12/17/05 – Ron Paul – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome to my lecture.
Alright, my friends, welcome back to the Weekend Interview Show.
I'm your host, Scott Paul.
He's the author of the books Challenge to Liberty, The Case for Gold, and Republic, If You Can Keep It.
Representing District 14 around Surfside, Texas, Dr. Ron Paul.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Paul.
Thank you.
Nice to be with you.
It's great to have you on again, sir.
And, you know, I was researching about you and, you know, obviously, mostly on this show I like to talk about foreign policy and the police state and gold money and that kind of thing, but I realize there's really not too much available on the Internet about you personally and where you come from and how you became the Dr. Paul that we all know and love.
So, I wondered if perhaps you could tell us a little bit about where you come from and how you became a libertarian and that sort of thing.
Well, I guess my claim has always been I must have been born that way because I can't remember when it started.
I think there were a lot of natural instincts for a lot of us to just enjoy the fact that we ought to be left alone.
But I think in some ways that natural tendency was knocked out of me by public schools and public education and through college and it wasn't until I discovered Austrian economics reading Hayek and Mises and Rothbard and getting to know Leonard Rhee at the Fee Foundation that I realized that there were a lot of people who seemed to be writing about what I agreed with and I was delighted to find people I thought were very intelligent defending the position I've held and then all of a sudden the whole philosophy came together.
But I was born and raised in Pennsylvania in the Pittsburgh area, went to college in Pennsylvania and then to medical school in North Carolina.
While I was in my training up in Michigan after medical school, I was drafted into the Air Force and ended up in Texas and stayed in the Air Force for five years but then went back and became a specialist in obstetrics and gynecology and settled in Texas.
But because of the reading in economics and more than anything else, I as a lark ran for Congress in the 70s and didn't expect much to happen and was elected.
So economics in the 70s were very tumultuous with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods and runaway inflation and stagflation that they had.
It gave me a chance just to talk about economics and I really was surprised I ever got elected.
So I've been in and out of politics ever since.
Now, when you were drafted, that was during the Vietnam era, you didn't have to go to Vietnam though?
No, I was called up, actually it was a little bit before Vietnam got really moving along, it was in the Cuban crisis which would have been 62 and by the time I actually got into the service, the crisis didn't last that long but I still had to stay and I was in for two years on active duty and then I stayed in the reserves after that.
So I was there up until 1960, I guess 68, 63 to 68 but did not have to go to Vietnam.
I traveled a lot as a flight surgeon to Korea and different places did but fortunately for me I didn't have to go to Vietnam.
I guess you were kind of lucky you had already finished medical school before you got drafted so you didn't have to carry a gun, huh?
Yeah, that was interesting.
I do remember World War II in Korea very well because one of my teachers was redrafted and went off and got killed and even early on I always knew that I couldn't shoot and kill people in war and I think it helped motivate me to go into medicine.
Alright everybody, hang tight right there Dr. Paul.
We'll be right back, it's the Weekend Interview Show with Ron Paul.
Alright my friends, welcome back to the Weekend Interview Show.
I'm Scott Wharton and I'm talking with Congressman Ron Paul.
His website is house.gov.
Paul.
And also you can read his archives at antiwar.com.
Now when we went out to break story you were talking about you had a teacher who was drafted and killed in Korea and how that kind of helped push you toward medicine as an interest.
Is that right?
Right, I always knew early on that I could not participate in all that shooting and killing so I thought during World War II in Korea it was just sort of thought that we'd grow up and be drafted and sure enough I was but I was determined that I would be on the medical side of it rather than on the shooting side of it and I think that helped push me in that direction and helped look into the libertarian views on foreign policy as well.
Well, yeah, not only did you end up being a flight surgeon and helping to save lives during your time in the army but after that you became an obstetrician and now you help bring lives into the world, quite the opposite of being a soldier.
Yeah, in many ways I think it was and I don't, it had to do with my personality I think as well as it fit the philosophy too.
It just never made any sense to me that we should be fighting some of these wars and the more I studied it and studied history and looked at what Wilson did with World War I and how that led to World War II it just is so much nonsense and so much foolishness and so much death and destruction that need not be and it's just a matter of I guess trying to educate people and wake people up to our foreign policy and hopefully we'll make some inroads right now though we still have a lot of work to do.
Now this is an older conservatism that you seem to hold here.
Modern day conservatism has it that being a tough guy and kicking butt is more appropriate and more admirable I guess than anything else.
Yeah, the one really disturbing aspect of some of this modern day conservatism is done in the name of Christian values too.
There was somebody on the House floor just the other day in this debate we had on a resolution yesterday is that we had to support this position of continuing the fight in Iraq because of the Beatitudes, blessed are the peacemakers and I thought what a distortion.
They were claiming to hide behind the Beatitudes in the support for this war of preemption and the war of aggression.
Yeah, and a war in which all the Iraqi Christians have been forced to flee.
That's right, that's right and what did we do?
We turned the country over to likely, it'll be that way, a radical Shiite theocracy aligned with Iran.
So we have the unintended consequences of the policies even if you want to try to give them the benefit of the doubt that are well intended.
There's always the unintended consequences that seem to be opposite of what they claimed they were trying to do.
Well, and Iran as the big winner of the elections that's the headline from the Financial Times this morning.
Yeah, I mean this is, it'll just lead one to another and here even yesterday we had a vote on a resolution, you know, just stirring up trouble with Syria, you know, and that's why I dwell not so much on just figuring out who to blame precisely for where we are at this moment but to try to look at overall policy because even those who have become critical of the administration endorsed what the administration wanted and gave them the authority and now they want to play politics and they blame him and the president for doing things.
At the same time they're all endorsing the policy of interventionism and military force and it looks like they're stirring up trouble with Iran and Syria.
And you know you're absolutely right about that.
Just in the last week when George Bush gave his speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center, surely these are the people who blame him for not carrying out the war properly I guess, but when it came to broad topics in terms of preemption and democratizing the poor backwards people who need democratizing, etc., standing ovations all around at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Yeah, that can be pretty discouraging.
And something that you've often emphasized in your writings and your speeches is the relationship between foreign interventionism and big government here at home.
The idea that we can't really have a Department of Homeland Security unless there's a foreign war going on so that they can say, hey, don't you know there's a war on?
Yeah, and I think this is pretty much what has happened throughout history.
If the wars are going on overseas, government forever grows at home and abuse of civil liberties and excess of spending and inflation, it just seems like it's over and over again and we're doing the same thing.
When I talk to groups, both conservative and liberal groups, I always acknowledge that you may well disagree with me on this.
I say, but I'm going to win the argument, not so much that I'm going to convert my colleagues here into Congress about the foreign policy.
I say, but we're going to run out of money.
And eventually empires collapse, as did the Soviet system.
They collapse because they can't economically be supported.
And finally, they just run out of wealth.
And that's what will happen to us.
I think it was kind of a rude awakening in my childhood to realize that most Congressmen really, they're just up there worried about their day to day and how they're going to get by and how they're going to make a million dollar deal when they get out of office and that kind of thing, as opposed to really being mindful that this is history in the making here.
Every law they pass, every war they start, especially, this is the history of the world going on here.
And when you say all empires fall, Dr. Paul, we all know that from the time we're little children.
We know that if America stays a limited constitutional republic, it can last another 500 years.
If we go down the road of empire, we'll destroy ourselves.
We all know that.
Even little children understand this.
We still have a lot of naive people in our country that still don't even understand that we're an empire.
They still see us as doing this wonderful service to the world of spreading goodness and democracy.
That's part of the educational needs that we have, but some days I think it will come before they even wake up and realize what's happening.
Well, I guess for the average person in my neighborhood to not really understand is forgivable, but for the Congress to not understand is unforgivable.
These are the people who are responsible for the future of this nation.
If they're driving us over a cliff and they're as ignorant about foreign policy and economics as my next door neighbor, then what kind of hope do we have if we got maybe Ron Paul and his three or four friends up there who even understand how these things work?
Yeah, it does sound rather dismal, but I think we also can look on the positive side that we're probably making more inroads than we did 15 or 20 or 30 years ago.
Washington doesn't reflect it, but with the use of the Internet and certain radio programs, I think we are reaching a lot of people, and the Internet has been a real help to us.
So I think the educational efforts are well in place, and we don't have to worry about converting and educating 50% of the people.
We just have to get more of the individuals who are in position to influence opinions.
In our teachers, you know how the Mises Institute works and bring about new teachers in universities and all, those kind of things are happening, so in some ways we should look on the positive things as well, although we'd better be prepared for the difficulties ahead of us too.
Right, well, and that's a really good point.
They say there's, what, 50 neo-conservatives and 40 of them are newspaper columnists?
Yeah, that's it.
If all the libertarians would have been in the positions of the neo-cons, the neo-cons really proved the point.
They had a philosophy and a belief, and they got a position of influence, and they became very, very effective.
I mean, how many people in the country even know what neo-conservatism is?
But because they were well placed, they were able to use the propaganda machine and affect policy.
So hopefully our views will prevail and that we will have an influence on policy someday.
Well, I really appreciate that optimism.
You know, I'm reading Justin Raimondo's biography of Murray Rothbard right now, an enemy of the state, the life of Murray and Rothbard.
And he talks in there about all these different times where literally there was Murray Rothbard and a couple of guys at the Foundation for Economic Education, and that was about it.
They were the only libertarians in the entire country.
They couldn't find a single journal to write a single article for.
They were having to go and make alliances with extreme left-wingers and extreme right-wingers and trying to do something to go against the national review grain, and they had basically nothing.
And it made me think, you know, Murray Rothbard was alive today and could see antiwar.com and lurockwell.com and Mises.org and see the amount of just the number of unique visitors a month going and exposing themselves to this kind of information.
I think he'd be absolutely out of control with the life.
Oh, yeah.
I think he would be, and we have to make the best use of it, too.
All right, everybody, I'm talking with Dr.
Ron Paul.
He represents District 14 in South Texas near Surfside.
He's a Republican, although he may not sound like it from his antiwar stance, but it's definitely true.
And I guess I want to say the Patriot Act stuff, I guess, until we get back from this break because we have all kinds of new news coming out about the Patriot Act and the National Security Agency tapping Americans' phones and that kind of thing.
But I wanted to ask you real quick about the Republican Congress and how they seem to do just nothing but carry water for George Bush.
I was talking with Jeff Deist, your aide, yesterday, and he was telling me how basically they just issue resolution after resolution just to browbeat the opposition, just to waste time and, you know, pass a resolution that says anybody who disagrees with us is terrible.
That's right.
If he needs a little bit of support, they put these resolutions in just to do whatever the president thinks he needs.
But the other day, in one way, it backfired.
The Democrats forced a vote on torture and accepting the Senate language, you know, McCain, about in opposition to torture.
So the Republicans, of course, didn't want this and they worked real hard and they couldn't win the vote, but they had 100 or so voted to support torture.
Then the next day, Bush changed his position and decided that he was against torture, too.
All those Republicans were hanging out there trying to support Bush, and Bush deserves them.
So most of the time it doesn't work that way, but we got a little bit of a chuckle out of there because the diehards tried to help him, but it didn't work out very well.
Yeah, making a list and checking it's why.
Right.
All right, everybody, we'll be right back with Dr. Ron Paul.
It's The Weekend Interview Show.
All right, my friends, welcome back to The Weekend Interview Show.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Dr. Ron Paul, Republican Congressman representing District 14 around Surfside down on the Texas Gulf Coast.
And, Dr. Paul, big news yesterday or two days ago, I guess, about the defeat of the Patriot Act or major portions of it.
I was wondering if you could tell us exactly what happened there.
Okay.
What happened is when they brought the conference report to the House, it passed pretty easily, but when it got to the Senate, the filibuster killed it yesterday.
But the President this morning had his radio message on this very issue really chastising the Democrats and the few Republicans that supported the filibuster, and he was urging them to compromise this out and change it.
But we're, you know, here it is, Saturday evening will be in tomorrow, but I do not think they're going to be able to revive it.
I don't think it's dead, but it sure is dying, and it's a great issue.
And I have always argued that the American people finally did speak out.
Think of all the resolutions sent up here, and I kept thinking all these resolutions, if we have the members of Congress should respond, and of course the House did better.
You know, I think we had like 17 or 18 Republicans vote against it this time.
The first go around, we only had three Republicans.
So there's some progress there.
But although it doesn't look like it's going to pass in the next day or two, unless they pull up something tomorrow and have some type of a compromise on it and make a vote on it.
But I'm afraid if they do get a vote, they might only get it where the sunsets are put back in there, and some of those horrible provisions are sunsetted for four years instead of seven or ten, which isn't a major victory, it's a minor victory.
Because in many ways, if something is bad, and this is why I argue with these guys, if something is bad that you think it should be sunsetted, you shouldn't even be doing it at all.
But they said, well, no, it's bad, but we need it, and we'll look at it again.
So it's a little bit better than not sunsetting, but not a reason why I'll support it, I'll tell you that.
Well, how many more days do you have before y'all come home for Christmas?
Well right now, it looks like we'll finish by Sunday evening.
Tomorrow evening we should be done.
And so there's still this possibility that it would come up.
Well now, if there's any good news that could be mixed with this, it's the fact that the New York Times has broken this story about the National Security Agency spying on Americans.
Oh, absolutely.
That is the military.
And that probably pushed three or four or five over into the filibuster Anti-Patriot Act column yesterday and provided that vote, so that was a story that was very helpful.
Here's something they don't hear me say very often.
Thank you, New York Times.
Even if they were a year late.
Yeah, they waited a year.
They sat on the story for a year, and it turns out they had good timing when they finally did publish it anyway.
Yeah.
You know, I saw Saxby Chambliss, a Republican Senator from the South somewhere, I forget, on hardball yesterday, and he was saying that before the Patriot Act, they didn't even have the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, and it was almost impossible for a police officer or an agent to type a name into a computer and find out if they were terrorists or not.
And I thought, that's funny, because I think I first heard of the NCIC in 1995.
Well, that might tell you about the efficiency of government.
Who knows?
Yeah, right.
Yeah, maybe they proposed it then and they only got it in place after the Obama one.
Sometimes it's a saving grace that they have a lot of bad desires, but maybe they'll never be efficient enough to do the harm they'd like to do to us.
Right.
Well, is it your opinion, sir, that the executive branch had all the power they needed to fight terrorism before the Patriot Act?
Most people who oppose it say that, well, there are certain provisions of it that I don't like, but overall, it's not that bad.
No, there's probably, I mean, if it would have been cut in half, I might have been able to support it, but most of the ones that they really want were totally unnecessary.
I mean, what's the big deal about following the rules that we have followed before and get search forms and, you know, get a judge to look at that and do it through a normal process instead of having tortures and secret prisons and reject habeas corpus, all these things, I mean, that they've gone through and now spying on Americans.
I'm afraid that that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I think they've been doing plenty of that for a long time, but fortunately, this story did come out of the crucial time.
Well, you know, and this also brings up the question of, you know, what if they do, what if the Patriot Act is dead and at least those parts that are going, are scheduled to sunset on the 31st, if they do sunset on the 31st, can't the government basically just do whatever they want anyway, regardless of what the law says?
Yeah, I unfortunately do, and the Congress is so complacent.
I mean, we allow presidents to do what they want in foreign policy.
I mean, how long has it been since they've declared war and the Congress is sort of, oh, you have a war going on, how much money do you need?
You know, that's how bad they are.
So and presidents, and you know, they're rather arrogant about it, too.
I'm going to do this.
I will make the decision.
I will decide when the war starts.
I will decide on who will be spied on, you know, in Congress.
But in this case, we have to give credit to a lot of members of Congress who have finally, you know, perked up their ears to this story.
So I guess our views are somewhat alive.
I hope we keep them well.
Well, and you know, they're coming up on an election year.
So all these House members who've been supporting the president no matter what, now all of a sudden they have their own interests to look out for.
So hopefully we can coerce them or compel them one way or another to erring on the side of liberty.
How many allies, close allies, would you say you have in the House of Representatives?
Well, you know, it's hard to say.
I have the Liberty Committee.
I have 22 members.
About half of them are pretty darn good voters.
But, you know, I tell people that everybody is an ally and nobody is an ally.
You know, it depends on what the issue is when it comes to civil liberties and war.
You know, I work closer with Democrats on economic policy and work closer with Republicans.
The main goal is to get people out there in America sending messages to their members of Congress to come over and help me out on some of these issues.
Yeah, got that right.
All right, everybody.
We'll be right back with more.
Oh, thanks.
We'll have to go now, you know.