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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means.
Clausewitz for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States in military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of bombs in the world today.
My own government.
All right, you guys.
On the line, I've got the greatest American hero ever.
Dr. Ron Paul.
He's got a brand new book out.
It's called The Revolution at 10 years.
But let me mention that he is also the author of a lot of great books.
The last one before this was Swords into Plowshares.
A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity.
And then I just want to mention a couple of my favorites here.
Liberty Defined and The Fed.
The Revolution of Manifesto, which Tom Woods helped with.
But still, Ron's notes.
Excellent book.
And A Foreign Policy of Freedom.
Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship.
And that's a collection of Dr. Paul's speeches from the late 1970s or very early 1980s through the 2000s.
All his anti-war speeches.
Just great stuff.
And I hope you guys will look at all that.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
Nice to be with you.
Doing well.
Good, good.
Happy to have you on the show.
And I love your book.
Well.
Good.
You're, you know, probably two-thirds of the reason I'm good on everything.
I've had you to look to for a solid 20 years now.
Since 1997 is when I first found you on C-SPAN, as I told you before.
And you're why I was good on the dot-com bubble.
And you're why I was good on the housing bubble.
And you're a big part of why I've been so good on war all this time.
And so I owe you a lot.
And I have to tell you, too, and I know I always talk at you instead of asking you questions when I have you on the show.
And I know you already know this, but I just want to tell you from my angle.
I have met so many people.
I mean, I couldn't count the number of people who are libertarians because of that time that you whooped Rudy Giuliani in that debate.
They call it the Giuliani moment.
But, you know, I think people kind of forget that you had such success.
But what it was, the argument was the most bitter pill that you were trying to get the American people to swallow.
That George Bush and Bill Clinton got us into this mess.
The history didn't begin on September 11th.
That America started it in the terror war.
And you said that at a Republican debate.
And people, not necessarily Republicans, but millions, tens of millions of Americans were receptive to that because they could tell that you were bravely telling the truth.
This was not a great political point to make if you're trying to be popular.
This was the truth, the hard truth.
And you respected them enough to tell them the truth.
And the light bulb just went off.
And I know you already know this, but it's just millions and millions and millions of people are libertarians now because of your courage, sir.
But, Scott, what you're touching on is really what the book is about because the question is, did Giuliani win?
And is his movement winning or is our movement winning the revolution that came to light back during those campaigns?
Of course, I don't call it the Ron Paul revolution as much as it is a movement for liberty, a libertarian revolution.
And yet on the surface, many people would say, and I acknowledge this, they say, Washington hasn't changed.
They're still warmongers.
We're still in debt.
We still have the Fed.
And what do you guys do?
How can you have this as a revolution?
But then when you come along and you have access to and you participate in the public arena, that you meet people that are actually very knowledgeable about this.
And they're laying the groundwork for the necessary changes that will come after this whole thing falls apart.
And, of course, I believe that the libertarian revolution is alive and well and that it's a philosophic revolution.
And numbers are less important than determination.
And when a system fails, it has to be replaced.
Just remember, not very many people in 1988 were predicting that the Soviet Union would disappear.
Nobody was doing that.
And yet it ended on self-destructive.
And I think what we have is self-destructive.
And it will have to change.
Nobody's certain when and how it will be replaced.
But I think we have a real shot at it because of what's going on in a quiet way, academically speaking.
I mean, you're on the radio and doing the work, but there's a lot of people doing it.
We have the Mises Institute, which is really influential in teaching young people the philosophy and going to college campuses.
I get encouraged.
But most people would think, what are you guys talking about?
Bernie Sanders has control of the college campuses.
Well, I disagree with that, and I try to make that point in the book.
Right.
Yeah, well, certainly there are a lot of young people who would be probably Bernie Sanders types, except for your intervention in their intellectual development there with the Ron Paul revolution.
Now, so here's my concern, though.
What if America, the country, can afford America, the government and America, the world empire?
Maybe Osama bin Laden's trap worked on the Soviet Union because they were communists and their economy was a joke anyway.
And then the oil price crashed.
That was it.
They were out.
And yet here in America, we haven't had a war here in 165 years where you look at all the freeways and all the factories and all the trucks and all the people, all the universities, all the capital that the American people bring to bear.
What if we can afford an empire for another few lifetimes?
Well, I don't think you believe that is a challenging question.
I don't believe that because this is all based on debt.
You know, it's debt and spending.
They're working real hard on taxes, but taxes are secondary to the spending because taxes tries to pay for all the spending.
And it's the spending that counts.
And because of our system based on the dollar, which allows us to run the world because it's the reserve currency of the world, it allows us to run up this debt, and the government prints the money, and the Federal Reserve builds that system that you're talking about.
It finances welfare and warfare.
But it's every bit as fictitious as the Soviet system.
It's a little harder to identify because on the surface, what you described – and I think of that too.
You know, I go around the cities where there's a lot of homeless people where you don't really see them, and think about the lower 50% of the population that are getting poorer.
And I think, well, it doesn't look that way, but it really is.
It's based on debt.
And you and I could do very well if we decide to go into business, and the business wasn't a good business, but the banks are loaning us a million dollars a week.
We could look pretty good until the debt comes due.
And the debt is coming due.
It comes due for a government and a country a little bit differently than it would be for you and I if we were involved in that.
The bankers would stop us.
But the only thing that's going to stop this system is the value of the dollar, and it's overburdened now.
And I think that time will come, but exactly when that will arrive, I don't think anybody can be certain.
All right, hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, did you notice the new and improved show notes?
Damon Hathaway has been doing a great job with the show notes.
They're on the pages at LibertarianInstitute.org and at ScottHorton.org.
So check out the links for all the information we talk about in these interviews.
You guys have been asking for that for a long time.
Well, we got it now.
Good show notes at ScottHorton.org, etc.
All right, this show is sponsored by The War State.
Mike Swanson wrote it.
He wrote a great book about the early history of the military-industrial complex after World War II.
And he also gives great investment advice at WallStreetWindow.com.
And when you get that advice, you want to go buy your medals from Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
That's rrbi.co, rrbi.co.
LibertyStickers.com for anti-government propaganda for the back of your truck.
And we got a brand new and improved site and brand new and improved sticker art coming up soon for you there at LibertyStickers.com.
And, of course, you'll probably also want to sign up for Tom Wood's Liberty Classroom by way of the link on my page.
And I'll tell you what.
Did you notice how great the website is at foolserend.us, the website for my book?
Well, it is great.
And you know who did that?
It was Harley Abbott at expanddesigns.com/Scott.
And if you go to expanddesigns.com/Scott, you can save $500 on your brand new website.
Well, now, so you do talk about sound money in the book.
And you talk about, and we've talked before about just how amazing it is that before the crash, this was all in the year before the crash.
Boy, can you imagine if only the crash had happened in 07, how different that campaign would have been?
Man.
But anyway, before the crash happened, you got the kids chanting in the Fed.
You got people interested in monetary policy, which we all learn in first grade when we learn how to count quarters.
We learn that George Washington's on there because the government makes sure the money is fair.
And that's all you need to know.
And that's all anybody needs to know.
They go their whole life thinking that, believing that.
And yet you made this a huge issue for people.
I mean, obviously, it is a huge issue.
But you drew people's attention to this issue in a way that I know you could have never anticipated.
But so if I give you a real short crack at it now, what would you tell people?
Why is it so important that we have sound money, Dr. Paul?
Well, you're right.
I was pretty surprised during the campaign that it did catch on.
But stating the facts sometimes are very appealing.
And I think there's more unhappiness than people realize.
And I think the reason that although they booed when I was explaining to Giuliani about the foreign policy, it made a lot of sense to a lot of people who have already come to that conclusion, but they were afraid to say that.
And I think the Federal Reserve is the perpetuator of all this.
I called them once the biggest taxer because they're the ones who tax us through the inflationary tax.
And they're the facilitators.
They allow this to exist.
So I started off with a serious concern about economic policy in the 1960s when I came across Henry Hazlitt and Mises and Hayek.
And I started reading, well, these guys are on to something, and they're predicting this Brentwood is going to fail.
And boy, that would be a big deal.
And, of course, August 15, 1971 was a big deal.
And we're still suffering the consequences.
You're talking about when Nixon finally closed the gold window.
Yeah, when there was a bankruptcy.
I mean, we no longer had the promise to pay for our currency.
Of course, already by then the American people were denied the right to own gold.
But the foreigners could still put down their $35, but the gold was being drained from this country.
And finally Nixon said, no more.
We're going to stop doing this.
So they declared bankruptcy in the 70s.
It was a very, very bad economic decade.
But we've been up and down ever since.
We've gone through NASDAQ bubbles and housing bubbles.
And now we're back in another bubble, and that crisis will come.
But I think it's going to be different.
It's going to be a lot worse.
There's no margin they have before they could pretend we're going to stimulate the economy by spending more, printing more, and lower interest rates.
How do you lower interest rates once they're down to 1% or negative interest rates?
They don't have any leeway.
The bust always comes, and the reason you can predict this is the fact that all bubbles are artificial, and they have to be corrected.
And they come from the fact that the Fed creates artificially low interest rates and extra credit and causes the malinvestment and causes the bubbles to form.
So they're there, and they will have to be corrected.
But I think monetary policy actually fascinates me about how it works.
And when you mentioned that some of these young people in college campuses were catching on, I don't think it's that complicated.
Well, it happens more than once.
They'll come up to me, and they'll say, boy, I understand what you're saying.
I get it.
And then they'll say, it's just common sense.
And don't you think that's about what it is?
Yeah, this is common sense.
Why should a secret group of individuals be able to just decide what interest rates should be and what the money supply should be and then become regulators too?
It's so far removed.
I was on a show yesterday, and I said that what's going on has nothing to do with free market economics.
This whole thing is distorted, and it's destined to fail, and I think the cracks are already there.
Yeah, well, and that's the whole thing about it too.
Whenever I interview Bob Murphy or Mark Thornton about the business cycle, I always try to set it up by saying, hey, you don't have to agree with us libertarians about any other thing at all.
But the Austrians have figured out this boom and bust.
And look, any of us who've lived a few decades, our lives are a history of booms and busts in our states, in our towns, where we live.
We can't ignore the fact.
They teach us the Fed is here to prevent that kind of thing.
And yet it's always either – and I think everybody knows it.
Right now we're at the height of a bubble.
Whether we can personally feel it or not, we can see the stock market bubble and see where we're at.
And I don't know how long until this one busts.
It seems like they're already deflating now.
Well, our greatest challenge is sorting all this out because we understand why when the bailouts come, they go to the rich and the poor don't get help.
They lose jobs, and they suffer the consequences of price inflation, and they get poorer.
And that causes wealth maldistribution and a lot of anger.
And it sets the stage for the socialists to come in.
So it's not illogical for the Bernie Sanders to all of a sudden arrive.
Well, there is gross distortion.
See what freedom does?
See what capitalism is all about?
Look at what it does.
But the libertarian free market explanation is crucial, and why it's vital for us to talk about it.
Because no matter what you like, we should have a much better alliance with progressives because true progressives are very much anti-war.
And yet they have to realize how does it get financed and who benefits?
And welfare in many ways is similar to warfare because the industrialists, the weapons manufacturers are the ones that benefit from all the war.
And we should have more coalitions, but I obviously think that understanding monetary policy is vital because we will have a bust.
It's going to be terrible.
And who gets blamed?
In the Depression, in the 30s, it was those terrible capitalists in the gold standard that got blamed.
And yet it had nothing to do with free markets and sound money.
As a matter of fact, it was the violation of sound money in the 20s that caused the problem.
They pretended that you'd been the president for eight years and said, oh yeah, see, it's the laissez-faire free market policies of George W. Bush that got us into this mess.
As though all the history between 1933 and 2008 never happened.
Right.
Okay.
And so this is the thing with the progressives, right?
Is that they don't understand or believe.
They think we're corporate shills.
We all work for the Kochs or whatever it is.
And they don't understand that we want the economy to be so free that these very powerful banks and insurance companies and arms manufacturers are free to fail and go out of business so that we can move on in a society without them.
And that we think that that's the best way to get rid of Citigroup is to have a free economy rather than the state regulating them, which is never going to happen, right?
The state just regulates them right into the position they're in right now.
And they need to understand why inflating a currency also leads to the point where average people's real wages don't go up.
Matter of fact, they go down.
When we talked about 1971 getting off the gold standard completely, real wages have essentially stood still.
The wages don't go up, but the cost of living always goes up, which prompts people to spend more money to pass out more welfare.
Which means they're going to print more money and create more inflation, which caused the problem in the first place.
And for a while that seems to work because a country and a currency can be strong.
The currency can be strong and the country very wealthy.
But eventually you consume the wealth, and then the productions go down.
And Trump harped on no more production.
We've got to force people to do this and that because we're not producing enough.
But just having a soaring stock market isn't the answer to the problems that we have.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry.
I know you have to go, but I really appreciate your time on the show again, Dr. Paul.
Great, Scott.
Nice to be with you.
All right, you guys.
That's The American Hero, Dr. Ron Paul.
The brand new book is The Revolution at Ten Years.
And there's so much other great stuff in there about the police state, about populism, and of course war, the drug wars, and all these things.
It's The Ron Paul Revolution at Ten Years.
And you know me.
I'm Scott Horton.scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, foolserend.us for my book, Fools Erend, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, guys.
