Bill Dod: If Obama doesn’t deliver change, the U.S. still has other potential candidates eager to lead the country. And one of them is Republican Ron Paul, who is poised to run for the presidency in 2012. Let’s now cross to Priya Sridhar, she’s in our Washington studio. Interestingly enough, Pria, Ron Paul hasn’t actually yet announced he is running for this, so why have supporters already started his campaign at such an early stage?
Priya Sridhar: That’s right Bill, nothing is official just yet. But if you go to Ron Paul’s website there is a question there that says, “Do you think Ron Paul should run for President in 2012?” and you can even buy “Ron Paul for President” merchandise. So people are getting pretty psyched for the 2012 election, even though it’s kind of far away.
And joining me to help talk about Ron Paul’s popularity is Shelly Roche from the Ladies for Liberty Alliance. Shelly, thanks so much for joining me.
Shelly Roche: Thanks for having me.
Priya Sridhar: So, first of all, why do you think Ron Paul is becoming so popular right now?
Shelly Roche: Well, I think it’s a number of factors. But really when you look at the direction we are going as a country and all of these big frightening things that are happening like the bailouts and the economy and health care, you know, he’s kind of the one voice of reason that’s standing up and saying, “We don’t need all of this. We do have other options”. And he is always making sense, and I think that really resonates with people.
Priya Sridhar: And what do you think? You think he is going to run for office in 2012? I have a feeling you’re hoping he will, but do you think he actually will?
Shelly Roche: I definitely hope he will and I think he recognizes that it would be a smart move to at least position himself to do that, because that’s really what launched him back in 2008 into the media and got him a lot of momentum. And so I think this is another big opportunity for him to kind of capitalize on that and just go for it and set himself up to do it, and we’ll see what happens. Continue reading “Ron Paul 2012: Why is Ron Paul becoming so popular?”
Ron Paul: I thank you, Mr. Chairman. Earlier this year, Secretary Geithner had an interview and he said that the main source of our problem with this economic crisis was that we kept interest rates too low too long. And I certainly agree with him on that. And I also agree with the authors of this bill that we don’t have enough regulations. But that doesn’t mean that I endorse the notion that we need more bureaucrats and more written regulations of that sort.
A lot of people think that if you don’t support the bureaucratic approach, that you don’t endorse regulations. But the free market provides a lot of regulations and those who the regulations that we have ignored, as a matter of fact we have actually allowed them to go forward. A major regulation we should have is “always enforce contracts.” The government has a responsibility to ensure contracts are enforced.
But also the issue of fraud. Just because we are unregulated in the sense of not having bureaucrats do it, it does not mean that fraud should be tolerated. And yet now it’s coming out that companies like Goldman Sachs may well have been involved in something that could be construed as fraud. They were selling AAA securities – the credit default swaps – and at the same time they were shorting the market. They knew there was a housing bubble, but they were telling their investors that they had these wonderful bonds to buy. Now that, to me, is fraud. And that should be handled by people like this going to prison. But there are free market alternatives to pretending that every single transaction and almost preemptively prevent things. To me it’s sort of like trying to protect against slander from anybody saying or writing anything that harms somebody. We don’t believe in that. If somebody commits it then we, of course, penalize them for it. But in the marketplace we assume that we can preempt it, we can have prior restraint, and that’s where the chaos comes from. So, in that sense, I don’t believe in prior restraint. The people in the media have their limits; they cannot lie and they cannot get away with defaming people.
But this “too low and too long” on the interest rates, I think, is the key to it. The free market explains the business cycle better than anybody else. Because they understand that the cycles come from artificially low interest rates. So Geithner admits they were too low too long. The reason why this is so damaging is that the interest rate level is key; it’s key to the investor. It’s key to the developer and the builder. If the interest rates are low, the signal that they’re hearing is that there is a lot of savings, and therefore there is capital available to them. But we went through a period of them when there was zero savings and interest rates were low. So it was very confusing. The savers don’t save anymore because there are so called too much savings. At the same time the developers and builders think, “Hey, there is a lot of capital out there”. But it really wasn’t capital; it was artificial. It was credit created out of thin air and it was a fraudulent approach to the issue of providing capital. And someday we’ll get to that. We’re not going to get to that whole idea in this bill because that deals with monetary policy and understanding of how that system works.
But systemic risk is very, very serious and it is the nature of money that creates the systemic risk that we’re trying to deal with. The Federal Reserve came into existence in 1913 and they were given a dollar that was worth 1/20th of an ounce of gold. Today it’s worth 1/1100th of an ounce of gold. Which means that our measuring stick is unstable; it continually loses value. And you can’t build a healthy economy domestically, or especially internationally, if that dollar or that currency becomes the reserve standard of the world. And we’re doing this constantly. Right now it’s not only the Fed’s fault; we’ve run up the deficits. There is a limit to what we can tax, there is a limit to what we can borrow. And at the same time we turn it over to the Fed and the Fed prints the money and artificially lowers interest rates, and that is where the systemic risk comes from.
So someday we’ll have to address that subject of exactly where this comes from. I will offer my amendment, which is the HR1 207, dealing with the Federal Reserve, but that deals only with transparency and we have broad bi-partisan support for this bill and I hope there will be a consensus on supporting that bill.
Ron Paul hasn’t announced a decision yet whether he is going to run for President in 2012. If he runs, who should he choose as his running mate?
This poll is now closed. It was open from Nov. 5 – Nov. 16, 2009 and attracted 9,425 voters who could select up to five options for Ron Paul’s running mate. The results are displayed below.
Channel: Fox Business Host: Davis Asman Date: 11/04/2009
Transcript:
David Asman: Are politicians inside the Beltway aware of the extent to which Americans object to all the recent government spending and government intrusions in our lives? One man who clearly is aware of the discontent is Ron Paul; he’s been fighting against government intrusion for some time now, and he joins us. Good to see you, Congressman. Thanks for being here.
Ron Paul: Thank you, David. Nice to be with you.
David Asman: So do you feel somewhat vindicated by yesterday’s elections?
Ron Paul: Well, in some ways. I mean it’s not exactly that each candidate that won was espousing everything that I’ve said. But I think it makes the point that people are unhappy and they’re punishing the right people; the people who are in charge. Republicans got punished a couple of years ago and I think that’s appropriate. People are very upset, more so now than ever before, and they’re directing their attention to Washington. The party that’s in charge should be penalized and who knows, this will probably spill over to next year. So I think it’s very good, it’s a good trend and hopefully the Republicans have learnt a lesson. So if we do get another chance we do a heck of a lot better job than we did when we got in control before.
David Asman: But frankly, it is business as usually for some politicians. Beyond what Nancy Pelosi said, I understand the senate just passed a bill to extend unemployment insurance, but tucked very secretly inside that bill was an extension of the $8,000 credit for first home buyers, which had some real questionable results couple of months ago. Some people are saying it didn’t do anything except spend more taxpayer money.
Ron Paul: Yeah, I don’t think anything has really changed here. If they had a concern about our problems and think it was related to government spending, why would they offer up all these new programs, you know, this trillion dollar medical package? But I think the absurdity even on the medical package is that the Pelosi crowd tells the people, “We’re going to be able to insure everybody and it’s not going to cost you anything. We’re going to save enough money by cutting waste and fraud.”
When the American people see that, whether they’re conservatives or liberals, I don’t think they buy into that. I think they lose credibility on this. But no, it’s business as usual whether it is spending or borrowing or printing the money. And I’m on the Financial Service Committee and it seems like just on a daily basis the solution is “if we just had more bureaucrats to protect us against all these bad investment.” But never asking the question why are people encouraged to make bad decisions, does it have anything to do with monetary policy? No, that’s not really ever discussed. Continue reading “Ron Paul: It’s “business as usual” in Washington, but Americans are waking up!”
Judge Andrew Napolitano: Hello and welcome to Freedom Watch, your daily dose of raw liberty streaming online at FoxNews.com. I’m your host, Judge Andrew Napolitano here defending freedom, depending your natural rights and defending your right to have a government that stays within the confines of the Constitution.
You’ve all heard me state repeatedly that everything the government runs is broke. Social Security is broke. Medicare is broke. Medicaid is broke. Amtrak is broke. The post office is broke. Now, the same bureaucrats that have run the government into the ground want to run healthcare and they also want us to believe that they can fix the economy and repair the damage done to the dollar by recklessly borrowing and ruthlessly printing money and by spending into the trillions. They forget that the government consumes wealth and only the free market can produce wealth. In an upcoming article in Forbes Magazine, Congressman Ron Paul says “be prepared for the worst.” The large scale government intervention in the economy is going to end badly.
It’s now my pleasure to introduce one of America’s great defenders of freedom and liberty today, Congressman Ron Paul joins us from our nation’s capital. He is the author of the New York Times’ bestseller, one of his several bestsellers, “End the Fed”. Congressman Paul, welcome back to Freedom Watch.
Ron Paul: Thank you, Judge. It’s good to be with you.
Judge Andrew Napolitano: Why should we expect the worst and what do you warn in this article that we should all expect?
Ron Paul: Well, as you said in your opening statement what has the government done right, and if you were going to turn medical care over to the government, their test was how well they could distribute vaccine for H1N1 and the question of whether it was necessary or not, all that exists. But they did that so poorly and intervene so viciously in our rights and that sent a message. I think that is part of the problem going throughout the society and throughout the markets right now. It’s that the government is just totally inept and the pretense is that the stimulus is working. You hear the liberal writers saying, “Oh, the stimulus has worked. All we need is more of it and it would have really worked.” Well, the trouble is it didn’t work. They took billions and billions, if not trillions of dollars away from the people and gave it to the government and the government spent it, which means they misallocated credit and resources and they make things worse, and so we haven’t changed anything.
This idea that the GDP went up, well, you know, they measure GDP by government spending as well. That’s included in it, so what is this? We either borrow the money from the Chinese or we print the money, we spend the money. It goes in and you buy up clunkers or buy up houses and say that, “Oh, the GDP went up.” Well, it has to be temporary and that’s been my argument. That’s my argument in the article, it’s that if you see economic growth returning, you’re kidding yourself because all the bad policies are in place and unfortunately from the people I deal with here in Washington, there aren’t very many free market economists or believe in the free market. They’ve all been trained and indoctrinated by Keynesian economics and they really don’t believe in freedom and sound money in the sense that I do.
Judge Andrew Napolitano: You point out in your article, Congressman Paul, that we are seeing some little snippets of growth here and there today. You called them some green shoots of growth, just as we saw in 1930 when Hoover and later FDR, of course, were trying to micromanage the economy from Washington D.C. Why do we see these snippets of growth and why should we reject the government’s claims that they are a sign of better things to come?
Ron Paul: Well, I think it is part of human nature because nothing goes down until the very end stages with a currency. The end stage is a currency does fall off a cliff and it goes down, but if you look at the dollar, the dollar has been going down for many, many decades. So all markets go up and down and have blips, but you have to look at trends. So because the market just really was bad a year ago, the fact that the, you know, a lot of money is pumped in and people are trying to stimulate things, even when they are artificial, it will look like there is some growth in the economy, but I think that’s all a delusion. I think it’s a mistake and the worse thing we could do is assume that what we have done here in Washington in the last year has been helpful. That is very, very dangerous because it has all been very damaging. Continue reading “Ron Paul: Be Prepared for the Worst”
Dina Gusovsky: A national emergency is declared in the United States, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the war in Afghanistan, the economic crisis, or nukes in Iran. Instead, it’s H1N1, the swine flu. But is all this media hysteria really justified, and is the threat as dire as some would have us believe?
Joining me to discuss this and other burning issues, both here in the U.S. and abroad, is Congressman Paul. Thank you so much for speaking with me.
So you have called this full vaccination program a failure. Why?
Ron Paul: Well, they have failed to get the vaccine to the people that need it. They’ve been working on it for months and months, they’ve spent a couple of billion of dollars and I have several physicians in my family and they don’t have any vaccine in their office, so even if they wanted to give it they don’t have it. This just demonstrates that when governments decide to do something, they’re pretty inept at doing it even though a lot of money was spent. And yet the American people are indicating that they want federal government to take over medical care, but if they can’t even deliver a vaccine, I don’t see how they can deliver medical care to everybody any more efficiently.
Dina Gusovsky: You have questioned before why Barack Obama doesn’t get his own children vaccinated, and just recently we found out that he, in fact, had Sasha and Melia get the shot. Do you think that this was a response at all to what you might have said?
Ron Paul: I don’t know the exact sequence. I know when I did it I obviously believed he hadn’t because he had announced in a press conference, “Oh no, they have not had a shot”. But I thought he probably figured it was in their best interest politically to do it. But isn’t that sort of sad that if he deep down in his heart didn’t want his kids to have it, that he was willing to do this. Of course, the analogy I made there was, you know, so many of our presidents, Republicans or Democrats, always pushed government education. At the same time our Presidents don’t send their kids to public school here in DC. So they talk big that they’re going to take care of everybody, but they want special treatment for their own children.
Dina Gusovsky: You talk about having the freedom of choice when it comes to this. You know, we’ve seen rallies in New York where doctors and nurses were saying, “We don’t want this to be mandatory”. Do you think that Americans will ever come to a point where they will have to get this vaccine, it won’t be an option anymore?
Ron Paul: Of course, while a lot of Americans are fearful of this – even I’m fearful – I don’t want to do away with the vaccines. I do think that we give too many vaccines and we can overdo it. But I want these choices to be made by patients and doctors, not by government. And the fact that New York is forcing government employees, it might be a sign of the times if it’s not reversed. If the American people go along with it, that’s what’s going to happen. And under these emergency powers that were declared they can actually, you know, quarantine people in large numbers and say, “You either do it or else we’ll put you here and we’ll inoculate everybody”. That is hardly the way I want to accomplish this and solve our problems.
Dina Gusovsky: You’re a doctor and critics of the vaccine itself are coming out and saying that in the long run it’s actually going to do more harm than good. Do you agree with this?
Ron Paul: I think it can do damage and some children can be affected. It is a live virus, it’s attenuated, it’s not supposed to be as virulent. But yes, there are rare cases of people dying from reaction to medication. And if this flu is not so serious, which it doesn’t sound to be… you know, they were yelling and screaming about a 1000 deaths. Well, regular flu kills many, many more than that every year and nobody gets up in arms about it. This whole idea about working so hard on this one vaccine actually makes shortages in the other vaccine as well. So it really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Dina Gusovsky: There seems to me so much media uproar regarding this issue. Perhaps even taking precedence over other burning issues, particularly when it comes to foreign policy and the situation in Afghanistan. Because the real crisis seems to be occurring within the White House with that debate to send more troops or change the military strategy completely. What are your thoughts on this? Continue reading “Ron Paul on Russia Today: H1N1, Quarantine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran”
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