07/03/15 – Ron Paul – The Scott Horton Show

Okay guys, it's summer fun drive time at the Scott Horton Show.
Bills are piling up and equipment is wearing out, so here's the deal.
Anyone who donates $50 or more gets a chance to win a week's vacation for two to Costa Rica.
Drawing is July 15th.
Winner, go whenever you want.
See more details at scotthorton.org slash raffle.
Anyone who donates $100 or more gets entered into the raffle, plus a one-ounce silver QR code CommodityDisc from CommodityDiscs.com.
And the first 25 people to donate $100 or more will also get a copy of Your Money or Your Life, Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax by Sheldon Richman or the audiobook of Lou Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, for free.
Stop by scotthorton.org slash donate or scotthorton.org slash raffle for details.
You can also sign up for monthly donations by way of PayPal per interview at Patreon, support with Bitcoin, and shop through scotthorton.org slash Amazon.
And thanks.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show, here live on the Liberty Radio Network, Monday through Friday, noon to two Eastern Time, 11 to 1 Texas Time.
Our next guest today is the greatest legislator ever in all of world history.
My hero, and probably yours, his name is on most of my shirts, the great Dr. Ron Paul.
Welcome back to the show.
Ron, how are you?
Doing fine, Scott.
Nice to be with you again.
Very happy to have you on the show, sir, and very happy to have gotten an advanced copy of your brand new book.
I read the whole thing last night, Swords into Plowshares, A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity.
It's just great.
And so glad that you did this.
Thank you.
So appreciative of it.
And there's so many great points in here, I almost don't know where to begin.
Much of it we've talked about before on the show over the past decade.
But I guess I'd like to ask you, first of all, about the national debt.
It's over $18 trillion now.
And you talk a lot in the book about, well, it looks like the empire is just not going to come down until the dollar breaks, basically, until the economy and the people's will to live under an economy suffering under the weight of all of this.
When it finally just breaks, then it'll all come home.
I wonder how far you think we really are from that.
Because when you make the comparison to the USSR, hey, they were communists.
They were going to implode anyway, right?
Their economics made no sense.
And it seems like for all the Keynesianism and all the intervention and all the corporatism and frankly even fascism here in the United States, it's still a pretty resilient economy.
There's enough market force to it that, as you also say in the book, we can afford a lot of empire.
And I wonder if you think maybe this could last decades and decades still into the future or what?
Well, I'd bet against decades into the future because I think the debt is too great and we're not producing any more.
It used to be a lot of concern even back in the 50s.
I remember when Barry Goldwater became famous in the 50s because he was complaining about the debt under Eisenhower.
Well, he was probably a little bit too early.
There's a big difference now, especially since 2008.
Since that crisis and the one that we're still in, productivity is down.
Structural unemployment is very, very strong and more and more people are unemployed.
They give you positive signals like the unemployment rate is 5.3%, but the jobs that are created are part-time and there are more full-time jobs lost.
So the number of people actually employed goes down all the time when you take into consideration the increase in population.
So the numbers aren't there.
But the question is, well, if it's so bad, why didn't the collapse happen two years ago or yesterday or why don't you say it's going to happen tomorrow?
Well, there's one aspect of Austrian economics that more or less explains this and it's called the subjective theory of value.
And so there's subjectivity involved in this and it's what people think is going to happen.
So they can convey confidence to a degree, not forever, but right now a lot of confidence has been conveyed to the American economy because like you said, if you look around, there's still a lot of wealth and there's still a lot of trust in the dollar.
But if you look at the true value of the dollar over the last 20 years or the last 100 years, compared the value of the dollar today to 1913, well, it used to be what you could buy for a penny when the Fed started.
You have to pay 25 times that.
And so that's steady.
I see it like the foundation has been totally eroded.
It's an economy built on sand and something is going to blow it down because it has a life that's sort of artificial.
So we're on the verge of it and sometimes we get special benefits.
As long as we're the reserve currency of the world, this is going to last and until somebody comes up with something else or they reject all currencies and people just leave all paper currencies like people were leaving the euro and the Greeks suffering the consequences, that's going to happen around the world eventually.
But there's going to be people then go to real money and gold and silver or some currency that is maybe established.
Maybe they'll establish a currency someplace with Russia and China and have some gold backing to it.
We don't know what that'll be.
But there's no reason to be optimistic that in 10 years from now we will see economic growth and people satisfied and there wouldn't be because if we keep doing this, the discrepancy between the rich and the poor, that's the big political issue now.
This is a consequence of this.
This is why the middle class is suffering and the discrepancy is what is going to motivate all the politicians but until they give a free market answer and emphasize personal liberty and emphasize no more wars, believe me, it's downhill for us.
Right.
Now, so speaking of dollar hegemony, I know and this is something we've talked about in the past as well.
At the end of World War II, of course, America's economy outmatched the whole rest of the world basically so there's just no question why the dollar was considered as good as gold and it was partially backed by gold at the time so having dollar hegemony as a legacy of that makes sense but I wonder how far past the kind of legitimacy of that legacy do you think we are now?
Is it because people say that it's the American empire itself that kind of forces the world like our deal with the Saudis to denominate their oil sales in dollars, for example, and other kind of contrivances like that, you know, mirrors and wires and smoke and bubble gum and shoestring kind of holding the thing together with American force is what makes the world continue to use the dollar in that way but I wonder, I mean, is there anything else?
I mean, are they going to switch to the Chinese currencies or some kind of market basket of other currencies because they all have their own problems, as you said, people I guess could just resort to bailing out of paper money altogether but it seems like you're kind of implying that there are no other currencies really to compete with the dollar that are much better.
Well, yes, but I think that is already starting and it's a consequence of our foreign policy for us all of a sudden deciding that we had to have the Cold War going in and starting to attack everything that Russia says or does and pushing Russia away from us.
Russia was integrating with Europe, the Europeans like trading with Russia but we badgered the Europeans into accepting a negative Russian position so we are forcing Russia to join China and other far eastern countries and now some of the oil is being paid for in Renminbi.
They're using Chinese currency so no, that's not the gold standard yet but it all serves to weaken the dollar and also makes us more aggressive so I think our foreign policy is speeding this process up not only because it contributes to the debt but also because of our stupidity and just building more and more enemies.
I see the day coming when finally this breaks out that the hostility toward America is going to be unbelievable because it's been held in check.
People haven't been quite strong enough to express themselves because if they do they get sanctions put on them or we bomb them but once we get a little bit weaker there's going to be piling on.
Right now there's strong talk about the Saudis going with Russia.
Now that is a big deal.
I mean we have been the protector of Saudi Arabia since World War II when Roosevelt made that commitment but I think there's a lot of things going on that potentially could change things overnight.
Not that I think it's going to be tomorrow or the next day but we are getting awfully close to this and yes we put on sanctions and we put our troops around Russia and all these things but there's going to be an accident.
There will be a false flag or there will be some unintended consequence and this is going to break down so it's one of these things that you ought to be prepared but not sit on the edge of your chair and say well tomorrow is the day it's going to happen.
You can't do that but just think of how many Greeks right now wish that they probably would have taken their money out of the bank a little bit earlier.
They had years to be suspicious of what was happening but now the government will take care of us.
We live in a welfare state.
They have always taken care of us before.
They'll take care of us but all of a sudden the banks are closed.
So debt is the big problem and debt is what will bring us down.
Not only do we have that $18 trillion national debt we owe foreigners over $6 trillion.
We're the biggest debtor in the world.
Our debt is greater than our GDP so economically speaking we're in bad shape.
All right now this is something that you talked about a bit in your speech or actually kept going back to this in your speech at UT, the Future Freedom Foundation thing a few months back about how you know kind of no matter what I think you even said all of the worst natural disasters even happen at once.
Volcanoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and a war and a currency problem.
Don't worry.
All we need is freedom and everything will be just fine.
Now for people who don't understand what you mean by that, what do you mean by that really?
Well I say things like that and close to it but I don't think I want to say everything is going to be perfect but everything will be better.
What I'm saying is that the only correction for excessive debt is liquidation of debt and this is why the Greek thing has been going on for five years.
They won't accept the idea that the debt is unpayable.
They're only looking around for victims.
Who's going to suffer the most?
Which banks are going to suffer the most?
Which group of people won't get their pensions and on and on but the debt has to be liquidated.
The sooner you liquidate the better.
We prolong the liquidation in our Great Depression in the 30s and early 40s.
The Japanese tried to handle their debt by adding more debt.
That's what we're currently doing but if we liquidate, if we allow the liquidation, let's say that there was no bailouts back in 08 and 09 and no QE's and propping up and transferring wealth from middle class to the rich.
If we had not done that, on the surface things would have looked much, much worse.
You know, immediately you say hey this is crazy but if you do that and people have a right to work, a right to keep what they earn, they get their freedoms back, we stop the wars, we protect civil liberties and even if we lost everything, you know, but if we have our liberties, I think it would have taken about a year to get back on our feet again.
The best example of this is the Depression in 1921.
There was the liquidation of debt in the Depression after World War I and the Wilson years and the war spending and all these kind of things and the GDP went down.
I think it was up like down 15% in one year but the debt was wiped off the books.
That's what you need but it's sort of like painful treatment and nobody wants it.
But if you concentrate on liberty and concentrate on reality about when debts get to a certain level, they're never paid.
It's just that they're looking around for victims and Adam Smith actually pointed this out pretty well that nations have this tendency to get this debt and they don't pay and so often debt is liquidated, you know, by the debasement of currency and that's what we're working on or at least Bernanke and Yellen are working on so hard is to liquidate the debt.
They know what they're doing but they're not trying and they don't come out and say, we want to liquidate the debt and punish the purchasing power of all people even though that's exactly what they want to do and they admit it and along the way they punish everybody who wants to save money and try to protect against this.
So yes, I strongly believe that if you take your medicine, things will look tough on the short run but we would survive if we have our liberties.
Today, the worst things get the more authoritarian our government gets, the more intrusion on our liberties, the more spying, the more wars we have and that's absolutely the wrong way to go.
So my vote is for liberty.
Yeah, see I think that's such an important message because I was speaking a few weeks back with Professor Alfred McCoy who I'm sure you're probably familiar with and who is certainly an anti-imperialist.
He was in no way trying to, you know, rationalize or justify the empire but he was saying, boy, when the empire falls, when Russia and China and Europe finally integrate, when America, as you were talking about before, succeeds in pushing all its former friends together in an alliance against us and that kind of thing and our empire finally does break, it's going to hurt so bad.
And I was thinking, well, jeez, you know, because, I mean, and really, Dr. Paul, it's because I've been listening to you for so many years now.
It seems like that's really the best thing that could possibly happen, never mind to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, et cetera, et cetera.
But for the American people, even if we do have to suffer a pretty bad depression when the dollar breaks or whatever it is, as long as we have free market pricing systems and so forth, then it'll be okay.
And we're, you know, working hard at it and I think there are some signs that the young people are changing their minds.
But the real problem is going to be is they can't stop the momentum.
Yes, they can temporize things, but the crisis will come and the financial system will break down and we will give up our empire.
But if they haven't talked about the real saving grace of personal liberty, then there's no other choice but to have another totalitarian come on.
And right now, why should a vile socialist get the biggest crowds right now?
And it's a government takeover and redistribute wealth.
And so they're out there and there are others who lean toward fascism.
I'm a strong guy.
I'm going to take over.
I'm going to be the boss.
So they're out there and our voices are getting more numerous, but we're not louder.
And I'm not too worried about that.
I'm worried about getting this 8% of the people who will be the thought leaders who will have an influence on the 51%.
And that is where we're making, you know, progress.
And that's why programs like yours is so important to get more people to listen and say that there is a good chance that we can succeed because we have alternative ways of spreading our message.
And that's the only choice that we have because most of us reject the notion for practical reasons as well as philosophic reasons that we can win this fight through violence.
You know, I just don't think that's the solution.
Right.
And now, yeah, especially on Independence Day, which I guess that's probably the one American word that you and I would agree that we might be for.
But, you know, it's that assertion of individual liberty is at the very basis of American civic life, that we're all born free.
And then the entire Misesian vision and the libertarian story that you've been telling all these years is about how, hey, guess what?
Conveniently, it's liberty that works.
All this socialism and planning and whatever, all it does is create distortions and worse problems later.
It's liberty that actually creates the ordered society that we need.
It's the mother of it, not the daughter.
And and, you know, as you're saying, when in especially in times like this, that message is extremely important when so many demagogues are willing to say, all you got to do is surrender more of your freedom and more of your power and we'll take care of it for you.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, right now we actually have an opportunity because our message wasn't listened to at all because there was a tremendous amount of prosperity and there was a lot of momentum and there's still this prosperity on the surface and all you need is a good lobbyist to get hold of it.
But more and more people now understand that the system isn't working and that we can't depend on it.
There will be more Greek failures.
And this this to me is, you know, very, very important.
I've many times over the years have said there's something wrong with us, us who promote liberty, because it's so wonderful.
Personal liberty, you can do what you want as long as you don't hurt people.
You mean there is more prosperity and there's more peace and we don't win the argument?
I mean, what's the matter with us?
Because somebody thought they could get a free lunch forever.
But right now, the free lunch is no longer to be free.
And that's why we have to make sure that they don't pursue it with more totalitarianism and say, oh, yeah, but we screwed up.
We didn't have the right regulations.
We didn't print enough money.
We didn't do this.
And we bailed out the banks and we should have given more money to somebody else.
So that is that is a challenge for us.
But I think we we haven't done a very good job, but we better do a better job to convince the people that something as wonderful as personal liberty and owning our own lives actually gives us more wealth.
There's still too many that don't believe that.
But we need more people, you know, teaching this.
And this is one reason why I've liked the Mises Institute, is because they work on trying to get more people into the universities and more people teaching this.
But we have to use everything, whether it's the Internet, your radio programs and things like this, to convince people to stop and think.
You just can't keep doing the wrong things that have been so destructive financially and to our personal liberty every day.
You know, there's another nail into the coffin of the republic by some politician.
You know, this past week there was a big nail into the coffin.
We saw Jerry Brown in California saying nobody has any exemptions for saying that this government doesn't have the right to inject you with anything they want.
So we better wake up.
That's all.
All right.
I'm talking with the great Dr. Ron Paul, the heroic Dr. Ron Paul, author of Swords into Plowshares, A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity.
Brand new coming out.
It's not quite out yet.
Am I right?
That's right.
But within a few days, it'll be be able to be preordered.
So I hope everybody keeps their eyes and ears open for it.
OK, yeah, it'll be right there on Amazon.
Of course, we'll link to it and all that at the website, etc.
Again, Swords into Plowshares, a great book.
And you really do aim very high in this book, too, and talk about the abolition of war.
Shades of this book, The End of War by John Horgan, where he says, hey, listen, you know, we haven't succeeded in truly abolishing slavery from the planet, but it's virtually universally outlawed.
And, you know, the people who participate in it are being hunted.
And and that's the way it's supposed to be.
You know, that's the best we can do, I guess, in a world of seven billion people.
But, you know, slavery has always been with humanity since coming out of the grasslands.
So, you know, this is a huge leap forward.
And you talk about the huge leap forwards that humans have made in the past few centuries in terms of material wealth and advancements in science and technology and medicine and different ways of taking care of each other and pricing systems and all these things.
And you say, hey, it's real.
It's possible.
Imagine it.
We could abolish war from the face of the earth.
Yeah.
And the world is so young.
You know, when you think about recorded history and just in its thousand years of history and the Industrial Revolution is even much shorter.
So I would say there's every reason in the world to have some sort of optimism that the human race can change its attitude.
It certainly became smart enough to have such a tremendous improvement in material things.
And in the book, I mentioned that, yeah, we're all better off.
We have such a, you know, higher standard of living because of the material benefit.
But they use a lot of that for war, you know, how to kill people.
So what we need is a little bit of intelligence and common sense on why the human race can advance to saying, you know, war doesn't make any sense at all.
Right.
Yeah.
Especially as you're saying, when the weapons that they can afford to make now include H-bombs and and the kind of even conventional weapons that lead to such scales of slaughter that previous centuries of humanity, people could not have ever imagined.
Right.
It's on the order of plagues, you know, the amounts of death from the World Wars and the consequences in the 20th century.
Now, something that's fun I like to talk about on the show.
I don't guess I've ever talked about it with you, but I've brought this up to people from time to time just to try to get them to imagine what if Ron Paul had won in 1988 and the end of the Cold War had happened on his watch and NATO had come apart just as quickly as the Warsaw Pact and we got our peace dividend.
And instead of, you know, Greenspan inflating, inflating, inflating to disguise the cost of the creation of the world empire in the 1990s, we just gotten all the way back to, well, I don't even know, back, went forward to some real libertarian economics in this country.
Think how there's our flying cars that we haven't had since the year 2000.
Right.
There's all that great stuff that we all thought would exist by now.
That's where it went was the empire and and the counterfactual.
The reason I like to bring it up is because, hey, you're real and it's a real it's a real possibility is something that really could have happened back in 1988.
It would have been the perfect timing for the end of the Cold War.
And and then when all the neocons and all their warmongering and bluster about spreading our way of life to the rest of the people of the world.
Well, what could have been better than America under the Ron Paul administration for showing the world this is what it's like to truly have a bill of rights?
That means what it says to truly have freedom and free markets.
Well, hopefully we could say it would have been helpful, but I'm cautious in saying that it would have been a complete reversal of all those bad things happening because you still need a consensus and the consensus hasn't been there.
Think about Obama is still a subservient to many of the neocon ideas.
But even when he makes a minor suggestion of of just having a conversation, you know, with the Iranians and opening up an embassy, what what is the consensus?
Don't let them do it.
We're not going to have an ambassador and we're not going to allow any traveling.
And in these consensus in the Congress by those good conservatives is to stop it all.
So that also is most important.
Yes, an individual, even from 88 or 96 or whatever, that was determined.
But quite frankly, if the sentiment is too strong, you don't you don't stay in office.
You know, they they have ways of silencing people if they're pushing things faster than they think they should be.
But nevertheless, you know, anything anybody can do to promote the ideas is what really counts.
All right.
And I'm sorry for keeping you over.
Can I ask one more thing real quick?
Quickly.
OK, you mentioned in here about the international institutions, the United Nations, the WTO and NATO and CITO, of course, the treaty organizations and all that.
Are you that confident, especially on the U.N.?
Are you confident that the world would be peaceful, that America be more peaceful without the U.N. Security Council, which, of course, the whole apparatus is created in the name of world peace?
Well, I think, no, there's things that would happen, but I think the world would be much better off because I argue the case for smaller government, smaller units, secession, self-determination.
And when you have fast track legislation for international agreements that are done in secret, whether it's WTO or who knows what is going in the opposite direction.
So I don't I don't think it solves the problem of the violence between states.
But it'd be greatly reduced.
I mean, you look at the the mess that's going on in Ukraine right now.
The IMF is involved and our funds are involved, NATO's involved, and it would be more difficult if if you establish the principle of self-determination and us staying out of those affairs, then the neighbors over there would have to deal with the same thing in the Middle East.
But I think the more organizations you have, the worse.
I mean, when you think about the organizations that came out of World War One and the Versailles Treaty and the artificial lines that were drawn, that was the real culprit.
But we're still at it.
So maybe maybe the names of the organizations change, but it's always these coalitions to tell other people to leave.
Mainly, it has been so often, you know, a way of getting hold of natural resources.
And if people understood the free market, the best way would be to let people alone.
And what else can they do with their natural resources but sell them to us?
So I think that the international organizations are a danger to us.
All right.
Thank you very much for your time again on the show today, Dr.
Paul.
Very good.
I sure appreciate it.
That's Dr.
Ron Paul, author of the brand new Swords into Plowshares, A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity.
We'll be right back.
Hey, guess what?
You can now order transcripts of any interview I've done for the incredibly reasonable price of two and a half bucks each.
Listen, finding a good transcriptionist is near impossible, but I've got one now.
Just go to Scott Horton dot org slash transcripts, enter the name and date of the interview you want written up, click the PayPal button and I'll have it in your email in 72 hours.
Max, you don't need a PayPal account to do this.
Man, I'm really going to have to learn how to talk more good.
That's Scott Horton dot org slash transcripts.
Hey, I'll check out the audio book of Lou Rockwell's Fascism versus Capitalism, narrated by me, Scott Horton at Audible dot com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty from medieval history to the Rampal Revolution.
Rockwell blasts our status enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan Fascism versus Capitalism by Lou Rockwell for audio book.
Find it at Audible, Amazon, iTunes or just click in the right margin of my website at Scott Horton dot org.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for Wall Street Window dot com.
Mike Swanson knows his stuff.
He made a killing running his own hedge fund and always gets out of the stock market before the government generated bubbles pop, which is, by the way, what he's doing right now, selling all the stocks and betting on gold and commodities.
Sign up at Wall Street Window dot com and get real time updates from Mike on all his market moves.
It's hard to know how to protect your savings and earn a good return in an economy like this.
Mike Swanson can help follow along on paper and see for yourself.
Wall Street Window dot com.