Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Dr. Ron Paul, former congressman from District 14 in South Texas and presidential candidate and author of a great number of wonderful books, including The Revolution, A Manifesto, End the Fed, Liberty Defined, The School Revolution, Swords into Plowshares, The Case for Gold, The Revolution at Ten Years, and I'm still looking for my Foreign Policy of Freedom.
Here we go.
A collection of speeches from the early 80s through the early 2000s.
Really great stuff there.
He also is the founder of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which he runs with the great Dan McAdams.
And they also host a show four days a week on YouTube called The Liberty Report.
And you can find all of those archives at RonPaulLibertyReport.com.
It's the best show anywhere.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Ron?
I'm doing well, thank you, Scott.
Really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And, oh, I wanted to start off with giving you an opportunity to talk about this event that you're doing in D.C. in August here.
August the 24th, I think.
Yes, and I think this is either our third or fourth year we've done it, and it'll be on foreign policy.
Daniel is excellent in putting all this together, and he has all our speakers lined up.
I don't have the names in front of me right now, but it's held at the hotel that's at Dallas, you know, real close there.
So people do fly in, and we usually get people from around the world there, so we're looking forward to having it again.
Great.
And people can find out all about that at RonPaulInstitute.org.
Right, on the website.
Great.
Okay.
And then also, I have an announcement.
So today, I will, later this afternoon, I'll get to my 5,000th interview, and that includes, with this one, 38 of you.
And I'm putting out a book, which is almost done.
I've had to go through it a few times editing it, but I'm putting together a book.
It will be called The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Horton Show Interviews, 2004-2019.
So I'm happy to announce that, and with you on the show here, and I thank you very much for your permission to go ahead and do that this way.
And it's really great.
I've had to read it three or four times through now, five times through now, and I'm just so proud of it.
And my association with you, the fact that you were available to say all these things on my show all these years, and it's such an education.
I think everyone will really like it.
The only bad part is it's a little annoying how much I like you, but people are just going to have to suffer through that, because I really do consider you the greatest hero.
I have a special interest in this, because I like people who are energetic, have their own method of getting a message out.
And people ask me, what should I do?
And I say, whatever you want to do.
And you did your thing, and you've done it, and you've done it for a long time.
So you've talked to a lot of people.
You are, at least, the number of people you've talked to over the years.
It must be in the many, many thousands.
Yeah, I'm not sure exactly the total number.
It's funny, you know, 317 of them have been with Gareth Porter.
Wow.
I do have my favorites that I do interview regularly, including you and Dan, of course.
I just got off the line with Bob Murphy again, so it is that kind of a show.
Yeah, but I'm talking about the people you have reached.
Oh, I'm sorry.
You know, your viewers, your listeners.
That's why I encourage people like you to do your thing.
You came up with it.
Somebody probably didn't come to you and offer you some money to put on this program, and you've been working at it, and you deserve a lot of credit.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
And, yeah, I have no idea the numbers.
And I guess I settled overall a long time ago for knowing that I can't really change history or anything like that.
But I can help to change people's lives and help to inform people who are looking for the truth, which is, you know, something that I've taken as a great inspiration from you all this time, too.
Back before you ran for president and were world famous, you were sort of this little old congressman all alone in the House of Representatives, just consistently telling the truth and setting the example that that's what you got to do.
Just stay at it.
And it's come to so much since then.
I mean, really, especially now in 2019, just looking back at the last decade, it's so easy to see the tremendous influence that you have had in American society and for libertarianism around the world and everything.
You know, your name is on people's tongue all the time.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's really great.
Okay, so let's talk about the news.
Oh, wait, before we talk about the news, let's talk about the funny thing you said about the news on the show yesterday.
I love this quote.
You said, The only time they tell the truth is when they admit they lie.
You know, sometimes, and I'm sure you've had this happen, sometimes when you're the most spontaneous, you can blurt out a good one.
Yep, that was a great one, definitely.
I looked at that, Daniel sort of chuckled over the whole thing.
And I said, yeah, I'll take that one.
But that is the sad story, you know.
And then it just compounded today because here we are, Pompeo telling more lies.
At least you can't say they're lying, but, boy, it's sure a gross distortion of what was going on there.
But now it looks like what he was saying yesterday was not true, that they had evidence, you know, a smoking gun, and that they know exactly how the Iranians shot up those vessels.
What's so disgusting is why don't the people realize that that's how they put us in the war?
They lie us in the war.
And these are guys that actually admit they tell lies.
So we should be awake from all their shenanigans.
And then I think you're referring there to the story in NBC News where the owner of the Japanese tanker says that it wasn't a mine, it was a flying object that hit his ship.
That's right.
That's exactly opposite of what Pompeo was saying.
It's kind of funny in a way how bad they are at this, that their lie can't even hold up for one day.
Yeah, and that's to our benefit.
You know, all we have to do is expose them because you wonder how anybody could trust them.
And now, you know, this is something that you and Dan talked about on the show too, was that it wasn't even just the Iranian president, it was actually the Ayatollah himself was sitting down with the Japanese prime minister essentially right at the time that this was happening.
It's almost inconceivable that they would do such a thing.
Yeah, it is amazing.
You know, the longer I've been in this business, I still am amazed.
I'm not totally shocked that it's happening, but it still is amazing that they don't even think about it and think maybe they're over the top, but they keep at it.
I guess there's a lot of gullible people out there that just buy into the distortions that they give us.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey guys, have you ever read The War State by Mike Swanson?
It's great.
It's a history of the rise of the military-industrial complex after World War II through the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations.
I think you'll learn a lot.
I think you'll like it a lot.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
So I'm sure you saw this.
Your son, Senator Rand Paul, did great yesterday on the Senate floor, gave a great speech about arming the Saudis.
I think UAE and Bahrain, or was it Qatar?
I forget.
Three of those.
Three of the four of those, I just said.
And talking about it, he sounded just like you.
So often we end up in conflict with countries who are armed with weapons that we have sold them.
Years ago I would make a statement because even though I didn't have all the details, but it would happen occasionally, but it probably happens more than we realize, is that all these weapons sales and all these alliances that we have, that we end up fighting those people that use those same weapons against us.
And the other silly thing is we go and we bomb too often these countries and put on sanctions and we destroy a lot of property.
Which is an expense to the people to pay for all the bombs.
But then we frequently go back and repair the very damage that we did to these countries.
So it makes no sense whatsoever.
Yeah.
Well, unless you have the contract for Kellogg Brown and Root to rebuild the broken thing, I guess.
It's in their interest at the expense of the rest of us.
Yeah, that's probably the way it works.
The military-industrial complex is very broad.
By the way, what did you think of Donald Trump in his statement?
You know, he's so blunt, whatever it is he's talking about, where he just said, hey, get real.
We have a military-industrial complex.
He said there are people in this town who love war.
Yeah, I think it's great when we hear that.
And we have to praise him when he does it and encourage him to do it more and to be cautious when he contradicts himself.
But, no, and Ran confides a little bit with me that he thinks Trump really has beliefs that, you know, are very tolerable and very much in our direction.
But I don't think any one person completely understands, you know, what makes his decisions from, you know, which sometimes appears like a flip-flop.
You know, he one day takes the troops out and the next day puts them back in.
But I've always wanted to believe that Trump has good instincts because he has said some good things, and sometimes he's consistent, and sometimes he's consistent in what he believes in, but sometimes he's consistent and sticks to some things that I disagree with.
But the one thing for sure, he has shaken up Washington, and for the most part, they deserved it all.
Yeah, sort of regardless of even his policies, just the fact that he got elected was certainly a repudiation.
Well, he beat Clinton and Bush in one year to get into that spot.
That's meaningful that the people would support even Donald Trump if it's at the expense of those two dynasties, or that one dynasty in a sense.
And so that brings me kind of to what I really want to talk with you about is, kind of at this point, at the end of the 20-teens now, and through the first Trump term, what's more and more a consensus about the death of neoliberalism as the path of the American center, that the American people have rejected it, because even though it does have, in a sense, sort of this pseudo-libertarianism in an embrace of capitalism and a freer trade, although it is the managed globalist kind of trade that you have opposed in the past, you could talk about that, but it's come with all this war and all this debt and the terrible boom-bust cycle that all of us libertarians have warned about.
And so it's just been rejected, and now we have people moving further to the left and further to the right and then reacting against each other even more.
And it just seems to me like it's now more than ever, it's important that people hear, especially the Ron Paul-ian libertarian take about what the real American consensus is supposed to be about, that it wasn't really the American way that failed, it was the Bush-Clinton post-Cold War neoliberal consensus that failed, but that wasn't what we're all supposed to be doing here.
And what you're talking about is very important, because we see things happening.
This was certainly the case in the 30s.
There was a major depression, and there had to be some analysis.
But the analysis turned out that people believed that there was too much free markets and the gold standard wasn't in existence, that sort of thing, in the 20s.
And so they blamed that, and they moved, of course, toward the New Deal, which changed things a whole lot.
And right now we're at a similar situation, although the statistics say that everything is rosy.
We know that they aren't, and the spending continues, and the deficit is out of control.
And there's a lot of people now who claim they understand it perfectly, and they're getting elected to office.
When you see some of these very, very far-left individuals getting elected, that means somebody is paying attention.
But the big question is, is this very narrow in certain districts where they have already been known as progressives, and is it a good time to use it as an excuse to move in that direction?
Or is it national?
And I tend to think that it isn't a national movement.
I think people are waking up.
And in that way you could argue the case that the establishment has been deeply challenged by Trump.
And it should be used as a shift away, and hopefully we can make the shift away, and then refine the best way we can the market economy.
And, of course, I've talked about the Federal Reserve as well, because for a sound economy you have to have an understanding about the monetary policy.
And that is a big one too.
That's as powerful and monolithic as is the military-industrial complex.
Well, and, you know, I've always said too that, sort of secondary to the war, but really intertwined entirely with the issue of American so-called global hegemony or empire, dominance or whatever euphemism, is inflationary money.
It's all part of it.
And then comes, it's not just the consequences for the Yemenis and the Iraqis, and the Americans who fight and are killed and wounded in the wars and all of that, but it's at the expense of our entire society.
And now with the global economy, even the whole world gets disrupted by this massive American boom-bust cycle that's driven by that paper money.
And that's a huge part of your appeal in your presidential campaigns.
And I remember you talking about how surprised you were, how resonant that was with people, that the government causes the boom and the bust.
We have to end the Fed.
And that's something people knew it was right, and they knew it was important, and especially it was reinforced how important it was that no one else would say that, even though that's the obvious truth of the thing.
Well, the one thing I tried, and I continue to try to do, is work with people who are on as progressives.
And I have been able to get them to look more seriously at the Federal Reserve and making the point, which I believe is accurate, that the Federal Reserve probably is much more beneficial to the very wealthy and the banking system and the warmongers and all, even though it's necessary for the welfare state.
So they throw the bones to the welfare recipients, and the liberals go along with it.
But there are many progressives.
Dennis Kucinich frequently, he and I worked together when he looked dishonestly with the war issue and the Federal Reserve.
So this is an issue that I think we can bring people together with, rather than making the disagreements even broader.
So I think that as long as we stick to those principles, we can get more people to join us.
But right now, on the surface, what is reported by most of the media is that this is the age of socialism about to be on our doorstep.
I don't believe that's true because it doesn't work, and I think it's a distortion of what's really happening.
And I'm still encouraged when I go to the college campuses that I do meet a lot of young people that do not spout the trashy stuff that we see reported so often.
Okay, so that's really interesting.
In a sense, it's a left-wing argument for the gold standard, saying that the inequality, which is the huge issue in liberal politics, which it is something, right?
CEO pay in ratio to the average employee pay at X corporation.
Those kind of numbers are completely through the roof.
We have what they call the financialization of the economy.
These guys, in the midst of that giant boom before the bust, you have people making absolute fortunes trading these ridiculously fraudulent pieces of paper around and all of these things, and these are all problems that, by the left, are typically identified simply as symptoms and problems of capitalism itself.
But your argument is that it's actually taking us off the gold standard that has helped to precipitate that.
Can you explain that better, please?
Well, I think that Mises helped me understand that, because he claimed that if you destroy the monetary system and get away from sound money, you will destroy the middle class.
When you have sound money, you have a bigger middle class.
America was generally known in a very positive way for having a very strong middle class.
Today, it is dwindling.
So the people who make the complaints that will come up with the idea that what we need is socialism, they're very annoying, but I think they're spotting the problem, and you touched on it with your statement, is because there is a discrepancy.
The money that was used, the trillions of dollars that were pumped into the system since the last recession started in 08, 09, has gone into the coffers of the big banks and big corporations and buybacks and mergers and the big salaries.
But actually, the average person is still in big trouble.
And no matter how they give you the statistics, there's a gross distortion of how they report unemployment and inflation.
There's no inflation, no inflation.
Yet the Austrian School of Economics teaches that you can't control where the inflation, that is the creation of money, goes.
And quite frankly, I think it's right now going into debt.
And that's a bond, and that's buying bonds, the bond bubbles.
I mean, you can't help the person who wants to save and take care of themselves by not being able to make any interest whatsoever, and now they're talking about banks charging you if you want to put your money into the bank.
It's a total mess, and it's because of the dishonesty in the monetary system.
And then also, of course, especially with the military, as you've written and talked about so much, that you have all these corporations that make massive fortunes off straight of Treasury dollars, where they don't participate necessarily in the free market at all, or even the rigged market at all.
They simply deal with the Pentagon as their customer and make cost plus on weapons that don't work, or who knows what.
Yeah, and that is good evidence for us to be used against these wild-eyed liberals.
If you can find one that's more honest about things and look at them independently, because they do benefit.
And this whole idea that nobody can ever question the military spending, conservatives or liberals.
I mean, right now there's no effort whatsoever to work together and cut back spending because they're locked into it.
It's politically so difficult, and also they can be high behind the intellectuals from our universities who probably 85% of them say, well, don't worry about the deficit.
You guys, you conservatives and libertarians, you worry too much about the deficit, but you shouldn't do that.
So that's probably the number one reason why this continues, because it's the difficulty of cutting back.
Politically, it's very, very hard to vote against the interest, which seems to be short term.
If you have benefits going to your district in the next year and you vote against it at the next election, they give you trouble.
Sometimes I wonder how I ever got away with it, but I believe if you couldn't vote against all the spending, then you have no credibility.
Well, I think probably it was because you delivered two-thirds of the population of your district in your obstetrician's office, right?
You know, it's funny.
I had contacts with George Bush, and socially it was a little bit easier, but I was so annoyed with the foreign policy.
But there was one time we were in a crowd, and we were meeting over a hurricane incident.
But he said, okay, we'll hear from Ron Paul.
He delivered more than half the babies in this country, in this county, and that's the reason.
So he was sort of giving me a build-up about one of the reasons why I was successful.
But I wouldn't deny I think it was helpful, but also I hope there were people who understood what I was doing.
If I would have been way, way out, what I've always got a big charge of is that you've known me for a long time, and I was always against this ridiculous drug war.
And you're living in the Bible Belt.
How can I do this?
I always voted and preached at and was a libertarian.
But the district never held it against me, which I thought was pretty amazing.
I remember that was actually one of my original introductions to you back then was the Democrats attacking you for that and showing a clip of you saying, we need to repeal all the drug laws at a libertarian thing, and then having your head float around the screen and this and that.
And it never stopped.
And the same as I sat there and watched you preach anti-war stuff to a room full of Republican constituents.
Again, before you ran for president and became world famous, there were some national libertarians who had come.
But essentially, it was a room full of all your own constituents at your birthday party down there in 2004 or 2005.
And you got up there and said anti-war stuff.
And I could tell that they didn't agree necessarily with everything you said.
But I could also tell that they respected you for your opinion and your honesty, and that it certainly was no deal killer to them in the way that you were coming about it.
I'm sure it's the same thing with the drugs, because you always say exactly the right thing, which is, hey, look, I'm a doctor and I'm an economist, and I know about this stuff.
And what you say, of course, makes sense.
And speaking of the economist thing, in the last couple of minutes here, I wanted to ask you about the trade.
Because, of course, this was a big part of what got Trump elected, too.
He ran against the centrist Republican-Democrat Clinton-Bush consensus for NAFTA and GATT and the World Trade Organization and all this stuff.
And we've talked about this before, that you're really for real libertarian free trade and open trade and none of these international organizations.
But essentially, these groups have regulated toward freer trade.
And it seems like just that, maybe this part is wrong, but it seems like that has been such a shock to the American people that they can't stand it.
And that's what they hate about the Bushes and the Clintons the most, is because, after all, before NAFTA and before the World Trade Organization, America had all these protectionist walls.
And so, American industry was built up under all this protectionism.
And then, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton came and took it all away all at once.
And so, maybe that's overstatement, but that's how it feels to the American people.
And they want their old, high-paying, blue-collar factory jobs back, and they're gone.
And they blame the center for that.
And so, now Trump is ratcheting up, especially with China, but also with Europe and some threats with Mexico tariffs and trying to bring back that old system.
And so, I just wonder, I know you don't take either side in that fight between those two, but how would you explain to the American people it really should be?
Well, I do it two ways.
I have never been in favor of more government, bigger government, international organization, even though a lot of libertarians liked WTO and these things because they said, we'll move it toward less tariffs and freer trade.
Well, I didn't trust them, but I didn't think it was the right thing to do.
A country doesn't need to belong to the WTO in order to work one way or the other.
Besides, I thought the organizations became political and that some companies got better benefits than other companies.
So, I didn't like that idea.
The other thing is I think the executive branch of government has too much to say about it, although Trump is getting some credit for some of the things that he has moved along by the use of tariffs and threats of tariffs and forcing people to do something.
But quite frankly, I think we're better off if we followed what they put in the Constitution, and that is the Congress is supposed to be involved in this.
Foreign trade is supposed to be a congressional function.
I think we've given way too much power to the executive branch.
And even if they can pull one off and did something and it was better than what was happening, the next guy, if he has this much authority, they use it to do it.
This is what happened, say, on foreign policy, on going to war.
Both parties like that.
They don't want to give up on it.
The War Powers Resolution, which tried to curtail that, is opposed by all presidents, Republicans, and Democrats.
So I don't like bigger government, and I'd like to see us follow a closer position following the Constitution on congressional authority.
But, Scott, one thing right now is pretty bad is congressional responsibility sometimes isn't much to brag about.
Right.
OK, but so what about the idea, though, that if we do have really just Ron Paulian, no tariffs, open trade, that because of labor costs in poor countries, the American people will simply just lose all their jobs or enough of the jobs that they wanted to keep to Mexico or to Indonesia or China or elsewhere?
That it causes this much of a disruption that they're willing to put in a guy like Trump to try to solve it for him in this manner.
But I don't believe taxing the people and tariffs mean you tax the people.
And I can remember going through all this in the 60s and even in the 70s when our automobiles were in very good shape and all they wanted was protectionism.
And they got a little bit, but they didn't get a whole lot.
And the Japanese were whipping us to no end.
And I think if you can't compete, and your point is the roughest one to defend, and that is wages are lower.
But wages are lower, which benefits the consumer.
This is always the thing.
Mises always said that the whole market system is designed for the consumer, not for the working man and not for the businessman.
It is geared to provide you services and goods at the best price and let the consumer make all the decisions.
So if we as a country can't provide the cars in competition because there are subsidies, well, if there are better cars at a cheaper rate, why take that away?
I mean if you can get a car for $1,000 instead of $2,000, you've got a good car and you have $1,000 left over.
And then maybe we would clean up our act.
Maybe we have too many regulations.
Maybe we have too much wages propped up too high, and you have to deal with that.
But I don't think the answer is just retaliate with put-on tariffs and tax the American people.
This whole idea now that we just put in $50 billion because we collect a lot of import taxes, I mean that came from the American consumer.
And I think we haven't seen the end of that yet.
I think that's all in motion right now, what the consequence will be, because so far there's been a lot of talk about the tariffs.
And on the surface it looks like it may have achieved something, but ultimately I'm still going to argue for free trade.
All right, well since this is going to be the last chapter of the book coming out here, I guess I'd ask you to say one last thing here about empire and individual liberty.
Well, the bigger the empire, the less liberty there is.
So when you spend the money in the government, that means the people have less money, even if you can borrow, even if you can print it.
Ultimately, empire needs a lot of money, and that requires a greater handicap for the people.
So I do not believe the republic can be defended in empire.
I think the Romans taught us that.
Once they went to empire, they lost their republic.
And that's what's happening to us now.
If you look at the last hundred years, the republic has disintegrated to a great deal.
And that is why the empire is so detrimental.
The biggest problem we have here is teaching people that what we're talking about is not isolationism.
I don't like isolationism.
I think the isolationists are the ones who want to put on tariffs and impose our will and tell people what to do.
And I want to trade with people and visit with people.
I just don't want these international organizations, which are very opposite.
But the empire always undermines the personal liberties, and they do it through an attack on the finances.
All right, well, thank you so much for your time again on the show, Ron.
Great to talk to you, sir.
Good.
Scott, thank you.
All right, you guys, that's the great Ron Paul.
And one of the books that he wrote that I left off the list there at the beginning is a really great little primer, I guess, a little pamphlet.
Mises and Austrian Economics, a personal view.
It's really a good read.
I think you might like it.
Add it to the pile there.
And again, check out the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, covering everything.
And they're good on everything over there, day in and day out.
And of course, the Liberty Report with the great Dan McAdams at ronpaullibertyreport.com.
So you like supporting anti-war radio hosts.
That makes sense.
Here's how you can do that.
Go to scotthorton.org slash donate, and there's all kinds of options to do so and all kinds of different kickbacks at different levels.
Of course, take PayPal, Patreon and all different kinds of digital currencies and all of those sorts of things.
And anybody who signs up by way of Patreon or PayPal to donate $5 a month to the show will automatically get keys to the Reddit room, my own private Reddit group that I have.
Quite a few members now and lots of fun in there every day.
So check out all about that at scotthorton.org slash donate.
And thanks.
