Interview with Ron Paul on Rand, Foreign Policy, Economy, And Homeschooling

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Let’s go straight to the Dude Maker Hotline and say hello to the one and the only former Congressman Ron Paul.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Let’s go straight to the Dude Maker Hotline and say hello to the one and the only former Congressman Ron Paul.  Ron, I guess I get to call you just Dr. Paul now.

Ron Paul:  That would be fine.  You can call me Ron, too.  Nice to be with you again, Mike.

Mike:  Last time I saw you, I got about 20 seconds with you.  I shook your hand at LPAC and I said: So what’s going to happen?  You pulled me close and said: I can tell you this, they’re not going to put me in a rocking chair.  So, have they tried to put you in a rocking chair?

Ron Paul:  They wouldn’t dare try.  The neat part is the schedule is more of my doing.  I get to pick and choose rather than somebody else telling me where to go every single day.

 

Mike:  What is it like?  It’s been a long time since you have been Citizen Paul.  What’s it like outside looking in?  You can’t go to the floor and say: Hey, you shouldn’t pass this bill and let me tell you why.  What’s it like being you now?

Ron Paul:  I’m enjoying it.  I think you’re constricted in many ways when you have to go back and forth to Washington.  I have less visits through TSA and that pleases me as well.  I find it very relaxing and actually a lot more opportunities or things I couldn’t do as a member of Congress, so now I have a little bit more freedom.

Mike:  I’m sure you know some of these questions are coming your way.  Your son is becoming quite the media and political celebrity.  As I was thinking about what I would ask you today, the thought occurred to me that in the United States, we’ve had some families that, I don’t know if dynasty is the correct word, but you had John Adams, president, and John Quincy Adams, president.  You had Grover Cleveland and then a term in between and president again.  In the 1930s you had the bootlegger Joe Kennedy.  Then by the 1960s his sons were either all in politics are trying to get into politics.  You had President Kennedy and Senator Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy.  The Kennedy name kind of became synonymous with politics in New England.  What do you think about the Paul name now becoming a political dynasty with Rand’s success?  I’m sure he learned a lot from his father.

Ron Paul:  I don’t think a whole lot about it because there’s not much I can do about it.  I think my career is rather minor compared to what might be ahead for him.  He’s on his own.  Actually, we don’t even talk too much about that.  Most people think we strategize and make these plans.  He’s pretty busy and very active.  Sometimes he goes off and makes very long speeches and I don’t even visit with him very often.  No, I think he has a good career ahead of him and mine in the past has been different.  I’ll go my way this time, even though basically our goals are very much the same.

Mike:  I think one of the questions amongst your millions of followers was: Rand is kind of suspicious.  He’s not telling us exactly what he thinks about this and that.  I heard in the major parts of the filibuster speech that I watched, and I’m sure you watched probably all of it, I heard some Ron Paul in there.  I heard some questioning of why we even have this thing called the war on terror.  We have a decade-old fake declaration — he didn’t say fake, but that’s my word — of war.  It seems to me that the message of liberty and the message certainly of civil liberties is alive and well.  How interesting that it comes from a Republican who is not exactly the beaux ideal of his party.  You’ve been there before, haven’t you?

Ron Paul:  I think the messages would have to be similar.  How could it be any other way?  I think the way people present things and tactics and decisions, they can be different.  None of us can be exactly alike.  We can be very similar.  We can have similar goals.  I think the way we proceed and what we do, his techniques are definitely different than mine.  I think you can arrive at the same place in different manners.  I didn’t work too well with the establishment, but if you want to advance a bit, you have to be able to do that.  I concentrated more on working hard — I’m sure Rand does this, too — trying to bring people together that are likeminded on some issues, such as the foreign policy and civil liberties.  That’s more appealing to progressives than conservatives.  This approach has worked very well for me on the college campuses.  It seems like young people grasp this and say: Yeah, this makes sense.  A lot of people say: This is just common sense what you’re doing.  I know you’ve been promoting this message for years and you know exactly what I’m talking about.  We have to bring people together where they don’t think in order to be a moderate and compromise you have to give up half of what you believe in.  I think that actually is the wrong approach.

Mike:  Former Congressman Ron Paul, we’re just going to call him Ron today.  I bet you like that.  Your friends can just call you Ron.  Ron Paul is with us.  I want to ask you a specific question, because I know you keep up with the news.  You’re one of the people I kind of model my thought process on because I know you continually read all there is to read about the issues that you care about, weigh what it is you think is garbage and don’t internalize, and the stuff that’s good you internalize, then you do a little historical research and start making points about it.  I was intrigued and then disappointed and then scared by Attorney General Holder’s response to Rand in the letter that he wrote when he pretty specifically said: Senator Paul, the president is not going to kill an American citizen unless.  You having opposed the NDAA, you having opposed the Patriot Act, that definition of combatant is very broad, is it not?

Ron Paul:  Absolutely.  That is a problem.  They allowed themselves a big loophole.  He won’t kill an American if they’re not involved in combat.  We also, in Congress, over my strong objection when they talked about the NDAA arresting American citizens unless they were allied with somebody.  What does that mean?  Does that mean you visit a website or talk to somebody or email somebody?  That means it’s open.  This is why this whole idea that a president — it really started under Bush.  Can you imagine the difference if Bush had been doing this?  Do you think the Republicans would be yelling and screaming?  Only a few of them would be.  This is a big problem.  They have too many loopholes.  Obama now is notorious for drawing up kill lists.  He didn’t hesitate to kill an American overseas.  Would it really make a difference if he had Al-Awlaki in this country?  They never even charged him or convicted him of committing a violent act.  That is very, very careless thinking about civil liberties, very dangerous.  That was the great thing about the filibuster.  Rand was able to call attention to this whole concept to millions of people.  I imagine a lot of people just shook their heads: This can’t be true.  If it is, what are we going to do about it?  Hopefully this has awakened a lot of people so we do do something about it, which is to put the pressure on members of Congress.  They are talking about legislation.

What was sad to me, Mike, was why are we debating it?  Isn’t this tragic and sad that we even have a discussion?  Why isn’t it automatic that presidents can’t do this?  For 200 years or so, they assumed that wasn’t the case.  They might have done it, but at least they thought it should be kept secret.  Now they want to put it out in front so everybody knows, to frighten and scare everybody.  If you don’t toe the line, your name might be put on the list.

Mike:  Ron Paul is on the line with us.  Ron, you studied Austrian economics.  You probably still study Austrian economics.  Some of your close friends, Lew Rockwell and others, are big promoters and proponents of Austrian economics.  You famously got ahead of the curve in 2002 and predicted exactly what was going to happen with Greenspan’s inflation of the housing market with the low interest rates.  Ben Bernanke has been able to keep the interest rates low for almost four solid years now.  Lew and others, yourself included, and myself — I’m not an economist, and neither are you, but we study the same things — have been saying this is all going to end tragically and there has to be a correct.  Are you surprised that the correction has not already occurred?  What would you say to young, budding Austrian economists?  Be patient, it is going to happen, and be prepared?

Ron Paul:  You can’t predict the timing.  If that’s the right word, be patient.  Just anticipate that you don’t know when things will happen.  I think to understand this, people have to look at the part of Austrian economics that teaches subjective theory of value.  Yes, it’s very objective to measure the money supply, but it’s very non-objective and there’s a subjectivity to anticipating how people act.  That’s why Mises’ great book was called Human Action.  There’s a human element to this in how they react.  When interest rates are low, sometimes it goes into NASDAQ, sometimes it goes into housing and creates the bubble.  Right now it’s going elsewhere.  It’s going into people just buying bonds.  There’s a bond bubble out there.  There’s a lot of inflation and distortion out there, too.  Most people overly concentrate on prices going up, which is very, very harmful, especially to those on fixed incomes, but they shouldn’t forget about malinvestment.  Where does the money go?

Right now, last year, education costs went up over 80 percent, the biggest jump ever.  There’s a lot of that activity there that’s hard to measure but it has a lot to do with legislation, interest rates, and also individuals making these decisions.  The worst part about it is the distortion.  Free markets don’t give you perfect economic conditions.  The corrections occur and you don’t get them so out of whack and the corrections keep it in check.  When government does it, they get out of whack and you have these horrendous bubbles.  Then they won’t allow them to correct.  The housing bubble could have been corrected in a year if everybody was going to go bankrupt, but that wasn’t the case.  We’re still facing a very, very weak economy.

Mike:  Ron Paul is with us on the Dude Maker Hotline.  Ron, I understand you’re working on a book called New School Manifesto.  It’s going to come out on Constitution Day, September the 17^th.  I didn’t know that you were a big educator.  You’ve always been educational, but now you’re putting some of your time and effort behind an education effort.  What can you tell us about it?

Ron Paul:  I mentioned it in my last speech in Congress.  I was looking for the encouraging things and one to me is homeschooling.  The discouraging thing is what’s happened to public education.  I went through public education and my kids did, but over these many years that I’ve looked at it, it’s gone downhill.  There was a figure the other day that said 80 percent of the people graduating from high school in New York City couldn’t read.  Those kinds of statistics, if they’re anywhere true, it’s pretty scary.  I think there is an option.  I’ve always argued that if you can have the freedom to get out of the system, we can survive, if you had a competing currency or if you can get out of the medical system.  Education, right now, over these last 30 years, homeschooling has been growing.  I want to emphasize that because of the conditions getting worse and worse.  Look at all the violence going on in the schools and overreactions.  People are looking for options.  I think it can be found in homeschooling.  It’s going to have a libertarian element to it on the programs that we design.

Mike:  We only have about a minute and a half left, so a final question for you.  Were you surprised by the reaction that you got when you experimented with Twitter a little bit and you tweeted something out about living by the sword and dying by the sword?  I actually had to look that verse up and I found it in the book of Matthew.  I understood where you were coming from when you posted that, but were you surprised by the reaction?

Ron Paul:  I was surprised by some of the libertarians that didn’t understand it.  It was the use of an incident which is always good, because people are thinking about that, to generalize it.  I think the translation from the specific to the generalization didn’t work as well.  If we are a country that’s pursuing an empire and use violence to spread our so-called goodness around the world, eventually it comes back to haunt us continuously.  It wasn’t so much the individual.  Just think, this whole epidemic of suicide we have and the violence and problems.  We have to realize that’s all related to bad foreign policy.  In a way it was similar to the grief I received over 9/11 being related to foreign policy.  That was horrendous in the hooting and booing.  Eventually I think, for the most part, I’ve won that argument.  I think the libertarians have done a very good job in showing that bad ideas have bad consequences.  This is the case and then all of a sudden there were a lot of articles after the dust settled.  People came up and sort of dissected that out.  It was a little bit of a surprise, but considering when you hit people with what they consider brand new and they don’t understand it, I don’t think we should be totally shocked over the reaction.

Mike:  That’s all the time we have.  Godspeed to you.  I tell you that every time I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with you.  I look forward to seeing you somewhere in the near future.  I know you’re keeping a schedule and traveling about.  Anything you want to tell the folks where you may be appearing or speaking or going?

Ron Paul:  I don’t have it all in front of me right now.  I think I’m at University of Florida.  I think that will be posted very soon.  I have several universities lined up and I’ve been to several already.  You should be congratulated for a great ten years.  You’ve done a great job and I’m sure your audience is much bigger than it was that first month you were on the radio.  Keep up the good work.

Mike:  Thank you, Ron, I appreciate it.  Great to hear from you, my friend, Godspeed.

Ron Paul:  Thank you.

Mike:  There you go, former Congressman Ron Paul.

End Mike Church Show Transcript