve is set up, so government can grow in a sinister way where they don’t have to be responsible and you can finance the welfare state if you monetize the debt and you can run this worldwide empire, which is so destructive, is so harmful to us and they can finance those debts the same way.

But not only that. The Federal Reserve is a government unto itself. They can literally create trillions of dollars, which they’ve had especially these last couple of years, put it into the hands of foreign governments, into the hands of foreign banks, into the hands of international financial organizations, into the hands of corporations and we’ve had no authority to go in and examine them. They don’t want to tell us what they’re doing. So they have the entire power of Congress.

Congress thinks they’re real important and they should be a lot more important and curtail this and have oversight and do all these things, but they don’t. They just continue to ignore the important issues until now.

Now, we’re getting their attention. The freedom movement is getting all their attention because I think we have proven a point, especially on this monetary issue. What happened was when the TARP funds were appropriated and authorized, the information got out that finally the Congress didn’t know where the money was going. It had no idea. The people sensed this. The economy were getting weaker and weaker and people wanting to know what was happening and so they put a lot of pressure on Congress and they’ve got a lot of attention.

But then it turns out that this is a small matter compared to the trillions of dollars involved in the Federal Reserve, so that is what opened up the opportunity for us to be able to move this bill and make the point, “Look, if you want to know where the TARP funds are, you’ve got to know what the Federal Reserve is doing.” And that is why the bill to audit the Fed, which the most I ever had before in that bill was 18 and today it’s 282 [co-sponsors].

Seventy five percent of the American people say it’s right to know what the Federal Reserve is doing. Now the one reason we got such a cross-section on this is because the American people want transparency and this is a bill of transparency. This is not a bill that has in it to design the replacement for the monetary system because that would have been a more giant leap. People wouldn’t have signed on to that, but they are willing to look into it.

But if we know more about what they’re doing, what kind of deals are being made and who has been benefiting, believe me, that will usher in the day when we can have true reform.

The odds of this bill being passed as a bill on itself (a stand-alone bill), quite frankly I think are very slim. It could happen if the American people put enough pressure on them and things come together, but the odds aren’t very good.

The odds of the bill being passed, with their strong effort to water it down a bit, are pretty good, I think they know that there is such strong public sentiment that they are going to permit something, and they’ll probably attach it to some horrible, horrible bill for reform on the regulatory system.

So, that’s a possibility of what will happen. But the question comes up; why, if you have a majority of the people who are for it, why don’t they just bring it to the floor. Don’t they have to? No, they don’t have to.

The 290 vote means that you have enough votes for it to pass under suspension. The super-majority support it, so just bring it to the floor. They could if they wanted to, plus they could bring it up on Monday. The first Monday we go back. It could be under suspension.

I imagine there wouldn’t be very many who would oppose it, but it’s not going to happen. The establishment does not want this, and I think if you get to be president or vice-president or speaker of the House, the establishment has a lot of influence on those individuals. So, they will be restrained in bringing this up, unless the momentum continues, and I think that is a possibility.

We don’t know exactly what will happen, but something is going to happen in the next several months. Let’s say they take that bill and they do nothing. Let’s say they refuse to, or pass something that is totally worthless. I think then, those individuals, the groups, the citizens who have been pushing this bill, as well as the 75% who think that transparency is a good idea, they are going to be outraged, because it will prove our point that they would defy this huge majority of people and common sense and the Constitution in order to protect their secrecy on what they are doing.

Part 3: If HR 1207 Doesn’t Pass, The People Will Be Outraged

So, I work on the assumption, I do not know for sure, but I know one thing, we can continue with this issue. This issue is going to be important for a long time to come. How would you bring it to the floor? Is there a rule in the House that allows you to bring it to the floor when you have more than half the people in Congress supporting it?

Yes, you can. You can get people to sign a discharge petition, forcing it out. But I haven’t chosen that way, because I think the chances are slim to none to even get Democrats to sign on to it, because they are really partisan. They will sign on to a bill, but to challenge and start going with a discharge petition, that’s sort of like saying, “We’re rejecting the entire leadership of the Democratic party.” And their political livelihood depends on at least a working relationship with their leadership.

So, I don’t see that as being practical. What I do see as practical is building up the momentum of the people and spreading this message and insisting on it. We will be hearing a lot more about this, but the effort to do this, I think shows you what the freedom movement can do. This is one bill, one very important bill, and it could do a lot of good, but it means that if you put the package together right and you are on the right side of these issues and you present them and it’s truthful and it’s constitutional and you can show the benefits economically speaking and you can work on transparency… you can put coalitions together, and that’s what we need to do.

We won’t awe… in Washington, it will be a long time before you get 75 percent of the congressmen to all of a sudden be endorsing all our bills, so it is gradualism.

But to me, the most important thing is prevailing knowledge and prevailing understanding and Nixon, at that time when he closed the gold window and stopped the Bretton Woods, he had said he was accepting wage and price controls because “we’re all Keynesians now” and that, in a way, was profound because in the sense we all were, anybody in the Congress. They still are, they’re all Keynesians, so they have a lot of difficulty in shifting gears and become Austrian economists and free market economists, but that is where the shift is coming and more and more pressure.

I think this is just one incident to show that if the grassroots wake up and the efforts were made and they send it to the congressmen, you can win more and more battles and that’s the reason they got on the bill. It wasn’t because I had any legislative clout. I have no clout up there at all and usually, if you get people to sign on, you have to trade votes, “Well, you vote for this and I’ll vote for that.” But it came from the people and going to these meetings and in many ways, it was done the right way. There was no yelling and shouting like there is on this medical care thing. I don’t think we’re… not that I care that much about people expressing themselves. That’s a little bit of attention getting, but that’s not going to solve the problem.

I think the way the Audit the Fed bill occured, by writing and calling and going to their meetings and being very diplomatic and putting pressure on them. I mean, to think that we have every Republican congressman on this bill and in Texas, all of us including our two senators. Who would have ever predicted it? I wouldn’t have. If had said 2 or 3 years ago when… or even a year and a half ago when the Republican party was laughing at me and booing me and hissing me on the stage anytime I brought up monetary policy or foreign policy, all this stuff, and then all of a sudden, but the Republican party is starved right now, but I just wished that we were able to move into the next stage, that they would capture the whole philosophy, not only on the monetary issue and the thought of auditing the Fed, but this whole idea of why government should be small. I’m in many ways more optimistic than ever, mainly because of the large number of people who have been interested.

The follow up from our campaign, there’s a group now that has been organized. It was spun off from our group. Our group from the campaign is called Campaign for Liberty, but there is a group called Young Americans for Liberty. It’s similar to what Young Americans for Freedom was all about, but remember that was Buckley’s group and it’s sort of done. I mean, that’s about over with, but Young Americans for Liberty is a good group. They’re organizing on campuses. A couple weeks or several weeks ago, they invited me to stop. There was a group that started up at Wake Forest, so I stopped at the north flying on my way back and they had 1,400 kids who showed up on campus, so that’s good.

And the other day, we stopped over into Orlando. It was both that group plus Campaign for Liberty and I think they had like 400 chairs or something set up. They thought they could get that many people interested. I think there were 1,100 or 1,200 people who showed up, so this is very encouraging and I think we just have to keep this momentum going.

But the opportunity is there because this system is failing. The biggest danger is that if it becomes disruptive, which it’s likely to, and it becomes more violent because of the anger and those people who think that it’s proper to have a right to your life, not a right to their life and right to their liberty and obligations to care for themselves, they believe they have a right to medical care and they’ll be very angry and everything they believe in, those people who believe in welfarism and socialism and fascism and all that’s based on violence, the guns of government and authoritarianism because if you don’t go along, you go to jail.

Sometimes you get shot, just by any token resistance to this and if you resist the tax code or the monetary system on principle, constitutional law, no matter how correct you are, you’re likely to go to prison. You know, it can be a pretty difficult situation, so I think my approach to it all has been to take the position that I don’t like the violence and others are preparing for it and maybe it will be necessary, but I just think that it’s the ideas that counts and that’s why I think the John Birch Society has done so well because they understand that issue of ideas and ideas have consequences and that’s what we have to promote. And if we do that, we can avoid the violence but we have to be prepared for it nonetheless.

So I would think in the next few years, nobody knows the timing but this thing could come unglued almost anytime with any precipitous economic or foreign policy event. We’re bound and determined to expand the war in the Middle East. It was once was a Republican war. Now, it’s a Democratic war. Policies are continued. They’re controlled by both parties and it was mentioned earlier that Republicans are having a much better voting record these days. Well, that’s good, but where they were all those years, you know, eight years that you have to start voting against that stuff, but attitudes have changed now. You know, that’s why it’s even more profound that a Ron Paul bill would get all the Republicans to sign on, so that might be a sign that things are shifting.

But we must continue to fight and we should be optimistic that we can prevail. We don’t know exactly what tomorrow will bring, but nobody knows what tomorrow will bring, and in the meantime we have to do our very best and present the case, present the case for individual liberty, constitutional law and a system of government that honors sound money and a sensible foreign policy. If we keep pushing that, I believe in the end we can win. Thank you very much.

Related posts:

1. Misinformation Alert: Barney Frank Never Said That HR 1207 Will Pass In October Missing Sentence in Transcript Causes Premature HR 1207 Victory Celebration...
2. Ron Paul: The Fed is getting annoyed because the American people are waking up In an interview with Yahoo! Finance’s Tech Ticker, Ron Paul...
3. Ron Paul: We Need True Competition in Medical Care Venue: House of Representatives Date: 9/23/2009 Transcript: Government has...

Event: Florida Liberty Summit with Ron Paul
Location: Orlando, FL
Date: August 7, 2009

Ron Paul: It’s really wonderful to see such a nice enthusiastic crowd, and you know, I give a lot of speeches in Washington, but believe me, I don’t get that kind of enthusiasm. It’s usually pretty empty when I get to talk up there, but I get back to my sanity when I get out of Washington and get home to be with people like you, so this is a real pleasure to be here and, you know, about a year ago we announced that the revolution was beginning. But today, we say let’s continue the revolution.

Good idea started and I wanted to make sure everybody here, but I’m sure the majority do know, but Mark Cross spent a lot of energy into this activity tonight. Not only that, but organizing this county and around the state, if we have somebody like Mark in every state, believe me, this will turn into a [...] revolution. Mark…

And I guess I can give you a few little updates on politics. I hear that Peter Schiff is doing it quite well. (inaudible). Then there’s a doctor in Kentucky who is running for the Senate and he’s [Rand Paul].

To me as, you know, I’ve [...] talked about what he is doing and I asked him if I can give him any advice, of course, I don’t really give him advice and I suggested things and asked him questions. I said, “Are you really sure you want to give up a perfectly good medical practice and go into politics?” and he said that I had no room to even question that.

But all of us have other things to do; we’re all engaged in the preservation of liberty and that should be our goal. That should be the goal of all political action, it’s the preservation of liberty. With our freedoms, all of our problems can be solved in a much better way than [...]

Earlier this evening, I ran into a gentleman and he asked me about fairness of elections and why don’t I do more to make sure that all elections are fair, and it is true, elections aren’t always fair. There was one time not too long ago that I had a problem with and election. It was in the early years, in the 1970s, where we actually thought an election was stolen.

But this shouldn’t surprise us at all, because don’t we have a very active CIA making sure all the elections are fair around the world, and if an election doesn’t come out quite well, right? We’ll have a new election and we do it all over again. But back in the day when we had a contest, we actually had a lot of evidence [...] One gentleman was called before the judge and the judge says, “Young man, do you know you’re being charged for voting seven times?” He says, “No.” And he says, “I thought I was getting paid.”

But fortunately, we don’t have to worry about that right now because ultimately – elections are key obviously – but ultimately, it’s what’s in the hearts and minds of the people. What is the philosophy in the country, the philosophy we believe in. Do we believe in socialism, welfarism, interventionism?

Then it has what the people believe, and believe me, that’s what we get in Congress and in Washington and the prevailing attitude has been wrong for a long time. That is why what is going on today is not a partisan revolution. It’s a philosophic revolution to change the hearts and mind and the philosophy of the American people to say, “We want our freedom. We don’t want oppression from our federal government.”

When we are successful and we’re becoming more successful all the time, we know it affects across supporting minds. It’s very difficult to introduce new ideas and new party because all the laws are biased against competition. We don’t have a very good democratic history in this country because it’s narrowed down to two parties and when you look closely [...] they look like the same party.

And for that reason, many of us who were in the major parties and I certainly have worked at the Republican Party and as a Republican congressman, but what we need to eventually do though is to make sure these ideas are across party lines.

Now, when we’re successful, the ideas will permeate, just like Nixon explained it all to us on August 15, 1971. He said, “We’re all Keynesians now.” And he was absolutely right. But today, we have an issue that we have made very bipartisan, for the right reason. Sure, you can say it’s bi-partisan when we’re handing out TARP funds and so-called bailing out the economy and then the Republicans get together and rip us off and they call that bipartisanship.

I’m talking about the other kind of bipartisanship where ideas permeate, and I will say that he have achieved this to a large degree, calling the attention to that very important issue and getting both Republicans and Democrats on board on auditing the Federal Reserve system.

Audience: (Clapping), End the Fed! End the Fed! End the Fed!

Ron Paul: How did you know about my new book?

But you know, like I’m saying, this has been a bipartisan effort. We have all Republicans and we have 104 Democrats and I think Alan Grayson was introduced earlier on [...], but Alan have actually, you know, gotten a lot of help for us in getting a lot of [...].

We do have a long way to go though. We are making progress. When we see crowds like this, people who are not strongly identified with one party or the other that are willing to work hard to promote liberty, believe me, we can be… we’re on a roll and we have to continue. We have to continue the momentum. This is the key. But we have to know what we believe in and, of course, it can be summarized rather easily. Most people talk about liberty, but do people really define it and understand it? Liberty to me means I have a right to my life, to my liberty, and to the fruits of my labor.

And my rights do not come from my government, my rights coming to me in a natural way, in a God-given way and apply to all of us equally.

And if we are to have a small government, that government should be restrained and limiting its power and authority to the protection of our liberty and nothing else.

There shouldn’t be a perpetual war on the people. They say there is always a war for the people, but too often it is a war on the people. You know, there is a war going on in Afghanistan that’s expanding, is that supposed to be for us? There has been a war going on in Iraq now for over 6 or 7 years, a trillions dollars spent, and thousands of American lives have been lost and hundreds of thousands of others lives have been lost. And that war is not for us, that is a war against us. It’s consuming us.

What about this war on drugs? We don’t need a war on drugs. Then they’ll say we have to have a war on poverty; we’re opposed to poverty. Who’s for poverty? Guess we’re going to have a war on poverty, and what do they give us? A lot more poverty.

Personal liberties are obviously part of this, but in order to have liberty protected we have to come to our senses on foreign policy. The founders were correct on foreign policy and they gave us strong advice. It’s written into the Constitution that we need to defend our country, but we are not supposed to be the policeman of the world.

And now that we’re broke and more people are starting to recognize that we’re broke, it’s getting more opportunistic for us to say “One of the solutions may well be to just bring our troops home.”

I’m not talking about Iraq. I’m not talking about the Middle East. I’m not talking about Afghanistan. I’m not talking about the attacks on Pakistan. I’m not talking about our Navy surrounding and wants to boycott the Iranians. I’m not talking about the Koreans. The troops we have in Korea. The troops we have in Europe. The troops we have in Japan. The 800 bases we have around the world. I’m talking about all of them! Bring them home!

And with the hundreds of billions of dollars we can save, we can inject that into the economy by cutting the income tax and let the people have the money.

Then if we reject the notion of the last 35 years of government managed care and reject the notion that the answer is socialized medicine, believe me, the American people will get a lot better healthcare if we just get the government out of the way.

Last week, there was another bill passed. It was passed under suspension and passed rather easily. It had to do with regulating food. They want everybody to have safe food. So we’re going to depend on the post office to give us safe food. But it’s an unbelievable bill. Regulating and inspecting every single thing about food. It’s going to be very bureaucratic and very, very expensive. Food prices are going up. Just like when they’re regulated [...], the prices go up. When they got into the housing business, did poor people end up with houses? Yeah, temporarily, then they lost them quickly and the housing crisis went up and then there is a collapse.

Governments can’t manage. They can’t manage anything. They can’t manage their own personal affair most of the time.

But what they can manage is their overseas travel. They love overseas travel. Somebody asked me, “Why don’t you go overseas, you don’t like the way the money is spent, we’re going to inspect how we’re doing this so you can be more informed about what’s happening with all that. I said, “I don’t need to go overseas to know that we shouldn’t be voting for any foreign aid whatsoever.”

But [...], you really think that after this last week of people being upset at these townhall meetings that they’d be paying more attention, but no, it’s still going through Congress right now with over half a billion dollars is being presented by the House to buy more airplanes for the congressmen to fly around the world.

Not only is it first-class flying, they are being jettisoned, I guess they need about 8 members, 4 Republicans and 4 Democrats. You’ve got to be bipartisan. They go up in big jets, and what really gets to me about some of that is I find some people who fly in those jets and burn up all that energy are greenies.

And sometimes, we get a bad rap, we don’t care
about the environment. You know, if you’re a true constitutionalist, true conservative, libertarian, you care about property. That’s why it’s in the hands of private individuals, they take much better care of the property than anybody else.

One of our great polluters today is the Pentagon. They burn more energy than about… except for about 15 countries, they burn more energy than most of all of the rest of the countries. But just think of the energy and the carbons that they put out in the air in countries like Iraq.

I have Trudy Miles [?] the other day and the lady’s expertise, she’s a journalist on these burn pits. I had to confess I didn’t know a whole lot about burn pits, but she said it’s been traditional, but they’re especially bad in Iraq. That means that when Halliburton and other companies get paid umpteen million, millions of dollars to do their things out there, all their waste gets into a pit, an open pit; medical supplies, rubber supplies, chemical supplies, and these pits burn constantly. And predictions now are made that we’re in trouble with the Persian Gulf War syndrome and there’s going to be a lot of that.

But we already had such a tragedy with that, the lsot lives of course, between the two wars we’ve lost 5,000 with 40,000 troops got injured and we have hundreds of thousands who now are applying, and probably most of them legitimately, people coming back who have post-traumatic stress syndrome; an epidemic of suicide these days.

I’ve got one staff person whose brother is on his way back to Iraq the fifth time, the fifth time to Iraq, and then they wonder why as a candidate our campaign ended up getting more money from the military than all the rest put together.

I find the issue [...] I don’t need to tell you, they are massive. But they’re probably even worse than I can even comprehend because I don’t think anybody can quite comprehend $100 trillion of financial obligations, and the reason you really can’t comprehend it is because these obligations are slipping. You know, they’re not fixed.

You know, they talk about Social Security going broke in a certain year, but there’s no way they can predict. Right now, they’re moving up the date. Why? Less people are working, the cashflow is much reduced. And therefore it’s shortening the period of time where it will be [...]

But then the other part that they don’t know is what the cost of living is going to be. It’s going to be automatically higher, so the prices are going up, your revenues are going down, less people working, more people living longer, and on and on and yet they claimed that they’re good managers of our affairs, and yet all is a tremendous attack on our liberties.

We’ve had an 18 percent reduction in tax revenues since the recession. I think we should cheer that.

It wasn’t on purpose. It wasn’t a policy. It was by default and it is because they messed up the economy of that. But the bad news is they probably have increased spending by that amoujnt of money and made it that much worse. So you can’t have a decrease in revenues and continue to spend more money and all these entitlement obligations, a national debt of about a trillion dollars. But right now currently, our national debt is going up at the rate of $2 trillion a year. You hear that in figures, but it’s $2 trillion a year because, you know, we take all the funds away from the other trust funds.

The other day, we got a note that we had used up all of the highway trust funds and we had to replenish all that. There was a special vote. Two thirds vote to put 7 billion dollars in there. So the money came in, probably from the highway taxes. They blew it on probably spending in Iraq. They come up short so they print more money and fulfill it and everybody goes for it.

But you know… once again, back to the silliness about ridiculous spending overseas. You know, in a transition, I think there’s a lot of things we can do. We don’t have to cut everybody off right away, but we ought to have some priorities and I think it’s a logical point of view to say, “Look, isn’t it time that we quit blowing up bridges around the world and then paying to re-build them and not even have enough money to take care of our own highways and bridges.”

The news has been pretty good this week. I think that there may be a much greater growth with the Campaign for Liberty when you see how many people out there are disgusted with the government.

And you know, I don’t like to deal with anger. I don’t think that’s the best approach. I was always taught you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and anger doesn’t work. But there is a lot of anger out there and a lot of it is justified, and I think our goal at Campaign for Liberty is to harness that energy and that extreme upset, being extremely upset with our government and take it and turn it into something positive. That is the key. If we can’t, we can’t win because the anger, and already they’re turning against us and they say, “Oh, they’re angry.” I heard one commentator interviewed a congressman and he said, “Oh, yeah. They were down there and having a ruckus with my townhall meeting. And they had the nerve to get up and say that under the 10th amendment the federal government shouldn’t be doing this with medical care.”

He was incensed to think that the 10th amendment actually restrained the government at the federal level. But they will continue to get away with this if we allow them to do it. But right now, our [...] is under attack whether it’s personal liberty or economic liberty or whether it’s the intrusion that we have overseas and we, as a group, have an honest responsibility.

I’m always pleased with the crowds and the enthusiasm, but in some ways,
once you see what’s happening, once you get introduced to the ideas of liberty, understanding Austrian economics, understanding our history a little bit better, it can make you uncomfortable, and that’s probably good.

And people will follow up and and they start reading and thinking, but I see people like you, as being very, very special, different, because you are part of a remnant of people who hold things together.

The masses of people will never quite understand, but what you do and say and understand makes all the difference in the world.

But you have more responsibility than anybody, and this is not new, this is not something I brought up or invented, that’s the way it’s always been, responsibility always falls on a small number of people.

And Samuel Adams talked about that. He said, “It does not require a majority to prevail. You need an irate minority.”

A minority that is keen to set brush fires of freedom in the minds of men and then you’ll have a revolution.

And I like the idea that he said “minds of men”. [...] I like this that he will start the brush fires in the minds of men so that you know and understand, because it is an ideological fight. This is not a political fight. Politics is secondary to the ideological fight.

And that’s where we’re winning. That’s where we’re making progress more so than ever before because Keynesianism failed and the American people are irate because they know it has failed.

They don’t quite understand what the alternative is and yet we need to fill that void and explain what is necessary.

Related posts:

1. Campaign for Liberty Conference in Seattle, with Ron Paul and Tom Woods From May 22 to 24, 2009, Ron Paul, Tom Woods...
2. C4L’s Liberty Forum at CPAC 2009 Here’s a collection of videos of supporter-made videos documenting the...
3. Ron Paul Opposes Supplemental Appropriations Act On June 15, Ron Paul gave the following speech in...

Event: Florida Liberty Summit with Ron Paul
Location: Orlando, FL
Date: August 7, 2009

Ron Paul: If we are to have a small government, that government should be restrained and limiting its power and authority to the protection of our liberty and nothing else.

There shouldn’t be a perpetual war on the people. They say there is always a war for the people, but too often it is a war on the people. You know, there is a war going on in Afghanistan that’s expanding, is that supposed to be for us? There has been a war going on in Iraq now for over 6 or 7 years, a trillions dollars spent, and thousands of American lives have been lost and hundreds of thousands of others lives have been lost. And that war is not for us, that is a war against us. It’s consuming us.

What about this war on drugs? We don’t need a war on drugs. Then they’ll say we have to have a war on poverty; we’re opposed to poverty. Who’s for poverty? Guess we’re going to have a war on poverty, and what do they give us? A lot more poverty.

Personal liberties are obviously part of this, but in order to have liberty protected we have to come to our senses on foreign policy. The founders were correct on foreign policy and they gave us strong advice. It’s written into the Constitution that we need to defend our country, but we are not supposed to be the policeman of the world.

And now that we’re broke and more people are starting to recognize that we’re broke, it’s getting more opportunistic for us to say “One of the solutions may well be to just bring our troops home.”

Related posts:

1. Ron Paul: Bring Our Troops Home – From Afghanistan, Iraq, Japan, Germany, … Download the column as an MP3 file here (3:53...
2. Ron Paul’s Speech at the Campaign for Liberty Summit in Orlando Event: Florida Liberty Summit with Ron Paul Location: Orlando,...
3. Ron Paul on Antiwar Radio Ron Paul was interviewed by Scott Horton on Antiwar Radio....

In less than two years, the freedom movement – under Ron Paul’s reluctant leadership – has made great progress in building a new popular consensus that freedom works and that socialism is a tyrannical, antiquated ideology that all Americans need to oppose.

At the same time, Ron Paul’s recent speeches have addressed the historical fact that peaceful revolutionaries don’t need to convince 51% of the population to determine a new course.

Instead, all it takes to set off the winds of real change in the 21st century is an energized, “irate”, responsible minority of 3% to 5% that claims ideological leadership and explains why Keynesianism has failed and what it can be replaced with.

This ideological fight, to quote Ron Paul, is “where we’re winning. That’s where we’re making progress more so than ever before.”

Event: Florida Liberty Summit with Ron Paul
Location: Orlando, FL
Date: August 7, 2009

Ron Paul: We as a group have an honest responsibility.

I’m always pleased with the crowds and the enthusiasm, but in some ways,
once you see what’s happening, once you get introduced to the ideas of liberty, understanding Austrian economics, understanding our history a little bit better, it can make you uncomfortable, and that’s probably good.

And people will follow up and and they start reading and thinking, but I see people like you, as being very, very special, different, because you are part of a remnant of people who hold things together.

The masses of people will never quite understand, but what you do and say and understand makes all the difference in the world.

But you have more responsibility than anybody, and this is not new, this is not something I brought up or invented, that’s the way it’s always been, responsibility always falls on a small number of people.

And Samuel Adams talked about that. He said, “It does not require a majority to prevail. You need an irate minority.”

A minority that is keen to set brush fires of freedom in the minds of men and then you’ll have a revolution.

And I like the idea that he said “minds of men”. [...] I like this that he will start the brush fires in the minds of men so that you know and understand, because it is an ideological fight. This is not a political fight. Politics is secondary to the ideological fight.

And that’s where we’re winning. That’s where we’re making progress more so than ever before because Keynesianism failed and the American people are irate because they know it has failed.

They don’t quite understand what the alternative is and yet we need to fill that void and explain what is necessary.

Related posts:

1. Ron Paul’s Speech at the Campaign for Liberty Summit in Orlando Event: Florida Liberty Summit with Ron Paul Location: Orlando,...
2. Ron Paul Reacts To Obama Speech Source: Campaign for Liberty Date: 1/20/2009 Transcript: I’d like...
3. Adam Kokesh to Ron Paul: The Revolution is alive and well! Ron Paul and Adam Kokesh met in the Congressman’s office...