04/12/16 – Ron Paul – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
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And now introducing the greatest American hero, the man whose name is on most of my shirts, Dr. Ron Paul.
Welcome back to the show.
Ron, how are you?
Doing well, Scott.
Nice to be with you again.
Very happy to have you here.
And everyone, you should know that Dr. Paul, while he was a congressman for a while, gave two of the greatest speaking tours on behalf of liberty ever in 2008 and 12, in the guise of presidential campaign runs, which were great.
And he's the author of Swords into Plowshares, the Revolution Manifesto and Liberty Defined.
And of course, he runs with Dan McAdams, the great Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
And every day, they produce a great TV show called The Liberty Report, which you can find on YouTube.
All right.
So right in the file cabinet of Ron Paul Warndom, right there at the top is Ukraine.
You told them, don't mess around in Ukraine.
And they went and did, Dr. Paul.
And then what happened?
Well, chaos.
And sometimes you wonder, are they stupid or do they want chaos or bad judgment?
Probably a little bit of all that.
But most of the time, wherever we go, whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or Ukraine, it's always chaos that we end up with.
And I made an effort while in Congress.
When I smelled it coming, I would make a statement and say, watch out, watch out.
You can get into trouble.
I can remember in 1998, I think, there was a Iraqi Freedom Act that they were passing.
I said, you better watch out.
This is going to give us a war there if this is the policy that you're establishing.
But no, the policies are really ridiculous.
They're stupid.
And the one in Ukraine, we're going to be putting up with that for a long time to come.
People thought at one time that we were finished with Iraq.
What are we doing?
Sending more troops.
I think the president just recently said that he is definitely committed to sending more if necessary.
So things haven't changed very much yet.
Well, you know, on the Ukraine one, it's funny.
There's a clip that should be famous anyway.
I guess it is in some circles of you being interviewed on Fox News two days before the coup d'etat in Ukraine in February of 2014.
And they were saying, Dr. Paul, how come you keep saying that it's a coup going on there?
And you said, well, because it is.
Watch.
And it's a bad idea.
And no good will come of it either.
And then it was, I believe, two days later that the president fled and the neo-Nazis took over all the government buildings in Kiev and accomplished the coup.
That one should have made, should have gone viral.
You know, here's here's Dr. Paul's prediction coming true within two days time there.
And, you know, I guess, in fact, it would seem that really the consequences of that coup in Kiev were even worse than you probably even expected.
Yeah.
And that always seems to be the case.
But it is a mess.
I think a good thing to look at to see exactly what's going on and a consequence of our policy is the way the parliament operates with fistfights going on.
Well, yeah, they're not killing each other, but it's not very, very dignified.
It's not very civilized, but that's the way the whole country is.
That country is poor and they don't have a concept of liberty.
It's a fight between do we go with the Russians or we go with the NATO hoodlums?
And do we go with, you know, United States?
And it's inevitable that, you know, there will be chaos.
It shouldn't it's not a it doesn't take a genius to figure this out.
But for some reason, their minds are just closed to using a little bit of common sense when it comes to our foreign policy.
Well, now, so at least the war is over for now.
I guess there's some, you know, limited fighting in the east.
But the Minsk to peace deal seems to be holding, even though it's not fully been implemented as far as all the different political agreements there.
But the big news, as you wrote about in your recent column at the Ron Paul Institute and at Antiwar dot com was about the Dutch vote.
And this was it was a referendum that came from the bottom up.
Is that right?
Right.
They had to get many, many thousands, I don't know, 300000 signatures or something to have that referendum come up.
And and then it went down 62.
The turnout wasn't huge.
But those who came, I think 62 percent of them said that they don't want to have any part, you know, with June joining with Ukraine.
And that was really what the fight was about in the first place.
Right.
And that was the fight.
You know, that was what was going on from the east and west.
And of course, we've had fuel to the fire because we have deliberately decided that we're going to put troops on the border of Ukraine and protect to protect everybody against Russian aggression.
Of course, I don't think they have strong evidence that the Russians are about to roll with tanks, you know, over Eastern Europe.
But nevertheless, we have to put troops there, just stirring up trouble, stirring up trouble to justify more military expenditures.
And the money keeps getting spent and wasted.
And and people, you know, even the Republican candidates now, even those who should have a little bit more sense.
What is the mantra?
We've got to rebuild the military.
Well, who tore down the military?
When did we become a military weakling?
We have more weapons than everybody else put together.
And all the candidates can say, of course, since Ram's gone from there, they can all say now, well, all we have to do is we have to rebuild the military.
And, you know, who controls those kind of that kind of language?
It happens to be the people who make money off the military.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of them, it was there's that great article, Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels.
That explains that Bruce Jackson from Lockheed was behind the committee to expand NATO back in the 1990s in the first place, because it was all just about transferring those big ticket jets on, you know, for on American taxpayer dollars, of course, to to arm up those Eastern European countries.
So, yeah, that certainly does have a lot to do.
In fact, I'm going to ask you about Plan Colombia in a second and the military industrial complex there.
But on on as far as NATO and the EU and all that, does the Dutch vote?
Do you think does that provide a real break on integration of Ukraine into the EU and the plans to eventually bring them into NATO there?
Well, I think they're going to have to reassess it, the whole European Union, because, of course, the June vote in Great Britain is a big vote, too, on whether or not they should just leave the EU.
So I think that that is all yet to be decided.
But I think it's a very strong indication that the European Union might be on its last legs, which it should have been.
It should have never been established.
And, you know, what bothers me is that we do such a poor job.
Immediately, if you take the position superficially, if you take a position of not supporting the European Union, they say, oh, you're a bunch of isolationists, you know, that term.
But the whole thing is, is integrating Europe is a grand idea.
You know, if you had a sound currency, if it was on the gold standard and you liberalized traveling and trade, you could still have the French and the Germans.
When they started talking about the European Union, I said, you know, I predict it's not going to work because for some reason I think there's going to be difficulty for the Germans to get along with the British and the British get along with the French and the French get along with the Italian.
The only way you can do it is if it's gradual and voluntary rather than a government.
It's the idea that you have another government dictating and ruling and who gets who has to pay the bills.
And then there are a bunch of socialists.
And then you have bankruptcies like in Greece and they have to be bailed out.
And then the foreign policy complicates things.
When you think about the migration and the people who are migrating now, the result of the wars that the Europeans and Americans have supported for years would do so much better if we were setting a standard for free market economics where people say, you know, that country is wealthy and free and safe.
So maybe we ought to look at free market economics.
That's what we want.
But that's never the case.
It's always force.
Using force to tell people how to live, how to run the economy and how we have to rule the world.
Yeah.
Well, you know, speaking of that, if I can divert for a minute onto American trade policy, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both have harped on NAFTA and the various trade deals with China, et cetera, and said, you know, this free trade is killing us.
I'm for free trade.
But but but they say.
And in fact, you know, Trump actually looks like he's already, you know, prepared.
They are prepared.
The Reagan Democrats, the union labor voters are prepared to cross the aisle, possibly even to support Donald Trump because of his opposition to China trade policy and that kind of thing.
And I know that over the years I've followed your your career since 1997.
I know that you've always denounced NAFTA and denounced all these trade deals as well.
But I know you have quite a bit different take and think it'd probably be beneficial if people could hear why you're opposed to the same thing.
But for just entirely different reasons there.
So a lot of what you just said about the EU to see what they're doing is misleading the people and saying that these trade agreements is is for free trade and low tariffs.
And then people get very nervous about it.
But it isn't.
It's for managed trade to serve the interests of some special interests.
And it has to do with more government.
So there's a big difference.
But, you know, this issue even splits the libertarian or libertarian groups.
At least they claim they're libertarians who are very strong for these trade groups because they'll say, well, they're going to lower tariffs.
And on occasion they do lower some tariffs.
But it's also management of lower tariffs.
Right now, you know, Trump talks about China and how much more tariffs he's going to put on.
But the United States just got permission to levy huge tariffs on steel coming from China.
But it's legal because the WTO authorized it.
So low tariffs are good.
But I don't believe in these international government organizations that happen.
Matter of fact, the Constitution said that foreign trade should be dealt with by the Congress, not by deferring to the president or an international body.
And I think that's where the big mistake is.
And then they turn around and say that we are the isolationists and we don't want to trade because we don't support these treaties.
But these people who accuse many of us as being isolationists are the ones who are always putting on sanctions on countries and stopping trade and invading countries.
And then they claim that we who believe in true free trade are the isolationists.
So it's an educational problem that we have to keep plugging away to make sure that people understand our position rather than being criticized falsely.
Well, and so when it comes to especially China and Mexico, I guess, for example, our biggest trading partners, if it was Sanders or Donald Trump in there, do you think their policies would lead to a trade war or could they get us a better deal?
Well, I don't think things will get better.
I think that even if they did bully their way through there and interfered with trade and raised tariffs and all, it would be much, much worse because it would hurt everybody's economy and it would be a trade war.
I think it would be a trade war to go on because they're not going to move in a libertarian direction.
They're going to move in a more authoritarian direction just saying, well, it's that we don't have – we're not getting our way on these international deals and we're going to have our way.
Well, I don't think that's going to work very well.
Even if they did, what are the Chinese going to do?
They might decide to sell some of our treasury bills and to penalize us.
Who knows what would happen?
But under the circumstances, the problems are so big economically that tinkering around the edges, which is what this would be, won't work.
They're not talking about what needs to be done when you need to look at monetary policy and central banking and deficit financing and all these other things that need to be changed.
And tinkering like this about a trade agreement, I don't think that's going to be the solution.
On occasion, I guess they might accidentally improve things.
Sometimes they do lower tariffs.
But overall, it's a big problem, and Europe is witnessing that problem because they still have the socialist, welfarist mentality, and we have it as well too.
So changing a treaty or an agreement with China is not going to solve all those problems.
All right.
Now, if I could ask you one more thing here real quick, Dr. Paul, I remembered I actually thought of you this morning when I was reading this thing out of Hillary Clinton's interview with the New York Daily News, where she cites the wonderful progress of Plan Colombia must be what caused the current peace talks between FARC and the government there.
And so what we need is another one of those, but for Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador.
And I remembered something that you had said years ago about whenever Joe Biden, when he was still a senator, and I guess his counterparts in the House would hold their hearings and pass their bills in favor of Plan Colombia, that there was only ever one interest group that showed up, and they had nothing to do with Colombia at all.
It was just Bell Helicopter at the House of Representatives saying, Dr. Paul, we'd really like you to vote for this.
Is that right?
It was.
And as I recall, I haven't refreshed my memory on this, but I remember this coming up, and they wanted to send helicopters.
And there was a big faction, and there were two helicopter companies, and they couldn't agree.
So the solution for Plan Colombia was one company got half of the helicopters, and the other company got the other half.
So we gave them away, and the taxpayers got stuck, and they were dealing with a situation that had to do with Americans' appetite for drugs and the willingness to break the law in this ridiculous war on drugs.
And it was all a consequence of that.
It's sort of like dealing with the Mexican-U.S. border without taking into consideration the chaos there about the drug lords.
And that's what was going on in Colombia as well.
But yes, it was the special interest, the military-industrial complex, no matter how little, how big it is, somebody's out there to look after their money.
Even though what they do so often leads to war, my guess is, because I want to think a little bit better of them than it appears, is they probably don't say, oh, let's go have a war.
They keep talking to themselves, well, let's do this, and this will prevent the war.
And they don't understand unintended consequences, and they don't understand all that can happen by doing this and how it gets out of hand.
But they continue the prospect, and I think the only solution is looking toward the principles of a non-interventionist foreign policy in a clear sense.
And we've had that leanings in our early history, but right now I think we have to be more dogmatic in believing that, yes, we can live in an integrated world, we can have trade and travel and friendship, but we don't need to be throwing our weight around and enforcing our will on other people and picking leaders through a military empire and belief in preemptive war.
That's where the real danger is.
Thank you again for your time, Dr. Paul.
I sure appreciate it.
Okay, Scott, good to be with you.
Great to talk to you again.
All right, y'all, that is the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, author of Swords into Plowshares and the Revolution Manifesto, Liberty Defined.
Check out the Ron Paul Institute at RonPaulInstitute.org.
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