Ron Paul comes to Iowa

On November 13, Ron Paul will speak at Iowa State University in Ames. The speech is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Benton Auditorium in the Scheman Building.

On November 14, Ron Paul will headline a fundraiser for Indianola state Rep. Kent Sorenson’s Iowa Senate campaign. The fundraiser is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. in the Iowa Room at the Des Moines Airport Holiday Inn, 6111 Fleur Dr.

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Healthcare Reform is Economic Malpractice

by Ron Paul

As Washington continues debating healthcare reform the rest of the country is primarily concerned about jobs and the economy. It is still uncertain what policies will be implemented, but I am certain about one thing: It will only further devastate our economy and our dollar.

The leadership has come up with a proposal they are confident will be what they consider fiscally responsible, only to have it scored as nearly twice as expensive by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Estimates of past healthcare spending programs have been off by as much as 100 percent so there is no telling what the actual cost will be.

The past century should have taught us one thing: that government intervention is expensive. Government programs lend themselves so easily to waste, fraud and abuse. Combine that with overall inefficiency and it all adds up to a hefty price tag for the taxpayer, with not much leftover for actual services. An outright takeover of an entire sector of the economy, especially one as important as healthcare, is something that we just cannot afford for the government to do right now. Not to mention the fact that it is completely unconstitutional. But Washington insists on torturing the numbers and tinkering around the edges rather than facing this truth.

If healthcare reform does indeed pass, we should not be under the illusion that it will be free. The money to pay for it will have to come from somewhere. They say they will get the money from cutting waste, fraud and abuse, but all of that is seemingly intrinsic to government programs. Since they want to expand the government’s reach we have to assume we will be trading waste, fraud and abuse for waste, fraud and abuse with a bigger budget. The powers that be have insisted the money won’t come from higher taxes, it won’t come from rationing of care, and it won’t come from higher premiums. This can only then put more pressure on the Fed to print the money out of thin air. We already have a weakening dollar. They are accelerating everything that weakened it in the past. Adding this new, monumental pressure could very well be the straw that will break the dollar’s back.

Foreign creditors are already nervous about continuing to invest in the US because of our skyrocketing debt. The explosion of debt that is certain to accompany the enactment of this national health care bill can only add to that nervousness.

Ironically, enactment of the health care bill could help the cause of liberty by hastening the day when Congress is forced by economic circumstances to stop increasing the welfare-warfare state and return to the Constitution.

There are many problems with our current healthcare system, to be sure. There are many tragic stories to be told. However, we need to look at the root of our problems in order to address them properly. More government intervention and bureaucracy injected into healthcare will take a flawed system and make immeasurably worse.

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Show: Glenn Beck Show
Channel: Fox News
Date: 11/06/2009
Host: Judge Andrew Napolitano

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Libertarians and Republicans joined forces this year at the tea parties, town halls and 9/12 rallies to protest big government interfering in our lives. But the parties differ on so many issues. Can the alliance remain or is it now the time for a third party to emerge? Joining us now is Texas Congressman Ron Paul and his son, Rand Paul.

Rand is running for Senate in Kentucky next year. Rand, first to you, you are an unabashed right down the line libertarian, yet you are running in the Republican primary for the United States Senate and leading, I might say, in the latest polls. Why the Republican Party?

Rand Paul: We’re doing quite well, but I’d like to call myself a constitutional conservative and I think that resonates in the Republican primary. I think what we’re finding is as we get our message out is that the message is actually popular. I think there is a disconnect between the Republican primary voter who does believe like myself in limited constitutional government and our leaders who have sometimes let us down.

It’s like the bank bailout. I said I have yet to meet a Republican primary voter who would have voted for it and yet, our leaders did vote for it. So I think there is a disconnect between the leadership and the primary voter. But I think the primary voter and the platform in the Republican Party are very conservative and I think as we get our message out and as we’re rising in the polls, it shows that the message is popular in the Republican primary.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Congressman Paul, we just witnessed a third party candidate running for Congress in Upstate New York. He was a conservative. He had a lot of strong libertarian leanings. The Republican was a moderate. She withdrew from the race and endorsed the Democrat who won. Yet, this conservative/libertarian got 45 percent of the vote. Question, will this spawn… there is his picture, Doug Hoffman. Question, will this spawn more and similar efforts by third party as your son calls them constitutionalist Republicans around the country?

Ron Paul: Well, I think there will be a lot more, but I think it really made Rand’s point that the leadership is at fault so often. It was the leadership that handpicked their candidate that finally dropped out of the race and became a Democrat, so that makes it a very strong point. So hopefully, they’ll get their act together and get the strong candidates that believe in limited government and believe what they say ought to be followed through with policy. That’s where the real problem is. I just don’t see in the near future a third party taking over, not because it wouldn’t be advantageous, but mainly because the laws are so biased and the credibility in the media. It just doesn’t happen. So the two major parties, which very often aren’t a whole lot different, make it very difficult to compete. You can’t get into debates. You can’t participate, so I think the battle will be fought in the big two parties and that means if you’re for limited government, you have to pick and choose and decide which candidate you’re going to support.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Rand, your dad is one of the few people on all of government today who when he says he’s for limited government, truly means it. Are you running for the Republican nomination for the Senate in Kentucky on a similar platform, that your goal is to shrink the federal government back down to the confines that the Constitution put around it?

Rand Paul: Absolutely. I think if we operated under the enumerated powers of the Constitution, we’d have a balanced budget. But I think we need reform. I don’t think the politicians are trustworthy and I think there has to be a rule requiring them to balance the budget because I don’t think they’ll ever do it on their own. In Kentucky, we have to balance the budget by statute. I think we need the same kind of rules in Washington.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: We can’t even get rules in Washington that require members of Congress to read the laws or point to the part of the Constitution that authorizes the laws. Congressman Paul, I’m very disturbed at Lindsey Graham, but it turns out he’s been attacking you for a long time. But last week, he said the following, “I’m going to grow this party. I’m not going to let it be hijacked by Ron Paul.” What is he afraid of, small government, maximum individual liberty, lower taxes?

Ron Paul: Well, I don’t know, but he seems to have given me a lot of credibility as if I have control over growing or shrinking the Republican Party. But maybe he wants to give me more credibility than I have, but certainly, I think he probably wants to grow the Republican Party, I do too and everybody, I assume, who is in the Republican Party would like to be in the majority. But the issue is what do you believe in? You know, do you believe in more government? But if you start off with saying, “Well, we’ll do this by being half of a Democrat. Oh, we don’t want to be a whole Democrat. We’ll be a half of a Democrat. Give up half of what the Republicans believe in.” I don’t buy into that. I can’t work under those conditions and the country has been working under those conditions for a hundred years. They always sacrifice a portion of their liberties thinking it’s a compromise, but it really doesn’t work. It’s a sacrifice of so much liberty and you end up with a mess. You end up with bankruptcy and you end up with a bureaucracy you can’t control and you end up with a financial crisis, so I would say that type of compromise isn’t worthwhile.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: Congressman Ron Paul and Dr. Rand Paul, thanks for joining us.

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Show: Alex Jones Show
Date: 11/5/2009

Alex Jones: [asks about HR 1207]

Ron Paul: Well, actually right now, we have 309 and that’s a 130-some Democrats as well as all the Republicans and at one time, Mel Watt had indicated to me that he would get a provision put in the bill by Barney Frank, which would be a very, very limited version of an audit, which would be a distraction, if nothing else. Even though the little bit of what he was doing, it was okay. He was just so small. It was canceling out most of what I wanted to do, but his provision didn’t get put into the bill. We are now in the middle of doing the bill. I thought there was even a chance today that I would get to offer my amendment, which is 1207 to the bill, but it was just announced a few minutes ago that Barney Frank said that well, the controversial type of amendments won’t be done until after the Veteran’s Day break, which is next week. So it won’t be this week and it won’t be next week, but the following week. I suspect they’re just lining up their ducks and there will probably be lots of attempts to water things down. But I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.

So we’re in the middle of it. We’re coming close to, at least, an initial climax of the bill on what the banking committee will do and it has to survive. It has to come up there pretty hard or things won’t look so good for us. But I’m consciously optimistic about it.

Alex Jones: But the momentum has clearly shifted, 27 years ago, you might get two or three co-sponsors. Now, you have over 300, a giant House majority.

Ron Paul: Yeah.

Alex Jones: So the momentum is shifting against the secretive organization.

Ron Paul: Yeah, and if we can get a clean vote, I can’t imagine very many wanting to be on record to vote against this. Just it’s going to give them a lot of grief especially…

(Phone cut due to technical problem)

Alex Jones: Congressman, do we have you?

Ron Paul: I’m back. I don’t know what happened.

Alex Jones: Gremlins in the House switchboard. Okay, we were finishing up with the Fed. On monetary policy, Congressman, you have long talked about the central banks using the dollar to prop up the empire. Now the G20 is discussing abandoning the dollar. What is happening from your research perspective with the dollar right now and what would happen if the dollar is fully abandoned?

Ron Paul: I don’t think anybody knows right now. If they just let it go and the dollar is rejected, then it will be that people will have to resort to sound money and they’d have to resort to commodity money. But as you say, the G20 or the IMF and the world leaders, so to speak, are going to try to replace it. I think the market has replaced the dollar reserve standard. They’ve gotten rid of that. I don’t think they can rebuild on that, so they are rushing around and trying to figure out what they’ll replace it with.

Maybe what they’ll try to do is come up with a basket of currencies. They even might be tempted to put a little bit of gold in there, but it’s not going to suffice. They don’t have even a little bit of gold. Even if they come up with another worldwide fiat standard, I don’t think it’s going to convey trust. I think they’re between the rock and a hard place and it’s not going to be easy for them to push something on us, but one thing’s for sure, I think there is going to be a lot of chaos and I think there is going to be a lot more economic problems and more poverty and more depression in the world just because of this.

Alex Jones: Absolutely. So just to be clear, you agree with the big economic headlines we have seen in the last month that the dollar as a world reserve currency has been abandoned. China, India, the European Union, the Arabs are now buying more foreign currencies than they are of the dollar. They still hold an overall majority of dollars at around 62 to 63 percent, but they are now abandoning the dollar as a reserve currency. A, do you agree with that? B, what will this do to our economy?

Ron Paul: It’s going to hurt the economy. I wouldn’t say it’s abandoned, but it’s less important all the time. I mean, the fact that they can still have 60 percent reserves means it’s still there. But the market, I look at the market, and I think this thing that happened this week was very, very significant. That is when the IMF announces that they’re going to dump 200 tons of gold on the market.

Well, you know, ordinarily, those who are thinking, they were hoping. “Well, with all that gold out there, that’s going to drive down the price of gold and make all the fiat currencies look better,” but what happened? A bank from Asia, India buys the whole block which sent a signal, I think, to the world market that in essence gold has been remonetized. It never got demonetized, but it has less importance as money when all the countries reject it. But I think this is a major, major signal that the dollar is getting closer. It is on its last leg and gold is getting more important and as the Chinese buy less and less, they have already started buying gold and they don’t want to buy too much too fast and you know, shoot the price up, you know, too quickly.

But I think that’s coming. I think the gold price is destined to go a lot higher and the dollar is going to go now a lot lower and they cannot dethrone gold. They can disrupt and play these games for a long, long time, but in many ways, this is very, very good because it tells us that the governments no longer can get away with just printing money to finance their schemes. And it’s those schemes that are what so damaging to us, whether it’s the welfare or the warfare, it all hurts the people because they have to pay the bill. So some of these things are good signals, although it means we have to be concerned about the chaos that might erupt.

Alex Jones: Absolutely. Congressman, the private central banks as you know are financing the Copenhageen treaty. I have the treaty here in front of me, all 200 pages of the framework convention on climate change. It states as Ban Ki-Moon wrote last week in The New York Times that this is global governance and that select groups of private interest are going to be able to decide who can have a factory, who can have a business. They can decide who is going to get the carbon credits. This scheme was designed by Kim Lei as Congress has reported. The Senate committee has now approved the climate bill as Reuters reports. If our economy, under globalization and NAFTA and GATT is already sputtering, what’s going to happen if we allow the very same central banks to create this new derivative system?

Ron Paul: Well, if it works, it would work for a short while and companies like Goldman Sachs and a few other will rip us off and they’ll, you know, get even more wealth. But it can’t help the econonmy. It has to hurt the economy and it can’t possibly help the environment because they’re totally off track on that. It might turn out to be one of the biggest hoaxes of all history, this whole global warming terrorism that they’ve been using, but we’ll have to just wait and see, but it cannot be helpful. It’s going to hurt everybody.

Alex Jones: What’s the inside baseball word in Congress? Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Baxter say they’re going to pass it this year or next year, but more and more evidence on the ground shows that we’re going to be able to beat the House and Senate version of the climate bill that is meant to tie into the Copenhagen/UN takeover.

Ron Paul: I think there is a chance and I think these elections might send a signal. I think the continual presence of the tea party movement and the people speaking out might wake them up finally, you know, and say, “Hey, maybe we are doing too much too fast,” and they might back off. Right now, they’re not absolutely positive. They have the votes from this medical bill. We’ll know shortly whether the House will see if they have the votes. They think the House can do it faster than the Senate. They’re going to try to do that on Saturday of this week. But they have two problems. It’s not automatic and thank goodness for radio talk shows and the Internet for us to get this information out. That’s what is rallying the troops. It certainly isn’t the mainstream media.

Alex Jones: Speaking of the Internet, we’re talking with Congressman Ron Paul, we now have the Cyber Security Act, three days ago. Finally, the national security blocked copyright treaty has now leaked and it says open taxing, open regulation of the Web. ICANN being handed over to the UN. Total control. Guilty until proven innocent. Copyright rules. Shutting down websites, ISPs, and really UN control over the Internet. Where do you stand on that, Congressman?

Ron Paul: Well, it’s very frightening and I think that if they’re successful, let’s just hope that the Internet is too big and too complex for them ever to have controls, but they’re making the attempt. They would love to put us out of business. But I am hopeful we don’t ever allow them to go that far, but they are doing everything in the world to control the Internet and that to me would be a real tragedy.

Alex Jones: A lot of people say it could never happen. It’s too big. They’ll never try it.

Ron Paul: I hope so.

Alex Jones: They are stating on record, the White House, the NSA, repeatedly in the last month, the White House has said, “We may have to shut the Internet off to save it, and during the flu pandemic or other emergency, only let you go to government sites.” That’s quite a trial balloon by the White House.

Ron Paul: Yeah, and all those authorities are packed in, you know, emergency legislation. They don’t really have to come to the Congress to do that. They do that on occassion just to get it rubberstamped. But there has been so much emergency legislation passed and besides, if it isn’t passed, you know what, how much license they take with executive orders and the various procedures that they use. So no, if they claim this is for national security reasons, they just go ahead and do it, so it’s a very dangerous time in which we live.

Alex Jones: You’re a medical doctor and you’ve also worked with the von Mises Institute and received awards from them for your economic understanding and, of course, this flu situation is economic for the vaccine makers. The government gets to have a power grab, but you’ve pointed out that Obama won’t give the flu shot to his daughters. Now, even Times Magazine is reporting the German government military won’t take the shot with the squalene or the mercury or the interleukin or any of this, so the governments is taking one vaccine, the people is getting another. Your take on that, Congressman?

Ron Paul: Well, that always happens that way and I did see a report after I made that announcement because he had said it in public about Obama’s daughters not getting the shot. But since that time we are told “now they have gotten it,” but you’d wonder whether which one they got and whether or not it had the mercury in or what not. But you know, we’ve done it to our own military personnel. You know, in the Persian Gulf war, they got a lot of inoculations and people came back with Persion Gulf War syndrome. It was a combination of chemicals and inoculations, so to me, though, it’s a mixed bag because a lot of people don’t want it and they’re fighting it and you know, they are being forced to take it. And other people get panicked into it and now, lining up for hours and hours and hours waiting for it as if this was a really, really serious crisis. It’s a serious disease and people do die, but even these few, the numbers of people that have died from it, they are significant, but they are very small compared to regular flu. And many times the individuals, I think over two-thirds of the children that died so far had other serious medical problems.

But the drumbeat for the fear, the build-up is to me is all done that for that reason, for the people to become more obedient and more dependent on the government.

Alex Jones: So they’re trying to set the precedent for this medical tyranny to force their will on us?

Ron Paul: I think this is just another attempt. I’m sure there are a bunch of people who believe, “Well, no, if this is very serious, the medical people have told us this and this is what we have to do.”

But let’s say it was a reasonable thing to give people a shot, I think the real message here is, why should the government be in charge of it? You know, if they’re in charge, there is a shortage. The people who don’t want it are being forced to take it. The people who want it can’t get it. It’s costing a lot of money. The other vaccine, regular flu shots, are not available and it’s on and on and right now, I saw a chart just a couple days ago that shows that this individual believed that swine flu is going to peak, you know, within another week or two. And if it peaks, it starts to drop off naturally, that’s about the time we’re going to have all these flu shots coming in and not have the flu shot that maybe is much more important.

Alex Jones: Sure.

Ron Paul: The point being, why should they be in charge and why should we turn over our health care to this clowns who are trying to distribute a vaccine. So either way…

Alex Jones: It’s bad. Congressman.

Ron Paul: It just proves the point that we shouldn’t be doing it.

Alex Jones: On top of that, all over the country, schools are injecting children even when their parents say don’t do it and the schools are saying, “Oops, it’s an accident.” Clearly, that premeditated.

But shifting gears now, we saw Republican wins in New Jersey and Virginia. The President’s approval rating when he was first elected up in the 80s are now the low 40s. But Republicans still, by and large, have low approval ratings, unless they’re like yourself who is actually a constitutionalist, we know that in 2010, there is going to be a huge backlash. Republicans will take back a lot of seats, but if they don’t deliver on smaller government and fiscal, sound constitutional policies, then we’re going to have a real crisis on our hands and if we wait to get politically active until 2011 and 2012, so much of this globalization would have already been expanded and submitted.

Ron Paul: Yeah.

Alex Jones: I know that this is still off in the future, but LA Times, New York Times, everybody is talking. I get calls every day saying, “When is Ron Paul going to announce for 2012?” Because if you announce early, you can build a coalition. You can get an even more elevated position in the media. You can speak for the people that don’t want war, that don’t want big government, that don’t want banker bailouts. If you wait to announce until 2011, after your congressional win coming up, but I guess I’m being presumptive. I mean, you’re not even saying you’re going to announce it in 2011.

Ron Paul: No, I’m still thinking a lot about that. Right now, it just doesn’t seem like the best thing to do, even long-term or even on a short-term basis. So I’m just undecided about the whole thing. You know, so I’m not about to say that I’m planning to do one thing or another.

Alex Jones: Congressman.

Ron Paul: But I still think you make some good points, but I think time is still a little bit early to start talking about it.

Alex Jones: But so much is happening and if you step up even further and no one is saying that you haven’t done more than anybody else, and start building the coalition now, I’d really, unless there are many election fraud, I see no way that you could lose the Republican primary. I mean, how can we allow a rhino, someone who is not really a constitutionalist like another McCain, another Mitt Romney to lead conservatives and libertarians down another rathole. I mean, you are the man for the job and I don’t pretend to understand your political strategy. I know you’re much more intelligent and wise than I am and have more experience.

It just makes perfect sense for, at least, sometime in the next six to eight months to announce, but you’re saying you’re not even sure at this time. I mean, even if you didn’t win, you would have huge fundraising. You would be able to buy ads. You would be all over the media. You’ll be the only candidate that will inject real issues. I mean, you’re the only man for the job. I mean, faith and responsibility and destiny says that you are the man for the job.

Ron Paul: Well, you have to realize you’re not the average Republican primary voter. You’re a little bit more optimistic about what we might be able to do. But we still have a lot to contend with. When you get involved in partisan politics so you follow that stuff that was going over in Nevada, how they really handled this. I think we’ll do better if we ever did it again, but you know, they’ll just close down shop if they think you’re going to win, so you have a lot of obstackes to overcome. But the most important thing and this is what you have emphasized as well, politics are very important, but also is getting these issues out and talking about the philosophy and why we need it and get the people energized and that should be ongoing. Of course, that is why we keep Campaign for Liberty moving in that direction because people have to understand things like the Federal Reserve. Just think, a couple of years ago, not too many people even talked about the Federal Reserve and now they can do national polling on the Federal Reserve to get opinion. So in that sense, I think we’re making progress.

Alex Jones: Exactly, we’ve gone from almost no one knowing it’s a private cartel, to over 75 percent wanting an audit or for it to be abolished. It’s only a win-win for you to run because it will elevate you, it will have you in the debates and I don’t see any way you won’t run unless you’ve got medical problems and you’re in great shape. You look like you’re 60, Congressman, and I’m just begging you for millions of other people to kick off the campaign sooner rather than later. I want to commend you for helping to get your son to run for the Senate. People need to get behind him right now and as you said, you know, the biggest movement now in the universities isn’t the burnout fake left or the burnout fake right, it is the libertarian, free market, non-collectivist movement that you have helped to grow and energize and you are the ombudsman of liberty, the leading light for freedom worldwide, as even the Czech president has said and I just want to salute you and thank you. In closing, we got thirty seconds, are they going to be able to ram through, the government takeover of health care?

Ron Paul: Oh, they are going to get it through the House, but whether the whole thing gets through, I think they’ll get a part of it, but not the whole thing, so we’ll wait and see and we have adapted in this country to incrementalism. We never socialize all at once. We just take it by pieces and think that we’ve really resisted something, so unfortunately, it’s going to get worse rather than better.

Alex Jones: Thank you so much, Congressman. God bless you.

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Show: Morning Meeting
Channel: MSNBC
Date: 11/05/2009

Transcript:

Dylan Ratigan: The bill no longer audits the Fed. In fact, the legislation gives Congress no control over the Fed’s authority to make monetary policy. That, perhaps, is a worthwhile debate, but it does not require any transparency either in the Fed’s secret agreements with foreign central banks, not to mention the monies that are pushed out to our own banks. Committee chair Barnie Frank told his constituents back in August that Congressman Paul’s plan would pass, likely in October. For the record it is now November and there is still no vote and if there were to be a vote it would be on a gutted version of the bill! Thirteen committee Democrats currently signed on to this shell of the Fed audit bill and now we’ll wait up and see if they’ll stand up for real change or just push through more false solutions in Washington DC.

Joining us now is Republican Committee member Ron Paul who originally proposed Audit the Fed. He will present and amendment before the full vote to get real reform back into the legislation. Chrystia Freeland is also here.

Representative Paul, in brief explain to all of us why you think it is so important that the American taxpayer be able to see what is going on inside of the Federal Reserve? Why does that matter, why should we care so much?

Ron Paul: It’s because everybody uses dollars as our currency and it’s an international currency. So it is very, very important, and yet it’s managed by a small group of people really run by the Federal Reserve board chairman and they decide each and every day how much money there should be printed that week and what the interest rates should be. So they are the central economic planners. And since they can create credit out of thin air and take care of their friends and buddies, which means that the burden is placed on the taxpayers… not directly with a tax but indirectly by devaluing their money. And that means that every time a price goes up, whether it’s medical care cost or education, you’re really paying a tax.

But the thing that gripes me most is it’s done secretly and they’re supposed to be like they’re sacred and never have their books opened. But one thing good has come out of this crisis; that the American people are demanding transparency and I think that’s why I’ve gotten so many co-sponsors on this bill. We do have a 130 Democrats on this, 308 total total supporters of this bill. So it will be a shame if we don’t get this through and it is true, it is going through the committee right now and today or tomorrow I might have my chance to offer my amendment and put it into the bill.

Chrystia Freeland: Congressman Paul, who is opposed to your push for transparency, who’s fighting it?

Ron Paul: The Fed. The Fed has actually, I think for the first time in their history, hired a lobbyist and the lobbyist used to work for ENRON. So they’re diligently pumping up the fear. You know, “Oh, if we know what was going on with the Fed it would causes tremendous inflation, it would cause interest rates to go up and all sorts of things. You know, if we knew what was going we might create a financial crisis.” It’s the Fed and the banks and the big corporations and some of the politicians are in the know and getting benefits. But the system depends on the control of money. But this is not new, this is historic.

The king in the old days always had control of the money, they did it in different ways. They clipped coins, diluted the metal, printed money. Today it’s really sophisticated; it’s done secretly with a computer and that’s why it has made it so much more dangerous than ever before.

Dylan Ratigan: Let’s just back away for a second because the Fed lobbyist some of the CEOs, some of the bank CEOs quite honestly might have a point. What if we were to look inside the Federal Reserve as you suspect, I certainly suspect it and I think Christian Freeman suspects it, anybody who understands how our financial system was built over the past 10 years suspects, that all those trillions of dollars that the Federal Reserve… that were collateralized… they’ve taken from the banks, is worth far less than it’s currently been represented as. So let’s say that that the 8 trillion of the Fed may be only worth 4 trillion. And everybody is basically trying to cover up the fact that there is this huge hole, this huge fraud has been perpetrated by the banks and the fraud would reveal itself truthfully if they were to audit the Federal Reserve and that would cause panic. Let’s assume they’re right, let’s assume that you’re right, let’s assume that this is worthless crap at the Fed, how do you deal with that fallout if, in fact, we get what we want and they open the closet. And what do you think is in there is in there, which is nothing?

Ron Paul: But pretending it’s worth 8 trillion is worth 2 trillion or even less doesn’t solve our problems. It just delays the agony. For me it would be like in medicine someone had cancer and we treated him with aspirin and we said, “Oh you don’t want to know the truth, and we don’t give you a real treatment”. You have to know the truth and you have to have a real treatment and today they won’t look at the real truth and the cause of the business cycle and the cause all the financial bubble and then the bursting of that bubble. What they’re doing is they’re saying, “Oh, all we need are more regulations, and what we need to do is prop up all the bad debt. We don’t want liquidation of debt, we don’t want the prices down, let’s stimulate housing” and on and on. So they’re doing everything that caused the bubble before to try to re-inflation the bubble, and believe me, they’re not going to be able to do it this time.

Chrystia Freeland: Congressman Paul, I agree with you that there is a little bit of an irony in the fact that in curing a crisis which was cause by too much money pumped out, one of the cures turns out to have been spending more government money. But don’t you have to agree that that cure has turned out to be pretty effective? We haven’t had a second great depression, the financial crisis has more or less been resolved. Isn’t that better than having a total freezing of the financial system, which it looked as if we might face last fall?

Ron Paul: Not long term. What if it turns out that we’re in 1930 and we have another 15 years of problems ahead of us. So, no. I think we’re still kidding ourselves. They say the GDP is up, but they printed money and they spent the money and when government spends money the GDP goes up.

Chrystia Freeland: Isn’t that better than the alternative of the entire economy just screeching to a halt?

Ron Paul: No, it really isn’t. You have to bite the bullet, you have to admit the truth, you have to make the right corrections. We used to do this. We’ve never had a perfect system; there was always abuse of the gold standard, but when they got out of whack they allowed the correction to occur rather quickly. The best example is the depression of 1920 and 1921. It lasted about a year and people did go bankrupt and it was really tough, but it’s not even an historical event. It was the introduction by Hoover and Roosevelt that the politicians can’t have hands off; you have to, “now that you have this sophisticated Federal Reserve, we’ll never allow recessions to occur.” They took the recessions of the early 1930 and turned it into a depression. So though you can do it is better. It is kind of like getting somebody off drugs. What you’re talking about is you don’t want the withdrawal symptoms, and I admit there will be withdrawal symptoms. But, keeping them on the drug which is easy money, easy spending and huge deficits and all that, that will kill the patient. And the patient remains the dollar and we’re going to be on the verge of killing the patient and when you see gold up at $1100 an ounce, that is a little bit of a warning sign. That might only be the beginning of what we’re going to see.

Dylan Ratigan: But what if you just decided is that you didn’t care about the children? If you don’t care about children, isn’t it better just to ignore it? To heck with the kids, it’s easier for me to just print the money and go out to dinner, don’t you think?

Ron Paul: Well, yea. That is live high on the hog, and maybe the bankers won’t come and get us. But the bankers always come, and in this case it’s the market that is coming. When an individual lives beyond his or means, they must be forced to live below their means. When a country does it, they will be forced to live below their means. And I believe that the lowering of our standard of living actually has been going on for about ten years, because the good jobs have been disappearing. The standard of living isn’t really going up. So we’re holding back the correction and it doesn’t look so bad. So yeah, we didn’t crash into a depression but what we’re doing is preventing the good policies to come back which means free markets, sound money and limited government, balanced budgets. All these things are totally rejected here because this place in Washington DC is run by Keynesians. Keynesians leaning towards socialism now because we’re buying up the companies. No, it cannot solve our problems.

Dylan Ratigan: It’s also easier to print money. You will appreciate this story, Congressman Paul, and then I’m going to let you go. I was talking to a couple of bankers the other day as to why it is that they’re still trying to keep 80% of their swap market, which is the crooked insurance market, in private? And they said, “Well, because if we bring it into public then we’ll have to post collateral, and we don’t have any collateral”. And so it’s easier just to keep it in secret than to bring the entire credit default swap market into public and reveal that there is actually nothing there for the market that is 9 times the size of the global economy.

Ron Paul: But you haven’t learnt the language yet. They’re just illiquid, temporarily illiquid. But if you use ‘worthless’ instead of ‘illiquid’ then why should the taxpayer ever be stuck for something that is worthless, and that is what’s happening.

Dylan Ratigan: Well, listen, keep us posted. I think that the most interesting part in this context and the context of the conversation at MSNBC and the political context, because there is such self-evident aspect to this point is why are our politicians so hesitant to get their hands dirty and do the hard work, as troubling as it may be? And why do they continue to indulge the political expedience of money printing because it’s quite simply an easier road to take?

Ron Paul: I think you got it there.

Dylan Ratigan: Alright Congressman Paul, thank you. Keep us posted.

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Show: White House Brief
Host: Paul Westcott
Date: 11/4/2009 or 11/5/2009

Transcript

Paul Westcott: Congressman Ron Paul, you spoke recently before the House Financial Services Committee during the mark up of what’s being called the Investor Protection Act of 2009. Really, you know, you were explaining the difference between regulation and bureaucracy. Can you explain that for our audience?

Ron Paul: Well, my complaint is that if you argue for the free market, that you don’t care about regulations and that everything is chaotic and that’s not true. There are two ways you regulate the market. If you do it by the free market, you’re regulated by the consumers, their choices and if they choose to bankrupt the company, the company has to go bankrupt, so you have bankruptcies. You have laws against fraud. You have laws against theft and there’s a regulation, but instead we sort of protect some of those things and we bail out the people who make bad decisions. At the same time, since the people who like government regulations don’t understand that the problems come from the Federal Reserve and the manipulation of the money supply that creates the business cycle, so they figure they can compensate. “We’ll just have more regulations.” All these mistakes being made as a consequence of bad monetary policies, “if we just have more bureaucrats checking up on everybody, we’re going to protect everybody.”

And my analogy is that it’s similar to people who would like to prevent any slander or any bad comments in newspapers. They have prior restraint. We don’t go to the government and say, “Well, check everything we say in the media.” Now, that would be preposterous, but you know, there still are restraints on the media and what people say and do, but as soon as it comes to economics’ prior restraint, we have to check everything, check it out and have the bureaucrats look over your shoulder. It causes chaos. It causes the prices to go up and contributes to the mistakes that the Federal Reserve makes.

Paul Westcott: Well, there you go mentioning the Fed. You know, you got a book out now, ‘End the Fed’ and there has been really a lot of discussion recently to grow the size of this organization. What’s latest ramp up looking like and is it just becoming more? Is it getting to a tipping point at this point?

Ron Paul: Yes, it’s getting pretty close. This bill we’re working on now these few more weeks. I don’t think it will be finished before we have our break for Thanksgiving. But it looks like the Fed will end up with more power. They always do. Of course, I’m working hard to go and try and at least get the books out so we’ll know what they’re doing. We don’t even know what all they’re up to. Barney Frank, the chairman, is not interested in the Federal Reserve taking over all this consumer protection bureaucracy. He’ll see that a separate group doing that.

Paul Westcott: Sure.

Ron Paul: But I believe that when we finally finish it all that the Fed would end up with more power, not less.

Paul Westcott: Well, and you know, turning to the health care bill, very hot topic obviously in Washington. As a Congressman and medical doctor, you’ve seen both sides of government-run health care through Medicare and Medicaid, of course. Would you say what we’re seeing right now going to the House and the Senate, are these bills going to benefit Americans in the end? I mean, I’m sort of lumping them all together, so feel free to break one off if you want. But do any of them really help Americans in the end?

Ron Paul: Well, like a lot of government programs, on the short run, some people seem to benefit. On the long run, it’s detrimental even to the people that it’s supposed to help. It is sort of like housing, when we had housing programs and the Fed pumping in the credit, it seemed like a lot of people were benefiting. You know, the prices of houses were going up and poor people had houses and it looked like a Golden Age. But then eventually, they’re the very people who suffered.

That’s the way it is in medicine. You pump in a new program like this, they’ll probably come up and say, “See, we can find these people that didn’t have any insurance and all this,” but ultimately it raises costs and diminishes service and there are shortages. So no, it’s very detrimental on the long run. And I think the real fallacy is they’re basing the need for all this that people are dying in the streets, you know, without medical care.

Paul Westcott: Right.

Ron Paul: But nobody is denied medical care in this country. I practiced medicine before we had government management and that coming in into the seventies and late sixties and nobody was turned away before nor since then. Emergency rooms take care of everybody and it’s just a bunch of scare tactics in order to get the bureaucracy growing and the special interest benefiting because there are too many middlemen in medicine.

Paul Westcott: Right.

Ron Paul: They do all the lobbying up here. The people when they come, the individuals, number-wise, more individuals are opposed to this, but the big companies. You know, whether they’re insurance or drug companies or management companies, they’re the ones. Even the AMA, they’re the ones who are pushing for some of this stuff.

Paul Westcott: Now, we’ve heard a lot of people in the sort of liberal intelligentsia as a word discuss the public option on how potentially you could move that public option to becoming a single-payer type system, government run, total government takeover of health care. From what you’ve seen, is that the direction some of your colleagues on the other side of aisle are leaning towards?

Ron Paul: Yes, that’s their goal and they say, “Oh, no. This would only be an option and a few people can join if they don’t have anything else,” but it would sort of like the public option on prescription drug program that the Republicans pushed through. It was a benefit to the corporations who were having trouble paying these benefits for the retirees, so they were very willing to dump it on the government. And even today, the public option of Medicare is not much of an option if you’re 65 and retired. I mean, you don’t just go out and buy Blue Cross insurance anymore. They don’t even offer it to you and the medical savings account, which was introduced by Republicans, which I think is a good idea, they’re prohibited if you’re over 65. So it’s always pushing you toward the government programs.

Paul Westcott: Sure, and just lastly here, I want to discuss the races in Virginia, New Jersey and in the New York 23rd. We saw a Conservative candidate getting 45 percent of the vote; Republicans take two very big seats. Should these results be taken as… I mean, everyone is talking about, of course, referendum on the President, but really, should this be taken as a warning to a degree to some of those Republicans who may have, shall we say, not been in touch with their conservative side so much over the last few years?

Ron Paul: Oh, I hope so and I hope it’s a sign that there is a trend away from more big government. It looks like that we could interpret that. But you know, it’s still a little bit early to tell and I think the biggest problem why there is this third party or tea party movement is that Republicans have lost so much credibility when they actually had a chance to cut back and they really didn’t do it. But it’s good that the people are unhappy with the status quo, which means that the group that’s running the show now are big government people and they’re very, very aggressive with it. So maybe this election will point out that they’re going too fast.

Paul Westcott: There you go. Congressman Ron Paul, thank you so much for your time.

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Channel: RT
Date: 11/05/2009

Transcript:

Bill Dod: If Obama doesn’t deliver change, the U.S. still has other potential candidates eager to lead the country. And one of them is Republican Ron Paul, who is poised to run for the presidency in 2012. Let’s now cross to Priya Sridhar, she’s in our Washington studio. Interestingly enough, Pria, Ron Paul hasn’t actually yet announced he is running for this, so why have supporters already started his campaign at such an early stage?

Priya Sridhar: That’s right Bill, nothing is official just yet. But if you go to Ron Paul’s website there is a question there that says, “Do you think Ron Paul should run for President in 2012?” and you can even buy “Ron Paul for President” merchandise. So people are getting pretty psyched for the 2012 election, even though it’s kind of far away.

And joining me to help talk about Ron Paul’s popularity is Shelly Roche from the Ladies for Liberty Alliance. Shelly, thanks so much for joining me.

Shelly Roche: Thanks for having me.

Priya Sridhar: So, first of all, why do you think Ron Paul is becoming so popular right now?

Shelly Roche: Well, I think it’s a number of factors. But really when you look at the direction we are going as a country and all of these big frightening things that are happening like the bailouts and the economy and health care, you know, he’s kind of the one voice of reason that’s standing up and saying, “We don’t need all of this. We do have other options”. And he is always making sense, and I think that really resonates with people.

Priya Sridhar: And what do you think? You think he is going to run for office in 2012? I have a feeling you’re hoping he will, but do you think he actually will?

Shelly Roche: I definitely hope he will and I think he recognizes that it would be a smart move to at least position himself to do that, because that’s really what launched him back in 2008 into the media and got him a lot of momentum. And so I think this is another big opportunity for him to kind of capitalize on that and just go for it and set himself up to do it, and we’ll see what happens.

Priya Sridhar: So he is becoming more popular. But realistically do you think he has a chance and what are some of the challenges he might face?

Shelly Roche: Well, I think he has a better chance than he had last year. One of the biggest challenges he is going to face is resistance from within the Republican Party, because he’s kind of at cross purposes with them in some of their platform items. And in trying to reform the Republican Party he’s going to meet with a lot of resistance. So I think his message resonates with Republicans and Democrats and it’s really he’s going to have to overcome that kind of obstacle.

Priya Sridhar: And what idea, specifically, do you think resonates the most with the American people that Ron Paul sort of stands for and advocates?

Shelly Roche: Well, I think it is the economic freedom, the fiscal responsibility and just ending corruption and the entrenched “politics as usual” kind of system. He doesn’t play that game and he kind of brings a new perspective to politics and what it can be. So I think that really gets people excited.

Priya Sridhar: And do you think his popularity right now is a direct correlation of President Obama’s kind of sliding approval ratings, or do you think that people are just looking for something that’s a little different?

Shelly Roche: I think it’s a combination. I think the degree to which we’ve started expanding government and really the debt and the economy has really contributed to people starting to think about that maybe this isn’t the right direction. And so that certainly helps. But also it’s just kind of… he has a totally different perspective, he has a consistent voting record. He’s been in politics forever, so he kind of offers that assurance that he is not going to succumb to special interests and that sort of thing. He’s representing the people and always doing what he thinks is best for the country whether you agree with it all the time or not. At least you have that.

Priya Sridhar: And how do you think the country would be different right now if Ron Paul was President and not Barack Obama?

Shelly Roche: Wow, I think there are so many ways. We wouldn’t be talking about health care the way we are. We’d be talking about different kinds of reforms. So maybe smaller steps that are more practical and limiting the size of government, getting rid of wasteful programs, real reform, not just the kind of reform that expands government and costs trillions of dollars.

Priya Sridhar: And the last think I want to ask you really quickly is, you know, a year ago today Barack Obama found out that he was elected as the President of the United States. How do you think things have changed from a year ago till today?

Shelly Roche: Well, you can look at the approval ratings and that sort of thing, but something I saw online last night and today, they were asking people to submit one word to describe how they felt about the first year of the presidency. And the Republicans, you can guess what they can say: “outraged, betrayed, scared”. But on the Democrats’ side they were saying things like “hopeful” and the things you would expect. But they were also saying “disappointed, anxious” and I think that really is a barometer of the way people are kind of starting to feel a little bit nervous that he has not really delivered on his promises so far and some of that support is waning I think.

Priya Sridhar: Well, I think there are a lot of people out there like Shelly who will anxiously be waiting to see what happens with Ron Paul next. But for now, Bill, it’s back to you.

Bill Dod: Thanks very much indeed. That was our correspondent Prea Shria talking to you with Shelly Rose from the libertarian organization, the Ladies of Liberty Alliance, live in our Washington studio. Thanks very much indeed, Prea.

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Date: 11/4/2009
Venue: Financial Services Committee Hearing

Transcript:

Ron Paul: I thank you, Mr. Chairman. Earlier this year, Secretary Geithner had an interview and he said that the main source of our problem with this economic crisis was that we kept interest rates too low too long. And I certainly agree with him on that. And I also agree with the authors of this bill that we don’t have enough regulations. But that doesn’t mean that I endorse the notion that we need more bureaucrats and more written regulations of that sort.

A lot of people think that if you don’t support the bureaucratic approach, that you don’t endorse regulations. But the free market provides a lot of regulations and those who the regulations that we have ignored, as a matter of fact we have actually allowed them to go forward. A major regulation we should have is “always enforce contracts.” The government has a responsibility to ensure contracts are enforced.

But also the issue of fraud. Just because we are unregulated in the sense of not having bureaucrats do it, it does not mean that fraud should be tolerated. And yet now it’s coming out that companies like Goldman Sachs may well have been involved in something that could be construed as fraud. They were selling AAA securities – the credit default swaps – and at the same time they were shorting the market. They knew there was a housing bubble, but they were telling their investors that they had these wonderful bonds to buy. Now that, to me, is fraud. And that should be handled by people like this going to prison. But there are free market alternatives to pretending that every single transaction and almost preemptively prevent things. To me it’s sort of like trying to protect against slander from anybody saying or writing anything that harms somebody. We don’t believe in that. If somebody commits it then we, of course, penalize them for it. But in the marketplace we assume that we can preempt it, we can have prior restraint, and that’s where the chaos comes from. So, in that sense, I don’t believe in prior restraint. The people in the media have their limits; they cannot lie and they cannot get away with defaming people.

But this “too low and too long” on the interest rates, I think, is the key to it. The free market explains the business cycle better than anybody else. Because they understand that the cycles come from artificially low interest rates. So Geithner admits they were too low too long. The reason why this is so damaging is that the interest rate level is key; it’s key to the investor. It’s key to the developer and the builder. If the interest rates are low, the signal that they’re hearing is that there is a lot of savings, and therefore there is capital available to them. But we went through a period of them when there was zero savings and interest rates were low. So it was very confusing. The savers don’t save anymore because there are so called too much savings. At the same time the developers and builders think, “Hey, there is a lot of capital out there”. But it really wasn’t capital; it was artificial. It was credit created out of thin air and it was a fraudulent approach to the issue of providing capital. And someday we’ll get to that. We’re not going to get to that whole idea in this bill because that deals with monetary policy and understanding of how that system works.

But systemic risk is very, very serious and it is the nature of money that creates the systemic risk that we’re trying to deal with. The Federal Reserve came into existence in 1913 and they were given a dollar that was worth 1/20th of an ounce of gold. Today it’s worth 1/1100th of an ounce of gold. Which means that our measuring stick is unstable; it continually loses value. And you can’t build a healthy economy domestically, or especially internationally, if that dollar or that currency becomes the reserve standard of the world. And we’re doing this constantly. Right now it’s not only the Fed’s fault; we’ve run up the deficits. There is a limit to what we can tax, there is a limit to what we can borrow. And at the same time we turn it over to the Fed and the Fed prints the money and artificially lowers interest rates, and that is where the systemic risk comes from.

So someday we’ll have to address that subject of exactly where this comes from. I will offer my amendment, which is the HR1 207, dealing with the Federal Reserve, but that deals only with transparency and we have broad bi-partisan support for this bill and I hope there will be a consensus on supporting that bill.

Thank you very much.

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Channel: Fox Business
Host: Davis Asman
Date: 11/04/2009

Transcript:

David Asman: Are politicians inside the Beltway aware of the extent to which Americans object to all the recent government spending and government intrusions in our lives? One man who clearly is aware of the discontent is Ron Paul; he’s been fighting against government intrusion for some time now, and he joins us. Good to see you, Congressman. Thanks for being here.

Ron Paul: Thank you, David. Nice to be with you.

David Asman: So do you feel somewhat vindicated by yesterday’s elections?

Ron Paul: Well, in some ways. I mean it’s not exactly that each candidate that won was espousing everything that I’ve said. But I think it makes the point that people are unhappy and they’re punishing the right people; the people who are in charge. Republicans got punished a couple of years ago and I think that’s appropriate. People are very upset, more so now than ever before, and they’re directing their attention to Washington. The party that’s in charge should be penalized and who knows, this will probably spill over to next year. So I think it’s very good, it’s a good trend and hopefully the Republicans have learnt a lesson. So if we do get another chance we do a heck of a lot better job than we did when we got in control before.

David Asman: But frankly, it is business as usually for some politicians. Beyond what Nancy Pelosi said, I understand the senate just passed a bill to extend unemployment insurance, but tucked very secretly inside that bill was an extension of the $8,000 credit for first home buyers, which had some real questionable results couple of months ago. Some people are saying it didn’t do anything except spend more taxpayer money.

Ron Paul: Yeah, I don’t think anything has really changed here. If they had a concern about our problems and think it was related to government spending, why would they offer up all these new programs, you know, this trillion dollar medical package? But I think the absurdity even on the medical package is that the Pelosi crowd tells the people, “We’re going to be able to insure everybody and it’s not going to cost you anything. We’re going to save enough money by cutting waste and fraud.”

When the American people see that, whether they’re conservatives or liberals, I don’t think they buy into that. I think they lose credibility on this. But no, it’s business as usual whether it is spending or borrowing or printing the money. And I’m on the Financial Service Committee and it seems like just on a daily basis the solution is “if we just had more bureaucrats to protect us against all these bad investment.” But never asking the question why are people encouraged to make bad decisions, does it have anything to do with monetary policy? No, that’s not really ever discussed.G

David Asman: Incentives: you know, you put your finger on exactly the point. They don’t understand that if you increase tax rates, people may decide to make less money or hide their money and maybe they won’t get the $400 billion they hope to get from new taxes to fund health care.

Ron Paul: Yeah, there is always an unintended consequence that they haven’t anticipated. They don’t see much past their nose. And whether it’s domestic policy or foreign policy, I think the unintended consequences of government policies are unbelievable. Mises, the great Austrian economist, said, “Every time the government has an intervention in the marketplace for a so-called good reasons, it creates two new problems”. And, of course, I think he would be vindicated now when you look back over the last hundred years, especially since the Depression, at all the interventions that we’ve had in the marketplace. And they have been able to keep themselves in business. They create more problems, more bureaucrats, saying, “Hell yeah, those are good jobs, of course, they’re really productive”.

David Asman: Congressman, I thought that short of a 2 x 4 wacked across their head, an election loss like we saw yesterday in New Jersey, Virginia, does have a tendency to shake politicians up because after all one thing they care about more than anything else is getting re-elected.

Ron Paul: Yeah, that is the case and they’re not seeing the light and instead of maybe backing off a little bit and thinking about the medical package, they’ve speeded it up. So we’ll be here Saturday night; we’re supposed to vote on that bill on Saturday evening. And it’s just more of the same. It will not improve the quality of medical care, it’s going to cost a lot more, there will be unintended consequences. The insurance companies will probably be coming out okay and drug companies will do okay. There will be all kinds of things. Next year the people will be yelling and screaming. But, fortunately, there are a significant number of American people right now who are seeing the handwriting on the wall and they are complaining about the process up here. But so far they haven’t gotten the attention of the leadership.

David Asman: Well, maybe not the leadership, but I was talking to some Blue Dog Democrats today and they said on air in public that they have serious problems with the Pelosi Bill. They had problems with the Bachus bill as well. But the Pelosi Bill is even more costly and it raises taxes more. They suggested they’re not going to vote for it over the weekend. Is there enough of a revolt now among Blue Dog Democrats and, of course, all the Republicans so that Pelosi won’t have the bill passed?

Ron Paul: I guess it’s always possible. I mean, we’ve been led to believe today “Be prepared, be here, start early Saturday, hopefully we will get it done by Saturday evening”. But things do shift, I mean, maybe if in another 24 hours of thinking about the election, maybe they will change their tune. It has happened before. When the American people get really, really outraged, they usually get attention of this place. But unfortunately things get so bad for so long that it’s hard to turn this battleship or this aircraft carrier around. We can make efforts but it is a major problem to reverse the trend. Because, quite frankly, as much as I’m opposed to all the spending and inflating, to stop it in its tracks and turn it around, there are going to be some people who aren’t going to be very happy with this. But if we continue this process, then we’re going to have a bankruptcy which will be manifesting itself in a dollar crisis, and that’s what I’m concerned about: these policies that we’re following are going to lead to the destruction of our dollar, and I think right now today we’ve noticed that even gold is signaling maybe some significant inflation ahead.

David Asman: Oh, it sure is. There are a whole lot of signs of inflation ahead. But one other big spending bill, of course, is Cap and Trade. A little later on in this program we’re going to be talking about Al Gore and how much money he’s making from certain carbon credit deals that’s he’s involved with. But I’m told by some people that Cap and Trade is a dead deal for this year at least. Are you hearing the same thing?

Ron Paul: I haven’t heard that, I hear the conversation and let’s hope that it’s true. But that, of course, again will be a major victory for people who believe in sanity and markets. But there is still a lot of pressure. You know, the greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming. You notice they don’t call it global warming anymore. It’s weather control. [damage control?]

David Asman: No, no, no. Because it’s getting cooler, you can’t call it global warming anymore.

Ron Paul: But it is a monster and sometime they’re going to have to say, “Hey, why hasn’t the economy improved itself? We pumped in all the…” You know, the Krugmans of the world. “Well, you just didn’t do enough. You know, trillions of dollars from the Fed and 800 billion dollars from the Congress, sure it’s working, you just need more.” You know, someday people will come to their senses, but probably not this week yet.

David Asman: Well, I got to ask you one final question because you have had some success in getting transparency – people behind you are voting for transparency in the Federal Reserve. Are there other issues on which you have been sort of the lone voice in the wilderness where people are finally coming in and joining you?

Ron Paul: Well, I think on the fiscal policies of just voting against some of the spending I would hope so. I guess the sentiment is there. But they don’t quite grasp what I am doing on the House floor, because I vote for anything that has money in it; every nickel, unless you pay for it. Not by taxes but by cutting someplace else. So if there is a program that we want to do, we should cut it from someplace else. I get a lot of sympathy for this saying, “You’re right, we should do this”. But I don’t think the votes have changed significantly. I do think the Republicans are voting better and I kid the other Republicans and I said, “Are you guys voting with me now, or am I voting with you?” But we are voting together more so than we did when the Republicans were in charge of spending the money.

David Asman: And you do have some Blue Dog Democrats with you as well. Congressman, Dr. Ron Paul, it’s been great to see you. Thank you very much for being here.

Ron Paul: Thank you, David.

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