Statement of Congressman Ron Paul
United States House of Representatives
Statement in Opposition to H Res 1021, Condolences to Haiti
January 21, 2010
I rise in reluctant opposition to this resolution. Certainly I am moved by the horrific destruction in Haiti and would without hesitation express condolences to those who have suffered and continue to suffer. As a medical doctor, I have through my career worked to alleviate the pain and suffering of others.
Unfortunately, however, this resolution does not simply express our condolences, but rather it commits the US government “to begin the reconstruction of Haiti” and affirms that “the recovery and long-term needs of Haiti will require a sustained commitment by the United States….” I do not believe that a resolution expressing our deep regret and sorrow over this tragedy should be used to commit the United States to a “long-term” occupation of Haiti during which time the US government will provide for the reconstruction of that country.
I am concerned over the possibility of an open-ended US military occupation of Haiti and this legislation does nothing to alleviate my concerns. On the contrary, when this resolution refers to the need for a long term US plan for Haiti, I see a return to the failed attempts by the Clinton and Bush Administrations to establish Haiti as an American protectorate. Already we are seeing many argue that this kind of humanitarian mission is a perfect fit for the US military. I do not agree.
Certainly I would support and encourage the efforts of the American people to help the people of Haiti at this tragic time. I believe that the American people are very generous on their own and fear that a US government commitment to reconstruct Haiti may actually discourage private contributions. Mr. Speaker, already we see private US citizens and corporations raising millions of dollars for relief and reconstruction of Haiti. I do not believe the US government should get in the way of these laudable efforts. I do express my condolences but I unfortunately must urge my colleagues to vote against this resolution committing the United States government to rebuild Haiti.
Show: Rick’s List Host: Rick Sanchez Channel: CNN Date: 01/20/2010
Transcript
Rick Sanchez: Alright, joining me now are two congressmen who’ve had some of the most colorful quotes, to say the very least, on this story so far. Republican Ron Paul of Texas, Democrat Anthony Weiner of New York. My thanks to both of you.
I’ve been trying to figure out what happened last night at Massachusetts, just like both of you have. And I’m wondering whether this really was a repudiation of Democrats and an embracing of Republicans.
Ron Paul, I want to ask you first, congressman. First of all, do you see yourself as a Republican or more as a Libertarian? I’ve never been able to figure you out.
Ron Paul: Yes. I think both. You’re allowed to be a conservative Republican, you’re allowed to be a liberal Republican, why can’t you be a libertarian? Libertarian just means you’re a constitutionalist.
Rick Sanchez: I’m not taking anything away from you. I’m just thinking that you’re in a unique position to try and define for us whether these folks in Massachusetts last night were saying, “Look, we don’t care, we don’t like either of you, and we’re tired of the same old stuff. And we’ll vote you out no matter who you are”. Or whether they were really saying, “We don’t like Barack Obama”, as the Republicans are telling us today that they are. What’s your take?
Ron Paul: Well, my take is that I’m apolitical and I think right now that’s very popular: the people that say they’re independent. I’ve never thought a whole lot of the political parties, though some of my legislation gets as much support from the Democrats as they do from the Republicans. So no, I think the issue is whether you’re right or wrong. And I happen to believe strongly in transparency and privacy and lot of liberal democrats will support me on that. And they will support me on foreign policy as well.
Rick Sanchez: What are Democrats like Anthony Weiner wrong about that cost them Massachusetts last night? What are the Democrats wrong about right now? What’s Obama wrong about?
Ron Paul: Well, I don’t know whether I’ll use the word ‘wrong’, but I think where they’re missing it is that what the people are upset about is that the government no longer can function because it fails. They’re incapable of doing this, they take on too much.
It isn’t who’s going to manage the right way or the wrong way, it’s just that’s its unmanageable. It’s sort of like directing traffic for every single person in the country. It doesn’t work. Markets work better than government.
Government bureaucrats and politicians tend to be political and they tend to mess things up and prices go up and become inefficient. So the process is wrong and I happen to believe in the marketplace; that they’re more capable. I’d like to see people at least consider delivering medical care like we deliver cell phones. Prices go down and quality goes up. But no, when the government does it, the opposite happens.
Rick Sanchez: Alright, Anthony Weiner, you heard that. That’s an interesting analysis he provided you with, giving you perhaps some information you could use as a Democrat. What’s your take?
Anthony Weiner: Well, the only problem with that is if you look at the places the government has entered, we’ve actually done, in many cases, a better job than the private sector. You ask people whether they like Medicare, 96% of people on it say they like it. It has an overhead rate of 1% compared to the private sector, which has an overhead of about 30%. And in terms of containing costs, actually we’re doing a better job on Medicare despite the fact that they’re all senior citizens.
Look, the problems the Democrats have had recently is that we’ve kind of gotten away from the things that we know work and the people like. You know, we’ve made compromises to get rid of the public option, and that would have been competition, more choice going in the direction that Congressman Paul wants to go into. We jettison that on the altar of getting 60 votes from our senators, and we forgot that the American people are pretty smart. They watch these things and they say, “What is it exactly that the Democrat healthcare plan is supposed to be about, if not something like the public option or expanding Medicare?” That, I think, is the mistake we’ve made.
You know, Congressman Paul is one of the rare, truly consistent guys in Congress, and we all respect him for that. I mean, sometimes I’m not sure he’s in touch with the mother ship on some of the things he proposes, but he’s always consistent. But in this case he just happens to have it wrong.
Rick Sanchez: Go head, Congressman Paul.
Ron Paul: On the Medicare: Yes, some people are satisfied with Medicare. But what he failed to say is that it’s bankrupt. The end stages are there, you just can’t whack away like they propose taking away some of the Medicare benefits. Take the housing, you can say public housing is great; everybody gets a wonderful house, we made interest rates low, we give them no down payments, and everybody is happy, until they lose their house and we bail out Wall Street and big banks. So it’s a failed system.
Rick Sanchez: Congressman Paul, you don’t want government in anything?
Ron Paul: Yeah, I do. I want them to play an important role. They should be enforcing contracts. We’re in charge at the federal level on bankruptcy, for instance. We bail them with the money from the people that were successful. So we have everything turned upside down.
Rick Sanchez: That’s a good point, sir. Anyway, Anthony Weiner, how do you argue with the fact that maybe we try and manage too much, which is his principled point?
Anthony Weiner: Well, perhaps that’s right. But I got to tell you, the schizophrenia of our Republican friends when it comes to Medicare… they believe it’s terrible to have government run healthcare, except for this healthcare plan, which covers about 45% of the American population. They don’t like healthcare, but when you try to mix it to get some waste out of Medicare, they scream.
Look, the fact of the matter is you can’t just simply say, “Government is good or bad.” There are some things we do well, some things we don’t do as well. But healthcare is a case that we know the free market is never going to be able to solve every the problem, because they’re never going to cover sick people.
Rick Sanchez: We’re going to have to leave it there, gentlemen. Congressman Ron Paul, Congressman Anthony Weiner. You guys are great.
Ron Paul: Up until 1965 they did.
Rick Sanchez: Thank you both. There you go. That’s Ron Paul, getting a last shot in. We appreciate both of you.
Ron Paul: I thank the speaker and I rise at this time to talk about a piece of legislation that I’ve recently introduced. That legislation is HR 4248, it’s called The Free Competition In Currency Act.
I believe that in the long-term this is a piece of legislation that will play an important role in the monetary reform that will be a necessity if we continue to do what we have been doing with our economy and our financial system.
We’re in the middle of a financial crisis today. Some people think we have turned the corner, but quite frankly I do not believe that has occurred. Recently, though, we have just had the opening bells of an inquiry into what the cause of the crisis has been. That’s the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and this is a takeoff of the Pecora Commission that was established in the 1990s when the crash occurring then.
Of course, that commission met, they talked to people, they tried to figure what was the matter, and from my viewpoint, they came down with all the wrong conclusions. They said that the Federal Reserve was involved, but the Federal Reserve didn’t print enough money fast enough. They didn’t have a big enough bailout package, and they needed a lot more regulations.
So they did all those things for the first time in our history under the two administrations: the Hoover and the Roosevelt administration. And what happened was they prolonged the depression, they took a one year depression/recession and turned it into a 15 year depression.
So I believe what we’re going through right now is the same old song and dance. We’re doing the same thing again. We have this new enquiry, and the members of the commission are people who didn’t see it coming, didn’t explain it and didn’t anticipate it. And the people who are coming before the commission, as I can see so far, had no anticipation or were acting surprised that the crisis came, that there was a bubble. So I can hardly see any good results coming from this.
My position over the many years has been that the Federal Reserve is a dangerous organization because it creates the bubble. Our country would be better off without a strong central bank like the Federal Reserve. I argue from a moral, economic and a constitutional viewpoint that it has no right to exist and it’s very dangerous to us.
I am very pleased, though, that one piece of legislation I introduced, HR 1207 to audit the Federal Reserve, has met with a large amount of support. We have 316 co-sponsors of that bill. And I think that is a major step in the right direction: looking to the Federal Reserve for the cause of our problems. The easy money system, the easy credit system, the fixing of interest rates too low.
Now, the reason why I’m addressing this is I believe the correction has a long way to run and that eventually we’ll have to have monetary reform. Now, in spite of my position being that we don’t need the Federal Reserve, I’m not in favor of closing the Federal Reserve down in one day or two. But I do believe the monetary system will close down this government and the monetary system and the Federal Reserve and a lot of other things if we continue on our profligate ways of spending and borrowing and inflating the currency and regulating the currency and this will get much worse until we have a total collapse of the system.
So, what my bill does is it introduces competition; competition in currencies. The Federal Reserve System and the dollar standard are run by a cartel; a monopoly. They don’t allow competition because they know they can’t compete. Just as we have competition in the post office with FedEx and UPS, I think that the Federal Reserve deserves a little competition. The public school system has competition with private schools, it has competition with homeschooling. And there is no reason in the world why we can’t enforce the Constitution, legalize the Constitution, and say that we can have competition in currencies.
But there are three major things that we must do to do that, and the bill does this. We repeal legal tender laws and we remove the monopoly control of the Federal Reserve. We legalize private mints so that mints can mint coins, and they will be controlled by fraud laws and anti-counterfeit laws. Today, our government commits fraud and counterfeit by just printing money at will. If a private organization did that, they would be in prison for the fraud that they are causing.
But the other important reform that would have to occur for money to circulate and compete against the monopoly control of the Federal Reserve, would be to take taxes off money. And the Constitution said only gold and silver can be money and only that can be legal tender. So you can’t tax it and allow it to be competitive.
So, these three things could occur and if nobody wanted to use it, they wouldn’t have to and everybody could be happy with the Federal Reserve. But, if the conditions get so chaotic and the people are looking for an alternative, they can go over and start operating in another currency.
So this, to me, could provide a smooth transition, it would not be chaotic, it would be legalizing the Constitution, it would be good sound economics, and eventually, the most important thing it would do is it would restrain the spending of this Congress. Because as long as you have a Federal Reserve over there willing to print up the money, anytime we spend more money than we don’t have and we can’t borrow, then the Federal Reserve will accommodate us.
Therefore, I argue the case for competition in currencies and strictly limited government.
Ron Paul: We’ve been going in the wrong direction for a long time, not just with this administration. This administration has only had one year. The problems we have today are a consequence of bad policies for decades. It takes a long time to destroy a healthy, vibrant economy and it took these many decades to do it. And there are two parties that were responsible: The Republicans and the Democrats. It’s a much bigger issue than 1 year of politics.
[Obama] a good leader, but he’s going in the wrong directions. So I would say that I give him credit for being a good leader. But he just wants more government. He talked about change, and nothing has changed. Republicans, of course, when they are out of office, they want change too. And yet when we had our chance ten years ago to get in and make a difference, not much happened. So it’s a big problem changing the course of a nation. And I like the analogy that it’s hard to turn around an aircraft carrier. You don’t turn an aircraft carrier around on a dime.
Question: Would the United States be better off with Sen. John McCain as president?
Ron Paul: It would be neither. It wouldn’t be any better off and it wouldn’t be any worse off. It would have been the same policies. You know, Obama has followed McCain’s policy in the Middle East. He’s expanding the war, sending more troops to Afghanistan, bombing Pakistan, taking on Yemen and threatening Iran. And that’s exactly what McCain would have done, and that costs a lot of money.
Question: As a doctor, how do you feel about the health care legislation?
Ron Paul: It’s a disaster. But, fortunately, those of us who would like to go in a different direction are winning this argument and it’s the key issue of this year and next year (at the end of this year and this election). I think it’s going to bring about major changes in the Congress.
Economic concerns are the biggest issue and along with that, because it is an economic concern, is the worry about healthcare. They’re happy with what they have, they see healthcare changes being made in Washington as a threat to them. And others are concerned about the cost of it, and they see that’s related to the economy. So that’s a big issue as well.
This idea of trying to make you feel better by saying there is a jobless recovery – I mean, that is about the most fantastic oxymoron I’ve ever heard of. I mean, if you don’t have a job, how do you have a recovery? You don’t have a recovery until people get their jobs back.
Question: How has Congress changed since you first joined in the 1970s?
Ron Paul: No change at all. It’s the same old stuff. The change is occurring, though, but it’s changing in the country. The people are waking up, the tea party movement is significant. The college campuses are changing, the organizations that have been formed to try to change this country, so there are tremendous changes going on in the country. And I place a lot of hope in the next generation because they’re very interested in this subject. But, with Congress the same old stuff goes on and on.
Question: We had to ask… have you given any thought to 2012?
Ron Paul: I think about it all the time. I think about where I’m going on my vacation and when I’ll be seeing my kids and whether I’ll get my exercise in and things like that. No, I don’t think about the politics. I think about 2010 though. One year at a time.
Last week, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission kicked off their first round of hearings on the causes of the economic meltdown on Wall Street. The commission is being compared to the the Pecora Commission launched in 1932 to investigate the causes of the Great Depression. The Pecora commission is beloved by those who believe the solution to every problem is more laws because it was used to justify a number of new laws, including Glass-Steagall. Of course, none of those laws addressed the real causes of the Great Depression. It was the introduction of unsound monetary policy and central economic planning pursued by the Federal Reserve that really threw everything off balance. The Fed was founded in 1913 to stabilize the economy and prevent a recurrence of the short-lived Panic of 1907, but instead it promptly produced the Great Depression which lasted more than 15 years.
The Pecora Commission was stacked with big government sympathizers who blamed the free market and the gold standard without question, and without any consideration of government interference in the economy. This panel is no different. Never will they contemplate how government steered us into this crisis, and what perverse incentives can be removed or repealed so that the market will function more smoothly. Never will they discuss how investment should come from savings, not debt. Never will it occur to them that fiat money, artificially low interest rates and the whole Federal Reserve System might be unwise and unstable, not to mention unconstitutional. The answer will always be more government regulation and oversight. It is predictable that this government panel will eventually come to the firm conclusion that government needs to be bigger, and that the market is just too free.
How sad is this when exactly the opposite is true?
It is big government that gives out tax breaks to engineer behavior, often creating large pockets of malinvestments. It is government that created the FDIC and the Fed as lender of last resort which all encourages moral hazard. It is big government that gives bureaucrats the ability to bail out cronies with taxpayer dollars while screaming that the economic sky is falling if they don’t. It is big government that every year adds new layers to the already labyrinthine regulatory code that smaller businesses can’t keep up with while simultaneously preventing new businesses from emerging. It is big government that misdirects economic productivity into bankrupt businesses that they consider to be too big to fail.
If this panel was serious about understanding the root of the problem, as they claim to be, they would have people testify who understand the crisis and saw it coming. To my knowledge, none of them have received a phone call. The problem is those people would say too many things the government panel would find inconvenient. They would point fingers at too many of the state’s anointed. They would recommend getting government out of the way of the free market and getting back to simply protecting contracts and punishing fraud. But the biggest fraud is perpetrated by the Federal Reserve. No one on this panel takes that viewpoint seriously. Instead, they will be asking people who are still scratching their heads at how they could have missed the housing bubble what new regulations they can put in place to prevent future bubbles. Thus, I don’t expect much real wisdom to come out of this current investigation.
David Asman: They bow their heads, and after getting slapped, they looked up sheepishly and asked, “Please, sir, can I have another?” Now, others did stand their ground. But what was the purpose of this show trial? Was it really to get to the root of the financial crisis, or was it to deflect blame to the easy targets while setting the stage for yet another tax increase?
After all the bankers, we’re just taking advantage of some dumb fiscal regulatory and monetary policies that government officials have been putting in place for decades. The bankers were taking advantage of a bad situation. For that they’ve been pillaried and paraded through the press the way capitalist voters were force-marched with dunce caps by Mao’s red guards during the Cultural Revolution.
Of course, many bankers were shortsighted. Like the rest of us, they just kept overextending during the boom cycle. And in some cases there was actual double dealing. Some banks recommended bad financial instruments that were being shorted by another division of the same bank. That’s bad, it’s possibly illegal and it should be exposed.
But aren’t we blaming the wrong people for the cause of the crisis? The right people to blame are folks like Alan Greenspan who left interest rates too low for too long because he believed a nation homeowners would be good for the economy at any price. Folks like Chris Dodd who are taking favors from sub-prime lenders while rewarding those lenders with billions of your tax dollars in legislation. Folks like Barney Frank who spat at anybody who was worried about Fannie and Freddie getting billions of dollars over their heads with these lousy sub-prime loans, folks like Tim Geithner who got us in so far over our heads with AIG’s bailout, that he now may be losing his job over it.
In short, the real culprits in this mess are the politicians and the bureaucrats who let the good times roll without any consideration of the consequences of bloated government and easy money.
So, are we blaming the wrong people? Let’s ask Republican Congressman Ron Paul, who joins us now from his home I believe. Good to see you, Congressman, thanks for being here.
Ron Paul: Thank you, David.
David Asman: So are we blaming the wrong people when we focus on all the attention on the bankers?
Ron Paul: If you do only the bankers and include all the bankers, yes. Some bankers know exactly what they’re been doing and they’ve been benefiting from the easy money system, and they were wildly speculating and making a lot of money. But they were also encouraged by the moral hazard of FDIC and “too big to fail” and they knew what they were doing. So they were acting in a logical way. But the real culprit that I’ve been talking about for so long has been easy money too long, and that is low interest rates, the false signals of a lot of savings out there and you should be investing and that, of course, isn’t looked at.
David Asman: It started with the Fed and Alan Greenspan?
Ron Paul: Well, even before that. I base our modern calamity in our financial situation from 1971 when all the restraints were removed from creating currency out of thin air. And that is the reason you have your deficits – because of the lack of the tying of our dollar to anything other than paper.
David Asman: Let me just be specific for the folks out there that might not remember. 1971 is when Nixon separated the dollar from gold.
Ron Paul: Yes, and this introduced an era where Congress could run up deficits for any reason, whether it’s for policing the world or for the welfare state, and at the same time accommodating the financial situation too; the financial organizations knew about this, too. So the Fed had to monetize the deficit. If you don’t have a central bank that monetizes the debt, you put a lot of restraints on big government. Anybody that thinks government should be smaller and held in check, they have to believe in sound money, because it’s with the Federal Reserve System and the ability to create this money and the following corruption and the malinvestment and the financial bubbles and the bailouts. It’s all a consequence.
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