08/27/10 – Rep. Ron Paul – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio and our next guest is Antiwar.com's man in the House of Representatives, Dr. Ron Paul.
You can find all his foreign policy interviews at original.antiwar.com slash Paul.
Welcome to the show.
Ron, how are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you.
I'm very happy to have you here and I was so happy to see your statement on the mosque issue.
You know, before I ever learned, I think, even about George Washington and the cherry tree or Davy Crockett or anything, I learned from my dad that the highest value in America, the most important thing about America as a place is freedom of religion and that's what we all value the most and is the most special thing about this land and it's just amazing to see the demagoguery and it was just great to, of course, you never do disappoint, but it was really great to see the stand that you took on this and everybody can read your article, Mosque Demagoguery is Bipartisan, is the title it goes under at original.antiwar.com slash Paul.
So thanks for that.
Can we start, I guess, with what you think of that, religious freedom as the highest American value?
Well, you know, in that statement, I make the point that the conservatives who brag about being big property rights people are the ones who are demagoguing the most about why they shouldn't build this, Newt Gingrich in particular, and to me, it was an opportunity to defend property rights in a pure sense of the word because it is closely related to First Amendment rights.
If we protected property rights, we would protect, you know, a lot of other of the amendments, you'd protect the Second Amendment, you'd protect the First Amendment because it would be your property that is being used, whether you're running a newspaper, whether you have a church or whatever you're doing, it's the property that should be protected.
And I think the conservatives wimped out on this, but the liberals are never good on it.
So the liberals come along and they say, oh, we got to protect freedom of religion and expression, and they're right about that.
But they're so weak on property rights and, you know, they always want to regulate property.
So this would have been a time that it should have been pointed out that the conservatives have sort of sold out and that the liberals who don't understand property rights very well ought to learn a lesson.
And I just thought I would give them my two cents worth and I find it interesting and fascinating and sometimes entertaining when I read a blog by some very, very liberal person and say, this is very great, but it really is confusing what's happening in the world.
The world's turned upside down when I agree with Ron Paul, and he's speaking more what I believe in and our own precedent.
But I think the most I can expect, or any of us can expect coming from a libertarian viewpoint is that we stimulate people's thinking.
So those who, you know, give me some support and say, yes, I agree with Ron Paul on foreign policy or civil liberties, but I keep thinking the but always means, of course, the economic liberty, but maybe, you know, they'll think about it.
And of course, you know, Scott, that you've met people that will come to our side from the liberal side as well as the conservative side and say, yes, it finally makes sense.
What I see is a tremendous opportunity now to increase our ranks because the liberals, the Keynesians, the interventions have failed so miserably with the economy.
So I just saw it as an opportunity.
I hope I made a few points.
Well, an important point you made, too, was that Islam was not the motivation for the attack.
And that's really the subtext of this entire thing is that it's us versus them.
And them is 1.3 billion people in the world.
Yeah, and this was, of course, the big motivation for writing this as well is that some who were promoting...and I didn't take the position that everybody who said, you know, that we're giving advice, they didn't challenge the property rights, but they were giving strong advice.
Well, perceptions are so bad, just don't do it, you know.
We don't want you to do it.
There's a lot like that.
But the people who are really beating the drums, they need to continue to blame Islam for 9-11.
They don't want to blame a small number who belong to Al-Qaeda who committed the violence.
They want to blame all of Islam.
You know, it's a hate religion and it's a religion of the devil and this kind of thing.
I have met and known and are friends with too many Muslims in the medical profession for me to even think, let alone let them challenge the principle that you stated, that this country was built on an understanding of tolerance of all religious beliefs.
Well, and on the foreign policy theme too, you always make the comparison to medicine and say, you know, if you diagnose the illness wrong, you're going to get the treatment wrong.
And here we're still operating on the false premise that they attacked us only for how nihilistic they are and how good we are.
And I guess perhaps we're still operating somewhat along the premise that we still have to invade them and occupy them and give them democracy so that they won't be oppressed and won't want to be terrorists anymore.
And I'm thinking if we got the diagnosis wrong and we continue to act the way we're acting, we're going to end up having a lot more terrorism in the future.
I think that analogy works both on the economic mistakes, if you continue to make those mistakes and not change your course of action, but in foreign policy it's the same thing.
You know, if the war, if the global war on terrorism is a good idea and we have to continue to do it and not realizing that we increase our danger to us, you know, national security, and we increase the odds and the chances of a national bankruptcy, you know, it's foolhardy.
It's insane.
It's almost a national suicide to do this.
But people don't like to admit they made a mistake.
Can you imagine George Bush, you know, analyzing this and say, well, you know, now that I look back, we made this mistake, no matter how bad it gets, they're not going to admit it.
One of the expectations of Bernanke is going to say, well, my whole life was wasted.
My monetary theory is completely wrong.
It's made things much worse.
There's no chance of that, so somebody else has to come in and offer a different alternative and we have to convince people, you know, philosophically in order to persuade them.
We can't do it by out-demagoguing them.
We have to educate people to come around to saying there's another way to look at this.
Well, now, one of the most important issues going on right now is the expansion of the war on terrorism under the special forces.
I'm sure you've seen these New York Times and Washington Post articles about this and I'm sure you know from your experience on Capitol Hill about what's going on in Yemen and the drone strikes and expansion and that kind of thing.
And I believe that Dennis Kucinich has sponsored a bill to, at the very least, ban the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen who is said to be hiding out in Yemen.
Are you a co-sponsor of that and could you take it further to ban this global assassination program in general?
Well, you know, I think if somebody did this, this might have been one of the better executive orders.
I think one of our presidents actually said that, you know, the law was supposed to be that.
You know, you shouldn't even have to have a law.
You know, just common sense and common decency should mean that you don't assassinate people.
But no, it could be done more explicitly.
It could be done, you know, on the House floor and the Senate and do resolutions.
And the whole problem is presidents especially, you know, don't necessarily follow the law.
There are a lot of laws in the books, laws that violate the Constitution.
The Constitution is the real law, so we don't live in a lawful society.
They generally do what they want.
Congress does what they want, the executive branch, the courts do what they want.
But any legislation that would suggest that we ban and not participate in an assassination, obviously I would be strongly supportive of it.
Now you brought up Ben Bernanke and the complete failure of his economic theory.
Well, I just heard on the top of the hour news that he gave a speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is I think where Dick Cheney lives part of the time.
And in that speech, he said he wants to reduce the interest rate that they're paying the banks to keep their reserves at the Fed to nothing and to force the banks to go ahead and lend out all the new money he's created.
Are we facing an inflationary depression or is there still so many bad debts left to be repaid that we're still going to have deflation anyway, you think?
Well, there's a strong contest going on.
Markets always want to deflate, governments always want to inflate.
Now he thinks that he's been, you know, they talk about pushing on a string and not having it work.
Well, he's been hammering on a string and it hasn't worked.
So now what he's trying to do is force the banks to loan this money rather than just putting it back in reserves.
If they make less, maybe they will take a little more gamble.
But a lot of people don't, you know, there's a lot of people who are skittish about borrowing money right now and banks are going to be held accountable.
So keeping reserves, making zero interest may, from their viewpoint, be a better deal than going out and making loans in an economy that nobody knows what it's going to be like.
And there's now a growing consensus that the economy is going to continue to get weaker.
So no matter who's running the bank, they might think it's more prudent to keep the reserves in reserves without interest.
Almost like putting it in a shoebox.
But I think what's going to happen is the inflationary impact is going to come.
This money will eventually filter out there and as things go on, when you're not earning any interest, you're going to find more and more people putting their money in gold and silver.
And I think that will be done, you know, by foreign countries as well.
And there's going to be alternative currencies as weak and difficult as it is for people to deal with in Euros.
I think people will start using Euros and other currencies and so I don't look forward to any economic expansion here anytime soon.
So are we looking at more or less as a model the 1970s where they called it the stagflation, right?
The high unemployment but all the stimulus and all the inflation in the world doesn't solve the employment problem.
Now we just have high prices too.
Yeah, but I think it's going to be a lot worse in the 70s.
You know, there was always a little bit of growth and things seemed to move along but prices, the inflation was the main thing.
But I think the economy is going to be much, much weaker and then when the dollar is rejected, you're going to have a lot more inflation so it probably is going to be an inflationary depression rather than just stagflation.
Oh, you're talking about once the world gives up on the dollar as a reserve standard and all those dollars come back.
Right, and they're going to come back.
I mean, what's China going to do with a trillion dollars if this market starts to slip?
They will try to moderate their dumping of dollars for a while but if it moves rapidly, they're going to have to invest those dollars rather.
And I think they're already doing this.
You know, we're wasting lives and money trying to protect our oil in the Middle East while they're over there actually being able to bid on some contracts in Iraq to drill oil and of course they're friends with Iran and they'll have inroads to that country's oil but it just seems like they're a little more capitalistic than we are.
They make stuff for us and we give them money and now they're starting to invest around the world.
I think we live in very dangerous times where things could change rather quickly.
You know, if something breaks out in Iran, which a lot of neocons would like to see happen, this could be devastating to the markets.
Well, I'll tell you what, I'll make you a deal, Dr. Paul.
You run for office again.
I'll vote one more time.
You will?
One more time?
Okay.
Well, we'll see what happens.
It's a little bit premature to talk about it, I guess.
Alright, well, here's waiting for February.
Thank you very much for your time on the show.
Good to be with you.
Everybody, that's Dr. Ron Paul, he represents District 14 in South Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives.
You know what you ought to do?
You ought to read his book, The Foreign Policy of Freedom.
It's really good.