Paul
spoke for about 13 minutes and 20 seconds and took no questions.
Rep. Ron Paul
Des
Moines
Register
Soapbox
Iowa
State
Fair
Des
Moines,
Iowa
August 12,
2011
[DEMOCRACY IN ACTION TRANSCRIPT/DMR
video]
Thank you very much. I'm glad you're out this
morning. But I'm just wondering, how many will be in Ames
tomorrow? [many people raise their hands] Hey, that looks
good. Maybe we can get a few more of you to come too as
well. But of course I think most people know why candidates are
in Iowa this week and what's going on tomorrow, but it's delightful to
be here and attending the Fair. And also I'm sort of enjoying the
weather as well, having come from Texas here just recently. But
it is great to be here.
But of course the real thing that motivates me is the issues that I
think have been messed up in our country and that we have to change our
way, we have to change our direction. The American people are
pretty tired of what they're getting. They know there's serious
problem. There's a lot of anger going on and frustration and a
lot of unemployment, and somebody has to come up with some answers.
Well you know a few years back, in the 1970s, I first ran for Congress,
and I was pretty concerned about what was happening then. I
believe the stage was set for the kind of problems we have today, and
it happened back in August of 1971. That was at the time that we
decided that money didn't matter. We can print the money.
There should be nothing to back our currency. We'll just print
the money and we can live happily ever after. That means that we
believe as a people that if we could just counterfeit our own money we
could live and not have to work any more.
What did we end up with? A huge amount of debt. We owe $3
trillion to foreigners, our good jobs have gone overseas, and now we're
deeply in debt and there's a debt burden and they're very, very
frustrated in Washington, which makes it very frustrating for the
people across the country. A lot of people have become dependent
on the government, and we're doing way too much.
So my simplest explanation of our solution is we have to drastically
shrink the size of our federal government. [applause, cheers]
Most people are starting to realize this, but the big argument is where
are we going to shrink it?
But you know people say well you need bipartisanship and you need
compromise and sacrifice. My argument is we've had too much
bipartisanship. Because it's the bipartisanship that we have had
that have endorsed all our problems. If we elect Republicans to
shrink the size of government, they go and double the size of the
Department of Education and get us involved in a bunch of wars.
So we elect the Democrats who say they will end the wars and they
expand the wars. And then we have Republicans that expand the
budget and Democrats are doing the same thing. So there's always
this compromise.
There are the big spending conservatives and the big spending liberals;
they get together, and they don't have to worry on the short run.
They can always delay it. Sure you can tax to a degree, but
there's a limit to how much you can tax. You can borrow to a
degree, but if you borrow too much, interest rates go up. But
there's a magic, magic answer to this. It's called Keynesian
economics. It's called fiat money. Oh, the miracle pill is
that you just print the money when you need it, and that's what 1971
was all about. No restraints on the monetary authority and all
our problems in the last forty years came from the fact that big
government is subsidized and taken care of by the printing press of
money.
Right now the American people have awakened and they're starting to
realize it has a lot to do with our monetary system. They know
that prices go up when the value of the money goes down, and they're
not very happy about it. Because the standard of living goes
down. People can make a little more money and the checks can go
out,
but if the money value goes down, the standard of living goes
down. That's one of the reasons that people are very, very
upset. And the people on retirement, people getting Social
Security are starting to recognize this.
And the tragedy here is that the production in this country is
down. The productive jobs have gone overseas because of this
monetary system and over-regulation and over-taxation. So
we chase our jobs overseas. In order to get capital back in you
have to have a strong currency, you have to have a tax code and a
regulatory code that invites our businesses back rather than chasing
these businesses overseas.
So it's sort of sad to me to think that in my lifetime we saw a point
where there was a country called Communist China evolve into being our
banker. There's something about that and we should reverse that,
but we have to endorse a very basic principle, and that's called
freedom, and the Constitution. [applause].
But since it was bipartisanship that got together and spent all the
money, how do you get out of this mess? How do you get people to
agree to cut spending? And that's where the difficulty is and
there's no agreement in Washington.
So what I do, what I have done is I've tried to propose a way to try to
get the two sides to come together. But I think the area that we
could most easily cut is what we spend overseas. We spend way too
much overseas. We have an American empire overseas. We
spend trillions of dollars. We're obligated to spend trillions of
dollars taking care of the seriously wounded and injured individuals
coming back home, which we're obligated to do, and we pass out all this
foreign aid and it's all supposed to be for national security.
All this militarism doesn't help us; it doesn't make us secure.
People won't vote against it because if you vote against a military
budget, not realizing all you're doing is giving subsidies to the
military-industrial complex, they claim and they accuse you of being
un-American and not caring about the military.
I'll tell you what. That's the way I've been voting and I"m very
proud of one thing. During this campaign and the last campaign,
our campaign always raised the most money from the military people,
more than all the other candidates put together. [applause]
And having served in the military—I was drafted in 1962; I was in the
Air Force for five years. So I understand a little bit what it's
like to have a bad war going on and people being sent around the world
and ending up with no-win wars. So I've been very conscious of
that. But we should be able to defend a non-interventionist
foreign policy just on principle, moral principle that you don't start
wars, you don't initiate wars, you don't fight unless it's
constitutionally declared. So it's a very simple answer as far as
I'm concerned about how to start off by saving a lot of money.
And that is have non-intervention, stay out of the business of these
other countries, mind our own business, and bring all our troops
home. [applause, cheers]
That means the Middle East, Japan, Germany, South Korea—the whole
works. Because if you do that one thing, instantaneously—and the
president does have the authority to move the troops around. That
means bring the troops home. If they're going to get paid all
this money, let them spend the money here rather than in Japan and
Germany. It just psychologically would give a tremendous boost to
our economy.
But you have to change a lot more than that. You have to change
the nature of what the people want. The appetite for big
government has been around for a long time. There's a lot of
blame to go around. You can blame our presidents, you can blame
our Congresses, you can blame bad philosophy, the philosophy of
economic intervention. But you also have to look to the
people. How many people ask their congressmen, I want you to vote
for this, I want you to vote for this, yes I believe we should be over
there, you should fight this war and do all these things.
Congressmen have over the years voted for these things and gotten
re-elected. So government very frequently and most likely will
reflect the attitude of the people.
That's why I'm interested in changing attitudes and understanding of
what government should be, the role of government. That is the
question that we must ask. What should the role of government
be? Should it be to police the world and finance a welfare
entitlement system or should it be as the Founders wanted it and our
Constitution dictates? That is that the purpose of the
Constitution is to protect your personal liberty. [applause]
And if you understand where liberty comes from, and it comes to us in a
natural way, you should have a right to your life, right to your
liberty and you ought to have the right to keep your own money.
[applause, cheers] And that would solve a lot of our
problems. But the other goal in my effort to spread the message
of liberty is
that to have an understanding of liberty we have to get this splitting
up of what freedom is all about into two bunches. One bunch says
well liberty means that you can run your life as you please, which
sounds like a good idea to me. And the other one says no, we want
to run your life, but we want to allow you to spend your money as you
please. What would be so bad about a country that said you have a
right to your life and run your life as you please and allow you to
spend your money as you please as well? [applause]
But the correction has to come not only with the change of our foreign
policy; we have to deal with the monetary system because it is coming
to an end. With the financial markets are in shambles and they've
been that way for several years and it's going to get much worse
because we're trying to correct forty years of mistakes, forty years of
debt accumulation and mal-investment.
And the one thing that is a little more difficult to understand but
it's
a very important economic issue. If you have a pile of debt, in
order to get growth again, if you're spending all your money on paying
the interest it won't work. You don't bail out bad debt.
That's why the bailouts were so bad, and it's a tragedy that the debt
of the people who made all the money got bailed out. They got
your money and you got the bad economy. [applause] If an
individual is bankrupt and has too many credit cards and too many cars
and they lose their job or downsize on their job and their income, they
know they have to cut back, get rid of the credit cards, sell a couple
of cars, and once they get out of debt they can have economic growth
again. And a country has to do the same thing.
But politically it's virtually impossible for the politicians to do
that because there's always one group saying do it because I want to
keep what I earn, but then there's another group that said no you're
going to cut my check, and they get very angry. And that's what's
happening in the world. This is a worldwide phenomenon; it is not
just in the United States, and it's because we did issue this funny
money, this paper money. Paper money never works. It never
lasts. Just for a short period of time. The real money of
the world for thousands of years has always been something of real
value like gold and silver.
But this is a worldwide phenomenon. We had the privilege of
printing it, sending it overseas, buying goods and services, living
beyond our means, accumulating debt, owing $3 trillion of debt now, and
what did the foreigners do with the money? They loaned it back to
us, they used Treasury bills as their reserves. That became their
gold standard, owning our debt. So it's a worldwide phenomenon
and it won't last. That's what's the matter with the shambles in
the markets and by next year or next summer you're going to have a lot
more price inflation because all they have been doing in Washington is
spending and inflating. We got into this trouble because we were
spending too much and regulating too much, taxing too much and then
printing too much money.
So they recognize this, and they say we're in deep trouble and we have
to do something about it. So they accelerated the spending and
the borrowing and the regulations and the printing of money and then
they say I wonder why things aren't getting better? Well it would
be logical to expect that if you try to treat a problem by doing more
of the same it's not going to work. So understanding how the
business cycle work and what you have to do in the liquidation of debt
and the sound money, but all this can be summarized by defending
liberty. And that is what America was all about. Liberty
and freedom of choice. We were the—we had the largest middle
class and the wealthiest country in the world and we're losing
it. The middle class has been shrinking now significantly for ten
years. We are losing our jobs in this country.
But this can all be reversed, and it's not difficult. Understand
and respect where our liberties come from in a natural God-given way,
defend that and have confidence that it does work, and also, what fits
in so perfectly with this is all you have to do, all you have to do to
achieve this is ask anybody that you vote for how serious are they and
how consistent were they in defending the Constitution. If we go
back to the Constitution we're going to solve just about all of our
political and economic problems. Thank you very much.
[applause]