11/21/08 – Ron Paul – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio on chaos in Austin, Texas, introducing antiwar.com's man in the House of Representatives, Dr. Ron Paul.
He represents District 14 on Texas Gulf Coast.
He's the author of Pillars of Prosperity, a Foreign Policy of Freedom, a Case for Gold, and the Revolution Manifesto.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you.
I guess I could have mentioned that you just finished running for President of the United States, too.
Yeah, I think that did happen this last year.
That sure was a big deal, bigger than I ever dreamed it would be.
Congratulations again on that whole thing.
Well, thank you.
It did stir up a lot of interest, and I was very pleased, especially the young people responded very well to our message of freedom.
Now, one of the terms that you threw around in that campaign that I think most people probably weren't ready for was the term empire.
And I guess it used to be when I was a kid, no one ever took it seriously when someone called America an empire, because that's what the Soviets said about us.
And so it was kind of, you know, the kind of thing that a communist would say, but not necessarily true.
And yet you used that term quite a bit, and it seemed to go without saying to you that America's not supposed to be an empire.
So what exactly does that mean to you, that America's an empire, and what's wrong with America being an empire, sir?
Well, I guess it's the opposite of what many of us believe a republic ought to be all about.
And I think Cicero had something to say about the Roman Republic versus the Roman Empire.
He, like many of us, believed that governments should be small and they should be local, they should be representative of the government, and the government's authority should be minimal.
But it should not be designed to tell other people what to do with their country and their lives and to invade countries and to be aggressive and protect natural resources, in the old days, to go and steal their gold.
I mean, all of these things means that they use force to impose on others the will that that particular country wants.
Now, our empire really blossomed when the Soviet Empire collapsed, because we were the sole superpower.
Instead of us backing off and becoming a more dignified republic, what we did is we just filled the vacuum and said, aha, the responsibility is ours.
And people who did this actually saw this as, you know, like a moral responsibility.
I mean, it is our obligation.
We are good and we are wonderful.
You know, the philosophy of the neocons, they saw this as a mission, and of course they never really understood the great danger of this.
And some, I guess, were well-intended, others, I'm sure, knew exactly what they were doing because they loved to wield power and control all finances and control all natural resources.
If you love liberty, you hate empire.
Well, what is that great danger?
What is it about empire abroad that threatens our liberty here?
First off, there's always a cost to it, and the cost is you build up enemies and then you're forever threatened.
So when we go overseas and we do things we shouldn't be doing, we build up enough enemies that sometimes they want to come here and attack us and do great harm to us.
The other great harm is that there's an economic burden, that there's a great cost, empires end for financial reasons as the Soviet empire ended.
And Osama bin Laden understands this.
He wanted to drag us over the Middle East because he says, we'll destroy you because you will eventually go bankrupt.
And of course, probably one of the most important reasons to not want an empire is an attack on personal liberties because of the nature of empire where you need to use force, you need to confiscate more wealth from the individual, and you are always under siege, so to speak.
The people get frightened and say, aha, we're under threat, so therefore, to be safe, you have to give up more of your security and more of your freedom in order to be secure, and certainly that has happened wholesale since 9-11.
So the loss of personal liberties is the number one, and along with that, we become a much poorer nation, and then you become more vulnerable to outside military threats as well.
So on the financial costs, it really is the kind of situation where, without question, it's a net loss to this country.
We're not going and looting everybody's gold and ultimately profiting from all this imperialism.
Everything goes out and nothing comes back, like Garrett Garrett said.
It goes out and no, we don't quite do it like the Romans did because one of their goals was to go and take the gold.
They brought the gold back in, and then they lived beyond their means, and they weren't productive, and they didn't care about their freedoms, and their bread and circuses finally ended the empire.
But morally, it's the same thing.
We go over the gold today as to have a pipeline through Afghanistan, to send the pipeline through Georgia, to control a dictator in Saudi Arabia that will be friendly to make sure that we have free flow of oil that may be below market price.
So it's on and on.
It's sort of a remnant of the idea of mercantilism, that you can't exist as an independent nation because you have to have control of your natural resources.
And it's not all old colonialism, but it's new in the sense that we still want controls, but we don't quite say they're our possessions.
But those who have us occupy their country see us as almost colonialists because we go in and our troops are there.
So the result is always the same, that republics can't exist unless we have this control of natural resources and have this power that is overwhelming and can deal with any threat outside.
Well, something else I know that you've been very concerned about over the years is the centralization of power in the presidency.
And it just seems so ironic to me that George Bush apparently can simply sign the Status of Forces Agreement and make a deal to keep American troops in Iraq, while Muriel Maliki has to submit it to the cabinet and to the parliament and to the president.
And they have all these separations of power and checks and balances in the new Iraqi democracy, apparently.
Well, you'd wonder, in the hypocrisy, we don't advocate democracy the way so many people talk about it, but, you know, democratic elections, we still use those, but then we send our troops and our money and we kill people because we're going to spread democracy around the world.
It's such a farce.
And I think you make a good point by saying that maybe the Iraqis want a better democratic process with the people speaking out through voting, more so than the people demand here.
But we're totally apathetic with this.
I mean, the Congress endlessly, Republicans and Democrats, are always anxious to turn more power over to the executive branch.
And sometimes I think they do this because they don't want responsibility for anything.
You know, they gave Bush the authority to declare, decide what he wanted to do with Iraq.
It didn't say, go to war, it didn't declare war, it didn't say, don't go to war.
It said, do whatever you want.
And I think what they were thinking about then is, well, if it goes badly, then we can criticize Bush for it.
And they don't take any risk whatsoever.
Yeah.
And in fact, many of them have said, well, I didn't vote for the war.
I voted only for this authorization for Bush to do the right thing, which I thought was something else.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's, that's no easy, easy out.
I mean, that's still assuming that you're giving up your responsibility and not reading the constitution correctly, because this accepting the idea that president can start a war is a serious mistake.
And yet the constitution is very clear that troops shouldn't be sent into battle and a war shouldn't be fought without the people speaking through the Congress and having an up or down vote on war.
Well, you know, we have a status of forces agreement with Japan and with Korea and with Italy and Germany and so forth.
But we also have treaties with them.
It seems like Bush is using the status of forces agreement in place of a treaty, which he would have to submit to the U.S. Senate for ratification.
Yeah.
It's worse than what we have with these other countries when we have a treaty.
But even that I'm not happy with, because even though we might have a treaty with Taiwan, I don't consider that in a strict sense, a constitutional law.
These treaties weren't meant to repeal law and repeal the constitution, because under these treaties, most people say, well, if Taiwan is ever attacked by China, we automatically go to war.
Well, that wasn't what we were supposed to think about treaties, that you could just literally, you know, amend the constitution in this manner.
So I just don't think we have had the right to do that.
But we don't have the moral right.
Yeah, let's say even if you could do that legally, let's say it was constitutional and it was legal to have a treaty to go to defense of ABC country.
But what right do I and one generation have to sign a treaty or an agreement that the next generation, 40 or 50 or 60 years ahead, have to automatically be committed to going to war?
So I don't like those treaties whatsoever, but like you pointed out, I think this agreement is even worse.
We've taken a further step, because we don't even have a treaty with Iraq, because really speaking, I don't think there's a true government of Iraq, United States government is the government of Iraq.
So I guess the power speaks for itself.
Well, you know, there's a major development in the battle over, well, frankly, the entire theory of having a rule of law in this society.
And yesterday, in as the result of a habeas corpus hearing, mandated by the Bowman Dean decision of the Supreme Court last year, a judge declared five enemy combatants were not in fact, enemy combatants, and has demanded that the Bush administration set these Algerian men free.
Yeah, well, then that's encouraging, but it's sure discouraging that they've suffered for so long, because we violated some of these basic principles of human rights.
And I know there's not reason to be too optimistic, you know, about the new administration, but let's just hope that we have a little bit of improvement, at least, hopefully, it doesn't get a lot worse than what we had with the Bush administration.
But so far, I'm not overly optimistic about that either.
Well, if the American people had come to their senses and elected you this November, what would you do with the men at Guantanamo Bay and at the various black sites around the world?
I mean, I guess it goes without saying that you would do your best to set the innocent ones free, but there are, you know, actual 9-11 conspirators and others like that within this mix.
Do you put them on trial in New York City in federal court?
Yeah, I'd put them in trial under our federal laws and give them right to counsel and right, you know, you know, recognize that they have the right of habeas corpus and people that there's no no evidence to hold them.
They should be released.
And the greatest threat, and this is a principle known for a long time, is that if you abuse those principles of law and you let one guy go free, that's not nearly as bad as if you institutionalize the abuse of law for all of us, for all little things that's been done.
And that's essentially where we are today, is that because we are frightened and we have to catch all the terrorists, we have victimized ourselves, so we have no right of privacy and the right of habeas corpus is slipping away.
And so I think that should be more important than the idea that one potential ally of a terrorist, you know, happened to be sent back to another country.
I'll bet the information is available about these people in Guantanamo that it wouldn't take too long.
I would think a month or two, you ought to be able to sort that all out and decide who should be released and who has enough evidence against them to be tried.
I mean, we have a pretty good precedent for that because, you know, they had good leads on the ones that participated in that bombing of the towers the first time.
They were arrested and convicted in prison.
So that's the way it should be handled.
I saw on the news the other day, I'm sorry, this goes back to the military spending, Barney Frank apparently wants to cut the Pentagon defense budget and was being attacked by some Republicans.
Do you anticipate working with him on that?
I haven't talked to him about it, but that is my argument, that that's where, and I don't call it defense money, I call it military money because I think it doesn't help our national defense.
No, I think that budget is huge and that's where we should cut.
It's easier to cut there, especially the overseas military expenditures, a lot easier than saying, well, we don't like the federal government involved in education and medical care.
I don't think it makes any sense to pick on that at first, but it depends on how they do it.
Let's say if they cut $10 billion and take that and add some more and spend it all on another program here at home and didn't do anything to cut back, that's a little bit risky.
But I've also taken the position that it's much better to spend that money here than overseas even though I would prefer not even to spend it here at home.
My idea of getting back to some common sense on the budget is if you can find one of these military appropriation bills that you can cut $10, $15 billion out of it, put half of it to the deficit and the other half to a program here at home, even if it's a program that we don't think is perfectly compatible with what our goals should be, but at least politically you would move in the right direction of cutting spending, cutting the militarism, cutting the deficit.
At the same time, it would be tidying some of these programs over where we've taught so many people to be totally dependent on the government.
Well, that's probably only going to increase as we head into this recession.
Of course, I'm sure you saw the numbers that unemployment is as high as it's been in I think 16 years.
The stock market had another massacre yesterday.
I think 400 and something, 500 points lost.
How bad is this recession going to be and how long do you think it's going to last, sir?
Well, it's bad.
Some days it even shocks me, which is pretty difficult to do because I've been anticipating a lot of problems.
At the rate they're making mistakes, which are daily, I would assume that this is going to last for a long, long time.
But I've dated the beginning of this mess in the year 2000.
I don't think we just went into a bear market here a year ago.
I think the bear market started in the year 2000.
If you look at the NASDAQ, it's pretty good evidence.
In real money, the Dow never went to new highs, but it was temporarily slowed up.
The correction, you know, with the housing bubble, the so-called financing that came from high housing prices, but that's all ended.
So we're already into this thing that's eight years, and people who invested in the stock market 12 years ago are just barely even.
So it's been going on a long time already, and the unemployment statistics and all that we see now are just, you know, getting worse every day.
If we don't do the right things and allow some of these corrections, allow housing prices to get down very, very low quickly, where people will say, hey, this is a good deal.
I couldn't afford this, and I want to buy a house.
That needs to happen as quickly as possible instead of artificially keeping these prices high.
I am expecting that it may be another 10 years or so before people say, ha-ha, the correction, the recession, depression has finally ended.
It may not go like the 30s, but it can be in a way insidious and longer, and that is also very bad.
Just think of what's happened in Japan here since 1989.
They've been living with a very weak economy for almost 20 years.
Their stock market was, Nikkei was $39,089, and now it is at $12,000 or something.
It's just a fraction of what it used to be, because they never wanted to allow the banks to write off the value of their assets, because it would look like the banks are technically bankrupt.
They never allowed the correction, and they're still struggling.
I suspect that we're going to do that, and probably what will happen is we'll destroy the value of the dollar.
There'll be a currency crisis, and then we may be forced then to revamp the system, and hopefully we'll come up with sound money.
That could end it sooner than this insidious slowing up of the economy, where every single day you hear bad news and people keep getting poorer and poorer.
It seems like the national governments of America and Europe are getting together.
In fact, I guess the G20, I don't know if that includes India and Brazil too or what, but what are we to expect from these big meetings of all these central bankers and finance ministers?
They keep talking about a Bretton Woods 2 or 3 or whatever number Bretton Woods we're on now.
What do you think is going to happen there?
I think they're going to keep working on it, and they'll probably not be able to come up with a new plan within a week or two.
The other day when I asked Bernanke about this, he totally denied it, but I just don't believe him.
I think that they have been talking about a new reserve currency, because they know what we know, that the dollar reserve currency has ended.
It just doesn't function anymore, although people are still holding dollars and hoping that they can get out of the dollar in time, but I think we're going to see the dollar get weaker and prices go up and interest rates go up, and the worse it gets, the more pressure will be put on them to have a new reserve currency.
The trouble is, they want to come up with a new fiat international reserve currency, like under the IMF and worldwide regulations and world government.
The battle is on between them and us.
They want the big government, we want the small government, we want honest money, we want money that comes out of the marketplace, and we want it to have real value to it, such as silver and gold.
Do you think it's fair for me to try to remain optimistic that if all these world leaders try to put together some sort of global central bank like that, that it just won't work, or is there actually a danger that it will work, that they would be able to institutionalize something like that?
That's a good question.
That's probably the key question, because if they are successful, that means we're all going to be a lot less free, and we're all going to be a lot poorer.
They always can have it work for a while, because in many ways, a lot of Austrian economists in 1971 probably would have never predicted that that dollar system would work for 37 years, and they got away with it.
A lot of confidence placed in the dollar.
It took a long time to make us a poor nation and an indebted nation.
It just didn't happen overnight.
So they might be able to come up with something that would work temporarily, but ultimately, history has shown that to really get a new start and to get confidence back in the system, you have to have a sound currency.
They themselves may use gold if they become desperate and say, hey, look, it's not going to work unless we at least pretend that we are going to have some dollars held in reserve for this new currency.
They still do have a lot of the gold.
The central banks still do hold a lot of gold, so they have to know what we know as well.
Every time you're on the Neil Cavuto show on Fox News Channel, he seems to ask you the same question, which I think is a very interesting one.
I'm not sure if I really understand the answer.
He seems to say, yeah, but Dr. Paul, everybody else's currency is made out of phony money too, and there's really no reason that ours can't remain the reserve currency because everybody else's is worse, even the euro and the yen and what have you.
I usually concede a bit to him on that because the euro is a fiat currency, and they have more socialism than we do, and so there's some merit to that.
I don't personally sell dollars and buy euros or yens.
I guess some smart people that know how to trade might be able to make some money doing that, but I don't think they are the answer.
But I think the ultimate test is not so much how many euros you get for our dollars as much as how much goods and services you get from it, and even though the price of oil is down today, I don't think the amount of money we're going to have in our bank account at the end of each month is going to go up.
I think really prices are going to stay high, and the cost of medicine is going to be high, and education will be high, and the food price is going to be high, and something else is going to get expensive, and oil prices may come back up because we still have inflationary pressures.
So I think even though I talk about the end of this fiat dollar reserve standard because there's so many imbalances, that is one thing.
The other thing is, does that mean the dollar is done?
No, the dollar isn't done, but it could end quickly.
Just as this emergency came up very, very rapidly, just think of all that's happened in three or four months.
When a currency goes, it goes quickly once they lose confidence in it.
So inflation is insidious for a long time.
You say, why isn't the inflation worse because there's so much new money, but then when confidence is lost, all of a sudden you see them really dumping the currency, and then the price is soaring.
So I think that is what we have yet to see about the dollar, but at the same time, I wouldn't bet on another currency like the high.
All we have to do is have the Euros or Yen, and we're going to be protected.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's Dr. Ron Paul, who represents District 14 in South Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives.
His websites are ronpaul.com, antiwar.com, and please run out and get the book, The Revolution Manifesto.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
Thank you, Seth.
All right, folks, this is Antiwar Radio.
We'll be right back.