Judging Freedom - Inflation War and Taxes - Ron Paul

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

A conversation with Ron Paul #inflation #war #taxes #debtSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello there, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, April 19, 2022. It's about 1245 in the afternoon on the east coast of the United States. My guest today needs no introduction whatsoever to this audience. He is, of course, the gold standard of defending human freedom against the encroachments by government, and he has been for the past 50 years. Congressman Ron Paul, what a pleasure, my dear friend. Welcome to Judging Freedom. Judge, thank you for inviting me on. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. You've been my role model and my idol for all these years.

The first time we met each other, I didn't know you were there in the audience. And I said to the audience, oh, my God, I have just seen Thomas Jefferson. Everybody thought I was losing. I was losing it, but it was you. And that's how we met. It was a surprise. I didn't know you were going to be there. But we have a long and wonderful relationship, and it's a joy to work with you.

You know, I remember that so clearly because the subject came up because you wrote something very, very complimentary. And I thought, boy, who is this guy? What's he talking about? And that is when you obviously tongue-in-cheek said, you know, Ron Paul should be on the Supreme Court. I said, doesn't he know I have an M.D. degree? And he said, well, that's the advantage. Of course, there is no there is no requirement that you be a lawyer. There'd be a lot of complaints from the Democrats in the Senate, but no legal requirement.

You'd be a lawyer of complaints from the Democrats in the Senate, but no legal requirement that you'd be a lawyer to be on the court. Let's start with something that's bugging the daylights out of just about every American today, and that's inflation. Last week, the president attempted to blame inflation on Vladimir Putin, and people laughed at that. Then he tried to blame inflation on greedy corporations. Some people accept that. Most people know it's absurd. Tell us the role of Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, in causing inflation. You know, a lot of things in economics affect prices, but that's different than inflation. And I think people carelessly have been adapting

to what the authorities wanted to get the people to accept. That everything could be measured by the Federal Reserve and the government, by the CPI. They say, if the CPI is going up, we're having inflation. And that is fudged and manipulated. And eventually, sometimes it goes up so much, they have to confess that prices are going up. But you don't need all that.

What they are doing by trying to give you so many different causes is to steer you away from the real cause. And the real cause is fiat money, the printing of money out of thin air so if you if you look at the statistics uh that's that's where the real problem is and why do we have fiat money why do we run up deficits because uh the people would never be taxed as much though they've created this thing and governments notoriously have done this first for a century that is dilute the value of the money originally it was just diluting the metal in in a gold or silver coin but the people will you know don't they don't understand

that it's really the taxation they're a taxing Authority so they people who don't they say 50 60 percent of the people don't pay income tax probably true and uh what what they that they don't they don't pay income tax but they're the ones who pay the higher prices so i try to tell people inflation is horrendous and uh and but look at it when you see the prices going up and that that is that is the inflation but it's But it's the other people that they blame, whether it's Biden or the war in Ukraine causing it. Indirectly it is in the sense that it gives license to spending and it takes away any restraint on deficits.

It just look at it, you know, in the last couple years, our debt tripled it was 10 trillion dollars not too long ago now it's 30 trillion dollars uh but it all ends the markets are stronger than the politicians so the destruction of money will occur where the the the the requirement and the need for monetary reform will come on the verge of it. But the government will never acknowledge that its appetite for federal spending, its voracious appetite for federal spending, and the unwillingness of the American public to pay for that in taxes is the sole cause of inflation. The government will never admit that, and the government will never get away from its addiction to federal spending. So how does this end? In one of your recent articles, you opined that we might have a budget deficit of $44 to $45 trillion in the next 10

years if the government keeps spending the way it's been spending. Joe Biden's budget is $5.8 trillion. The government only collects about $3 trillion in taxes. The rest they have to borrow. What would it take to discipline the federal government so that it only spent what it collected? Or is that a pipe dream? Yeah, it's a pipe dream. We still dream about it and talk about it in theory, but no, they're not going to do it. If you get new members of Congress, you'll never get enough to do the voting. And if you did, there'd be a revolution. So that's not going to happen. But there's always a default. There's a debasement of the currency. You can do it or they'll quit paying

the bills if we're in debt and we can't pay our debt. So we're in default. If people worry about it, say, well, what does that mean? I'm not going to get my social security check. No, it's going to continue. The default is in progress now and people are starting to recognize that. It's the value of the dollar that goes down. But if you look at statistics today, you know, gold is down and the people are, you know, the dollar on international exchange market, it's decent. So you think things are really, really, very good, except for one thing, the true interpretation of the value of the unit of account, which is a Federal Reserve note, which is fiat, isn't doing so well. And that is what will bring down the house of cards.

It's going to happen. But right now, people are saying, well, statistics that are so bad. So they change the way they collect statistics. So it's always a gimmick and it's always there to you know expand the size of government but it will end because all empires and all central economic planning and the the world reserve currencies come and go and I think ours is on its way down it's not crashing it's not going to happen in a week, but it's going to continue. And nobody knows exactly when it really gets out of hand. But right now there's a lot of people becoming square. People will respond politically speaking, but not economic common sense. They don't seem to grasp that. But right now, politically, inflation is a big deal. And

that is inflation. I always want to clarify that. That is the price of goods and services, not the inflation of the Federal Reserve. That's what we have to deal with, the printing and creation of money out of thin air just to prop up big government. So Biden's proposed budget is $5.8 trillion. $1.6 trillion of it is discretionary. What the heck is the rest? What is mandatory in the budget that comes to $4.2 trillion? What is the Congress forced to spend money on? Otherwise, there'll be a revolution. Are you talking about the defense budget, social security, and other wealth transfers? Yeah, that's right.

But everything, and that's a trick there too about discretionary and then some are indiscretionary. Everything should be discretionary. They should be voting on every single thing, but they don't. They take this big lump sum and say, well, you can't. And politically, that's true. They're not going to cut social security say, well, you can't. And politically, that's true. They're

not going to cut social security. This doesn't happen. And on the short run, it would be a disaster. There'd be a revolution. Now you say, well, you mean you're advocating a revolution? No, I'm not. But I'm trying to steer people away from the calamity if we continue to do what we're doing now. because along with the growth of government and the spending there's a loss of liberty because they perpetuate wars at home and which is we have coveted boards at home war against our liberties at the same time we're always agitating you know to subsidize the military industrial complex. There's a lot of profits going on under today's confidence. And they're satisfied. The military corporations love what's happening. And they say,

well, yeah, but we're doing the Lord's work because we're going to fight this war and protect democracy around the world. That bugs me too. They use the word democracy like we would use the word liberty. So when they say we're protecting democracy, but you know, Judge, a few of us have understood it that the pure democracy the founders didn't like. What will happen when the government can't pay its bills and people won't lend money to the government because they know they won't get the money back. Well, they're going to pay their bills. They always pay their bills,

but they're just going to send you what they're doing. They're sending you money with less value. And that's why you have, I don't think there's one chance in the world that you can avoid runaway inflation. We're not going to wise up and do the smart things you know yes if you did everything in one day there'd be absolute revolution but even if you had a 10-year period where you're going to cut the budget and go back to balancing the budget and

rein in the federal reserve but it's not politically i cannot imagine that happening they're not going to put up with it because, you know, a couple of years ago, they tried to shrink the balance sheet and the markets revolted against it. And right now they haven't even shrunk the balance sheet in reality. And they say, well, we've learned how to keep the balance sheet up and and lower interest, you know, and raise interest rates as if the lower interest rates. And they purposely claim that raising interest rates will bring on a recession. And that's what we need to solve the problems of inflation, is to undermine the health of the economy. That's how bizarre it is.

For years, five to 10 years, they've been saying, our goal, we don't have enough price inflation. We want price inflation we need two percent they decided destroy the value of the dollar by two percent a year and that's going to be beneficial well you know two percent came and went because now it's ten ten percent i don't think anybody remembers it being two percent but they were always arguing the case for two and i always predict those like when 2% comes, they're not going to like it. It won't last very long because it's going to keep going up.

I'm waiting. We started this conversation jokingly about you being on the Supreme Court. I'm waiting for a challenge to the constitutionality of the Federal Reserve at the Supreme Court. It hasn't happened in 110 years that we've had the Federal Reserve. No challenge to the constitutionality of it has made it to the Supreme Court. I want to switch gears. You wrote recently that you were not surprised about CIA lying. You were surprised that NBC News, of all places, broke the story. So NBC News recently reported that the CIA has been making up stories like Vladimir Putin is going to use chemical weapons in the Ukraine. China is sending military hardware to the Russians. And the people around Vladimir Putin, I think I'm summarizing your article.

The people around Vladimir Putin are lying to him so he doesn't know how poorly, from the Russian perspective, the war is going in the Ukraine. How dangerous to human freedom is the intelligence community, particularly the CIA, which has its own army? Yeah, that means that the top-notch policing forces are criminals. You know, you may know this name, Judge, but years ago, I visited with and talked to Dan Smoot from the old right position, and we talked about that because he had been in the um uh fbi and his job at the end of the war was to pick the people to go

into the cia and he sorted them out the good guys and the bad guys he says when they decided to start the cia they took the pile of all the bad guys that he had sorted out and said these people are very questionable but that that is the real problem. The CIA, and then he followed up with something he told me, which I thought about back then, but now I truly believe. He says, you cannot have a free society, you cannot have liberty with the existence of an organization like the CIA. The CIA is one of the most important things you deal with and eliminate it with it. And, you know, you, you

know, coups come and go and United States gets involved in coups at times. And, and yet the insurrection on January 6th is the, is the biggest issue that we've ever heard about. But just think of the coup of 1963, 62, or 63 with Kennedy. That was a coup as far as I'm concerned. The CIA was involved. So I would say I agree with my acquaintance, Dan Smoot, that you can't have a republic if you have a CIA type operation. So the CIA is lawless, it's unaccountable, and its budget keeps growing. Why does its budget keep growing? Does the CIA have dirt on members of Congress who are afraid to do the right thing? Why do they just keep giving tax dollars to the CIA to run a sort of secret government that answers to nobody? Well, I guess the members

of Congress get brainwashed. Why do they always vote bipartisan-wise all the budget, all the military budget? So they go along with it. And that and that that is a big problem but you know i've decided judge that it probably doesn't matter that much you know just even recently with cobit and different things yes they appropriate money and and they get this rubber stamp and they appropriate a trillion dollars here bail it out and and we'll be fiscally careful about what we do but the trillions the big stuff comes from the federal reserve that's why that's why i have figured that the way to get rid of the federal reserve is audit the fed and let people know what they're doing what if you had a true audit and an understanding of every single

conversation of the cia Of course, right now, there's investigations going on, and there's been effort. Senator Church one time tried to figure it out, but they're very, very powerful, and it may be that they have control over everybody, but I think there's philosophic control, too. They say, well, we're protecting our national security. What about this justification, Judge, about going to war? Why are you going to war? Well, we have to protect world democracy, but we also have to protect our Constitution and our liberties. So they go into a war without a declaration of war, and they finance it with fiat money, and also

the Federal Reserve financing their friends. Believe me, there were trillions and trillions of dollars. And they say, well, this is just credit. We just loan this and all this. But that is why the issue of money, I think, is so important. You will not reign it in without a better understanding of gold but there's too many people you know the deep state uh is real i mean uh and they're identifiable in in many ways but uh they they have the control maybe it is the intimidation uh by the the the deep state because they they can do it just think of how they've got all, how'd they get all those corporations to become the law enforcement agency

to enforce all this lockdown stuff. They just rolled over and did it. They did. They did just roll over and do it. Look, the CIA is largely responsible for the war in Ukraine today. The CIA perpetrated a coup in 2014 against the popularly elected government that was neutral. It was neither pro-Russian nor pro-West,

but it wasn't Western enough for the CIA. 2014, who was in office then? Ah, Obama and Biden. So clearly, would the CIA perpetrate a coup without the president signing off on it? Oh, it's crazy. And then the other thing that's been 90% of this discussion has been the insurrection of January 6th. so there is the coalition, the big corporations who make a lot of money, the banking system who manipulates the money, and then also the military industrial complex, you know, they have it locked in. They control our universities. But, Judge, in spite of all this, I still see signs of hope because, you know, I like to see and we like to report on the fact that

when there's been an insurrection by the people who said no more masks and finally we get a judge to go along with that and moving in the right direction. One of the favorite views that I saw in the last year was when everybody showed up at the football game, 100,000 people just threw their masks away and had a party. So that is when the people have to stand up. See, I believe that the people have to endorse. You have to have leaders to tell them what, you know, to help. But sometimes all you need to do is have that one teacher or parent get up at a parent PTA meeting and say, hey, look, we've had

enough of this, and before you knew it, they fired the whole school board, so that's the kind of thing I like. I like, you know, the educational part. That's why you and I have been supporters of institutions like the Mises Institute. I think long term, that's where a lot of we'll get a lot of help. Were you surprised when two members of the United States Senate whispered into the president's ear and then stated publicly they're looking for troops on the ground, American troops on the ground in Ukraine? Lindsey Graham didn't surprise me and probably didn't surprise you. He never met a war he didn't like as long as he's not in it. But Senator Coons of Delaware is the president's closest buddy in the Senate, was actually rebuked by the White House this morning for suggesting troops on the ground. Are we getting to the point where that will be discussed seriously. Is the military preparing for something as absurd, irrational and immoral and unconstitutional as American troops on the ground in Ukraine?

But they've been they've been doing that for a long time. I was in the middle of my residency in 1962, and there were a few problems that we've stirred up around the world and uh you know they took me out of my residency and sort of interrupted things i made the best of it the uh but uh it was uh it's it's an evil thing i mean if you see there are two two things i claim that is the personal attack on individual liberty. One is the draft. They take your body and they ship you over there and they do all kinds of evil things and people die over that. But the other one that establishes the fact that the government owns us is the personal income tax. Because even if it's 1%, I argue that they control 100%

because what they're doing is you have 100% and we'll tell you how much you can keep and under what condition. So that means the government owns us. And I think a lot of the things we're talking about, Judge, and you've pointed this out so often in your writing that it's the natural right to our own lives and we can't put up with the government pulling,

that's the source of all the authoritarianism and the war. People actually believe that stuff, but I think the universities have turned out to be, you know, a real menace. I think they contributed to the psychology and the willingness for so many people to go along with the lockdowns on COVID. Congressman Paul, this has been the most popular segment of Judging Freedom since we started. I'm sure a lot of the people watching now have been patiently waiting for you because I've been promoting this for the past couple of weeks

will like and subscribe. You've been a hero of mine. You remain a hero. Thank you very much for your time today. All the best. Judge, great being with you. Thank you. Judge Napolitano with Congressman Ron Paul

for Judging Freedom.