KramerDSP
04-25-2010, 11:51 AM
Long Post Warning!
While looking through archives of older Ron Paul interviews, I came across this gem. RP was interviewed by Yahoo! Finance's Tech Ticker in July of 2009 regarding what he would have done if he were elected President in 2008 (mostly regarding the economy).
YouTube - What Would President Paul Do ? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJdItySlf4E)
This gave me an idea. In 2007, Ron Paul Forums was a hotbed of projects and collaborations. Now, there's not nearly as much of that going on around here. I'm as guilty as anybody of that, but I was thinking one thing we could do is work together on a video project on this thread. More specifically, towards creating a script for an epic YouTube video that would make "A New Hope" and the best of Aravoth's Triology (I feel like he's Sergio Leone or something :D) look like ripples in a pond (from a viral-spreading perspective, not necessarily in terms of quality).
The goal of this video, at least in my eyes, would be having clips of Ron Paul over the years talking about his transition plan were he or someone similar to him become President. We could juxtapose it with screenshots of standard mainstream media headlines that call him kooky, quixotic, and a longshot. I can't help at all with the audio or music stuff, but I was thinking each of us in our own ways have some ideas and we could harness it through this thread, and then Aravoth, Elib3rty, AdamT or one of the other experts on this forum could simply create an epic video using the script we as a forum have worked on together.
Here are some money quotes, IMHO. If anyone wants to jump in and try and cut out quotes and make it all flow together, added in with clips of establishment Politicians and Mainstream News Media making hypocrites of themselves, etc., that would be great.
From Tech Ticker Interview: (A goldmine of quotes to select from) (http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-07-17/what-would-ron-paul-do-2/)
Aaron Task: While the politicians here in Washington and the pundits across the country are debating the state of the economy and whether or not we need a second stimulus, Texas Congressman Ron Paul is taking a contrarian view, as he often does, about what the government should and shouldn’t be doing for Americans.
If you had won the presidency, and obviously you ran for the presidency, what would you be doing differently than what President Obama has done, specifically with regard to how he’s handled the economic crisis?
Ron Paul: I would have done a lot less.
Aaron Task: A lot less?
Ron Paul: I would have allowed the bankruptcies to occur. We allow Lehman to go bankrupt so it helps Goldman Sachs. And then we bail out AIG that bails out Goldman Sachs. The people that were overextended shouldn’t be bailed out, debt should be liquidated. The sooner the debt is liquidated the better, the faster the prices come down. To really understand the issue you need to understand 1921. The recession, depression that came after World War I one year along because we didn’t believe in all this intervention. Hoover messed things up and Roosevelt compounded it because they believed the government had to prop up prices, especially price of labor. It didn’t work.
Aaron Task: If you had been President again, what role would you give the Federal government to help the estimated 16 million uninsured Americans and the millions of American families who are at risk of losing their homes right now?
Ron Paul: Well, first you have to stop the inflation and you have to deregulate, then you give tax credits to the people who take care of themselves or to the doctors who provide the care. And in a transition, and I talked about this in the campaign, in a transition because we have so many people so dependent on government, say the elderly. You know, my ideal society isn’t going to arrive in a week or two. We’re in a four year presidency.
So my argument is that you can do that; you can take care of people but never with a deficit, never by expanding the spending. It would be by cutting spending and I would cut money oversees. I’d cut hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of this maintaining our empire around the world. Bring that money home, take care of the people who are dependent and then work for the day where we can trust freedom once again and understand how free markets actually operate.
Aaron Task: In the past you’ve lobbied that the U.S. should be out of the U.N. entirely and we should disengage. People look at that and say you want us to disengage from the world. Isn’t the U.S. a force of good in the world?
Ron Paul: No, I think it’s the opposite. I want to really been engaged. These people who talk about free trade and engagement around the world have given us sanctions against Cuba for 40 years. So, I’m the one that wants to trade and travel and deal with Cuba. And same way with Iran. I want to be engaged. I would say move the navy away from there and talk to them and say, “Look, let’s start off with a soccer game or something.”
Aaron Task: Right.
Republican: Let’s break the ice, let’s talk to people. Let’s not threaten. What we have in foreign policy is we have two polices. One: we threaten and if they do our bidding we give them a lot of money. If they don’t we bomb them. And I say just talk to them and don’t threaten them and this whole idea that North Korea is a threat to the United States or the Iranians are going to drop a bomb is sort of like the argument that we had to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein was going to bomb Washington DC. I mean it’s nothing more than war propaganda to build up the military industrial complex.
Aaron Task: Alright, turning back to the economy, what is your sense of the state of the U.S. economy right now? How optimistic or pessimistic are you?
Ron Paul: Very pessimistic. I think we might be through a third of it and nobody knows how long it will last. Correction is good. We want to correct problems. But they won’t allow that correction. The more we do to interfere with the correction the longer it will last. The Depression actually ended after World War 2. The war did not end the Depression. I remember the war and we lived in very depressed conditions… wage and price controls and people didn’t have automobiles. It was very depressing. It took that long to liquidate all the debt and bad investment. Finally then the people came back and they got jobs and they weren’t in debt and we went back to work again. The one good thing that is happening right now is that people are starting to save money. The government is frantic, they say, “You don’t want to save money, we want you to borrow more money and buy stuff.”
Aaron Task: Right, government says we want you to spend.
Republican: The government wants you to borrow more money and buy stuff. Well no, they don’t need to buy stuff, they need to save money and pay down debt and then we’ll go back to work. And the faster that happens the better it is for us.
Aaron Task: Right, so obviously hindsight is 20-20. But who do you blame, if anybody, for the housing bubble, the boom and bust we just went through? Is it more the Fed, is it Wall Street, is it the American home owners who bought more houses than they could afford, or your Democratic colleague Barney Frank who a lot of people say it was people like him who pushed low-income housing and people couldn’t afford it.
Ron Paul: One person.
Aaron Task: One person?
Ron Paul: Keynes. Keynes did it because he came into vogue into the 1920s and the 1930s and believe believed it and they’ve been living by this and Nixon put the rubber stamp on for all Republicans, “We’re all Keynesians now, we all have been, we believe in deficit financing, printing press money,” and that created the bubble. So it’s an intellectual fight. Keynes has lost this and people are starting to recognize that the system doesn’t work. So now the underground thought process right now… the thinking goes now on the Internet and elsewhere is Austrian economics. They have the answers to our problems.
Aaron Task: Right, but it seems that Keynes is making a comeback, at least here in Washington DC more recently.
Ron Paul: That’s the last hurrah, it’s not working, that’s like saying, “Well we’ve had these two stimulus packages, that’s all Keynes. We need one more.” People are laughing at that.
Aaron Task: What is your sense of the political appetite right now for another stimulus package? Do you think we’re going to see the Democrats try?
Ron Paul: Yea, they will and it might get passed and it might be passed and they’ll probably wait till next month when the economy has a few more bad statistics and unemployment’s 11%, and they will frantically pass more money and continue to do the things that created the problem in the first place.
YouTube - Ron Paul's State of the Republic Speech (3 of 3) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAHRN-foivQ)
The prevailing attitude of the people, as it once was in early America, must be that of liberty and self reliance, rather than the nanny state and dependency, relying on government force to mold all private choices.
If this is understood, a smooth, although not painless, transition to a free society is achievable. Ignoring this option will be very destructive to everything that is dear to the hearts of most Americans.
What is it that we must do? We must immediately embark on:
Balance the budget by reducing spending
Change our foreign policy to that of non-intervention
A full audit and more supervision of the Federal Reserve leading to abolishing the Federal Reserve
Legalize competition to the Federal Reserve with competing currencies
Regain respect for civil liberties and privacy while reigning in the CIA
Wean ourselves off the dependence of wealth transfers by government
Abolish crony capitalism: no subsidies, no bailouts, no regulatory or tax privileges to protect the powerful elite, especially the military-industrial complex
Eliminate the income tax, inheritance tax and taxes on savings and dividends.
None of this can happen without the restoration of Congress to its dominant position of the three branches of government as was originally intended by the Constitution. The Executive and Judicial must be reined in, and Congress must assert its prerogatives over all legislation curtailing all unconstitutional agendae through budgetary controls.
(1 minute, 35 seconds thus far)
Signs abound that angry Americans are now more ready than ever before for a change in direction that is indeed real. If this program were improvised, even suddenly and dramatically, the adjustment, though significant and to a degree somewhat painful, would be much shorter and of minor consequence compared to the chaos and poverty that will result if we refuse to change our gluttonous appetite for a free lunch.
(2 minutes total for the entire clip)
YouTube - A Very Good Interview of Ron Paul by PBS's Judy Woodruff (Part 1 of 2) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz6p2anpFHE)
PAUL: All empires end, end badly, for economic reasons, because you can't afford them. If you look out through all of history, eventually they collapse. And you may be militarily powerful, but eventually you undermine the finances.
The Soviet system collapsed. I was drafted during the Cuban crisis. We thought we were going to have a hot war. We never did. The Soviet system collapsed, because they couldn't afford it, and their system was nonviable.
Our system isn't viable, either. We can't have a current account deficit of $800 billion a year. We can't owe foreigners $2.7 trillion and think we can keep paying them interest and keep borrowing money. They'll quit doing it, and that's why the dollar is weakening.
And that's why we face a major crisis. And all I want to do is stop it from collapsing, and that means you have to change foreign policy. You have to save a lot of money. If we want to tide some people over here, the only way we can take care of the people who are sick and dependent on government programs is by cutting somewhere else. And I say we have to cut our empire back in order to save our economy here.
My goal is just to have a transition period so you don't have a collapse of the economy and a breakdown of the political system, which happens if you don't deal with this. And this is what's happened so many times over history.
WOODRUFF: Another question back here at home, you're an obstetrician. You've delivered, what, 4,000 babies over the course of your career in medicine. You did not, as I understand it, take Medicare and Medicaid payments from your patients. You either took nothing at all or you negotiated down. Are these programs you would do away with, Medicare, Medicaid? And if so, what would you...
PAUL: No, but I would -- I would have a transition period, like I said before. I'd cut money from overseas and allow people who are totally dependent to have this care.
But I'd let young people get out of Social Security and have them get options to have their own medical care, because I was raised at a time when medical care was provided by a lot of people. And they had no government programs. And I never saw anybody out in the streets.
I worked in a hospital in San Antonio. It was a church hospital. It was always the lowest charge or nothing, and everybody was taken care of. Today everything is the maximum charge, because everybody is on third-party payments. The government has to pay, and nobody says, "Who's the government?" But the government can pay, so everybody gets the biggest bill possible. Everybody gets extra tests.
So we have a system now that just encourages very, very expensive medicine, and it diminishes the chances of the poor people to have medical care.
WOODRUFF: So get the federal government out of medical payments altogether?
PAUL: Eventually that is the case, but certainly, in the transition period, that's not my goal is to attack those programs. As a matter of fact, I'm the only one that offers a way to pay for it. Right now, they just add on.
The Republicans gives us prescription drug programs, and the Democrats gives you S-CHIP, and they don't have any money. They're going to print that money; that's all they're going to do. They can't even tax anymore, because taxes -- we're taxed to the hilt, so they're going to print the money, create the inflation, and cause the cost of medicine to go up. We're on a foolhardy course that has to be changed.
Morning Joe Interview (The one where Joe asks "what did you, Ron Paul, know what nobody else knew at the time..."):
REPORTER: So, Congressman, is your solution then to get rid of the Federal Reserve?
What else are you proposing we do here to make sure this kind of stuff doesn’t happen again?
PAUL: Well, first off we ought to obey the Constitution, live within our means and balance the budget, quit war-mongering and quit the welfare state.
Minor things like that. But eventually you don’t need the Federal Reserve. No, it’s caused too much trouble.
Central banking has always been harmful. It’s a seductive way of financing big government. Conservatives love it because you can pay the military bills. Liberals love it because you can pay the welfare state bill. But it’s all deception, it’s all a tax. It eventually destroys and hurts the very people you are trying to help.
You try to help poor people by giving them stuff for free but you end up giving them inflation. They are the first ones to lose their jobs, they’re the ones who suffer the most from inflation. We have inflation today much more so than anybody admits because that’s why the cost of medicine is so high and the cost of education is so high. It’s the devaluation of the dollar.
So with all these good intentions of helping poor people, the very people who are doing this are actually making it more harmful and hurting those they want to help.
YouTube - Ron Paul vs. Michael Moore on Larry King CNN 10/29/2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hn6ad4_FzM)
KING: So you would get out of Afghanistan and Iraq posthaste?
PAUL: I would, and my saying during the campaign was “we just marched in, we can just march home.” Nothing good can come of it and it’s an undeclared war. It’s an immoral war. We don’t have any money. The longer we’re there, the worse it’s going to get and we just need to come home. We can’t nation-build and besides, I will win this argument because we are bankrupt and we can’t afford it, so it’s going to end badly if we don’t come to our senses and just say, “Let’s quit this militarism around the world.” I mean, we’re in 130 countries with 700 bases around the world and we cannot sustain these and it is, it’s pumped up by both the Left and the Right in the Congress, “Oh, we can’t do away with this weapon. It will be bad for jobs.” There is conservative Keynesism and Liberal Keynesism, always government management, which always fails and gives us the financial crisis that we’re in.
While looking through archives of older Ron Paul interviews, I came across this gem. RP was interviewed by Yahoo! Finance's Tech Ticker in July of 2009 regarding what he would have done if he were elected President in 2008 (mostly regarding the economy).
YouTube - What Would President Paul Do ? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJdItySlf4E)
This gave me an idea. In 2007, Ron Paul Forums was a hotbed of projects and collaborations. Now, there's not nearly as much of that going on around here. I'm as guilty as anybody of that, but I was thinking one thing we could do is work together on a video project on this thread. More specifically, towards creating a script for an epic YouTube video that would make "A New Hope" and the best of Aravoth's Triology (I feel like he's Sergio Leone or something :D) look like ripples in a pond (from a viral-spreading perspective, not necessarily in terms of quality).
The goal of this video, at least in my eyes, would be having clips of Ron Paul over the years talking about his transition plan were he or someone similar to him become President. We could juxtapose it with screenshots of standard mainstream media headlines that call him kooky, quixotic, and a longshot. I can't help at all with the audio or music stuff, but I was thinking each of us in our own ways have some ideas and we could harness it through this thread, and then Aravoth, Elib3rty, AdamT or one of the other experts on this forum could simply create an epic video using the script we as a forum have worked on together.
Here are some money quotes, IMHO. If anyone wants to jump in and try and cut out quotes and make it all flow together, added in with clips of establishment Politicians and Mainstream News Media making hypocrites of themselves, etc., that would be great.
From Tech Ticker Interview: (A goldmine of quotes to select from) (http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-07-17/what-would-ron-paul-do-2/)
Aaron Task: While the politicians here in Washington and the pundits across the country are debating the state of the economy and whether or not we need a second stimulus, Texas Congressman Ron Paul is taking a contrarian view, as he often does, about what the government should and shouldn’t be doing for Americans.
If you had won the presidency, and obviously you ran for the presidency, what would you be doing differently than what President Obama has done, specifically with regard to how he’s handled the economic crisis?
Ron Paul: I would have done a lot less.
Aaron Task: A lot less?
Ron Paul: I would have allowed the bankruptcies to occur. We allow Lehman to go bankrupt so it helps Goldman Sachs. And then we bail out AIG that bails out Goldman Sachs. The people that were overextended shouldn’t be bailed out, debt should be liquidated. The sooner the debt is liquidated the better, the faster the prices come down. To really understand the issue you need to understand 1921. The recession, depression that came after World War I one year along because we didn’t believe in all this intervention. Hoover messed things up and Roosevelt compounded it because they believed the government had to prop up prices, especially price of labor. It didn’t work.
Aaron Task: If you had been President again, what role would you give the Federal government to help the estimated 16 million uninsured Americans and the millions of American families who are at risk of losing their homes right now?
Ron Paul: Well, first you have to stop the inflation and you have to deregulate, then you give tax credits to the people who take care of themselves or to the doctors who provide the care. And in a transition, and I talked about this in the campaign, in a transition because we have so many people so dependent on government, say the elderly. You know, my ideal society isn’t going to arrive in a week or two. We’re in a four year presidency.
So my argument is that you can do that; you can take care of people but never with a deficit, never by expanding the spending. It would be by cutting spending and I would cut money oversees. I’d cut hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of this maintaining our empire around the world. Bring that money home, take care of the people who are dependent and then work for the day where we can trust freedom once again and understand how free markets actually operate.
Aaron Task: In the past you’ve lobbied that the U.S. should be out of the U.N. entirely and we should disengage. People look at that and say you want us to disengage from the world. Isn’t the U.S. a force of good in the world?
Ron Paul: No, I think it’s the opposite. I want to really been engaged. These people who talk about free trade and engagement around the world have given us sanctions against Cuba for 40 years. So, I’m the one that wants to trade and travel and deal with Cuba. And same way with Iran. I want to be engaged. I would say move the navy away from there and talk to them and say, “Look, let’s start off with a soccer game or something.”
Aaron Task: Right.
Republican: Let’s break the ice, let’s talk to people. Let’s not threaten. What we have in foreign policy is we have two polices. One: we threaten and if they do our bidding we give them a lot of money. If they don’t we bomb them. And I say just talk to them and don’t threaten them and this whole idea that North Korea is a threat to the United States or the Iranians are going to drop a bomb is sort of like the argument that we had to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein was going to bomb Washington DC. I mean it’s nothing more than war propaganda to build up the military industrial complex.
Aaron Task: Alright, turning back to the economy, what is your sense of the state of the U.S. economy right now? How optimistic or pessimistic are you?
Ron Paul: Very pessimistic. I think we might be through a third of it and nobody knows how long it will last. Correction is good. We want to correct problems. But they won’t allow that correction. The more we do to interfere with the correction the longer it will last. The Depression actually ended after World War 2. The war did not end the Depression. I remember the war and we lived in very depressed conditions… wage and price controls and people didn’t have automobiles. It was very depressing. It took that long to liquidate all the debt and bad investment. Finally then the people came back and they got jobs and they weren’t in debt and we went back to work again. The one good thing that is happening right now is that people are starting to save money. The government is frantic, they say, “You don’t want to save money, we want you to borrow more money and buy stuff.”
Aaron Task: Right, government says we want you to spend.
Republican: The government wants you to borrow more money and buy stuff. Well no, they don’t need to buy stuff, they need to save money and pay down debt and then we’ll go back to work. And the faster that happens the better it is for us.
Aaron Task: Right, so obviously hindsight is 20-20. But who do you blame, if anybody, for the housing bubble, the boom and bust we just went through? Is it more the Fed, is it Wall Street, is it the American home owners who bought more houses than they could afford, or your Democratic colleague Barney Frank who a lot of people say it was people like him who pushed low-income housing and people couldn’t afford it.
Ron Paul: One person.
Aaron Task: One person?
Ron Paul: Keynes. Keynes did it because he came into vogue into the 1920s and the 1930s and believe believed it and they’ve been living by this and Nixon put the rubber stamp on for all Republicans, “We’re all Keynesians now, we all have been, we believe in deficit financing, printing press money,” and that created the bubble. So it’s an intellectual fight. Keynes has lost this and people are starting to recognize that the system doesn’t work. So now the underground thought process right now… the thinking goes now on the Internet and elsewhere is Austrian economics. They have the answers to our problems.
Aaron Task: Right, but it seems that Keynes is making a comeback, at least here in Washington DC more recently.
Ron Paul: That’s the last hurrah, it’s not working, that’s like saying, “Well we’ve had these two stimulus packages, that’s all Keynes. We need one more.” People are laughing at that.
Aaron Task: What is your sense of the political appetite right now for another stimulus package? Do you think we’re going to see the Democrats try?
Ron Paul: Yea, they will and it might get passed and it might be passed and they’ll probably wait till next month when the economy has a few more bad statistics and unemployment’s 11%, and they will frantically pass more money and continue to do the things that created the problem in the first place.
YouTube - Ron Paul's State of the Republic Speech (3 of 3) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAHRN-foivQ)
The prevailing attitude of the people, as it once was in early America, must be that of liberty and self reliance, rather than the nanny state and dependency, relying on government force to mold all private choices.
If this is understood, a smooth, although not painless, transition to a free society is achievable. Ignoring this option will be very destructive to everything that is dear to the hearts of most Americans.
What is it that we must do? We must immediately embark on:
Balance the budget by reducing spending
Change our foreign policy to that of non-intervention
A full audit and more supervision of the Federal Reserve leading to abolishing the Federal Reserve
Legalize competition to the Federal Reserve with competing currencies
Regain respect for civil liberties and privacy while reigning in the CIA
Wean ourselves off the dependence of wealth transfers by government
Abolish crony capitalism: no subsidies, no bailouts, no regulatory or tax privileges to protect the powerful elite, especially the military-industrial complex
Eliminate the income tax, inheritance tax and taxes on savings and dividends.
None of this can happen without the restoration of Congress to its dominant position of the three branches of government as was originally intended by the Constitution. The Executive and Judicial must be reined in, and Congress must assert its prerogatives over all legislation curtailing all unconstitutional agendae through budgetary controls.
(1 minute, 35 seconds thus far)
Signs abound that angry Americans are now more ready than ever before for a change in direction that is indeed real. If this program were improvised, even suddenly and dramatically, the adjustment, though significant and to a degree somewhat painful, would be much shorter and of minor consequence compared to the chaos and poverty that will result if we refuse to change our gluttonous appetite for a free lunch.
(2 minutes total for the entire clip)
YouTube - A Very Good Interview of Ron Paul by PBS's Judy Woodruff (Part 1 of 2) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz6p2anpFHE)
PAUL: All empires end, end badly, for economic reasons, because you can't afford them. If you look out through all of history, eventually they collapse. And you may be militarily powerful, but eventually you undermine the finances.
The Soviet system collapsed. I was drafted during the Cuban crisis. We thought we were going to have a hot war. We never did. The Soviet system collapsed, because they couldn't afford it, and their system was nonviable.
Our system isn't viable, either. We can't have a current account deficit of $800 billion a year. We can't owe foreigners $2.7 trillion and think we can keep paying them interest and keep borrowing money. They'll quit doing it, and that's why the dollar is weakening.
And that's why we face a major crisis. And all I want to do is stop it from collapsing, and that means you have to change foreign policy. You have to save a lot of money. If we want to tide some people over here, the only way we can take care of the people who are sick and dependent on government programs is by cutting somewhere else. And I say we have to cut our empire back in order to save our economy here.
My goal is just to have a transition period so you don't have a collapse of the economy and a breakdown of the political system, which happens if you don't deal with this. And this is what's happened so many times over history.
WOODRUFF: Another question back here at home, you're an obstetrician. You've delivered, what, 4,000 babies over the course of your career in medicine. You did not, as I understand it, take Medicare and Medicaid payments from your patients. You either took nothing at all or you negotiated down. Are these programs you would do away with, Medicare, Medicaid? And if so, what would you...
PAUL: No, but I would -- I would have a transition period, like I said before. I'd cut money from overseas and allow people who are totally dependent to have this care.
But I'd let young people get out of Social Security and have them get options to have their own medical care, because I was raised at a time when medical care was provided by a lot of people. And they had no government programs. And I never saw anybody out in the streets.
I worked in a hospital in San Antonio. It was a church hospital. It was always the lowest charge or nothing, and everybody was taken care of. Today everything is the maximum charge, because everybody is on third-party payments. The government has to pay, and nobody says, "Who's the government?" But the government can pay, so everybody gets the biggest bill possible. Everybody gets extra tests.
So we have a system now that just encourages very, very expensive medicine, and it diminishes the chances of the poor people to have medical care.
WOODRUFF: So get the federal government out of medical payments altogether?
PAUL: Eventually that is the case, but certainly, in the transition period, that's not my goal is to attack those programs. As a matter of fact, I'm the only one that offers a way to pay for it. Right now, they just add on.
The Republicans gives us prescription drug programs, and the Democrats gives you S-CHIP, and they don't have any money. They're going to print that money; that's all they're going to do. They can't even tax anymore, because taxes -- we're taxed to the hilt, so they're going to print the money, create the inflation, and cause the cost of medicine to go up. We're on a foolhardy course that has to be changed.
Morning Joe Interview (The one where Joe asks "what did you, Ron Paul, know what nobody else knew at the time..."):
REPORTER: So, Congressman, is your solution then to get rid of the Federal Reserve?
What else are you proposing we do here to make sure this kind of stuff doesn’t happen again?
PAUL: Well, first off we ought to obey the Constitution, live within our means and balance the budget, quit war-mongering and quit the welfare state.
Minor things like that. But eventually you don’t need the Federal Reserve. No, it’s caused too much trouble.
Central banking has always been harmful. It’s a seductive way of financing big government. Conservatives love it because you can pay the military bills. Liberals love it because you can pay the welfare state bill. But it’s all deception, it’s all a tax. It eventually destroys and hurts the very people you are trying to help.
You try to help poor people by giving them stuff for free but you end up giving them inflation. They are the first ones to lose their jobs, they’re the ones who suffer the most from inflation. We have inflation today much more so than anybody admits because that’s why the cost of medicine is so high and the cost of education is so high. It’s the devaluation of the dollar.
So with all these good intentions of helping poor people, the very people who are doing this are actually making it more harmful and hurting those they want to help.
YouTube - Ron Paul vs. Michael Moore on Larry King CNN 10/29/2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hn6ad4_FzM)
KING: So you would get out of Afghanistan and Iraq posthaste?
PAUL: I would, and my saying during the campaign was “we just marched in, we can just march home.” Nothing good can come of it and it’s an undeclared war. It’s an immoral war. We don’t have any money. The longer we’re there, the worse it’s going to get and we just need to come home. We can’t nation-build and besides, I will win this argument because we are bankrupt and we can’t afford it, so it’s going to end badly if we don’t come to our senses and just say, “Let’s quit this militarism around the world.” I mean, we’re in 130 countries with 700 bases around the world and we cannot sustain these and it is, it’s pumped up by both the Left and the Right in the Congress, “Oh, we can’t do away with this weapon. It will be bad for jobs.” There is conservative Keynesism and Liberal Keynesism, always government management, which always fails and gives us the financial crisis that we’re in.