Q. What policies should have been put into place in 1932 to stimulate the economy instead of the confiscation of monetary gold?
A. A trust in free markets and sound money would have made the 1930′s much less rough. Inflation caused the Depression, and the big government policies of Roosevelt exacerbated the problem. Murray Rothbard wrote a masterpiece on the cause of the 1929 crash and the Great Depression, and I highly recommend it to anyone with a deep interest who wants to read the authoritative view.
Q. Is there any part of the Republican Party reaching out to you? At what point do we dump the G.O.P. and leave it for dead?
A. The leadership in the House of Representatives and at the N.R.C.C. has been cordial, and I as a ranking subcommittee member am myself in leadership. Other national leadership bodies largely ignore me.
Where I get the most attention, though, is from rank-and-file members. Dozens of Republican congressmen from across the country asked me for money and support in November’s election. I was happy to support and contribute to several deserving individuals through my Liberty PAC.
As far as quitting or staying with the Republicans, everyone will have to make up his or her own mind. There can be value in choosing either path. I myself have no plans to leave the G.O.P.
Q. Why is it that, even in the midst of unimaginable deficits and an economic crisis, both our enormous military and our policy of drug prohibition remain sacrosanct? Do you think this reflects actual democratic opinion, or is it the work of powerful, but numerically small interest groups?
A. I think that it might reflect democratic opinion, but only because each issue has been demagogued.
Take military spending. I believe in a strong national defense. I want our troops here, defending our territory; I want nuclear submarines and an adequate arsenal of weapons that can repel any conceivable attack. What I don’t want to do is spend a trillion dollars a year maintaining an empire.
Today, our troops are in 130 countries. We have 700 foreign bases. We can spend far less and have a stronger national defense than we do right now. But if you question our foreign policy, you are branded as un-American. And we’re told that if we don’t “fight them over there, we’ll fight them over here.” That’s absurd.
On your second example, the federal war on drugs has proven costly and ineffective, while creating terrible violent crime. But if you question policy, you are accused of being pro-drug. That is preposterous. As a physician, father, and grandfather, I abhor drugs. I just know that there is a better way — through local laws, communities, churches, and families — to combat the very serious problem of drug abuse than a massive federal-government bureaucracy.
There are certainly some powerful special interests that benefit from our flawed foreign and drug policies. Now, do I think they openly conspire together to deceive and manipulate? No I don’t. The system is much too complicated to think a few puppet masters control the strings. But I do think we’d be a lot better off if we listened to our founding fathers and obeyed the Constitution. The founders would never have formed a D.E.A., and they would be horrified if they saw our troops spread thin around the globe.
Q. What do you think were your biggest mistakes in the primary race, and what would you now do differently?
A. I was always pessimistic and never thought we would get to where we did. My regret is that we couldn’t see how quickly things would grow and were not adequately prepared for the explosion in money and support when they came. There are dozens, hundreds of things we could have done better, but we all worked hard and did our best. And I know we built something that will only get stronger in the years to come.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
If I could ask him a question it would be this.
You are proud of pointing out that during your time practicing medicine you didn’t take $1 of government money, however you treated people without regard towards their ability to pay. While very admirable on an individual level, are you implying by this that spontaneous altruism on the part of the medical profession/industry is the answer to provide care for those that are otherwise unable to afford it?
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Mike my understanding of Ron Paul’s beliefs is that the government and all governments are inefficient and things like helping the poor should be left to local communities. Essentially instead of the government redistributing the income and determine what treatment a person should get the local state/county/neighbors/church/community should take the extra money the government is taking and determine the best way they feel the money should be used. If Bob feels it’s worthwhile to give money to Jane, because she needs medical treatment then she gets it and if not then she does not.
Essentially government creates inefficiency and abuse, but you can’t abuse your own money and you should be in complete control of how it’s used not the government.
That’s at least my understanding of Ron Paul.
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First states, counties and localities are forms of government. Granted I don’t know what Mr Paul feels about them, but most libertarians I know don’t tend to differentiate.
Regarding my question what I am really digging at is if he believes:
A) The medical profession and charities in general will step up in the absence of government and meet the same or more of the need that is being met by government etc today.
B) The need will not be met, but it doesn’t matter because healthcare is a matter of personal responsibility (or something like that).
C) The need will be met because those in need will find ways to adapt to the new environment (beg, borrow, steal) since they aren’t guaranteed a handout.
I wouldn’t even begin to try to change his mind on anything, I’m just interested in his line of thinking.
What I find ironic is that a guaranteed right to basic human needs allows for the sorts of rabid individuality that Libertarians value so much. If you are reliant on your community’s personal decisions for any sort of charity (and that can happen to anyone) then it would be rather risky to act in non-conformist ways.
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I apparently can’t reply to a lower level post. So this is to Mike B below.
My understanding is Dr. Paul’s main focus is on the constitution and freedom and he has a strong belief in limited federal government, but believes the states should be able to do pretty much as they please.
To answer your A,B,C question would be to answer a straw man. Again my understanding as I can’t answer for the man and my opinions differ from his is as follows.
1) Individuals would step up and donate some of the extra money the government is no longer redistributing to non-profits who could then fund medical care for the needy. You know the donations that Americans are well known for (due to our tax code).
2) With a proper medical climate of reforms doctors would be more willing to treat patients pro-Bono.
3) Local communities would determine need instead of large inefficient governments. (Who better to prevent abuse then the people who know what’s happening instead of a distant authority)
And to answer your last point about “What I find ironic is that a guaranteed right to basic human needs allows for the sorts of rabid individuality that Libertarians value so much”
I think you have a distorted view of Libertarians. The main thrust of Libertarianism has nothing to do with individuality. The main thrust is each person should make his or her own decisions and they have to live with them. Each person should be free to do as he or she desires without large restriction from governments.
The following is an excerpt from the wiki definition of Libertarianism.
“In the strictest sense, it is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view. Libertarianism includes diverse beliefs, all advocating strict limits to government activity and sharing the goal of maximizing individual liberty and political freedom.”
—My understanding is Dr. Paul’s main focus is on the constitution and freedom and he has a strong belief in limited federal government, but believes the states should be able to do pretty much as they please.—-
Interesting. My understanding is that Mr. Paul’s main focus is on generating personal revenue and notoriety by running whimsical campaigns for President he clearly has no chance of winning. It’s quaint to have a candidate openly stating that he’d like to eliminate the FED, it’s also obviously pandering to a small uneducated demographic who will continue to send contributions, (in the case of 2008 even after the candidate is mathematically eliminated from the nomination).
Of course the good news for Señor Ron is that he can collect them indefinitely and then when he finally suspends his campaign, he can…you know…keep them.
Viva la revolucion imaginario!
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Hot debate. What do you think?
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“Essentially instead of the government redistributing the income and determine what treatment a person should get the local state/county/neighbors/church/community should take the extra money the government is taking and determine the best way they feel the money should be used.”
Scenarios:
An atheist / muslim / person of alternate faith cannot afford health care. Does the community pay for that person’s care?
A Hispanic person cannot afford health care. He is in the country legally, but speaks Spanish as a primary language due to growing up around other Hispanics. Does the community pay for that person’s care?
A man cannot afford health care. This man has an old debt that he has been unable to pay off on his working class paycheck, and the stress of staying on top of bills has turned him into an alcoholic. It is no secret to the local community that this man has a drinking problem. Does the community pay for this man’s health care?
A middle class family has health care. The father in the family is the main wage earner. He runs a small business of which he is the only employee (perhaps he’s an independent plumber or mechanic), so he must pay for health care through an individual plan. The father develops a severe disease which will require lifelong treatment. Due to the costs of this treatment, the cost of the family’s health care plan goes up every year, on top of the many copays of his treatment. The family reaches a point where it decides it cannot sustain the costs of medical care, despite earning a comfortable salary. Does the community pay for that person’s care?
A working class woman cannot afford health care. She is pregnant. Some members of the community hold her in disdain for having sex with her boyfriend despite not having a high enough salary to raise a child. A complication develops midway through the pregnancy, and the doctors in the emergency room tell the woman that if she brings the baby to term, there is a risk to her life. The doctor recommends terminating the pregnancy. Does the community pay for that woman’s care?
Local government can be a clique. Local government can be elitist. Local government can be exclusionary. I’m sorry, but whenever people say that kicking a problem down to the local level is a solution, I cringe.
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You mean the Hippocratic Oath? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath
First I don’t think that requires pro bono care and even if it did (and was somehow enforceable) that is an awfully socialistic (give according to one’s abilities?) point of view if I might say so myself. Economic mechanisms (ie payments) must be used to allocate societies’ scarce resources, not altruism.
If you want to live in a society where everyone has a RIGHT to a basic level of medical care, relying on good will ain’t going to cut it. If you want to roll the dice and live in a society where its every person for themselves, well then I won’t argue with you, but don’t try to kid yourself what that’s going to look like.
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People are charitable when they have more than they need and feel secure. That requires economic prosperity, which we simply don’t have right now. If government stopped taking the money out of the peoples pockets to deal with problems that charity would usually handle (Poverty, Sickness, Homelessness, etc.), do you think society would just let people rot on the streets? Not going to happen.
But it’s all moot as people don’t have any sort of security that they won’t imminently lose their job, have their taxes go up, have food prices go up, have the value of their house continue going down, along with their investments? And we already pay for it! Thats what taxes are for!
In a free market system, reputation is the most valuable asset you can have – Charitable people are respected. Respect begets success. Success begets wealth. It’s called a “self reinforcing positive feedback loop”
Adam, honestly, yes I do think that much of society would allow people to “rot in the streets.” For example, during the housing bubble when people were foolishly using their home equity as an ATM machine, most of that money got reinvested in the home, or in start up businesses, or alleviating expenses.
Everyone with a dollar in their pocket that isn’t earmarked to pay a bill or a debt, is faced with a choice between keeping that dollar for later, spending that dollar on something non-essential (but hopefully cool), or giving that dollar to someone else who needs it. But time and time again, we all (except for a few in monastic orders) make one of the first two choices and not the latter.
Charity is a beautiful thing. I give about 10% of every invoice for my work to charity. I strongly recommend it to anyone with the means to make that choice themselves. But it would be foolish to believe that as a society we will all make that choice to a level that will replace the spending of the government.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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BTW, where are you getting that we spend $1 Trillion a year on overseas deployments when the entire DoD budget is only about $700 billion. It’s not like just bringing the troops home would save all that money even if it were being spent unless you were to discharge every people previously stationed overseas and mothball all of their equipment. I guess your definition of “not weakening” our national defense is different than mine.
Also while being non-interventionist is just great how would you respond to China’s increasingly interventionist policies? Just pretend China doesn’t exist until they have locked up all the natural resources we need to have an economy? There’s a reason isolationism was discredited, its called World War II. You probably remember it.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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There is no possibility for isolationism when when have created organizations as the UN and NATO for exactly that purpose. As a matter fact invading Iraq was a blatant violation of that principle. If anything interventionism is a relic on old era. China influence on the world of natural resource is not being done with military interventions but with money and influence. This creates a playing field that stays far from your imperialistic ideas while at the same time stop us us from involving ourselves in the houses of our neighbors and keeps boys from dying just so the banks can finance more wars and the industrial complex can make some money.
Mike I’m not sure your reading it correctly. I’m not saying it’s correct or incorrect.
The article states that we spent $1 Trillion in overseas expenditures. It is not only referring to military spending it is referring to money we give other countries in aid and all overseas activity. And he claims you can save 500 million by closing bases overseas and stopping all other aid etc to countries.
On a definition front I would propose that non-interventionist policies do not have to coincide with isolationism. As you can not interfere in other nations issues, but you can still trade and work with the rest of the world and form consensus and well not act alone. Of course taking action against a nation state does something that is such a detriment to the US that it is deemed worthy of action has nothing to do with non-interventionist policy.
Here’s the budget.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_federal_budget
Total discretionary spending is only 1.3 trillion. Even if you counted the trade deficit you can’t get anywhere close to $1 trillion dollars being sent overseas on an annual basis. Peddling easy answers that foreign aid or black people are the root cause of the national dept is not going to solve the problem.
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Correct Mike I agree with you my response was only that the wording you used to reference his wording was incorrect.
If you want a full response to explain where Dr. Paul got his $1 Trillion number and why Dr. Paul is wrong and mistaken check out the following.
http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/wrong-paul/
I would like to know how he thinks states would provide anything like a standardized education if they were each allowed to do their own thing. While it is not necessary for each student to learn exactly the same thing, it is important to ensure that students are taught a comprehensive set of basic skills. For one, our university admissions systems are based on this. Granted, this system is also arguably imperfect, but without well thought out alternative I would be wary of scrapping the status quo.
I would also like to know what evidence Paul has to support his claims that the DoE is guilty of “indoctrination, and in come cases, forced medication of our children with psychotropic drugs”. Not sure, but I think he is referring to the teaching of a science-based curriculum (indoctrination) and the voluntary medication of children for psychiatric disorder (forced drugging).
These comments are at best very misleading and at worst totally farcical. Hyperbole like this is typical of politicians with hidden agendas and fringe beliefs. I would think this would disqualify Ron Paul as a mainstream candidate.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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People would rather have better education possibilities rather than standardized education possibilities.
The DOE has only existed for 32 years, during which time, education in America has fallen greatly behind most other countries. If something has been failing steadily, getting rid of it is a wise choice.
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While the educational plight of the US is well documented, I’m not sure dismantling the DOEd would improve the situation, or even maintain the status quo. I think there’s a risk in making these kinds of decisions in the name of cutting needless beauracracy.
With that said I’m not even sure what the DOEd actually does, other than standardized testing which is basically pointless. So maybe it wouldn’t hurt to cut them off.
I can’t speak of what Dr. Paul would say on this instance, but I can take a stab at ideas.
Lets list some assumptions.
1. Parents want kids to go to college
2. Colleges want to only accept kids who can pass
3. For colleges to accept kids they must of had a standard education
One solution would be for a non-profit education standardization organization that is driven by college admission requirements. That can then be used to verify that schools meet certain criteria for education.
This type of thing exists everywhere already and why could it not be extended to public school education?
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It exists. They call them SATs and ACTs
Our education has been thoroughly standardized across the nation and is a failure. The way that we educate is a perfect example of top down, central planning. The Dept. of Education exists for little reason other than to distribute money.
California needs more students who can go to Silicon Valley and go to work. Iowa needs agricultural experts. Texas and Louisiana need petroleum engineers. Let each state decide what it needs or what it does best and then pursue what is important to it. Break up the Dept. of Ed. and send that money back to the states and let the states get on with things.
Careful education in that manner prevents upward mobility and leans society toward more class-ism as you are even more likely to be what your parents were.
This is true only to the extent that you ignore the top-down educational systems of countries that are beating the pants off of us educationally.
I love those tall Texans like RuPaul.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Kind of an aside comment. I wish we did look more at what people said in the past, like this.
Unfortunately the general public seems to have 0/0 hindsight with respect to politics.
It being New Years season, many shows, were doing their yearly predictions by the “political experts” of what would happen in the next 12 months, what I would rather is see how well these experts’ old predictions held up.
I had that in mind when I saw a Ron Paul speech from 2000, where he stated if we pass this idiotic bill in 5 to 10 years it would cause a devistating collapse of the housing markets.
7 years later it collapsed, the experts who passed that bill were scratching their heads, trying to find someting else to blame it on.
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Ron Paul lost a lot of respect from scientists and environmentalists when he declared global warming ‘a hoax’. To many it seems that a big problem with Libertarian philosophy is that it does not have a good mechanism for dealing with a problem like anthropogenic climate change, and so to save face Libertarians fall back on silly conspiracy theorizing and quack science.
I would ask Ron Paul, if, hypothetically speaking, he did not believe there was a grand Communists conspiracy amongst scientists in regards to global warming, how his political ideas would solve the problem.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Did you read the article or would you link to the full context of what your claiming?
Q. Do you deny global warming? Is Obama right to invest money in green technology? If you don’t deny it, and don’t think Obama is right, what is your solution?
A. I try to look at global warming the same way I look at all other serious issues: as objectively and open-minded as possible. There is clear evidence that the temperatures in some parts of the globe are rising, but temperatures are cooling in other parts. The average surface temperature had risen for several decades, but it fell back substantially in the past few years.
Clearly there is something afoot. The question is: Is the upward fluctuation in temperature man-made or part of a natural phenomenon. Geological records indicate that in the 12th century, Earth experienced a warming period during which Greenland was literally green and served as rich farmland for Nordic peoples. There was then a mini ice age, the polar ice caps grew, and the once-thriving population of Greenland was virtually wiped out.
It is clear that the earth experiences natural cycles in temperature. However, science shows that human activity probably does play a role in stimulating the current fluctuations.
The question is: how much? Rather than taking a “sky is falling” approach, I think there are common-sense steps we can take to cut emissions and preserve our environment. I am, after all, a conservative and seek to conserve not just American traditions and our Constitution, but our natural resources as well.
We should start by ending subsidies for oil companies. And we should never, ever go to war to protect our perceived oil interests. If oil were allowed to rise to its natural price, there would be tremendous market incentives to find alternate sources of energy. At the same time, I can’t support government “investment” in alternative sources either, for this is not investment at all.
Government cannot invest, it can only redistribute resources. Just look at the mess government created with ethanol. Congress decided that we needed more biofuels, and the best choice was ethanol from corn. So we subsidized corn farmers at the expense of others, and investment in other types of renewables was crowded out.
Now it turns out that corn ethanol is inefficient, and it actually takes more energy to produce the fuel than you get when you burn it. The most efficient ethanol may come from hemp, but hemp production is illegal and there has been little progress on hemp ethanol. And on top of that, corn is now going into our gas tanks instead of onto our tables or feeding our livestock or dairy cows; so food prices have been driven up. This is what happens when we allow government to make choices instead of the market; I hope we avoid those mistakes moving forward.
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Shane,
The Q&A is from 2008.
After the “Climategate” emails were leaked in 2009, Ron Paul told Alex Jones, “It might turn out to be one of the biggest hoaxes of all history, this whole global warming terrorism that they’ve been using…”
What a joke.
My bad, Ron Paul said this on November 5, BEFORE the “Climategate” emails were leaked in late November.
Whenever I read Ron Paul I think of the saying “Novelty is often forgotten antiquity.” (probably inaccurate). Or, as Shakespeare put it “What’s past is prolouge.”
I don’t hate ALL of Ron Paul’s ideas, but unfortunately so many of them just seem like straight up bad ideas to me. I often feel like libretarians don’t account for externalities enough and run with some assumptions that I just can’t get on board with. Such as tax breaks for corporations.
I think Dr. Paul is the only republican candidate I would consider voting for. At least the man is honest.
Here’s Milton Friedman on education: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxeP-krUrdU
It should shed some light on Paul’s views on the topic
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My question to Ron Paul is; how does he feel about comments in this blog being hidden by the tyranny of the majority?