Here we go again. The hyped-up threat of a government shutdown looms as a way to get the House and Senate to again agree to government spending increases. Does anyone think the outcome is not already pre-ordained? Campaign for Liberty’s Norm Singleton joins the Liberty Report for an insider’s look.

Ron Paul: Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. With me today is the co-host Daniel McAdams. Daniel good to see you.

Daniel McAdams: Dr. Paul good to see you.

Ron Paul: Good. Daniel we have a special guest today and he’s somebody that has worked with me for about 20 years now and he was the legislative director in the Congressional office and you know him well and he’s also the Vide President on the Campaign for Liberty. He’s the expert on legislation and what’s happening in Washington and we might ask him why he hasn’t changed everything up there, since he’s an expert, but he can explain the mess. I don’t know if anybody has the answer to explain how we are going to get out of. Welcome Norm Singleton today. Norm it’s good to have you with us.

Norm Singleton: Thank you Dr. Paul and Daniel, it’s great to be back on the show. Good news is today DC is pretty much shut down because of the Pope’s visit, so I guess that qualify as a miracle that we have one day where they are not going to be taking our liberties.

Ron Paul: I used to believe that, but I’ve become reluctant because government’s on autopilot when you think of the courts and the bureaucracy and all the evil things that go on and how they fight wars without Congressional approval, but it’s a nice, it would be nice if you had a reprieve a day or two, but I’d like a reprieve for about five years or so and just never allow any more expenditures.

Today there’s a couple of issues that we’d like you to catch us up on. One is the issue on Campaign for Liberty has really worked on for a long time and they have been instrumental in getting a lot of good work done. This was especially the case when we, the three of us were in the Congressional office and we got some votes on House floor and we always won these votes. Right now, I understand with the work of Campaign for Liberty and with the help of Rand Paul that there is a possibility that we can get a clean vote in the Senate. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on there.

Norm Singleton: We have a possibility of finally getting an up or down vote in the Senate this Fall. At some time, hopefully in October, Senator McConnell promised that he would have a vote on audit the Fed and he is the co-sponsor of the legislation. Campaign for Liberty is carrying up a program to A – make sure that Senator McConnell keeps the promise and B – make sure that we have the votes to pass it in the Senate. We are currently actually running a grant program and who wants information on that you can go to our website at campaignforliberty.com.

What we want to do is try to get to at least 50 votes, hopefully 60, because we are not sure. McConnell could bring it to the floor, but he may under Senate rules use that to set the 60 vote threshold. At least we are having a clean up and down vote in letting people know what Senators are for it, what Senators are against it and in the case that it is a subject to a 60 vote limitation filibuster, what Senators don’t even want to discuss Federal Reserve transparency, we will make a step forward. If it passes in the Senate, we will pass it in the House and will send it to Obama’s desk and honestly I don’t think he has ever said one way or the other how he stands on the bill. I suspect he would veto it, but again you never know where he stands on it.

In the Democratic primaries Bernie Sanders has in the past co-sponsored it and supported it, but then he’s also worked with Chris Dodd in the Dodd-Frank debate and voted it down. So, how this plays out in the Democratic primary is anybody’s guess and in the Republican primary, obviously Senator Rand is the co-sponsor and a signature. The other two Senators who are frontrunners are also on the bill. The only Republican Senator, the other Senator who’s running from South Carolina, whose name escapes me at the moment. He’s position on it is undefined.

Daniel McAdams: Norm you kind of answered my question actually, but I was hoping on the best case scenario you’d walk us through the process. A lot of people are not as familiar with the arcane legislative tunnels on Capitol Hill, but you are saying a best case scenario would be a vote in the Fall in the Senate followed up quickly by a vote in the House, or what kind of timeline are you hoping for?

Norm Singleton: Yes. We hope that there will be a vote in the Senate in October and that it would be a 50 vote threshold because we think we can pass it with 50 votes, if not we will work really hard to get 60 votes. If we don’t get 60 votes we might be able to go back to Boehner and McCarthy and have them pass it in the House and send it back to the Senate, in which case I think that some Senator, Rand or even McConnell could put it back up on the, the House bill, back up on in Senate calendar and maybe even do it that way with a 50 vote threshold and get it to Obama’s desk that way.

Ron Paul: Norm you sort of alluded to a little bit of the practicality of it, we don’t expect a victory tomorrow, the next day the President signs the bill and all of a sudden we’ll know what we need to know about the Fed. From my perspective of having worked on this for a good many years and even back when I first went to Congress in the 70s, there was talk of auditing the Fed and Gonzales from Texas and Wright Patman, they talked about this for a very long time.

It seems to me like we’ve made tremendous progress here in the recent decade or at least seven or eight years, the recession, depression that we got involved in with the collapse in 2007 and 2008 also helped. Also, I think it’s getting so where people now are very much aware of the failure of the Fed, so I see this as great PR and it’s important. It’s legislatively important, but also we have to talk to a lot of people in order to get the support and I think both of you realize that when we did get the ability to get that vote to the floor, it wasn’t my ability to talk to my colleagues, twist arms and trade votes and that’s how I got the vote. It came from the grassroots and I think that’s where we are making great progress and certainly you ought to have been observing this tremendously, since you are so close to the activities at the Campaign for Liberty.

Norm Singleton: That’s very true; it is the grassroots people and the grassroots revolution that was ignited by your 2008 Presidential campaign and everything that’s Campaign for Liberty, the 2012 campaign since then that keeps us alive. Also, it was seven years ago last week that the housing bubble imploded, the stock market crashed and if you remember that really put attention and focus on a lot of that revolutionary movement on the Fed, on the Treasury, on the bailout culture, on the crony capitalism. It was really fortuitous, the market crashed, but it was fortuitous when it did, because it gave the anti-Fed movement that you had started in 2008 a really the next big boost, it was to point the finger and say this is why Ron Paul was right to warn about the Fed.

And in fact if you remember you were very busy those two weeks doing a lot of media, a lot of the tenure was that you said several months ago that we would do a drastic correction, that our prosperity was a phony one, built on fiat currency, that we don’t know what the Fed is doing, but it’s very dangerous. We laughed at you at the time, but now you are right and tell us what to do and unfortunately you told them again and they didn’t listen and that’s why now there’s a movement designed Campaign for Liberty, it’s the leading design to force Congress to do the right thing and take that first step by exposing the Fed to sunshine and then once we get the audit we will see where we go from there. My prediction is and I think yours and Daniel’s is too is that when the audit is out you are going to see an explosion of public concern and criticism and demands the Congress to do something to change monetary policy and I think if that weren’t the case the Fed wouldn’t be fighting this audit tooth and nail and come down to the point of actually lying about what the bill does.

Ron Paul: Daniel?

Daniel McAdams: Norm, I am going to switch gears here a little bit and in the word of the sadly now late Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again with the Federal government, they are talking about a shutdown, they’ve got the newspapers giving us all kinds of scares about oh my goodness what are we going to do the government is shutting down. Can you give us a little bit of your insider view as to what’s going on with this? Doesn’t it feel so 2013 all over again?

Norm Singleton: It does, and unfortunately 2011 and 2010 and even before that. Sadly, they always promise to shut down, but they never deliver and when they do it’s like what, 20% of the government and it’s always like national parks and national zoos and panda camp that goes out. You never get to an airport and there’s sign saying I’m sorry but you can’t be poked or groped, because TSA is closed. What’s going on is the government’s fiscal year ends on September 30th and as always there’s no advanced planning for this even though they knew the deadline months in advance and they are rushing to pass a continuing resolution and the big argument is a lot of conservative members have said they are after the videos of Planned Parenthood released and they are not going to vote for anything that has Planned Parenthood and that’s the public issue.

Ron Paul: Yeah. Let me ask you about that, about Planned Parenthood. Some of these individuals who want to cut the funding from there are they interested in making sure that they don’t repeal sequestration and that we can nibble away a few weapon positions that we have in spending or they strictly thinking they are going to be fiscal conservatives with dealing with Planned Parenthood.

Norm Singleton: As much as I’d like to see Planned Parenthood lose its funding, realistically that’s not even a percentage of the federal budget and you are right Dr. Paul that what is really going on behind the scenes is that there is an effort led by the defense hawks to cut a deal with the, I guess you call them the welfare hawks of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration to say we don’t like the phony cuts in defense, you don’t like the phony cuts in domestic spending, let’s make a deal to just increase spending across the board in real terms.

Ron Paul: Right.

Daniel McAdams: That’s called a compromise in Washington.

Norm Singleton: Right. It’s an awful deal and again as important as I think the Planned Parenthood debate is, the sad fact is that the really major thing that is going to happen in the Fall, no matter what happens with Planned Parenthood, I think you are going to see a growth of government and you are likely to see a continued funding of abortion in some form or another, because remember Planned Parenthood is just one institution that performs abortion that is federally funded. That doesn’t count all the hospitals and it certainly is not going to stop all the overseas organizations, all the U.N. programs that are funded by the United States which perform abortion overseas, which may be one reason for people overseas resent the United States government.

Ron Paul: Right. The budget I understand this year is a little bit under 4 trillion dollars and they are excited because the deficit is the least it’s been in 7 years and they want to celebrate because it’s less than a half a trillion dollars. This sort of a positive attitude and they think this is positive and with the politics of what’s going on there and I think all of us agree that there is not a chance that anything is going to get cut. The other thing they don’t realize is the projection say in 2007 and 2008 of what would happen to the deficits, there was nothing like what happens, so tomorrow, the next day there is going to be an event, there will be more military expenditures when you listen to some of these clowns that are running for the presidency, now wanting to massively increase the military that has been severely slashed by Obama.

I want to thank the audience for tuning in today and please come back soon to the Liberty Report.

Why does homeschooling continue to increase in popularity? Ron Paul Curriculum course creator and Mises Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods joins the Liberty Report to discuss the continuing education revolution.

Ron Paul: Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. With me today is Daniel McAdams. Daniel, good to see you.

Daniel McAdams: Good morning Dr. Paul.

Ron Paul: Good. We have a special guest, a friend of the Freedom movement and he’s a prolific writer. He’s written many, many books, he’s also a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and he just happens to be a course director and writer for the Ron Paul Curriculum. Welcome to our program today Tom Woods.

Tom Woods: Ron and Daniel it’s a pleasure to be here.

Ron Paul: Good. We consider you an expert, although we have a homeschooling program and my name is attached to it, I also have to have experts really helping me. Of course, Gary North has been involved, you are a course creator and you’ve been working closely with that, so we want to start off with a little bit of generalities about homeschooling, because we have a lot of listeners now to the program and some are interested, but I think a little bit more information might help. Could you give us a little indication on what are your perceptions on homeschooling over the years, maybe ten years or so, what has happened? Is it escalating and growing exponentially or is it a very gradual growth or is there no growth at all and what do you see in the future for homeschooling per se?

Tom Woods: I think it’s been growing very dramatically and certainly in terms of cultural acceptance it’s been growing. My own wife was actually homeschooled back when people would say wait are you even allowed to do that? Whereas today people understand that there are all kinds of reasons people might even want to do it. There was a, some years ago, that the only reason people would homeschool is for religious reasons, but it turns out there are great many people who want to school for a whole variety of reasons, there are people on the left, on the right, in the middle, people who are Libertarian, people who are not Libertarian, they just feel that a one size fits all approach doesn’t really work for them. It’s been extremely encouraging to see that you can engage in homeschooling and there is now a huge infrastructure that has developed to support you in terms of social events, athletic events, all kinds of special events at museums, at libraries just for homeschoolers. You don’t feel like you are isolated, you are a weirdo, you’ve really been made to feel like welcome in many different social situations. That’s wonderful.

Daniel McAdams: Tom that’s absolutely right. We’ve taken advantage, we homeschool our three children, we’ve taken advantage of so many special museum programs and they have been a long time coming, but they‘ve recognized there are so many kids at home during the week being schooled and they have so many different programs. I am glad to hear you say that some of the old stereotypes have fallen by the waste. I fear that with the homeschooling, people from the public school people are getting more worried about homeschooling, so you do hear more about stereotypes, the kids are so isolated, they are not socialized, it’s the funniest thing, because these kids I think are amongst the most socialized, at least in our experience of kids.

Tom Woods: Also I find that in general they are the ones who are most able to have conversations with adults and they are aware of what’s going on in the world. They can handle themselves in a variety of social situations, so the accusation of socialization is really starting to backfire these days. These are the most sophisticated of the kids, the most polite, the friendliest, the most helpful. I don’t mean to say that’s impossible to have these qualities in a traditional school setting, I went through a traditional school setting, but homeschoolers there used to be these tremendous stereotypes about them, that they were backward, whatever, that they would make their own clothes or whatever. Now you are finding that the homeschool kids are actually just like the kids down the street.

Ron Paul: I first became very much aware of homeschoolers when there were the early fights in the 70s in Texas, they tried to put homeschooling out of business, but by the 70s and the 80s, when I have gone on campaign trips in the middle of the week during the school year, all of a sudden there would be some kids there and I was impressed and I finally found out they weren’t playing hooky, they were actually there for a purpose and they would ask questions, so I was very impressed, so your point that there’s a lot more adjustment from homeschoolers that everybody realizes.

Give me an idea about what is available, because we have a precise goal and we are not bashful about what we would like to accomplish in our curriculum and we are not going to be teaching Keynesian economics and we are not going to teach Woodrow Wilson foreign policy, but what is out there? I know there’s some religious schools and it delves in promoting religion per se, but is there anything on the left? I am trying finally to figure out what is the variety out there that is actually offered up. Of course, we are for variety, we want to defend variety, although we want a curriculum that people know exactly what we are looking for to bring our leadership in the freedom movement. What do you know about the various courses that have been used in recent years?

Tom Woods: I am afraid I don’t know of anything that’s expressly leftist, that’s coterie towards homeschoolers, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see more and more of that, because I suspect the reason people homeschool in Vermont and quite different from the reasons they might homeschool, let’s say in Alabama or Idaho or some other place. So, it wouldn’t surprise me to see that. I know that there is a wide variety of curriculum companies that you can find, a lot of them struggle with subjects like American history, because frankly it is impossible to find a decent American history textbook, so they are using textbooks from the 50s, they haven’t been updated in 65 years.

This is a bit of a problem, but one of the benefits of your curriculum, Ron Paul Curriculum is that we don’t get tied down by textbooks. They cost a lot of money, it’s very, very rare to find a decent one anyway and they are put together by committees, they just repeat the conventional wisdom and they are boring, there’s no kid in the world who ever said to their parents thank heavens you bought me this textbook. None of them feel that way. Although, there are variety of curriculum companies out there, in terms of not using textbooks, focusing on primary sources, focusing on getting students reading what the people said, instead of what some textbook author wants them to know about what they said.

This is definitely one of the benefits and I would also note, by the way, the way I pitch it, I have a site ronpaulhomeschool.com and my headline is not Hey your kids will learn liberty. Yeah, that’s great and of course that’s why we are here, but the headline is if you are a homeschooling parent, you are probably working too hard. The idea of the Ron Paul Curriculum is that it really is self-taught after about the fourth grade it’s self taught. You watch a video, you do your reading and you do your assignment. Then you have Q&A forms where students can interact with each other and they can tutor each other, but basically it runs itself and that’s not something I am familiar with elsewhere and we’ve been around long enough now that we have parent testimonials and these testimonials are for parents saying I finally have my mental health back.

Before I tried to keep up with my house, I have younger kids I have to watch and I have to prepare lesson plans. If you want to use the Ron Paul Curriculum, you have prepared the last lesson planned you will ever prepare your entire life and on top of that not only will your kids get a top notch education, but they won’t have to go looking around a way the rest of us did, to find out who Ludwig von Mises was or who Frederic Bastiat was or what Austrian economics is, that will be part of their curriculum, they won’t have to go searching for it.

In the curriculum, by the way, we don’t just say here’s the Libertarian curriculum and they have theirs and they have theirs, we do show you what the other side’s arguments are, in my government course I explain here are the reasons people say government needs to do A, B, C and D. The difference in our course is that in their course they never tell you here’s some arguments against it, but I do show here’s the other side, how about that? There is actually another side, or here’s why maybe you don’t need a Central Bank. All you get in an economic course is of course why the Federal Reserve System is responsible for our prosperity. That’s all you get.

There is another side of the story, it gets totally neglected, so you’ll get to keep your mental health and your students will actually learn the sorts of things you and I had to search around looking for, because nobody was going to teach them to us.

Daniel McAdams: Tom, you mentioned textbooks, the one book that my 15 year old son has read is your Politically Incorrect Guide to History and I don’t know if I should praise you or condemn you, because he comes running to me with all these questions, what about this and I read that this was true, but Tom Woods says something very different, so I’ve got to be on my toes.

Tom Woods: Yeah.

Daniel McAdams: You captured something really important Tom and that is the diversity of homeschooling, it’s not simply a school that you’d go to, a public school, but transferred to home, there are so many different types of homeschoolers, there are the unschoolers that believe that you should not teach really anything, the kids discover on their own what they want and there are others on the other end of the spectrum, who are very rigidly in a program, there are many others like our family who sort of pick and choose what works. You get a little bit here, a little bit there and I think that’s one of the attractiveness of the Curriculum as well as you can take courses as you wish. You can look at things that are important, that you feel are important, you can supplement what you made with other things with Ron Paul Curriculum. I think that’s one of the best things for our family that it has to offer.

Tom Woods: Yeah, take the courses that you want to take, it’s not like we say you are in 8th grade, so you are officially signed up for all these courses. We don’t even believe in that, our view is that maybe there are some people in 8th grade who should be in 10th grade math, but 7th grade history or whatever and you just decide which course works for you. You test it out and you take 60 days with it and then you say whether this is too hard or too easy and then you get your money back and you try a different one. It is great that you can do, you can tailor it with what you need.

Also, it’s not like we just teach, we have math and science and literature and all that, but what we’re also doing is courses that you won’t find at all. This is not just our spin on them, these are courses that you won’t find at all, for example for teenagers how to manage your own finances, personal finances, so that you don’t get into debt, you learn how to manage spending and balance a checkbook or whatever. Every teenager should be trained in this and yet I don’t know of anybody who’s teaching that. We have a course in that or we have a course in how to start your own home business or how to be an effective public speaker.

This is another aspect of the curriculum. It’s that we don’t want to just fill their brains with grade information, that’s a wonderful thing, but if it just sits there it becomes sterile. We want to train them to go out there and to be persuasive, to be able to write effectively, to speak effectively, to know how to run a blog, so that when you graduate and get out there, you can be contributing to the conversation, it will be old hat for you. It’s the whole person here, it’s not just the brain, it’s the whole person we are trying to reach.

Ron Paul: Tom one thing we’ve tried to do is have these choices and there’s a lot of those, but there’s also the ability that if you decide that you want to go to college, you want to go to medical school, you have to orient that, so it’s not like the kids can pick and choose what they do and just go about, but if they have a desire and they have a content with some conventional testing and all, I think we make a sincere effort to help them achieve these goals, rather than saying I don’t know anything about those tests, just go there and maybe they’ll let you in. Tell us a little bit about how we try to prepare these kids to compete in the real world of getting into a medical school or into college.

Tom Woods: There’s great emphasis on clep exams and these sorts of advanced exams that people can use to get, first of all it help that you take some of these exams for when you are applying, but also when you are in college you can use these exams for college credit and place out of certain subjects altogether. In fact, the young man Bradley Fish who teaches some of the junior high courses is a classic example of this. He entered college, as a matter of fact he may have graduated college at age 18, at some crazy age. He entered really, really young and he already placed out two years of college, because he took clep exams, so if you have a specially ambitious student, again with our courses there is no timeline, you have to take a year or you have to take nine months.

You can do it in four months if you really hassle, you can do that if you want to get some course out of the way, you can take clep exams successfully on the basis of the information we teach you in these courses and then you can save your parents a lot of dough by possible taking out a year or two of college, as I say one of our faculty members did this himself, so we do talk about how to that.

We don’t just teach you stuff that no one would ever test on a test, it’s all just Libertarian stuff and no one’s ever going to ask you about that. You learn about the stuff you would need to succeed on these tests placed out in these courses, save yourself some money and start your life a year or two earlier. Think of all of the earnings that you would have earned, that you are spending in some classroom somewhere. We are going to restore those for you, by possibly helping you to go early.

Ron Paul: Good. We are running out of time, but we have a couple short questions that we’d like to ask.

Daniel McAdams: Yeah, Tom, we were talking here before we started here about the future of homeschooling and we have something on the Institute’s website on the Californian vaccination law and how that is driving a lot of parents into homeschooling and these are not necessarily parents that are opposed to all vaccinations, but they don’t like the government schedule, where they don’t get to choose which or where they are going to cocktail a certain age of many things, so these kids are not able now to go to public or private schools and it’s really causing a boom in homeschooling. How do you see the future of homeschooling versus the state that I think will remain skeptical, a state with capital S that will remain skeptical of this sort of thing.

Tom Woods: When you have something like homeschooling that so many people have latched onto, we have a tipping point where it becomes pretty much impossible for the state to do much about them. In the beginning you could be a prosecuted minority, but today it’s just growing too rapidly. I think not just the vaccination thing, but also there are a lot families that do not approve of leftist social policy and they are going to see this pushed more and more and more in the schools. I think that’s going to drive more them out. I think the trend is definitely upward for those reasons.

Ron Paul: Ok, Tom I want to thank you very much for being with us today and I’d like to close with a couple comments to our audience. Homeschooling to me is very important and that’s why I respond very favorably to both Tom and Gary North for proposing and helping to put this homeschooling program together. I am really big in education just like Tom is and he still has education at the Mises Institute, he deals with that and also with the books that he writes. Of all the things that I do I’ve always concentrated on education and for me it was a sort of an educational bully pulpit, because the politics sometimes was rather annoying to me.

I think this program to me, if it does what I expect and what I sense is already doing introducing this, this could be one of the most important things that I have done and will leave and that is a set of educational standards that we have here. It doesn’t happen overnight, we’ve been doing this for a couple of years now and our particular program is growing rather steadily and it’s mostly by word of mouth and it’s economically feasible and you don’t have to be very wealthy. As a matter of fact, very modest income people come and get these programs. It is something I am excited about because I believe sincerely that this is an answer to contradict so much misinformation that we get from the government schools. Tom you’ve been the expert on history and Daniel already emphasized that one of your books is really challenging to one of his kids and that is what we need.

We need a clear understanding and match them up, let them pick. Whether it’s economic policy, it seems to me that I’ve always been so disappointed that non-interventionist foreign policy just didn’t win hands down and yet the propaganda is so bad. Why doesn’t free markets win hands down over Keynesianism and socialism? Now we have Keynesians running for Congress, as well as socialists. We should do so much better and I believe that we live in a time where we are going through a transition, we are seeing the failure of all these programs, whether it’s education or whether it’s foreign policy or government programs or welfare, it’s all going down the tubes, so this is why I see a tremendous opportunity in homeschooling. I hope those of you who listen and view this program will consider just looking up ronpaulcurriculum.com and see if it would be something worthwhile for anybody in your family.

I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report and please come back soon.

Following last week’s meeting of the Fed, at which the decision was made to keep interest rates at virtually zero, even many mainstream commentators are beginning to question whether we need a Federal Reserve Bank and even whether we need a central bank at all. Special guest Paul-Martin Foss joins the Liberty Report to discuss the future of the Fed.

Ron Paul: Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. Today we are going to be talking about the Federal Reserve, that item that pops up on a frequent occasion on the station, but we have a special guest to discuss the Federal Reserve with and that is Paul Martin Foss and he was the legislative director for all my banking matters when we were in Congress and he’s coming to me by way of Skype, he’s coming from Virginia. Paul Martin welcome to our program.

Paul Martin: Thank you Dr. Paul, it’s great to be here.

Ron Paul: Good. Since you left the Congressional job and went on you started a new organization, it’s called the Carl Menger Center. Just refresh everybody’s memory exactly who Carl Menger was and what your center is and your website.

Paul Martin: Carl Menger was the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, he was the first generation Austrian, the guy who started it all. He’s one of the three economists who basically ushered in the Marginal Revolution and his students were Friedrich von Wiser and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, those were the second generation Austrians and their students including Ludwig von Mises, the third generation Austrians who really popularized Austrian economics, started bringing a lot of the monetary focus in Austrian economics and then other ones obviously who have been responsible for the popularization of Austrian economics in the mainstream and in the United States.

Menger had his own monetary contributions, he wrote On the Origins of Money, one of his monetary pieces, very short piece, but he also was involved in the Austrian-Hungarian monetary reforms in the 1890s. The website is mengercenter.org. It’s available on the web and we basically named it after Menger to show that we are firmly within the Austrian tradition and try to be more understanding of the economists among the general public, because he is the founder of the Austrian school and he’s often forgotten and a lot of his works are still in German, not translated into English, so a lot of his ideas still need to be brought out to the general public.

Ron Paul: Good. Today we are going to be talking a little bit about the current status of our Federal Reserve, as well as central banking per se, but what was Menger’s position on central banking? Did he talk about central banking and think of central banking as we do today or how did they look at that? You remember and I remember personally Murray Rothbard and others and we know their position of central banking and they were so strongly opposed, but what was the attitude of central banking in the time of Menger?

Paul Martin: At the time of Menger, you read some of his stuff and it is a little more, I wouldn’t say it was a little more open necessarily to the central banking that exists today, as the kind of super lender last resort that’s just purchasing assets and trying to define economy. He was definitely, because he was involved in the Austrian monetary reforms, a slight role of government in the issuance of money. He would not have favored in the complete centralization what we have today, the government completely monopolizing the issuance of money. I don’t think he would have supported, he saw money essentially as a social institution that came about due to market needing some medium of exchange.

He recognized the fact that governments had kind of jumped in and provided money, so one of his goals was to make sure that the government provided sound money, stable currency, something that can be relied on. His marginal revolution works in 1870s and he really didn’t do a whole bunch of writing after about 1904, I think 1904 or 1908. He died in the early 1920s and if he had seen what the Federal Reserve end up doing in the 1920s and what happened with the depression, I have no doubt that if he had lived another ten or twenty years he would have been just as strong against central banking as Mises and Rothbard ended up being.

Ron Paul: From my viewpoint I think the central banking is under the gun, the Federal Reserve is under the gun between a rock and a hard place, they don’t know which way to go in. Every time they come out with an announcement everybody is on pins and needles and the announcements can mean the difference of not a couple of billions, but even trillions of dollars on which way it goes. We saw that last week in the announcement on the market and it went down sharply on Friday due to the Fed didn’t act and didn’t raise rates, what would they done if they have raised rates, it could have been even a lot worse.

They are now struggling, even this morning the markets went down initially, I don’t know whether they’ll stay down because the bank of Japan after they’ve been in trouble for 20 or 30 years, the bank of Japan announced that they may go back and do some more QE. Tell me a little bit how you see the status, first on our Federal Reserve, you and I worked so closely on trying to bring attention to the American people about just getting to audit the Fed and a lot of people know about the Fed now, but I think currently the Fed is getting a lot of negative publicity and it’s all deserved.

Paul Martin: Yes, definitely. They’ve got a 4 and a half trillion dollars balance sheet and keep talking about wanting to raise rates, wanting to reduce the size of the balance sheet, but this has been, let’s see, 8 years now, we’ve had basically zero interest rates, Federal funds rates have been close to zero, 8 years of huge and ever increasing balance sheet. This is not going to happen overnight even if they end up being serious about this. I think Yellen a couple of meetings ago said something we don’t expect to get back to full policy normalization until the end of the decade, that’s another at least five years, if they decide to do this and if you hear Yellen last week at the press conference, she said we are still waiting on this rate hikes, we still want to see a little more improvement, we want to see a little higher inflation.

They keep expecting this wonderful recovery with 4% GDP growth and an unemployment goes down to 4% and inflation shooting up to 2% and what they don’t realize is that we still hadn’t had a liquidation of all of our malinvestment from the last bubble, so prices really want to go down, but the Fed is trying to prop them up and they are trying to prop up this thing that doesn’t want to rise. I am not sure that they will ever get to a point where they will say we feel completely comfortable, the economy’s recovered. They may start raising rates a little bit, move them up to a half percent, or three quarters of percent or maybe even one percent. I am not sure we will get back to the 3 or 5 percent that we saw a decade ago, but the balance sheet I don’t think it’s ever going to, I’d be shocked if it ever starts decreasing.

I think before they get to the point of full normalization as they call it in reducing the size of the balance sheet, I think we’ll probably have another bubble burst and the Fed is going to start doing QE, start more asset purchases and you can only go so long. Even with the Bank of Japan, there’s only so many assets that the Central Bank can buy and at some point there’s nothing left for them to buy and these policies will have to come to an end and that’s when the ultimate crash will come.

Ron Paul: They know that interest rates should be higher, this is abnormal and everybody agrees, that interest rates should be higher. They also know that there is price to pay under current conditions and that if they raise the rates it’s going to be very serious, but they don’t really talk about the consequence, they think that it’s either the status quo or raise the rates and suffer the consequence, but when you don’t raise the rates and then you pretend that they can do it later on, all it does is from my viewpoint, is delay it and actually sets a stage for doing it all these years, so the bubbles are bigger. The bond purchases are bigger and the debt is more.

I think they are at a point where they are losing credibility, but let’s hope that maybe they’ll lose total credibility. Do you see it that way, do you think their credibility is really on the line right now?

Paul Martin: I think it is, I think most traders and most economists right now are scratching their heads wondering if these people know what they are doing. So many people say ok it’s been 8 years, you need to start raising rates again. You are setting the stage for a much, much larger bubble and this next crash is going to make 2008 look like child’s play. It will be very, very bad and partially also because we haven’t still dully liquidated all the malinvestments from the last crisis. We still have a lot of bad debts out there, we have people with mortgages that they barely can pay off, we have people still who are looking for jobs, they were laid off last financial crisis and still not fully adjusted to the kind of normal that we have right now. A lot of people have dropped out of labor market. I think things are going to be really really bad in the near future.

Ron Paul: They talk about the goals and the purpose and the functions of the Federal Reserve and stable prices and high employment, but in the last 20 years, maybe getting close to 20 years, the function of the Federal Reserve seems to me to prop up the stock market and that actually started in 1987 with this President’s working group on financial markets which is called the Plunge Protection Team and the Fed leads the charge on that, it’s always the prices.

This morning on CNBC, Baullard from St. Louis was on there and he was critical of Jim Cramer for being a cheerleader for the stock market. Here’s a Fed official who’s part of the system that does it, is criticized by somebody who is always cheerleading, they always want these higher prices. They’ve been directed to their attention to the stock market, at the same time the average person is getting poorer and nobody earns interest and they save money. Does it appear or is it absolute policy do you think that the whole purpose of the Fed in this past decade is to try to keep stock prices up?

Paul Martin: The stock markets, every time you see it, the dollar drops 200, 300 points and people start to freak out and panic and think the bottom is going to fall out if it goes down 500 or 1000, then people really, really start to panic. I think they definitely are trying to boost stock prices, they are definitely trying to help the banks, one of the reasons they have this 4.5 trillion dollars balance sheet, you have these huge amounts of excess reserves, because they purchase all these assets, they take bad debts, bad mortgages, bad securities, the books of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs no holding and the excess reserves are being held by these big banks and they pay them right now a quarter percent interest.

As the Fed begins to start raising the Federal funds rate, they will also start to raise the interest rates they are paying to these big banks on the excess reserve. The banks are basically the winners regardless and it’s the rest of us who can start to see the price of beef rising, the price of milk and the price of eggs, apartment rents are skyrocketing, they are increasing at unprecedented rates right now, so the cost of living, small people are getting squeezed and the big banks are literally laughing all the way to the bank.

Ron Paul: They have a problem with the price inflation and yet they say the CPI, yet there are other things they don’t recognize. Maybe they’d like to see this money being spent differently and devalue the currency faster to lower the real debt, but they get really frustrated with that. The inflation of the money supply and the zero interest rates does play an important role in the accumulation of debt in the various areas. Why don’t you speak about that for a minute, what kind of debt accumulation have we had, public and private, that we ought to be concerned about?

Paul Martin: We should definitely be concerned because you still have a lot of it that was not liquidated during the last bubble bursting and then you are piling more on top of that, because when you have such low interest rates you are incentivizing people to continue taking on debts that they are not going to be able to afford, five or ten years down the road. Mortgage applications are up, car loan applications are up, credit card debt is starting to increase again and now after 8 years, when you first start the zero interest rates policy, people are thinking it’s only going to last two or three years and maybe they get concerned.

Now that we are 8 years, the Fed has once again kicked the can down the road and said we are not going to hike interest rates this time, people are still thinking maybe I’ll apply for that mortgage, try to get a fixed rate while rates are still low and try to get advantage of these low rates and get themselves into something that’s completely unsustainable, so the private debt, I read somewhere that adjustable rate mortgages are back, so these rates that are just based on the interest rates if people are getting in to those, the rates are going to start rising, they are going to get squeezed. Then, of course, we have the government that is running a whole bunch of deficits every year and the Fed loves that, because that’s what allows them to continue engaging in monetary policy.

They are basically indirectly monetizing a lot of this debt that the government sells to the big Wall Street banks, the primary dealers and the Fed buys it from the primary dealers, so the government gets the market for its debt, and the Fed gets more securities put on its balance sheet and the cycle is going to keep going until it bursts again.

Ron Paul: There was another thing that James Bullard said, the President from St. Louis, he said he would have voted to raise interest rates last week, but he’s not a voting member right now. The person who did vote against it is Jeffrey Lacker form Richmond. Do you know anything about him that would suggest, has he been doing this before or is this the first time he’s dissented like this?

Paul Martin: I can’t remember because it’s been a few years since he was on board. I want to say that he dissented from some of the stuff the last time he was on board, but I remember when I was working for you on the Hill, we had some Richmond Fed economists come up and talk to financial services staffers and we went and talked to them afterwards and they even though weren’t completely on board with Austrian economics, you wouldn’t say they would necessarily sympathetic to anything sound economics-wise. They at least understood where Austrians were coming from and were somewhat sympathetic to some of our views.

They seem to be fairly understanding of some of the problems that were happening, of course this was three years ago and nowadays they would definitely see some of the warning signs. I think Lacker he’s getting some good information, he has some good people advising him, obviously not fully on board with Austrianism, but definitely kid of a sympathizer, he understands the problems with this continued zero interest rates policy, so I definitely see him as somebody who will continue to dissent in the future. He had a speech a couple of weeks ago where he said yeah it’s definitely way past time to start raising rates and they need to start rising.

Ron Paul: They asked me, the point that Hayek makes that the pretense of knowledge that comes across me, he says they are a bunch of guys getting together and women too, get together in a secret room and they actually convince themselves we know what the proper rate of interest would be, no t ever taking into consideration the interest rates, to have a sound economy, you have to have a market rate or the whole thing goes nuts. Everybody then makes mistakes in the price of money is involved in every transaction. That simple principle I guess in the early years of central banking they weren’t nearly as involved in this and somewhat this may play into our scenario into wanting to challenge central banking because it isn’t working. To me it’s really amazing that they actually believe that they know what the proper rate of interest ought to be.

Paul Martin: I think they forget that a lot of people understand that this interest rate fixing is essentially a price control and we know what happened if the government would have set the price of oil or set the price of housing or set the price of milk. We know and understand what kind of negative effects that would have, but there’s a kind of a blind spot there among most academic economists and most mainstream economists in large part, because a lot of them were captured by the Fed and paid by the Fed, but they don’t seem to see this and understand that it’s price fixing and basically the price of money and the price of credit and the price of loanable funds and money is half of every economic transaction, what society causes civilizations to be able to exist.

It’s what allows for the people to plan for the future and when you get the fundamental price messed up because 12 people are meeting in Washington and are setting that price and setting the rate that has no correlation to any sort of market fundamentals or market dynamics. You are going to have to introduce a whole bunch of shots into the economy and that’s what causes malinvestment, so basically everything undergirding the economy is messed up, because you have these 12 people, thinking that they can set this price.

Ron Paul: The Keynesians sort of like debt, there is no fear about debt and we worry about debt. Debt is built-in and compensates for not paying interest because in checking with some prices, prices are a little bit higher if you have no interest rates for five years and they check it out, it’s really built in to the system. People get to the point where they buy stuff they don’t need when there’s zero rates and then it’s just paying back principle that becomes a problem.

The other day somebody asked me from an Austrian viewpoint. What would the Austrians do and under these circumstances if we were in the Fed, they couldn’t quite comprehend that the Austrians are not forced to pick a rate of up or down. We are running close to this, so give me a brief answer to that, how an Austrian should answer that question, because it’s a question to which there is no answer. We can say, no stay and we are going to raise interest rates.

Paul Martin: Yeah, the thing that the Austrians should recommend is that the Fed to get out of the whole business of setting up interest rates to begin with and I think once that happened you might have a small shock in the beginning when people say now they no longer have access to this low federal funds rates, but then the banks are going to be able to set their own interest rates how much they charge in loaning money to other banks.

You still have problems obviously because you have fractional reserve banks and their system is propped up through subsidized deposit insurance, so there will be instabilities in the banking system, but without that price fixing you are going to get back to market rate interest, where the banks are unsound they are not going to be able to go to the Fed, so the banks that borrow in the overnight market at nearly zero percent, they might have to pay a penalty, a real penalty rate of 3, or 4 or 5 percent and if they are in a real bad shape maybe 8 or 10 percent. If the bank is in real bad shape they will go on under and their assets and debts will be liquidated and passed on to other banks and you will end up with a stronger financial system as a result.

Ron Paul: Paul Martin I want to thank you very much for being with us today, this is an interesting subject and you have worked on it for a long time and I hope this will be the beginning of the end and I appreciate you very much for being with us today.

Paul Martin: Thank you very much Dr. Paul for having me on.

Ron Paul: I want to thank all the viewers today for tuning in please come back to the Liberty Report soon.

Antiwar.com columnist Lucy Steigerwald joins the Ron Paul Liberty Report to discuss Dick Cheney’s new book, “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.” The neocons never give up…

Ron Paul: Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. With me today is Daniel McAdams. It’s nice to see you Daniel.

Daniel McAdams: Good morning Dr. Paul.

Ron Paul: Good. We have a special guest today and she’s very interesting because she writes about your good friends, the Cheney family and we are going to get some enlightenment, because she’s written a recent article “Who is listening to Dick Cheney?” and we hope the answer is nobody, but we are going to find out. Lucy Steigerwald has written for Antiwar, as well as Reason magazine and I believe she puts a column out every week. She also interviewed me on my little booklet “Swords into Plowshares”. Lucy it’s nice to have you with us today.

Lucy Steigerwald: Thank you Dr. Paul, I’m very happy to be here.

Ron Paul: Good. I like the title of your article “Who is Listening to Dick Cheney?” I guess you can’t give us a real quick answer and settle the whole thing. Nobody ever will listen to Dick Cheney again. What’s your answer?

Lucy Steigerwald: That would be great, that’s always been very optimistic, to hope that nobody is. I was kind of responding to a Washington Post piece that I unfortunately found a little too optimistic by a man called Paul Waldman and sort of what I got out of it and I’m sure he could dispute my interpretation, but basically saying don’t worry about Dick Cheney and spawn coming back and offering their opinions, because nobody want to listen to them, because Bush left office with historically low approval ratings, so kind of Dick Cheney is out of fashion. We don’t really need to worry, the class of 2016 is not going to be calling him up and asking him to give them a photo op. I just think it was too optimistic for a lot of reasons.

Daniel McAdams: It sounds to me like nothing to see here, move along. I wrote an article for the Institute a little while ago about this and we’ve talked about it before Dr. Paul and Lucy I’m sure you’ve probably see this that there’s a shop called the John Hay Initiative I think, where all with the exception of a couple, all of the GOP Presidential candidates are going to this one shop to get all of their off the shelf foreign policy and look who started the shop. It’s the absolute same neocons who were all around Cheney when they were lying us into the war. Don’t you think Lucy that they are trying to divert our attention away from the fact that these guys never left power, they’ve always been in charge?

Lucy Steigerwald: Yes, I think just because Dick Cheney himself, people have this certain idea, they make all these jokes about him being kind of a super villain, but we’d never trust him again and even though this Washington Post piece it wasn’t in praise of Cheney, it’s still a little too much like we are over that, it was a decade ago, we are much more morally upright people when we were when the war in Iraq happened.

I am afraid that I don’t think it’s true. I still think that people are very easily pushed to war and we have a slightly different type of war being bashful now, which is the Obama version, which is robots in numerous countries which are not even legally at war, which is a very sustainable type of war and will probably get more sustainable as drones get cheaper and cheaper. Someday a terrorist is going to have some too, probably.

Ron Paul: Under the circumstances today there was a lot of bipartisanship and a lot of rhetoric going back and forth and yet we all see that the foreign policy doesn’t really change and a lot of people on TV sometimes would ask me, don’t you think it’s time for a third party and I said there is time for a second party, because they are all the same. A lot of people don’t believe that, they think there’s a difference and maybe there is in who gets to wield the power, but it still seems like you already alluded to, they all endorse this whole issue of power. Their book is called “Exceptionalism: Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney and Why the World Needs and Powerful America.” That sort of bothers me, what do you think they have in their mind when they talk about powerful? I doubt it they are talking about a powerful Libertarian views.

Lucy Steigerwald: They most certainly are not. If you saw that Wall Street Journal excerpt from last week I believe, it’s just like a joke. There’s nothing, it sounds sort of intellectual like this is a serious policy suggestion, but there’s nothing there, it’s just America great, American powerful, America was powerful and then it made everything better. That’s all. There was one point where the Cheneys write about how the young people need to learn about World War II, learn about how the bombs were necessary, this list of historical things that are completely lacking in nuance or complexity when they are mentioned by the Cheneys. They are just cheerleading for America and that’s the kind of history books they want for young people. It was very difficult to read, nor did it surprise me considering the source.

Daniel McAdams: It seems to like they are trying, I’ve said this before Dr. Paul, they are trying to rehabilitate 2003, they are trying to rehabilitate the Iraq war, just as the Soviets had rehabilitated people that were Titoists etc, etc, if you fall out of power. I think they want American people to feel good about a bad war, that’s why we are seeing people like Petraeus whose wonderful 2007 surge contributed to the creation of ISIS, now telling us we have to make common cause with Al-Qaeda to defeat ISIS, but what I was going to ask you Lucy and I cannot figure this out, for the life of me it’s a question that I always have. Why is it that the neocons, every analysis and every prescription that they have for our future has been wrong and discredited? Why are the neocons not discredited? Can you imagine your financial advisor, every advice he’s given you has caused you to lose money. Do you have an answer for that Lucy, I’d love to hear it.

Lucy Steigerwald: Speaking from a purely Libertarian perspective government isn’t discredited in people’s minds yet, but in my mind government has officially proven that is bad at the least possible arguable no government at all is superior, but in most people’s minds that’s absurd. Of course, you need government. There’s something about government and public policy, including something that’s deadly serious as war where no matter how many mistakes you get you are allowed to make more. There are a few people saying why we listen to Dick Cheney, why we let him be on TV, with a lower third that says was wrong about the Iraq war, but nobody who puts them on TV really believes that, it’s just I don’t know, it doesn’t matter if you are wrong, it matters because hundreds of thousands of people died because you were wrong. I don’t know, it’s just how it works, you get a thousand chances.

Ron Paul: I think the one lie they get away with here in the campaign right now and is on both sides on the aisle. Of course, the Republicans turn on Obama, it’s all Obama’s fault. It’s this idea that Obama and the Republican Congress obviously has allowed our military to deteriorate and we are under threat, the Chinese are coming and the Russians are coming and the Cheneys say we have to rebuild, rebuild. How in the world are we going to refute this thing until somebody, we need to get those statistics out, they control the major media, but I would say I doubt very much, as a matter of fact I know there’s been no reduction in military spending.

Lucy Steigerwald: That is something that the general rule is that when you are talking about cutting the military you are talking about decreasing the automatic increase. You are not talking about less military one year than there was before, as far as I know that’s generally how it works. It’s even dishonest to talk about cutting the military, we slash the military, when there are all these automatic funding, that hasn’t been touched by anyone.

Daniel McAdams: And the rein of increase is affected by their design of the procurement. You have a lot of money; trillions being spent on this F-35 which everyone concedes is a piece of junk, so it costs a lot. In a way it’s the people who are appealing to the military industrial complex like the Cheneys who are actually depleting our military because they are diverting so much money into junk and diverting it away from taking care of troops, from taking care of veterans and this sort of things.

Ron Paul: Right. Daniel’s concerned about the fact that they keep going back to the bad guys to get more advice. I have a word of encouragement, I’ll keep my fingers crossed on that, because this is actually my belief. I’ve been there and I know the clowns that are in Washington and you’ve met many of them too, we are not likely, there are a few good ones too, but we are not likely to have a majority vote and come to our senses, but it does end. What did the Soviets do for all those years? Did they really change communism? When did it disappear, when did their Empire end, when did the communism and the walls come down? It’s when they went bankrupt. Unfortunately, there may be a little bit of wait, unfortunately it may come too fast and we may not be prepared, but this is not going to be long lasting. I think it will end.

Lucy Steigerwald: Here’s hoping.

Ron Paul: Anyway, Lucy I want to thank you very much for being with us today and your article is great, who is listening to Dick Cheney. I advice people to read your article and read your weekly articles, but I do not advice people to send in money to the Cheney and buy Exceptionalism and buy their book. They should read your articles, because I do know that you are a consistent opponent to wars and I am delighted that you are opposed to the war on drugs. I do have one short question dealing with that. Just recently and I’m sure you saw a gentleman was released from prison after 20 years of a life sentence, at least he didn’t get to life, now he’s a grandfather and elderly, but he was put in jail 20 years ago for a life sentence for smoking marijuana. Can anything be more atrocious with a society that we pretend to be a free society and an exceptional society?

Lucy Steigerwald: There are a few things more awful than that, the war on drugs was the worst domestic policy since Jim Crow certainly. That’s another thing where people who made it, did not get punished. Joe Biden, to talk him running for President, he was a huge drug warrior. The nice thing, a reason for optimism is that public opinion and even politicians who is John Stossel taught us to lead the way of public opinion, pretend they are leading it. Finally everyone’s decided we do want to reform the war on drugs after decade on being a complete non starter of an issue. It’s a natural reason for optimism, but the causalities of it are still in prison or are still like this man, who I’ve read about. He lost 20 years, you can’t give that back, you can’t give that back, no matter what, no matter how sorry and how serious you are about changing policy. Can’t give it back, that’s all.

Ron Paul: Thank you Lucy and hopefully our audience will be following what you’ve been writing for several years now already.

Anyway, I think this is an important issue, the Cheneys are very important people, because they are so negative and they are so destructive to our country and there are so many people in the Republican Party who still think that they are our salvation and unfortunately I was hoping that at the beginning of the problem that nobody would listen to the Cheneys, but unfortunately there are too many and most of it is being controlled by the military industrial complex and they are very much involved. They are militants and it’s very, very dangerous.

The whole thing is that neoconservativism, even when the Democrats are in charge, is very much an influence. The rhetoric is different, but just look at this current administration that is being run by somebody who won the Nobel Prize for Peace and he’s initiated wars in Libya, Ukraine, as well as Syria and they are ongoing. Unfortunately, we have to once again look at the role of government and what our foreign policy ought to be. The Founders have given us some advise and unfortunately that advice has not been followed, that friendship and trade and peace, that would certainly go a long way.

Eventually, it will become necessary, because we won’t be able to afford this type of a policy, the welfare state will come to an end and as far as I’m concerned we live in a very exciting times and they can be very, very good and we just need to generate the interest in this newer generation, individuals who will have to do all the paying and all the fighting, get them where they say war is done with, we don’t want more wars, we don’t want war on American people’s privacy, we don’t want war on people’s drug habits, or marriage habits or anything, we want to just get rid of the wars and we don’t want any more of these wars under the Cheney doctrine, not the Bush Doctrine, it was the Cheney Doctrine that we can go anywhere to fight terrorism, in any country we want without a declaration of war and justify anything that they do without Congressional approval. Unfortunately, we are very close to the day where there’s been a total acceptance of an enabling act that permits our federal government at the executive level to do what they want.

If we want to live in a free society that whole attitude has to change and we have to start thinking about who should be making the decisions in a free country and that’s the people. They’ll make mistakes, but they suffer the consequences. We should be brave enough to believe that individuals making decisions is a much better system than putting them into the role of government officials, because people who like to make decisions for other people and who make bad decisions find themselves in government like the Cheneys. That to me is a very dangerous recipe for disaster.

Once again, I want to thank everybody today for tuning in to the Liberty Report and come back soon.

Last night’s Republican candidate debate was a marathon slug-fest, but why did they fail to even discuss the really hard questions?

Ron Paul: Hello everybody and thank you for joining us at the Liberty Report. With me today is Daniel McAdams. Today he happens to be in DC and I’m glad to see you Daniel.

Daniel McAdams: It’s good to see you Dr. Paul.

Ron Paul: Very good. I guess you stayed up all night and watched the debates and analyzed the debates and now you know everything we need to know about the debates. Is that right?

Daniel McAdams: The first part of it is true, I did stay up late watching it and thinking about it, but I don’t’ know that I know that much more than when we started.

Ron Paul: All I know about some of this campaigning, since I’ve been through few, it’s rather frustrating. It’s sort of sometimes like the Fed, they make an announcement and immediately after they make an announcement they start agitating what are they going to do in six weeks, or eight weeks. It’s immediately concentrating on the next move.

This is what I thought was happening during this campaign, as soon as the election is over in ’16, it must have been the earliest time ever, who is the frontrunner, who is the frontrunner, it’s been going on and on and on and of course it takes a long time. When I thought they were overdoing it people are getting tired to know so much about it. I was entertained with somebody on social media and there were a couple who did this, they tweeted out is Jeb Bush related to George Bush? So I thought maybe there are still out there trying to figure out what was going on.

It was a fascinating event, it was a long event, if I’d been there three hours would have been very tiring, but there were a lot of breaks and somebody asked me already who do you think was the winner and of course everybody has their own winner. I think CNN might have been the winner of this, because it’s a lucrative deal and I’ve always been fascinated that we as candidates just go along with this. They set these things up, they control everything, they control the questions, so I think that there’s a tremendous advantage of it.

What I’d like to do with you today Daniel is talk a little bit about what we might have done or what we might have asked the questions differently than those who are indoctrinated by a certain philosophy on economics and they all agree on a certain philosophy of foreign policy, both those who are asking the question and most of the candidates. Today I’d like to sort of think of what kind of questions would we ask. I know you do a lot of special work in foreign policy. Do you think you could have come up with something a little bit more creative? What would you like to have learned from these candidates in something more specific about their views and what we are doing in foreign policy today?

Daniel McAdams: It’s funny just what you said earlier I was looking at the press coverage this morning of the debate and it was really all lacking in substance it was all about now it’s Carly Fiorina’s time to rise and to be the new frontrunner and it’s almost as if they are treating it like a reality show or a sporting event, it’s really quite funny, One of the things that struck me, thankfully there were a couple of the candidates who spoke out against the Iraq war and said they were against it and some of them were even skeptical about the next wars. What really, we didn’t hear much about was many of the candidates talking about being against the next war, it’s easy to say when the reputation of the Iraq war as a failure, but few of them seemed to have learned at all from that. I would have asked them about the military budget and how we can be the greatest country in the world and spend so much of our national treasure on the Empire and that just didn’t come up.

Ron Paul: Yeah I know that’s right and they call themselves fiscal conservatives, the deficits in the runaway stay and yet we keep spending. A lot of Republicans, though they didn’t take a poll last night, but a lot of Republicans are really heft in getting rid of sequestration which is a token a little bit restraint on military spending. I heard several times last night that we need to rebuild the military. Obama has left the military rundown. I think the military spending has gone up and you might qualify that, but I think this spending has been going up with Obama and we’ve expanded our commitments around the world and it’s not like we are vulnerable, it’s not like we haven’t spent enough money. Compared to other nations what we do, we spend close to what everybody else spends together.

Daniel McAdams: I think that is really one of the great falsehoods that they were able to get away with last night in condemning the so-called sequester. They pretended that Obama was gutting the military budget, whereas you often said and it’s absolutely true, it’s been confirmed by the facts and by figures and studies, that the sequestration does not reduce the military spending at all, it simply slows the rate of increase, so there’s been no gutting of the military, at least in terms of finance. If you want to talk about what cuts the military is wasting trillions of dollars on things like the F-35, but of course that doesn’t come up either.

I was going to ask you Dr. Paul, I know you were watching on a close eye the discussion on economics, was there something on monetary policy or economics that you were surprised it didn’t come up, that you would have liked to have seen it discussed?

Ron Paul: I think it would have been pretty interesting to ask them about is there an important event occurring tomorrow, which is today with the Federal Reserve and that has to do with interest rates. That never even came up, so that’s the problem. I think the Federal Reserve obviously is very, very important and it relates with the spending we have in the military, because it facilitates the spending, it facilitates the Empire and yet what about even just audit the Fed? Do they ask about this, why aren’t you for audit the Fed, why don’t you champion this cause, why aren’t the people told about what’s happening? You could ask them about the Fed and say whose interest are best served by the Federal Reserve? Are the people’s interest best served by the Federal Reserve? Andrew Jackson didn’t necessary think that Central Bank would serve the people, that why he got rid of the National Bank.

I thought it was interesting of one candidate when they asked him who would you put on the currency, he said I would certainly take Andrew Jackson off and put on Hamilton. He loved Hamilton, he hated Jackson, a Hamiltonian against a Jeffersonian is a very clear cut, but not too many people pick up on that.

Daniel McAdams: Yeah I did hear that night, I was astonished too, I have the luxury of a DVR here, so I rewound it and listened to it a couple of times, because it was hard to believe. It’s a kind of trivialization, wasn’t it? To talk about whose face you put on the currency and it sort of gave the whole show a feel of a reality TV show, rather than debating some of the critical issued that our country is facing in the future.

Ron Paul: I think the format under the conditions that we have is better than nothing, you do get to see people, but it’s so canned, when you think that there’s not that much philosophic disagreement even with the individuals interviewing or the candidates or even the political parties. I would like to have sorted out more. How do you differ from the Democrats on your foreign policy, is it the same, you think we should maintain an Empire, is it a wise thing to think that we can actually conquer Afghanistan? We are still there and we are still very much involved, but pin them down and say do you believe in American Empire or do you say we don’t even have one. Then why are we in 150 countries?

The other question I wouldn’t mind finding out from them in detail is why is it so easy to mellow on what has happened in the past like I didn’t like the Iraqi war, at the same time for the most part the hostility toward Russia and Iran as if they are the monsters of the world and they never take it in context in compared to what we may be doing. There is a lot of imperfections in the world, but it seems like our people, our leaders and ourselves, our responsibility is to correct our mistakes and not pretend that we know how to correct everybody else’s mistakes by ignoring our own problems. I think that is so misleading.

Daniel McAdams: I was interesting that most of the candidates seem to want to outdo each other in terms of a more masculine response to foreign policy, of course whether it was men or women on the stage, I think it was Rubio who was talking about how he’s going to deal with that gangster who’s running Russia and he’s going to confront him. I mean does he even understand the implications of such an aggressive foreign policy in today’s situation? Who is advising these people? We talked about this on a previous show Dr. Paul, that a lot of these candidates are getting their foreign policy advisers from the same organization, the John Hay Initiative that is full of neocons and what they do is send in advisers to each one of these campaigns and that’s why they all sound the same and I think that’s what we are getting. These people have not given foreign policy a lot of thought, basically outsourcing it to a neocon shop.

Ron Paul: Rand and Trump don’t have a whole lot in common, but last night Rand acknowledged one thing on immigration, but also they are the only two that don’t go to that think tank and so they have a little bit more independence on their foreign policy, whether they agree or not on foreign policy is another question, at least that they haven’t been sold out that they have to go to the neocon think tank.

There’s another domestic issue that initiatives dear to my heart for several reasons and that has to do with the drug war and they did debate that and talked about it in a study, talked about it in a context of what the federal government obligations were, as well as the state government and it was a lot of inaccuracies and not very precise as far as I was concerned.

One thing, and I think it was Fiorina that had an emotional impassioned plea that the government has more responsibility because it’s so dangerous. The issue there is not the danger of the drugs and of course drugs are dangerous and of course prescription drugs are the most dangerous and that’s where all the addictions are. The biggest dangers sometimes come from the FDA pumping drugs out there and the other thing is when the subject of immunizations come up and I would have certainly brought up the idea that drug companies behind are pushing all these immunizations.

The drug was is a freedom issue, I detest so many prescription drugs that are way overused, but the so-called bad drugs, yes they are terrible. Never one of my kids or grandkids use them, I think they are terrible. I think it’s a freedom issue, because once you concede that it’s the government’s responsibility to protect us against ourselves from making bad decisions, the ball game is over. As a matter of fact, when you use that argument well under these circumstances, Christie would probably accept this, whether there’s a time when you need the government to protect us because it’s so serious. Yes, it’s serious and that’s probably why we should have individuals making decisions. Why wouldn’t it be legitimate to compare this to the Liberals argument that registering and controlling guns, guns are dangerous, they kill people and therefore we should have stricter regulations for safety reasons. No, they do this and they pick and choose, yes on drugs we will regulate, on guns we wouldn’t regulate them, then the Liberals come back again.

This is probably my frustration on looking at the whole concept of liberty and the role of government. Then, all of a sudden if you had a precise understanding and a role for free market economics, you’d have a different understanding of monetary policy, it would be so different. I would like to pose the questions like that. What do you think is the precise responsibility of the government, in this case the federal government? What is the responsibility of the government? I would predict from what I hear in discussions in Congress and elsewhere, especially since 9/11, they say the main thing the government has to do is make us safe, give us security. We have to have our economic security and we have to be physically safe. Even that implication is not in the Constitution at all. They gave us a 2nd Amendment and a few other things which implied that maybe we have our own responsibility.

It reminds me of Franklin’s admonition that if you sacrifice your liberty for your safety you will end up with neither. I think that total principle would have been good to have a little bit of discussion on.

Daniel McAdams: It’s interesting that Fiorina was talking about the tragedy and it is a tragedy of her son whose life was destroyed by drugs, but then she wants to make that as an emotional reason to ruin the lives of many other people that are taking drugs by putting them in prison forever, both of them ruin their lives. It’s a great point you make about prescription drugs, I was just reading this morning that they’ve decided that these anti-depressants are not appropriate for young people to be taking and these are things that have been approved for so long, so there is a danger of legal drugs and prescription drugs as well.

Ron Paul: I think this is true and I’ve learned a long time ago not to blindly accept the official medical position and I don’t want to look like I’m singling out any one individual for claiming the medical profession is for all these immunizations, but the instincts of a lot of people on immunizations have turned out to be right and once again why is it that we can’t make our own decisions and decisions for our children.

There was one other subject that you may have heard it and I didn’t, I missed it or something, the subject on education. I am big on education and I think educators and more important than politicians. That’s a question I might have asked them too. Who’s the most important, philosophers who teach what the role of government ought to be or politicians? The question is they frequently say we won’t do this and this and what we need is more education. When they talk about education, they mean government education and that will correct things and then they can get jobs. They say they don’t have jobs because they are not well trained. They want the government to do this and it hasn’t gone well. The Department of Education at one time in 1980, that was the rallying cry of Reagan to get rid of it.

We come up with all these compromises, we won’t take over the schools, but we are just loaning the money. Now, we have somebody running on the other side, Sanders, he says education should be free. Nothing is for free, but they are always indicating that responsibility and here are the students already 1.3 trillion dollars and half of them aren’t paying their bills, why should the other half pay them? At the same time, they just recently said you can get a loan easier six month sooner than you used to be able to get it. I don’t know whether you caught anything on education, but my guess is that you didn’t see any reason to be too optimistic that they have much of an understanding on which direction we should go on education.

Daniel McAdams: Many of the candidates kept going on about how they want to emulate Reagan; they are going to be the new Reagan, the Reagan policy. They are probably right in that case, because Reagan came in promising that he would abolish the Department of Education, that he would be shrinking government and doing all these things and it turns out he did the opposite, so they probably will be emulating Reagan in a way, making a lot of big promises and then nothing good happens when it comes to cutting government.

Ron Paul: If I had been in that predicament, I haven’t been there when you hear that questions you don’t know, what would I say, what would I say? I’ll you what on regulating, I did it in the debate before, it is that I think the most astounding thing that Ronald Reagan ever did, the best lesson ever, was his reconciliation with his mistake he made in Lebanon with 242 marines being killed, by admitting he made a mistake and admitting that he would never turn tail and run, but he finally came around in understanding the irrationality of the politics of the Middle East and he should have never gone in there and therefore he said If I had done that and had been more neutral on the situation those marines would be alive today. That should be Ronald Reagan’s quote, the recognition when he made a mistake and Americans died needlessly. Nobody wants to talk about that, they want to talk about Ronald Reagan being forceful and the extreme of this is when Reagan bombed Libya needlessly, which just further antagonized and we are still in a mess with Libya, as if that had solved the problem. That is the type of intervention that I think is just so difficult for me to understand.

Daniel McAdams: Yeah, absolutely.

Ron Paul: I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report and although I talked about the reports and haven’t been there and even pretend I would give a different answer, I want to let you know that I am not nostalgic for it because it’s a difficult job to do that, to run. Of course, I had the satisfaction at the time that changed in people’s minds and hearts on the issues of war and peace and also on monetary policy and sound economic policy.

Overall, trying to get a message out about individual liberty, that to me made it worthwhile, because I did get to visit with a lot of young people and I’m still in touch with many of them and they still know the difference between a free society and an authoritarian society and right now they are also very much aware of the need for us to move in the direction of a free society and reject the notion that we need more authoritarians in Washington to tell us how to run our lives, to tell and explain how to run the economy and tell other countries how to run.

There’s a large number of people who do understand that, I just hope someday that through the educational movement that the conventional sources of where people get their information, whether it’s TV, movies or other politicians, that they will realize that there is an option and we were introduced to this option many years ago by the Founders and we had experimented with it and we developed tremendous wealth and a huge middle class, but we have to be very precise what should the role of government be, it should be there to protect liberty and not to assume that we have some magical cure to make you always perfectly safe and secure, because the only way that can be even attempted to be achieved, would be with the sacrifice of liberty.

I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report and please come back soon.

Today and tomorrow the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee will meet to, among other things, decide whether to increase the interest rate. Will they or won’t they? Ron explains their dilemma.

Ron Paul: Thank you everybody for tuning in to the Liberty Report.

Tomorrow is a big day in monetary history. The Fed is getting ready to announce what they are going to do with interest rates and the world waits with bated breath. Everybody is watching worldwide, it is a big deal in spite of the fact that the system that we have is ridiculous and ineffective and it’s going to fail. Right now though, everybody is watching this and one little word can make all the difference in the world. All the Fed needs to do is say yes, we are raising interest rates; no, we will not raise interest rates. It would make a big difference.

Right now, I would say the markets are discounting any raising any interest rates any time soon, from the way the market’s reacting. I’ve been on record for many years that the Fed won’t do this, but that doesn’t mean that they eventually won’t do it, but right now I’d be really pretty surprised if tomorrow there’s an announcement that interest rates are going up. Right now, today gold has gone up and on the short run gold has been going up when the Fed keeps interest rates very low. There are other reasons for the gold going up, but at the moment on the short term the gold goes up and they think they will keep the monetary money flowing.

The same way stocks have been recovering little bit from their downturn and on today it’s been anticipating that the Fed is not going to have a sudden announcement and raise these rates.

I’d like to talk about the silliness of the program. Here we have 12 individuals in a room, a secret room, unelected officials and they are pretending they know what the interest rates ought to be. Seven of them are permanent members and the New York Fed President, he’s a permanent member and there are four regional banks. They get together in secret and they have this pretense that they know, ok what should we do? The real problem is that they believe they’re smart enough to figure out. My idea is they don’t have the vaguest idea what the interest rates should be, nobody in the world know what the interest rates should be, because just as all the prices should be set in the market place, it takes hundreds, thousands, millions of people buying and selling, borrowing and lending and saving to make this determination, but the officials in central banking actually deceive themselves.

Some believe it in a philosophic sense, in an academic sense, that this is good and proper and they are doing the Lord’s work and this is why it’s working. Others are very much aware of the power that can be wielded in central banking and that is why you see not average people going to become members of the Central Bank. They usually have a strong relationship with Wall Street and the banking industry, both domestic and international. That’s a driving force.

I have met Federal Reserve Board members and others who really believe in this, almost like a religious belief that the world would be totally chaotic if you didn’t have smart people doing central economic planning by manipulating interest rates and monetary policy. I am a strong disbeliever in that, I don’t believe it is possible and somebody that I learned this lesson from I want to put up a quote from and that is Hayek, Frederich Hayek. He is the one and only Austrian economist than won a Nobel Prize. He won that price in 1974.

Interestingly enough in the early 1980s he was in Washington DC and I was a member of Congress in the Banking Committee at the time and was fortunate to have dinner with him, which really was a fascination for me to sit down and spend an evening with him. He is well known for a statement and a concept that he called the pretense of knowledge and the quote is on the screen right now. It says “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.” You can’t be anything more straightforward than that because I think he’s been proven absolutely right. Look at the harm done with the manipulation.

The potential harm that is coming up now is much greater than ever before and that’s why there’s so much attention given to this announcement that will be coming tomorrow at two o’clock Eastern Time and there will be a lot of people waiting and watching, but it still just blows my mind thinking yes or no will it make a difference. Will it might make a difference of billions of dollars? No, trillions of dollars, instantaneously and even though there may be some quick reactions to what they say; it won’t be the permanent reaction because there’s no long-term too.

The trades will react immediately to what is said or implied and sometimes it’s vague and sometimes people have to anticipate, but one thing is if tomorrow they say no, we are going to hold the line or they say we are going to raise it 2.5%, they are going to raise the interest rates which is miniscule and immediately after that happens that will be discounted and they will be starting to anticipate when are they going to do it again, what will happen in four weeks, what will happen in six weeks, what is the Fed going to do and it just goes on and on.

This time it’s been longer than usual and this is why it’s historic. We’ve had the dollar reserve standard, paper standard since 1971 and they hobbled along with this with many recessions and the financial bubbles and the burst that happened and we are still in a recession that started in 2008. The Federal Reserve, because they are addicted to interest rates and the economy is dependent on forever pumping in liquidity and so-called capital and we don’t depend on savings and then we don’t operate with a free market. They haven’t raised interest rates in ten years, not that I think they should have or could have know what to do, but just in relationship to their policy they haven’t touched it for ten years and of course it’s been at zero percent for more than six years and when Greenspan even before Bernanke, people said he caused the crisis because he kept interest rates too low too long, so the solution since that time has been to take the interest rates down to zero, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Today, I noticed that the gold price has bumped up a significant amount in reaction to their anticipation and for it to go up to 15 to 20 dollars means that they are pretty confident and that there is not going to be an announcement that all of a sudden interest rates would rise. One thing that people make an assumption and on the short run and its current condition is true that if they raise interest rates and the dollar goes up a little bit, it might be harmful to gold, but there are other conditions when the market pushes interest rates up. If the interest rates go up and there’s inflationary pressures it could cause gold to explode, which is exactly what happened in 1970. To have a computer model to predict what will happen if they raise or lower interest rates, just doesn’t hold. Conditions do change all the time and that’s what they can’t predict.

I am going to suggest in the form of a prediction that history will show, exactly when that history will come, I don’t know, it could be in five years, it could be in ten, fifteen years, but history will show and there are individuals now already reflecting on current status. They are going to look back and look at this as the craziest monetary history they’ve ever seen with what the world is being sustained with by this inflation and the QE and by the computers running with no results and they still want to do the same thing. The silliest notion I heard was when we need to get the interest rates up a little bit now, because there will probably be a recession not far in the future I think definitely there will be. They say we have nothing we can do. The only thing we know to do is to lower interest rates and print more money. That is about the most ridiculous reason to raise interest rates.

This whole idea that the Fed should decide the supply of money and what the price should be and the interest rates is socialism in money. That means one half of the economy is socialized, because you have the supply of goods and services and you have measured those supplies in a currency. It used to be that we had a stable currency we could define it and define what the dollar was. That doesn’t happen. The job is to try to bring these together, but nobody can define the dollar and therefore there is no way that they can anticipate.

It becomes a monopoly and one thing characteristic of a monopoly is I believe that the only true monopoly are the government monopolies and though a lot of people argue that the Fed is not a part of the government, it is the government and the people that allowed it to be created, but they are being created by legislation, they’ve been tolerated, but they do have a monopoly control over a lot what’s going on in the economy. That’s why they can be so bold that they believe they can regulate stock prices and they do a lot of that, but eventually that isn’t possible. That’s the reason they come up with these schemes that when their policies are failing, that they say the stock might go down, so we have a Plunge Protection Team, we have to have the government interfering and prop up prices. They’ve tried it in Japan, they’ve tried it in China, we do it all the time, we do it constantly. That is all artificial.

Another characteristic of monopolies, it serves the interest as long as they exist and they benefit from the power they get from government. There’s going to be groups with benefit and other groups would suffer. This is one of the reasons why we have the discrepancy in wealth distribution and now we have a socialist running and a populist running and saying isn’t it horrible that we have the rich and the poor and we have to use the force of government to redistribute laws, redistribute the wealth and regulate the economy and all this. That’s just more trouble as Hayek pointed out, it breeds more trouble and they can’t do it is the big problem, because the power is so strong, but it will serve the interests and this is it.

The middle class gets wiped out under these conditions and the very wealthy do benefit. The whole problem that I see politically is that anybody who has wealth is blamed for, not just the people who have had special privileges form the Fed, they got their bailouts and they get their contracts from the government, they are in the military industrial complex and all these things. They are not the people they sort out, they say anybody with wealth and they come down with these solutions, wealthy people ought to be taxed 90%. We’ve tried that in the past.

The monopoly ideas are just horrible and in money it is extremely bad, but what I see happening today and especially tomorrow is us getting awfully close to the day when this quits working. The markets always win out in the end. This type of monetary system causes a couple of things, it causes too much debt and it causes malinvestment. We have too much debt and we have too much malinvestment, which are the bubbles, too much money buying bonds that aren’t worth anything and too much money in stocks that are still in a bubble formation.

The market says this has to be corrected and when he recognizes it, the market forces are powerful, so we talk about deflationary pressures and we have to stop the deflationary pressures and of course the government and the politicians want inflationary pressures even though that has been the basic problem, so they keep arguing back and forth. The deflationary pressures always win, but not always in the sense of all of a sudden, the money prices shrink like it did in the 30s. We have money managers now that will not let the money supply shrink, but they have lost total control of where the money will go and that’s the problem that they face.

Under these conditions when there’s an excessive malinvestment and excesses in the economy and especially too much debt, it has to be liquidated, the debt has to be liquidates and in a way the Fed knows that in a way they are saying a prayer, let’s liquidate the debt a little faster, that’s why they talk about if we could only get the CPI going up to 3 percent a year this liquidation will be smooth and orderly, but the truth is that they can’t control it and that will get out of lock too. The basic flow is in central banking, the basic flaw actually started with our government giving the Fed the authority to manipulate and regulate money and since that time all we have done is try to write more regulations to try to correct the mistakes that the Fed has created.

We are at a milestone and an opportunity, because as this failure becomes more apparent, changes will have to come and hopefully we come up with sensible changes. This is also the reason that we have to concentrate on knowing more about the Fed, 12 guys, women too, in a secret room figuring out something that there’s no way they can know. They do not have this wisdom. This will end and it has to end and we will have a system someday where the market’s allowed to operate. We know that most economists in this country would never vote for wage and price controls, but this is equal to wage and price controls of all the economy, because it’s price control of money.

It makes no sense whatsoever, it is very, very dangerous. It’s dangerous because poverty prompts people to say and do dumb things in a more authoritarian way and also the system that we’ve had also has provided the financing for these senseless wars that are going on around the world. We have runaway welfare, we have runaway warfare and we have a runaway control of the special interests and powerful places who benefit from the Federal Reserve. What we need is a true audit of the federal Reserve, so we know what exactly are we dealing with, the American people are with us on the audit, so the sooner we get an honest audit, the better off we will be.

Anyway, I am sure I will be talking about this tomorrow after the announcement made and a lot of other people will be talking about it, but I just hope they will talk about it in the sense of honest money and why we need to get rid of the culprit who had brought this crisis to our doorstep and the discrepancy in wealth distribution and that to do with the Fed.

The sooner the people understand this, the sooner the people in Washington will understand it and right now we have put more pressure on Congress than ever before, because in the last four, five, six years, we have got the national attention about auditing the Fed and the importance of the Fed. We are moving in that direction and as their failure or its failure becomes more apparent, more Americans will wake up and say what’s going on with this Federal Reserve, maybe we ought to consider a new monetary system and we don’t need to give so much power to the Federal Reserve. The sooner the better as far as I am concerned.

Thank you for tuning in today and please come back to the Liberty Report soon.

US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Powers told CNN that Russian support for the Syrian government is “not a winning strategy.” Meanwhile, the US strategy of fighting ISIS has yet to produce tangible results. What’s going on?

Ron Paul: Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. With me today is Daniel McAdams, but he’s not in the studio, he’s up in Virginia, solving the problems of the world giving very, very significant speeches. He is with us by Skype. Daniel, good to see you today.

Daniel McAdams: Good morning Dr. Paul. I wish I were with you in Texas.

Ron Paul: Good. Daniel you wrote an article recently for the webpage, the Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which caught the attention of a lot of people and I want to talk a little bit about that. This comes from a recent interview actually on CNN on Samanta Powers, who’s our Ambassador to the United Nations and she’s our spokesman for the world audience. The headline is something else and this must have been part of what caught your attention.

It says, she’s speaking U.S. to Russia Backing Assad is “not a winning strategy”. She’s warning them of course and my immediate reaction was that doesn’t she know that the policy that the United States has been following since 2011, Assad must go is not a winning strategy? I think she stretched this a little bit and of course your concern has been something that we’ve been concerned about all the time is, are we getting the straight scoop? There is a lot of misinformation and repetition of outright lying that we heard from her, so why don’t you fill us in a little bit about what was she trying to portray there and do you think she achieved what she was trying to do.

Daniel McAdams: Yeah, I think it is almost comical when she says it is not a winning strategy as if she ever created a winning strategy. Remember she was one of the big voices in favor of bringing democracy to Libya and that has not worked out very well either and their strategy in Syria has not worked out very well. We saw a report back in July from the USA Intelligence community saying that the U.S. attacks against ISIS have had very, very little effect on the organization. As you mentioned she brings up a lot of the things that have been discredited. She once again brings up the issue that Assad gassed his own people and if you remember that was back in 2013 when the U.S. almost started attacking directly Assad and it turns out it simply wasn’t true, but she repeats it as though it was true and she goes through the interview doing this several different times, so it’s clearly and exercise in propaganda.

Ron Paul: The theme behind this was to blame Russia and build up the animosity between the United States and NATO and Russia to further aggravate the situation in other parts of Europe as well, like in Ukraine and Latvia, where we are putting cruise missiles and drones. This is part of all that scheme, but if you look at just the outright evidence, yes I imagine Russia has sent some ships in there, they have a port there and exactly what they send in I personally do not know, but we do know that there is an intent on their part to help send in goods and just help people survive under these conditions, because they have been an ally of Syria all along. This is one thing, but what is it, how many bombs have we used from drones in the last year? Thousands.

Daniel McAdams: There have been at least 2,500 airstrikes on Syria alone and a lot of those have destroyed the infrastructure and factories and places of business and that is one of the reasons people are fleeing in their absolute economic despair as well as their concerns about the war. If you look at the Powers interview, she talks about the 12 million that have left Syria and as you point out it’s almost half the population that have been displaced in this war. She points it out as if it’s the fault of the U.S. not doing enough, rather than the U.S backing this regime change that has turned the country into a total chaos.

Ron Paul: Before we go into a little bit more about the strategy and the problems we have there I want to get the map put up of the region, because in spite of the fact that I think I could mark the states and draw rough outlines, it’s necessary for me to go and look at a map. Here’s the map that tells us about the significance of Syria and you can see two lines come up. One comes from Saudi Arabia up and another comes about everything comes to Syria and one comes through Iraq. We made Iraq a worthy ally of Iran, so they are interested in that and Syria is in a key spot there. Both pipelines are coming up in that direction and a half go through Syria.

Those who chanted early on back in the Iraq war, it’s all about oil, it’s all about oil, it is still a lot about oil, not only drilling oil, but it’s a lot about pipelines too, because Afghanistan is involved with potential pipelines and they’ve been arguing over 30 years about where the pipelines are going to go, so I just wanted to review that with everybody and then I didn’t know whether you were going to comment about this map or not.

Daniel McAdams: It certainly is about oil, but both from an economic perspective and a geopolitical perspective, it has become U.S. strategy to try to reduce Russia’s geopolitical influence and one way of doing that is to decrease the importance of Russian oil pipelines to Western Europe and Syria, as the map points out and as you point out, Syria is a key center in these pipelines, so it’s also about isolating Russia and Iran to a degree.

Ron Paul: We are over there and theoretically our greatest enemy is ISIS and she even downplayed this. Powers downplayed this, ISIS is not nearly as bad and then it looks like our policies in many ways followed that, because ISIS ends up with our weapons. I think their real goal is geopolitical and pipelines and getting rid of Assad and if you look at the whole regions, our policies just don’t work and we have talked so much about the refugee problem as a consequence of our problems and unfortunately nothing seems to improve. Russia is probably a legitimate opponent of ISIS, as is Iran, so if things were more normal where we were less involved in entangling alliances and staying out of the affairs of Europe and the Middle East, we would probably see some regional activity that would have prevented ISIS from ever being established.

Daniel McAdams: Russia has long dealt with problems of radicalized Muslims in its southern plank and I am sure the idea of some of these fighters that have been radicalized and trained in and are now even fighting with American weapons, I think the idea of some of these guys moving up into Chechnya or somewhere else and starting problems with Russia when they are done in Syria probably rightly terrifies them, so they certainly do have more of an interest. They are much more in the neighborhood than we are. Let’s put it that way.

Ron Paul: You can see why behind the scenes our government may well be sort of friendly with ISIS, because ISIS, in theory at least, is to get rid of Assad. There are fighters in some ways, because when we send weapons over there to one group and enhancing ISIS, because ISIS would like to get rid of Assad and that’s been our goal. The stupidity of the whole thing is so costly to us and financially, it’s costly to us and strategically and yet they never stop they just come back and they say more, more, more and here Powers is practically, did you sense that, it was almost like a threat to Russia, just don’t do this if you are getting awfully close to causing a serious problem for yourself.

Daniel McAdams: I think so, I think it was a threat. She’s portraying the Russia and Iran’s interest somehow fueling terrorism, but in reality it has been the U.S. support of those who want to overthrow. She makes this great claim, as you pointed out earlier, it’s really shocking, she accuses those that have only cared about ISIS being a Machiavellian, but the other thing that is interesting Dr. Paul is we talk about ISIS, ISIS, ISIS and it’s the big threat out there, but what we forget is not very long ago ISIS began as an organization called Al-Qaeda in Iraq, that was its older name before it called itself ISIS, so that Al-Qaeda in Iraq emerged after the U.S. attack on Iraq. It wasn’t there as you know beforehand. It’s important to look at this; it was a breakaway group of more radical Al-Qaeda that became ISIS so it all stems from back in the U.S. intervention in the first place.

Ron Paul: The whole issue is they distort the idea that Russia is allied with Syria, I don’t think we can deny that, they have been friends and they have dealt with each other and they have a contract, a treaty to have a port, at least as legitimate or maybe more legitimate than us in Guantanamo. They are their neighbors and it’s very important for them. We have the Russians allied with Syria and that’s realistic and legitimately I believe there’s a pretty strong argument that they have, at least a right to do this and we have an obligation to stay out.

Who are we allied? We are allied with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are involved in this too and what kind of reputation do they have? We complained about ISIS being violent, but what about the Sharia mentality and Saudi Arabia, that’s still a problem that we just wholeheartedly endorse and never say a word we talked about human rights in China and everyplace else, but we never talked about in Saudi, not that I think we should be talking about it, we should put things in proper perspective, but here we are allies with them and where are they going in right now? They are involved in a border dispute, a violent border dispute, and we are openly supporting Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia couldn’t fight that war without us and I’m sure strategically we are giving them a lot of information, so I think the American people ought to question this and realize this and as all the presidential candidates ought to ask some questions about this. Also, how does it help us and where is the advantage? I see none and that is of course why we want to bring this subject up quite frequently.

Daniel McAdams: Samanta Powers really is really the epitome of hypocrisy in many ways because she prides herself on this as a great human rights activist, but she’s really responsible for what we call the weaponization of human rights. As you point out, our great ally Saudi Arabia has absolutely decimated Yemen, killing thousands of innocent civilians. She’s not said a word about their human rights within Saudi Arabia as you point out, though it’s none of our business. They’ve got about the worst human rights record on Earth. The great humanitarian Samanta Powers had said nothing about it, so it really is turning the concept of human rights into a weapon at the hand of the US foreign policy.

Ron Paul: On Samanta Powers, diplomatically what do you think she was trying to achieve, other than the fact just to stir up more anti-Russian sentiment? Was that the whole goal or was there something that she was pretending that she was trying to promote?

Daniel McAdams: I think that we saw some reports last week and they all emerged from a poorly sourced article in an Israeli newspaper that Russia was about to invade Syria with several thousand troops and every article proceeded from that article and I think we can get conspiratorial, but I think it really serves an important U.S. policy goal to have everyone start thinking about a Russian invasion of Syria, which we would obviously notice if it took place and it obviously has not taken place, but I think it allows Washington to change the subject when things are going very badly in Syria for the U.S. it really is Assad or ISIS and the U.S. at least claims that it doesn’t want either, but there is no alternative anymore, so I think it’s a classic example of them trying to change the topic and get people to focus on something else in this case the big bad Russian bear.

Ron Paul: Unfortunately, the propagandists are winning this in spite of the exposure of the lies to get us in these other wars and I think they, more or less, have had a propaganda victory over Ukraine and nobody really talks about NATO and the United States orchestrating the coup. This is the same way in Syria. They perpetuate these lies and they seem to win these battles, because they have control of so much of the media perpetrating these stories about how vicious they are, but Russians are probably not angels, but I’ll tell you what, they have a lot more legitimacy in this and we have so much less legitimacy, but people don’t think that way and right now it looks like the authoritarian approach, unless people’s attitude changes.

Just remember, two years ago the Russians, I think actually served a purpose when they exposed the lie about the gassing and they interceded and acted as diplomats and the British had a vote and they voted it down to start bombing Syria. Obama knew he couldn’t win it so he didn’t bring about the vote. They backed off and that was the result of Russia. If anybody cares about peace and they care about the truth, the truth was that. What’s the result been? Just last week we talked about the British starting to use drone missiles and participating in the bombing and you just stated in the last year we did 2,500 bombing missions and yet the people have spoken and their message has been lost.

We are in such a mess, because if we do get a half-hearted vote, it votes against the war and they change the propaganda and they ignore the vote. We really have a job cut out for ourselves; I hope someday we get more support for our opposition.

Daniel McAdams: Absolutely.

Ron Paul: I want to thank everybody for tuning in to the Liberty Report today, because we have and will continue to emphasize the crisis in the Middle East and in the various spots. When we tell outright lies and the officials do that, the people deserve to know the truth and I know it’s hard for people to be self-critical and say I was on the receiving end of this, no matter how accurate the information was, if it sounded that you were critical of your own government that was wrong. I work from the point of view that to be patriotic and care about one’s country, you challenge your government; you challenge the government when they are wrong. In this day and age obedience to the government and that is the reason that we end up with Edward Snowden, they call him a terrorist and criminal and committing treason, because he is telling the truth and he’s challenging the government and that’s what this is all about, it’s are we able to sort it out and find out what the government should be doing and actually what they are doing and are they doing what they say.

That is a big problem, but sound simple, clear, fundamentals can help us get out this. We should mind our own business, be non-interventionists, be willing to be friends with countries, talk to people who supposedly are our enemies and even in the worst part of the Cold War we talked to the Soviets and to the Chinese and the world didn’t end, things actually improved. Why are we obsessed with the people, with the likes of Samanta Powers with trying to aggravate the situation and trying to precipitate another major crisis which is absolutely unnecessary? The cause of peace can be found in this world today if we just use a little bit more common sense.

I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report and please come back soon.

Today the Liberty Report welcomes special guest, renowned trends forecaster Gerald Celente, who discusses his coming rally to launch a new peace movement.

Ron Paul: Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.

Today we have a very special guest, the publisher of the Trends Journal. He’s well known and he has a lot to say about what’s going on in the world and what to anticipate and his reputation is very good on making these projections, so it will be very interesting. He also has a special event coming up that we’ll visit on. Gerald Celente is with us today. Gerald welcome to the program.

Gerald Celente: Thank you for having me on. There’s no one in the political world that I respect more than you and thank you for all that you have done and all that you do to bring out freedom and liberty and let it reign again, so it’s a big honor for m to be on with you. Thank you so much.

Ron Paul: Thank you very much and it’s interesting to note that you used to turn peace and prosperity a lot and that’s something that I like to use too, because that of course should be our goal. Common sense tells us how we can achieve that, but it seems like sometimes we are engulfed with politicians that have zero common sense. Before we get into talking about Trends and what’s going on in Washington and in the economy, I understand that at the end of this week, the next weekend you are going to have a conference in Kingston in your Institute. This is a conference I believe you put on quite a few times. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about this conference and the rally that you want to hold on the 20th, which is on Sunday?

Gerald Celente: Yes, the conference is Get Peace and Prosperity is the foundation of it, but looking at trend lines, as well as different areas that had a profit from them and one of the speakers at the conference is going to be Dr. Paul, Craig Roberts, as I am sure your audience knows the former assistant Treasury Secretary under Reagan and a man highly respected for his geopolitical and economic insights. He never travels anywhere, but he’s coming to the conference which beings on the, we will have a reception on the 18th and then on Friday and Saturday, two full days of conference work with him, Gary Null, who’s a leader in health, fitness, nutrition, particularly we are focusing on ageing healthy and as we get older hopefully we get wiser and have much more to offer than we did before, as we keep taking new steps in new directions. As the whole population of the world ages, we are really focusing in on that how to stay in the shape physically, spiritually, emotionally and mentally. That’s a big part of it, as well as other trend lines we will be looking at, geopolitics, economics, the whole gamut.

That precedes the rally and I’m very thankful that you tried so hard to make it, but of course I totally understand with your schedule and the difficulty in coming to Kingston, New York, that you weren’t able to get here. One of the speakers that we have is Robert Thurman, who’s Uma Thurman’s father and he’s a real, he’s a peace activist Gary Null, Cindy Sheehan will be here of course, a great woman who’s son was tragically killed along with many others needlessly in Iraq, she’ll be here and Ralph Nader will be kicking it off.

Ron Paul: Oh, good.

Gerald Celente: We are very excited about this and we are pretty where our heart is. We are funding this primarily and other people that want to donate we can use all the help we can get. The website is occupypeace.us and of course for the conference you go to our website trendsresearch.com and there’s still room at the conference. Going back to the rally, as a trend forecaster what really pushed me into doing this is that I’m very concerned about the march to war that we are going on. As your Institute is called the Peace and Prosperity, I don’t know why it’s such a difficult concept for people to understand. Even the Rand Corporation, hardly a left wing cooperation, did a study just recently showing that there was peace in Israel, between Israel and the Palestinians. It would add some 250 billion dollars over few years to the Israeli economy and also 60 to 80 billion to what’s left of the Palestinian economy.

Ron Paul: Right.

Gerald Celente: With peace comes prosperity, but people can’t seem to figure it out. The rally that we are holding is not about wishing and screaming and chanting, it’s an action plan for peace. It’s to honor thy Founding fathers, we are holding it here in Kingston, New York, the first capital of the New York State, at the most historic four corners in America. The only place where there’s a stone building on each corner that predates the Revolution and New York’s Constitution was written right here, right across the street from us. 90% of America’s Constitution comes from the New York State Constitution that was written here and every one of the Founding Fathers, as you well know, beginning with George Washington has farewell address – no foreign entanglement.

Ron Paul: That’s for sure.

Gerald Celente: The Occupy Peace program is to close the bases overseas, secure the homeland, put our troops to work rebuilding our rotted third world infrastructure, rather than building highways in Afghanistan for the military industrial complex and other places that we invade and occupy and as you well know, Congress has not voted to go to war since what, World War II? We are going to demand that anytime America becomes involved in a foreign entanglement, Congress must vote on it and a little caveat, we are working Dr. Paul to have on each state ballot, a referendum that we the people will tell Congress how to vote, because after all we are the ones that pay for the war with our money and our lives.

Ron Paul: I think you are making a great point here, because we could say that it’s only Congress’s fault for not acting on their responsibilities, but it’s also the people’s responsibility to hold the Congressmen responsible. That’s still available to us and just a few years ago there was this desire to have a vote to start bombing Syria and of course it didn’t occur, because they couldn’t get the votes, but they are bombing Syria anyway. The people ultimately have to speak up.

I do have a question about the rally. I know the people who attend the conference can go and stay with the rally, but if somebody shows up for the rally is there a charge to get into the rally?

Gerald Celente: No, no, the Mayor of Kingston Shayne Gallo as given us permission to close down the four corners, we are erecting a stage right in the middle of it. No, please everyone, come to the rally, it’s free, and it’s free because it’s about freedom and as you said it it’s up to us, what’s that wonderful quote from Samuel Adams “It does not take a majority to prevail, it takes an irate, tireless minority that will set brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” It’s up to us.

Ron Paul: Very good.

Gerald Celente: That’s why the website is occupypeace.us. Us, it’s not about anybody else, it’s about us and we can do it.

Ron Paul: Ok. Gerald we are talking a little bit about your conference and we know about your Journal, but I want to go back a little bit, because in your resume I found an item I thought was of interest. You actually confessed that you worked in government at one time, that you spent some time in, I forget what the title was, but you worked for several years and why don’t you tell us about that and maybe that helped formulate some of your ideas.

Gerald Celente: That’s exactly what happened. At a graduate school I used to run political campaigns at Westchester County in New York, the richest county at the time in the United States. I was so good at it, they sent me up to Albany and I was the Assistant to the Secretary of New York State’s Senate and that’s where I really learned how disgusting the whole thing was. Here’s what used to happen. I have been in the back of the chamber, a young guy, talking to my buddy and all of a sudden a Senator walked in and they leave me and they follow the Senator like a little puppy dog, pull out their chair and help him sit down. They come back and I say what’s the matter man, he can’t sit down by himself, he needs some help? They used to say, Gerald if you keep that attitude you are not going to make it very far here. I said listen, that’s not the way my parents, may they rest in peace, brought me up. I don’t do that kind of thing. From there, I designed and instructed American politics and campaign technology and taught it at St. John’s University and from there I became the Chief Government affairs specialist for the chemical industry and I was between DC and Chicago back in the 70s. I used to stay at the Willard and put on my meetings at the Hay Adams. That was the level that I was at those days and that’s where I learned.

As I said the conference is about aging and aging artfully. The older you get you keep on learning, you pick up some things and I hit the point in my life when I started to reach my mid 30s and said what I’m doing is all wrong. I can’t do this anymore and I quit. I quit outright and that’s how I began the Trends Research Institute.

Ron Paul: Gerald was that a moment of enlightenment, or was it a gradual metamorphosis where you changed your mind or any individual back then that you might have come across that had some influence on you?

Gerald Celente: Every day I thank all of those that came before me, my ancestors, of course my aunts and uncles and parents and I go through the list of all of the people that have passed on that gave me so much when I was a young guy. I mention their names in my mind […] I learned from them and then it became, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I was at the Hay Adams, I used to bring the top scientists from […], and then I hired the best attorneys in Washington that understood science. I’ve had them all going around the table, as they are going through the Federal Register showing me strengths and weaknesses of the law and after they’d go around I’d say to the attorneys, do you understand what they are talking about? They said yeah and so then we killed the legislation. I’m sitting there one day and I looked across the table and I said to myself what am I doing here? That was the epiphany, but it was all that was taught to me by all those wonderful people that I was so fortunate to have in my life that got me there.

Ron Paul: Right. Gerald I wanted to ask you a little bit about the way the conventional world, the conventional media treat those of us who would like to suggest things aren’t going so well and we should look out, there’s danger ahead. Sometimes it seems like they make a tremendous effort to destroy the messenger, rather than refute the arguments we have made and I’m sure you have been aware of that, a victim of that. I certainly have received that type of thing. They think that if they try to destroy the individuals who are trying to tell the truth, think about our whistleblowers and all. They turn them into traitors and everything else, so that the truth is hidden. I am sure you’ve had some experience along that way.

Gerald Celente: I used to be on Oprah, the Today Show, Good Morning America, I’ve been on from everybody from O’Reilly to Brian Williams, he’s gone now. Here’s what happened. USA Today used to run my Top Trends all the time and in 2001, December 14th, you can go to our website trendsresearch.com, we have the forecast page. In 2001, they ran our forecast and the headline read “2001 won’t be our year, Trends Seer says”. This is nine month before 9/11. 9/11 happened and everybody is calling me up, why did they attack us, why did they attack us? I’ll tell you why they attacked us, because I wrote in Trends 2000, my book that come out years ago about Crusades 2000, American foreign policy. I said you can’t keep going in all these countries, destroying them and the United States policy with Israel, it’s letting them steal all this land from the Palestinians and not have blowback. They would say to me, the President said they attacked us because of our freedom and liberty. I said how old are you, you believe in that stuff? I broke down George Bush’s evening speech of 9/11 and his speech to the State of the Nation several days later, not one fact in it as to why we were invading Afghanistan, not one fact. All he’ll say and all emotional fear.

They are making a movie about me and one of my books. The book is called “What Zizi gave Honeyboy” Zizi is a Neapolitan dialect for auntie and she’s my aunt, may she rest in peace. You know that TV series, “Everyone loves Raymond” and the mother that played the mother of Raymond, Doris Roberts, plays my aunt, the movie is being shown in Film Festivals now. It opens up and I’m on the phone and I just got my third cancelation of the day, because I was saying, they were asking me about the outcome of the Afghan war and I said, listen if Alexander the Great couldn’t pull it off, if the English couldn’t do it and the Russians couldn’t, what makes you think the Americans are going to? This was going to go on forever. One by one they started cutting me out.

Then the Iraq war and then I said what would happen and it’s right there in 2004 I said by 2007 we will enter into the Great Recession. That was the term I used in 2004. No longer am I on Bloomberg; no longer am I on CNBC. I have went through five very difficult years in rebuilding my business without the major media. They used to fight to get me on in the beginning of the new year between the Today Show, Good Morning America and CBS Today. I know what you are talking about.

By the way this is the cover of the book and that’s my lovely aunt, may she rest in peace. That’s what they are making the movie about.

Yeah, they don’t want to hear it, because they are presstitutes, they get paid to say what they do. The person, by the way, that runs Trends Research, his name is Derek Oseneco. Derek was the Editor in Chief of Gannett News Service. This is a guy at the top, he’s responsible for our magazine and working the way it does. He knows what it looks like out there and that’s why he loves it here so much, because there’s nobody, like with you, tells us what to do, how to do it.

I have a definition for hell and that’s taking that last breath and knowing you weren’t the person you said you were or could have been. It goes back to working up in the New York State Senate. I don’t pull out chairs for anybody, unless they really need the help, because of physical or other kind of impairment. I don’t bow down and suck up, but the idiot does.

Ron Paul: Ok. Gerald, we are going to have to go in a minute here, but I did want to ask you another question. I think there’s a couple of things going on, they say that something that we talk about, it didn’t happen, everything is perfect, look out there, the GDP is going up and the CPI is going down and everybody is doing well, at the same time we have 94 million people unemployed, so there is a depression out there for a lot of people that they close their eyes to, that’s where they really blank an eye on all the problems.

I think it’s perfectly safe to try to remind people that if they paid any attention, Detroit had a problem and other cities have a problem and other states have problems, which is a warning sign just sitting out there. If they like Detroit, they just continue to do what they’ve been doing. For example I think it was in today’s paper, they reported the student loans are in trouble, 1.3 trillion dollars and half of them don’t pay anything, yet the solution is they can apply sooner and get more student loans.

It always goes back to if you don’t have enough money and debt, you just create more and that caused the problem. They totally ignore it, they always go back to the people who designed our foreign policy to get us out of the mess that they put us in. I would think there are so many signs on there, we don’t have time to go into it. You might just refer to the fact of Detroit ought to be a warning sign of what the whole country could look like, because we know where the countries are going. We know what’s going on in Greece and all the other potential problems around the world.

Gerald Celente: I got it wrong, I thought it would have collapsed earlier. I had no idea they’d make up a thing called quantitative easing. I had no idea they had not raised interest rates, it’s going on, it will be 16 years, since 2006. You can’t make this stuff up and by the way this is not capitalism. In capitalism, there’s no such thing as too big to fail. It’s called the merger and state corporate powers. What did Mussolini call that? I think fascism.

Yeah, you get it wrong, because they change the game and the only people that it has benefited is Wall Street. I’m not making that up. It’s because of the record low interest rates, they are borrowing money for nothing, buying up the stock, the numbers are there and all these merger and acquisitions. Merger and acquisition activity right now is now breaking records that was set in 2007. There’s a collapse, oil prices are not the only things collapsing, commodity prices are in 16 year lowest, because there is too much supply. Money is concentrated in the hand of the few, so the people can’t buy, that’s why it’s an oversupply and lack of demand. It’s a global economic slowdown, it’s happening in front of us, we are on the verge of the worse panic that’s way worse than that night in 2008.

Ron Paul: Gerald we want to close down now. I am going to give you a chance to name your websites and people interested in your conference and also the rally. I think you touched on a very important point and they use it against us all the time. See, capitalism and the freedom and the markets are failing. They’ve used that and they did the depression. It was a free market and a gold standard that brought on the very depression. I think the use of the term fascism is very fair, I think it’s crony capitalism, it has nothing to do with free markets and sound money and yet that to me is really the key.

It’s Republican or Democrats, some people said Obama’s a socialist, I said no, he’s closer to being a fascist than he is a socialist, because who has he benefited with medical care, the insurance companies and the drug companies, the military industrial complex, he’s not a peace candidate. I think you and I understand this and of course we work together best we can to promote this. Why don’t you go ahead and close out and remind the viewer the websites that they can go to if they are interested in signing up for the conference, but also getting to the rally. There are a lot of people within a couple hundred miles of this rally and they ought to be able to make it.

Gerald Celente: Yes, the rally is high noon, this coming Sunday, September 20th. Ralph Nader, Robert Thurman, Cindy Sheehan, Gary Null, myself, bands, the whole thing. We are closing down the most historic four corners to honor thy Founding Fathers, no foreign entanglements. Please come bring your friends, it’s free. Occupypeace.us is the website and for the conference that precedes it, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, that site you go to our site trendsresearch.com and click on the conference button.

Ron Paul: Once again, the publisher of Trends Journal, Gerald Celente, thank you very much for being with us today.

Gerald Celente: It’s an honor to be on with you and thank you for all that you’ve done and all that you do to let freedom reign.

Ron Paul: I want to thank all the viewers today for tuning in and please come back soon to the Liberty Report.

Ron Paul and the Liberty Report appreciate the many great comments and questions that keep flooding in! Today Dr. Paul is going to answer a few of them.

Ron Paul: Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in today to the Liberty Report. Before I start today, we have a special program today, but before we start I want to remind you if you miss seeing this program live, you can always find this program on ronpaullibertyreport.com, because these programs will be there and you can get to them if you miss a program live.

Today is going to be different, because I am going to take live tweets from the audience and we haven’t really done this with the Liberty Reports, but I want to get the viewers more engaged.

I see the first question that comes in is Garrett Waits, who writes to me. He says “Ron Paul is conservation something the government should be involved in? For instance the National Park System.” I think it’s a good question, because if you are a true, true libertarian, you have no government ownership over land, but that might be an idealistic world that we will never reach. He asks specifically about the National Parks System. I think that moving in that direction, if we had even a good Republic, we wouldn’t have a National Park System, what we would have is have individual states and they would have parks if they wanted them, but in a true Libertarian state, parks could be very well managed by private organizations and yet, today most people believe the government has to take care of that and we don’t think that the government should be the sole responsibility for taking care of parks, but in a free society there would be parks and I think it would be best if there were more local control, but I think nevertheless we should recognize the fact that we should move in a certain direction, so the least amount of government involvement, the better.

I don’t think we are going to see the day when there is going to be so minimal amount of government. I don’t think that should dispel the idea and the effort to talk about the perfect free society, even though we recognize that we don’t reach that. The far left and the authoritarians and the globalists, they have all kinds of goals which they are not going to achieve, but they never give up on them.

I’ve always argued that you should have a goal, you should have a precise definition of the role of government in a perfect free society, even recognizing that we are not going to see that achieved, because if you don’t have a goal based on a perfect idea, I think what you do is you don’t sit in the middle and you have the other side wins out, because if you start from the middle and say ok, yeah, we don’t have what we want, so we will argue the case that we just want to slow down the globalists. I don’t think that works at all, so I would say that do our very best to make things local, including parks, you have local parks at the local level, local communities have them and there’s nothing wrong with the idea and the concept discussed about even having private parks.

Now, we have another one coming from the Libertianen and he writes to me and says “Ron Paul do you believe in global warming?” Of course, the very fast answer, which is complete, is sure I believe in global warming. Global warming has been going off and on for centuries, if not for thousands of years, there’s evidence of Ice Ages and warm ages and all that. We do know that there’s climate change and the globe gets warmer and then gets colder. I think what is implied is do I believe in the fear-mongering of the radical environmentalists who are saying the end is coming, the end is coming and Al Gore was right and the whole world is going to be destroyed because of the modern age.

I don’t think that’s true, I think it’s a lot of hype, a lot of fear-mongering, I think that there’s a lot of false information out. For instance, if you look at the last hundred years you find that some people will come up with statistics showing the globe is getting warmer and warmer and there’s so many problems. Between 1910 and 1940 the average temperature went up 5 degrees centigrade, between 1910 and 1940, thirty years. From 1940 to 1970 it was essentially flat. From 1970 to the year 2000, it went up another 5 centigrade and you can say the last hundred years has gone up gradually. What’s happened in the last 15 years in this century? Actually it’s very static, it’s flat.

There’s a lot of deceitful information out there. I think there’s a lot of hoax in it. I think that people are fudging the figures and we do know that some of the scientists are on the defensive now, because they have fudged the figures and they have not been up front with us. I think it’s a political tool that a lot of people use to get control of property. I don’t think we can say the globe has not warmed up, but it’s interesting to see that in the middle part of the century when we were fighting World War II and when we were dropping all these bombs and nuclear and atomic weapons, when there was a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere the temperature was flat. I don’t think there’s any relationship with CO2. You can go back thousands of years and find ice with huge amounts of CO2 and yet they lived in an ice age.

Here’s another question, another tweet from VereSapiens and he says “Ron Paul do you favor the rights of states, communities and individuals to secede?” We could get into a discussion whether states actually have rights, but I think the gist of this question is do they have the authority and should they be able to. Yes, the answer is yes. I think the Founders of this country believed that the states should be able to secede, they went together voluntarily, it’s a voluntary contract and they should leave, but of course, that principle was destroyed with the Civil War, but the community is this whole idea that communities get bigger and bigger and they are looking for more tax revenues. It’s really a harm to the people, so big government whether it’s international government or whether it’s our federal government or whether it’s the state or very, very large cities taking over all of neighboring communities.

The real issue is, what about individuals to secede? It will be real nice, but will that ever happen? Probably not, but you should be able to, the principle of liberty is that you should be able to lead your own life and if sustaining means that you take care of yourself and live in a community and you promise you won’t hurt anybody, yes, we should absolutely push for that and just think, if every individual who seceded, took care of themselves, it would be a wonderful world. You wouldn’t have to take care of them, there would be no welfare state, there would be no militarism around the world, so under those circumstances that would be very good. Unfortunately though, the authoritarians are in charge and they are both conservatives and liberals and they like to take control of the situation and not allow you to leave. This is the most important thing right now, it’s getting harder to leave even this country with your money if you don’t think things are going well here, because they don’t want you to expatriate or secede or even leave and certainly in most authoritarian systems like in Russia that was the case and they put, build walls around individuals like that so they can’t leave.

I have another question here from Jesus Sanchez and this is an interesting question. He says “Ron Paul why we should or should not raise the minimum wage? Russia has one of the lowest; Australia one of the highest. Thank you Mr. Paul.” I first look at this whole idea of minimum wage as a freedom principle and a freedom of association and if you start with that and end with that, things work out very well in protecting liberty, as well as protecting the economy. Force control of wages by government never works. It seems to work on a short run. Even today we are putting up with seeing what’s happening to the minimum wage going from doubling, going from 7 dollars up to 15 dollars and there’s already evidence of prices for consumer goods that the very people who are pushing for minimum wage are suffering the consequences, because they pay more for their food. The most important thing is it interferes with the voluntary contract.

Let’s say one individual comes and he knows he’s a marginal worker and he needs to learn the job and he’s willing to go to work for 8 dollars an hour. He says yeah, I will go, put me on and I will learn this and I will work my way up and the government says no to the businessman, you can’t do that, you have to pay him 15 dollars. That’s a prohibition against a voluntary employment situation. That is the basic flaw in it. Then, when you get into the economics, no matter what they tell you about, minimum wages never hurt employment. No, the evidence is out there that it really does and I think these recent raisings of the minimum wage are going to be very detrimental to our economy. Wages are going to go up and the purchasing power of the dollar will not follow and that will be a problem. It’s going to be added burden on the economy and help drive this economy down once again.

I have another tweet here from Art Vandelay and good question on foreign policy “Why are civilian targets in Yemen being bombed by Saudi Arabia, with the backing of the UK and America?” Darn good question. I think it’s wrong, they shouldn’t be doing it, but the question is why, why are we doing it, why Saudi Arabia? Saudi Arabia might want to do it because they fear a rebellion in Saudi Arabia, because they have been overly friendly with us and we protect their oil and we are a close ally and we violate some of their belief by putting troops on their land. Yemen has not benefited quite as much and there’s a rebellion there, which actually threatened Saudi Arabia.

The big question that we as Americans should answer is why are we supporting that? We can see this is being a border war going on and yet here we are supporting it. Saudi Arabia couldn’t bomb anybody if we weren’t providing the weaponry for them to fight. To me it’s absolutely wrong for this and many times it’s commercial, it has to do with finances and the bigger question is why are we such close allies of Saudi Arabia? They are the strongest proponents of Sharia Law, they do a lot more beheadings than ISIS does and yet we are bosom buddies with Saudi Arabia and we are backing this bombing. Most Americans don’t know about it and they don’t care about it and it’s going to really be part of the serious problems that we have in the coming years, the next decade or even longer until this is ironed out. I think the violence in that area is going to escalate. We, as I’ve said so many times, we have no business being over there, let alone picking sides and picking sides with people that we know should be very cautious about trusting. There’s a close relationship with Saudi Arabia and 9/11.

Now, interestingly enough, I have another tweet here dealing a little bit with this very subject. It says “Ron Paul will you sign and share the White House petition to declassify the 28 pages and petition the White House?” Certainly I would, I think we should do anything possible. These are the pages that were classified, we are not allowed to read and the Senate investigation that most people have now figured out the close association with 9/11 and the Saudis. I can remember very clearly being in Washington when this happened, if I had to guess right it was on a Tuesday and it was trouble getting out and I had to go to Baltimore to get out and it was just horrible to get out of Washington DC, yet we did know even that early, on that very day that it was happening, that Saudis had their private planes and they were practically ushered out and given free rein to leave the country, not even questioned once by the FBI.

The pages that they won’t declassify tells a lot about that according to those individuals who have looked at it. Yes, we should and we should do whatever we can to find. This is once again is trying to make government transparent, but our problem today is that governments are secret and we have no privacy left and we need to reverse that and we should know about the secrecy of government and when we finally try to protect the whistleblowers like the various ones, Edward Snowden and others who tell us the truth, they become the criminals and they are considered traitors. This is the problem that we have, is getting the truth out.

Very simply, if we would honor our 4th Amendment to make sure the American people have their privacy and, of course, decent politicians should limit the secrecy of government, but right now it looks like we are moving in the wrong direction, because there are serious problems seen after 9/11 and guess what? The attack since 9/11 has been on the American people. It’s almost like the American people were guilty. There is no doubt and just talk to Edward Snowden, he says that there is no doubt that the information was buried in there to know everything about what was to happen on 9/11 and he blamed in on the inept bureaucracy of having just way too much information and it’s never put together. At least, that’s their explanation, they couldn’t act on it.

His point is just getting more information from more Americans and innocent people won’t do any good, it will complicate the matter and that of course gives our government too much free rein and this is why we should always question what they are doing. Whether it’s the lies they told leading up to the Iraq war, the lies about needing to take over Afghanistan and right now the lies we hear about Ukraine and also the many lies that are being told about Syria. This is the real answer to that and to really try to understand Saudi Arabia and Yemen is to get more transparency from our government. We don’t get it, we need to change our government.

I want to thank everybody for tuning in and participating in this episode of ask Ron Paul questions and do it through live Twitter. It’s a lot of fun doing in and let’s hope we can do it again and come back to the Liberty Report soon.

As Carol Paul prepares to receive the “Homemaker of the Year” award from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, she joins Ron in the Liberty Report studio for a discussion.

Ron Paul: Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. I have a very special guest today and it may be a tough interview for me, but let’s see how it goes. My wife Carol is with us today. Carol, I’m glad you were able to make it.

One thing we wanted to talk about today is because Carol’s getting an award. She’s getting it from Phyllis Schlafly this weekend. It’s for a Homemaker of the Year award. There’s been a lot of times over the years that she traveled with me and I got awards and pseudo awards and all kinds of things, sometimes things thrown at me and sometime praises, but this time on the Saturday night show she’ll be receiving this award in St. Louis, so this is something that we wanted to express.

I guess you are anxious to tell us all about what this means to you and what was your reaction when Phyllis called and asked you to do this. Did you say great or you had to give it some serious thought?

Carol Paul: I guess I gave it mostly thought about getting from Texas to St. Louis, but I was very pleased and was glad to do it, because I believe in the homemaking being very important and I just think new life is very important and it all goes together.

Ron Paul: You are comfortable with being a homemaker and I appraise you for it, because you have made a home and made significant contribution of raising our kids and all of this, but we are probably in the minority. If you go and do a survey, they don’t generally say a homemaker, that’s just somebody that doesn’t work, they just stay at tome. The politically correct people aren’t going to be flocking to St. Louise to praise Phyllis Schlafley or you for being a homemaker and yet it seems to me of course, pretty darn important.

Carol Paul: Maybe they will come, because it is important. A lot of brides come to me and tell me, ask me how they can have a marriage that is going to last and what to do and how to raise children and different things. I have a few little things that I tell them that I think are just absolutely important; know your children’s friends; an evening meal where everybody can attend. I have one friend who believes in this sincerely, but never can do this because of the work schedules and they have family breakfast and I thought that is really interesting.

Ron Paul: Yeah, it does seem like it is a lot different than when we were raised, compared to the average family now and it is and has economic problems to it too, because of the consequences to individuals, the spouses are both working and the conditions are such, there are a lot of different, a lot of single parent homes. That does contribute a whole lot and I like to talk about all the serious things in the world and fixing up the Federal Reserve and the foreign policy and all, but the plain truth is deep down in my heart I am in total agreement with your efforts, because it is the home that makes the difference. If you look at the statistics there’s no doubt that the kids do much better if they have a home.

I wanted to refresh our memories about starting our first home and it was early on, shortly after we were married. The first place we lived in was Gettysburg and then for a short period of time while I was still in college and then, of course, we went to Pittsburgh, but when I left Pittsburgh I was on my way to medical school and we drove there. We bought a house, fortunately we were able to get a house. Here’s a picture of this house and it was a mansion for us, mainly because we had four rooms, not four bedrooms, but four rooms in our house and also, you knew how much I would enjoy having a yard. You can see there was at least a yard around there. This, of course, was for us a very special place, because it wasn’t a house. It turned out to be a home. I think we had our family, my parents, even your grandmother came here to see it.

Carol Paul: My grandmother called it the doll house. It was powder blue, I don’t know if you get the color there, but it was powder blue and it was just perfect and the yard was much, much bigger than the house, though.

Ron Paul: That’s right.

Carol Paul: The backyard was very big.

Ron Paul: What’s the picture on the left there? It looks like two individuals that we might be able to recognize.

Carol Paul: That was bringing our firstborn home from the hospital 57 years ago. Very special time.

Ron Paul: As a matter of fact, that was Ronnie and he had not even entered the house by that time, we were just standing and your mother and father were there and they took some pictures. I think it turned out to be great, because we did so many different things in the yard, we had other medical students come over, but looking at the house right now, reminds me of a few things that were a little bit crazy. See that front window on the left? One time there was no basement, because underneath the house it was about three foot high and I was worried about some termites eating away at our house, so I had to crawl in under there and it was only about two feet high, right under that window, but we solved that problem and the house still stands today. It was fantastic, as far as I am concerned and we actually got involved in the dog business and raised some dogs.

Carol Paul: I’m just going to say you crawled under that house one time to retrieve…

Ron Paul: I didn’t tell you about it, you would have panicked.

Carol Paul: To retrieve litter puppies.

Ron Paul: Yeah, that too. We raised dogs and I remember one time we were desperate to get 25 dollars to drive to Pittsburgh and at the last minute we sold one of my colleague puppies.

Carol Paul: They were pretty.

Ron Paul: They sure were. We moved a lot in the first several years, in the first eleven years. We were married in ’57 and then by ’68 is when we moved to Texas and settled for my medical practice. We were first at Gettysburg, then we were in Pittsburgh, then we were in Durham, then we went to Michigan for residency, then the military told me I was going in Texas, then we go back to Pittsburgh for more medical training, and then finally go down and moved to Texas.

You were asked to write sometime about this subject and put to a political brochure. Something I’ve kidded you about over the years, it was a cookbook and I said nobody wants to read your silly old cookbook and look at pictures, but you wrote something in there about these years in general and you described it and some people were impressed with this, because some people would have described this as sort of a struggle from getting around and getting it done. You were keeping a house together and worked on the side and a lot of times worked on the house, teaching lessons, but you describe this as fun filled years and I think, boy, I guess she wasn’t too upset with all this moving around, but what was in your mind with fun filled years, instead of me saying this was hard work?

Carol Paul: The piece I wrote…

Ron Paul: That was for the cookbook.

Carol Paul: For the cookbook and everybody liked that and everybody talked about it, because they were fun filled years. We didn’t have any money, but we didn’t really need it. We would get together with friends, medical students and I can remember playing cards and just doing silly things and I remember one night we had medical students over and we were I think playing bridge and I had a price for the winner and the loser. The loser got a goldfish and he said Carol I don’t care about your old goldfish and he picked it up and wiggled it like this and put it in his mouth and swallowed it, but then I found out I had been serving fresh vegetables and things and he had picked up a carrot, the fish was still in the bag and he chewed in, he just chomped it down. People still remember it.

Ron Paul: The cookbook is rather famous and you became well know about the cookbook, but I remember very well when you decided to do this and that was in 1996 after I had been out of Congress for 12 years and decided to go back, but we were getting a lot of heat and you wanted to do this and that’s what I would kid you about. This is sort of silly, but was the thing that bothered you that you thought you needed to have a different approach?

Carol Paul: My story was called The American Dream and I wanted people to know that we were a real family and that you’d work hard and I’d work hard to have your medical practice and how much you cared about the country and they were putting terrible things out like you wanted kids to have drugs and I said this is awful, we have to let them know that we have children and that what they’re doing. I know when we were first married you said you’d take care of the government money and I’d take care of the household money. Right?

Ron Paul: Yeah, I think you won on that deal.

Carol Paul: And you would take care of the government and fix it and I would take care of the kids. I think I have done a pretty good job with the kids.

Ron Paul: If you compare the budgets, I was in charge of the Federal budget and it hasn’t done well with me there or away, but our checkbook is balanced, so I would say you have done a much better job.

Carol Paul: That’s right, that’s right. Yes.

Ron Paul: There were times when you were afraid of moving away and moving to Texas away from your home, but I made some rash promises, it wasn’t quite like jump on the airplane anytime you want, but I thought it was a pretty bold promise that we could actually use the telephone once a week to call home. Anyway, it worked out quite well.

The things is, I think what we are facing in this country today is probably the de-emphasis on a home. There are houses and there are buildings and there are apartments and there all kinds of stuff going on, but it’s back to what is important in raising kids and I think one of the things I marveled at when we had five kids to raise, was the fact that you knew where they were and you knew the names of everyone of their friends and you still know the names of most of their friends and at the same time there’s no downside on this, because people welcome the idea that they could come to our house and be there too, which meant that you were able to keep up with them when they didn’t even have a cell phone. That was pretty amazing.

Carol Paul: I just thought it was important to keep up with kids and to know their friends and to have them want to come to our house, so that I could spread not only what we were doing and the love that we had in our family, that we could spread it with their friends.

I remember one night seeing a young boy and I think his mother had passed away and he loved my brownies and he arrived at ten o’clock one night and he said “no brownies?” and I said I bet I can whip them up real quick, so I made him some brownies.

Ron Paul: I’ve made comments over the years in campaigning about my decision to run for Congress the first time, which was in 1974 and I truly believed in my own heart that I was on a lark, because there was just no way, the odds were just utterly remote. Texas was a Democratic state and all these things totally against it. When I told you that what was your reaction?

Carol Paul: He said to me, don’t worry, I’m not going to win, he said you can’t run against Santa Claus, I’m not going to give many things, only their freedom and I said Ron, if they hear you, you will win, because people deep down in their hearts are searching for something like this.

Ron Paul: I guess it turned out that you were more correct in the assessment than I was.

Carol Paul: Yeah.

Ron Paul: Because I truly, as a matter of fact, even up as late as 2008, when I expected to come from of the opportunities and the career in politics that it would just be a very, very minor footnote. It turned out a lot more people were reached during these campaigns.

What did you find, there had to be sometimes when campaigning was annoying, it annoyed me at times, I got tired, but what were the things that bugged you the most?

Carol Paul: I never got tired of the people and answering questions and just talking with them, because they wanted to share with me why they were supporting you and what they felt was wrong. The only thing I didn’t like was when the press would mess a few things up and report it wrong and then they say days later that was a mistake. That doesn’t matter, it’s already been written as a mistake and it’s hard to erase something that you’ve already done.

Ron Paul: I know you used to get in and sort of manipulate things a little bit, because somebody told me that your message was out in the campaign trail they couldn’t get to me, which sometimes it was difficult for a lot of people around. Go see Carol, go see Carol. If you can’t get your pictures on it, Carol will take care of it, so they would come for you and it was pretty hard to turn down your request down. This person and they were hard, to me it was heartbreaking, and some of these individuals traveled a long way. You’d hear stories like I just drove 300 miles and all I want to do is get a picture or a signature. It was one of the reasons why we did go out and like you say it was the people that made all the difference in the world.

Carol Paul: I wanted all the people to be able to say they shook your hand and that was important. I remember one of our grandchildren, we had on the stage one time and speaking of getting people saying come here and he’d run over to the edge of the stage and they’d say see if you can get him to sign this and they’d hand him a book and send him back through the crowd.

Ron Paul: They were using the grandkids?

Anyway, if anybody deserved a Homemaker Award for the Year, it’s you, I believe. I think you’ve made all our houses a home and you’ve done such wonders and with our children, we are proud of all our kids.

I do want to thank everybody for tuning in today, I know this program is a little different. I hope you enjoyed it, I hope you learned something along the way. It certainly was fun to do, because it refreshed our memories of our first house that became our first home and all the things that we have done in politics and actually if you say she was very much involved, I don’t think you’ve heard the whole part about it, because she was very, very much involved. She sometimes would say I’m not much into politics, I’m not into these issues, but her instincts were very good, just like advising me in the first campaign and when I said there was no way I was going to win, she said that’s not right, you better be careful if you think that’s going to happen.

It’s been good, of course, being out of politics now. We will still as two individuals interested in all we do. Yes, our children were raised, we have a few grandchildren and few great-grandchildren and I’m pretty sure I can name all of them, but she can name all their birthdays, so that’s pretty good.

I want to thank everybody for tuning in today, I hope you enjoyed the program. Come back soon to the Liberty Report.