57. Standing for Something

57

RON PAUL

STANDINGFOR SOMETHING

IN FEBRUARY 2002, Linda Johnston interviewed Ron Paul for a chapter in a book she was preparing on the importance of the development of character and values and how they helped shape ones perspective on life. The interview is verbatim and can be found on LewRockwell.com.

I never had much interest in politics. My interest is in policy, economics and foreign policy. I was looking for a forum to ventilate and politics has allowed me to do that. I never thought anyone would listen. My goal was not to be in politics or be elected but to present a case for what I thought was important. My wife warned me that it was dangerous because I could end up getting elected. I told her that would never happen! She was right. I came to Congress, but on my terms.

I was raised in Pittsburgh. I don’t recall anything dramatic in my childhood. I am from a family of five boys. We had supportive parents but they didn’t over-indulge us. They made sure we knew what the work ethic was all about. The greatest influence on the development of character is from your family and the way a person has been brought up. I was influenced over the years not by any one particular event.

I went through regular public education and then Gettysburg College. Overall, my education was uneventful. The public school system and also college made it clear to me that the way things were was not the way things should be. I had instincts toward the idea of a very limited government even then.

Early exposure to war and several specific incidents dealing with the issue of war left a huge impact on me. I heard about people going and not coming back. I had friends and relatives dying in various wars; World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. I asked myself, did they really serve a just cause? The families so often have to say their loved one was serving their country and put it in noble terms. I was never convinced of that. What else can you do? The alternative is that you have to admit that your government wasted someone’s life. To me that is so tragic. I became even more determined to see that some of these terrible things that are so unnecessary wouldn’t happen. We drift into these conflicts and they could be prevented. I couldn’t figure out why our country was so stupid to get us involved in some of these wars that I didn’t think we should be involved in. Then it dawned on me that the government was not really following the rules. Korea and Viet Nam weren’t even declared wars. That is an awful lot of violence that was done without real proper authority to do it. This all has had a lot of influence on me and helped formulate my views.

I have no idea why some people react to war and violence one way and some the other way. I don’t have anything special to make me look at it this way. It just seemed natural to be opposed to violence. That was one of the reasons that I went into medicine. Throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it was known that if you were male, when you became eighteen you were going to have to go off someplace. So many went off and didn’t come back. I knew my personal make-up was such that not only did I not endorse these programs but it would have been hard for me to pick up a rifle and shoot people. These conflicts were not what I considered to be real self-defense. That helped motivate me to go into medicine instead. If I was going to have to be trapped into war, I would rather help people who were injured than trying to find someone I could shoot.

In medical school I was still fascinated with ideas. I got interested in sorting out some of these things I had always felt and thought. I wanted to find out what the principles were. I remember having the book Dr. Zhivago sent to me from my mother. It had come out in 1957. One person who stimulated me most to put the whole philosophy together was Leonard Read who founded The Foundation for Economic Education. He was a very lone wolf after World War II. Everything had become big government and internationalist. He wrote a lot of articles himself and revived some classic articles that were forgotten like Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law. Henry Hazlitt was associated with him and Mises as well. Mises and the Austrian economists influenced me the most on policy. He was also close to Hayek who wrote the Road to Serfdom. Then I read Ayn Rand’s books. They all had a strong influence on me.

Early on I thought I was the only one to think this way. I had a natural instinct for this view and then I discovered other people who had done a lot of serious writing and explaining on how government and society works. After studying other peoples’ thoughts on these topics, I found out there was a hard-core position that could be defended morally and constitutionally. I was not by myself! I thought I would just talk about politics and economics, but I ended up doing more than I ever expected.

For those who think this way, it just seems that we are alone, but it is just that the establishment has totally rejected these views. Whether it is the political establishment, or the media establishment, or the university system, they are saying how things are going to be, how we should be. I think that is not the way it is supposed to be.

It has always been part of my nature not to want to engage in violence and that led me to libertarian philosophy and my views. I hold strongly to the view that libertarians commit to. You should never use force to impose your will on other people. You should never use the government to do it either. That is a sound principle. You would not have to be a pacifist. If everyone decided to follow these rules and never to use force, it would be a pretty peaceful and good world. It is good advice to follow. I don’t know why I hold those views. I think some of us are born that way. Some of us just like to be left alone.

I finished my two-year residency training of internal medicine after medical school. Then I went into the Air Force. When it comes up in the district, I make a joke about how I got into the Air Force. I always say that I volunteered and served five years. Then I laugh about it. The real story is when I was a medical resident two years out of medical school I got a notice saying that I was hereby drafted to go into the army as a buck private—unless I volunteered. If I volunteered, I could practice medicine and be a captain. I capitulated rather easily and became a volunteer.

I stayed a little longer than I had to because it wasn’t too bad. It was a break from the tedious task of college, medical school, and residency. I stayed in the reserves as well. I tolerated it well because the physicians were treated differently than other people. I was interested in flying so I became a flight surgeon and got to fly. I took care of pilots and flying personnel because they have special problems. Whether they were enlisted or officers, all flying staff came through the flight surgeon’s office, my office.

After the military service, I went into an OB-GYN residency at the University of Pittsburgh. My personal feeling was that delivering babies would be fun, and it was. I finished my residency and opened up medical practice 1968 in Texas. That was great and very challenging. I did exactly as I wanted to do. I was very busy in a growing county, a suburb of Houston. I was the only obstetrician there. The first day in the office I had 35 patients! I had a huge practice and loved it.

I like practicing medicine. I like delivering babies and doing surgery. I really like the independence. When I went to Texas and started a practice, doctors had a lot more responsibility and I was expected to do a lot more than doctors today. For example, we didn’t have an anesthesiologist or urologist. We did all of that ourselves. Now everything is more specialized and you are not allowed to do that, mostly for legal reasons.

I took a career right angle to get my beliefs expressed. I have been here in Congress on two occasions. The first was 1976–1984. In the 1970s I was more involved in medicine than now. I would see patients on the weekends and do some surgery. After seven years in Congress, I went back to medical practice. I have been back here since 1996. It is not as easy to keep involved with medicine now because medicine is different. I have stayed interested and when in my district I go to a medical center one day a week and work with residents and interns. I don’t actually deliver babies or do surgery any more. The transition out of medicine was easy and I didn’t notice it was a problem. I just did what I was supposed to do.

What helped motivate me to run for Congress were some of the stupidities in economics I saw and our involvement in armed conflicts that could be prevented. When it comes to monetary policy the underlying issue was the idea of personal liberty. The government was getting too big. People became dependent on government instead of being responsible for themselves.

Here in Washington, D.C. people are totally confused. They think the force of government is always legitimate. They think that whatever government does is legitimate. I think they are wrong. It is not legitimate even under our Constitution. I am out of the mainstream in Washington because they all think that way. My position here is considered odd-ball. Yet, I can’t quite comprehend the others who are so willing to use guns, force, and violence to tell everyone what to do and how to live their lives. They are going around the world dropping bombs. To me, that is so bizarre. Very few here agree with me. They don’t have any idea what I am trying to do. Whenever people write about me and what I am doing, the terms they use are always “out of it” and “totally ineffective.” I think there are other ways to be effective, like trying to influence people in their thoughts and in what they believe.

People in my district and those who know a little bit about a constitutionally limited government, however, are very, very supportive. Those interested in individual responsibility are also very pleased, more so than I ever dreamed they would be. Up here in Washington they are all so conditioned just to getting reelected that they don’t care about the rule of law, being precise, and only doing those things that they are allowed to do by the Constitution. They just think I overdo it. That leads me to vote by myself many times.

They see that as an absolutely ineffective use of my vote because then I can’t trade my votes. This is how it works up here. You don’t vote on a principle; you trade votes. You say to another, “You need my vote on that issue and I could do that for you. What can you do for me? What can you do for my district?” That is the way the system works.

Character means that you should assume responsibility for yourself. You have no right to another person’s life. We have gone a long way away from that idea. In my Challenge for America speech I quoted Thomas Jefferson, “Material abundance without character is the path to destruction.” Today we have the material abundance, and we lack character. Those in government have no character because they are willing to use theft and force without even thinking about it. The founders were very keen on this idea of the character and limiting government’s power to use force. They did not believe a free society would work unless people did have character and assume responsibility for themselves. If people are going to use government for the benefit of special interests, it won’t work. That is why I think it is failing.

I think the population in the country lacks character out of ignorance. They don’t know anything differently. They think what is, is what was supposed to happen. They think the government is supposed to take care of them. Give me a house if I need it. Give me food stamps if I need them. Give me medical care if I need it. They are not deliberately evil. They have lost their way, lost their concern and lost their character.

It is felt that if someone needs something, they can get help from government. They never ask the question who in thunder is the government! They assume that government has that money to give. They separate the government from where the source of the wealth comes from and that, of course, is the people who do things, and produce things. The government is nothing more than some group that is stealing from the producers. They are willing to use government to steal and think it is proper.

I think we are in the midst of some serious problems both domestically and internationally. This is first time in our history since 1812 that we have been attacked on our mainland. The only explanation given of why they are coming and doing this to us is that they are jealous of us and don’t like us to be free. That is so simplistic. There is a lot more to it than that. Today it is considered very unpatriotic if you think we had some responsibility for the predicament that we are in. Everyone else is to blame and therefore it is justification to do anything and everything we want.

My biggest concern is that the president will take it upon himself to assume that he has the authority to literally fight war endlessly even though the resolution that was passed said that he only had the authority to use force to find those who committed these acts. That is a lot different. Already going into the Philippines is an indication that he is going to take advantage of this situation. There are many in the administration that would like to have a major conflict with Iraq and change that government. I see those moves as very dangerous. There is a good minority group of people in this country that are very much aware and concerned about this. Unfortunately we are in the minority.

I have resisted these moves. There are many members of Congress who have gone along with it not because they believed in it but because they were afraid to go home to their districts without having voted to do something. Every place I go and talk, especially on the radio shows, the people I talk to and those in my district are very pleased that I make an effort to try to restrain government power.

I was talking to two conservative Republicans over the weekend. I brought up the issue of the Patriot Act. They both agreed that it was the worst vote they ever cast and that it would come back to haunt this country. Privately, they were both sorry they did it. They had been listening to the patriotic fervor and got carried up in the moment and went along too easily. They did not want to listen to criticism or someone who would challenge their patriotism. They were not doing something because it was right or wrong. They were thinking about how to act to anticipate the greatest number of supporters. If we had enough momentum here or in the educational institutions or the media or with our people, these guys would do better. They are supposed to be leaders yet in Congress most of them are being pushed here and there. That is the way it always works. The prevailing philosophy of the country creates the leaders and pushes them in certain directions. When attitudes change enough you can get rid of them.

That is what happened in the Soviet system. Finally it was recognized that it wasn’t working. They had tried it and it was a total failure. The result was a non-violent revolution. It collapsed because the ideas collapsed. That could happen here. Welfare is not functional in the long term. It will collapse on itself. Although that is good there is also a danger because you might end up with something more authoritarian to replace it. With the Soviets, at least that system broke up. The world is better off without it.

People accept what we are doing because there is a mass psychology of patriotism and people misplace it. It is fine to be patriotic and believe in the American ideal and freedom. This patriotic zeal that says we all have to be together and do anything and everything because we have been attacked by terrorists is a false patriotism.

Samuel Johnson said, “Patriotism is the refuge of a scoundrel,” and that is so often the case. People will hide behind patriotism when they want to do some of the worst things. The masses and greatest number of people get carried up in this. The support for war comes not so much from the people but what they hear from the leaders and propaganda on television.

I saw this during the time we were preparing for the Persian Gulf War. The immediate reaction of the people was proper. They wondered why do we have to go there. In the three or four months of preparations all the major networks kept pumping them up about the need for war. The people responded to this mass psychological conditioning by becoming in favor of it.

Those in leadership in the government in combination with our corporate leaders know this. When they want something they know they have to get the people behind them by rallying the people to accept the idea. They have some very special plans. For example, they might want to be in Colombia to protect oil wells. They say they are doing it to stop drugs and the people agree to that. The government always claims to have a good cause. I think those who would do harm to us deliberately are willing to use the tools of propaganda. With television, what they can do is a lot easier today than a few hundred years ago.

This was certainly the case for getting us involved in World War II. Eighty percent of the people were “America First” and didn’t want any part of Europe or its troubles. Once we were attacked, you couldn’t even debate why we were attacked. You can’t ask if we provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor or did we know it was coming and avoid doing anything about it. Once it happens, any opposition is absolutely neutralized. That is my instantaneous thought on 9/11; for those of us who believe government should be limited, we have just been set back a great deal.

No matter how much we are responsible for this, no one will ever listen. There are a few of us, a very few people who understand. There are others leaning this way but not vocalizing it. They listen to the same propaganda and are so easily intimidated. They are worried that their people at home in their districts will reject them. They don’t want to go through the effort of explaining and teaching their constituency what is going on. So they go along with it all.

There are flaws in our foreign policy. We invite these hostilities. I feel we should not be doing so much overseas. We should ask ourselves why we have troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. Why did we embargo Iraq and bomb them incessantly? Why do we have troops in 144 countries? Why do we use military might to protect oil and commercial interests around the world? All of that leads to conflicts. There will be a lot more resentment to us than anyone realizes. All this token support that we get from other countries recently is really saying, “Please don’t bomb me tomorrow! We will say what you want us to say!”

As a doctor, I was never involved with the Medicare program, even from the very beginning. I don’t like interference in the doctor-patient relationship. The last thing I wanted was the government involved in medical decisions. In the early days of Medicare, before cut backs and increased government control, they promised no government intervention in medical decisions. But even then, I did not get involved because I thought the whole idea was a bad omen. As bad as the insurance system is, I thought Medicare was a worse idea. I could work with a patient and collect from the insurance company. Then I drew the line. I would not and have never taken money from the government for medical services. That was it. That hurts your practice, especially now if you are a practicing OB-GYN. It is so easy to get on Medicaid now. A pregnant woman who is working and her husband is working also can get on Medicaid. Now if you don’t take the Medicaid patients you don’t have as much practice.

To me, there was no doubt about it, Medicare was a bad omen. I had heard stories about socialized medicine in England. There were more private obstetric doctors in England under socialized medicine because it was a personal part of medicine that people would hang on to. Maybe that knowledge slightly influenced me. Later on, I was always disappointed because it seemed that Americans didn’t care. If they could get a better deal by changing their doctor or going to an HMO, they would. They didn’t care. They would go where the least charge was, regardless of anything else.

In 1977, a few of us made a tour of ten cities round the country for Private Practice Magazine trying to warn people about socialized medicine. We had doctors from Canada, Australia, and England. These were doctors who had gone through it, and they were really supposed to wake up the public to the danger of government medicine. I remember one doctor from Australia told a story about medical care which had became so impersonalized that the doctor no longer checked the patient. He had a window and the patient would drive up in his car and tell what the symptoms were through the window. The doctor would write a prescription and hand it out. I believe that is what it would come to.

Someone asked him once that if it is so bad, how did it happen? Why did doctors go along? He said that when the question was asked to someone in the British government about how were they going to get the doctors to accept this, the Government official replied, “We will stuff their mouths with money.” And they did. They literally stuffed our mouths with money and we gave in. Now they are in so deep they can’t get out. Some don’t really care.

At the beginning of Medicare, it was lovely. If you joined the system you got paid for everything. You got paid for things you didn’t get paid for in the past. Hospitals got paid and you didn’t have to do ward work for free. You got paid for charity hospital work. Doctors got more money at the beginning. An ophthalmologist doctor was paid $2,000 for a cataract surgery. He loved it. Now, several decades later, it is down to $600, in spite of inflation.

As the financial problems of Medicare got worse, the government came up with this HMO policy that was supposed to help Medicare, but it has only made more problems. You can’t close it down. It won’t happen politically. The country will be bankrupt first before Medicare disappears. The only answer under today’s conditions is to promote medical savings accounts and give a tax credit. People could get $3,000 off their taxes if they assume responsibility for their own medical care. I don’t know if people are using them yet. When people get sick and tired of it enough they will get out of the system and pay their own bills and buy their own insurance. That would be the best possible answer to move away from government control of medicine.

How did we get from the self-reliance to the self-entitled? It did not just happen on a dime. Immediately after the Constitution was written, it was recognized that there were flaws in it. There was a tendency to go in that direction. There also have been a few major events in our country that made it worse. The Civil War was one. The idea that you could be independent of a strong national government was given up a lot during the Civil War periods, if it survived at all. After that war, there was a sharp uptake with the federal government. The problem was there was a great confusion between liberty and slavery. Those defending liberty were also in the camp where there were slaves. Lysander Spooner had the correct viewpoint. He was anti-slave but pro-south and the right to secede. The twentieth century was also bad news. We had major wars and in times of war, just like the war now against terrorism, the government uses it as an excuse to expand substantially.

The depression had a tremendous impact on our country. There was a willingness to bring in the welfare state based on bad ideas. During the depression the government kept saying that the real reason it happened was because of the stupid people who believed in sound money and in free enterprise. Freedom had failed. That is absolutely false! We had a depression because we had government intervention that created the whole mess. The government supported by academicians insisted that we had to have this “third way,” and called it “putting a human face on capitalism.” They wanted to curb freedom, but not as far as communism or socialism. They believed that you could have some regulation and some taxation and some special interests and still protect liberty.

They did not realize that there is always a steady and inextricable growth of government if you don’t draw your lines sharply. People cannot grant power and authority to government other than the rights they themselves have in a natural way. For example, I don’t have the right to take anything from you so I can’t transfer that power to the president. We do have a natural right to defend ourselves and protect our liberties. We can transfer that power to a government, which then can form a police force and an army. We can’t transfer anything else. Yet government now has everything else. That is where it fell apart, especially in the twentieth century. We are now suffering the consequences.

We need to go back to the fundamentals and decide what we really believe in and what the role of government ought to be. That is what the founders did at the time of the revolution. They decided what had to be done and they knew enough about history that they were able to fight the revolution based on those ideas. Fortunately for us they came up with a pretty good document.

Unfortunately, the country is moving in the wrong direction. The government is getting bigger and getting more involved in the economy and our lives. We are spreading ourselves around the world even more. The crises we have now with the terrorists’ attack has given us the chance to reassess this. Instead, again we are using it to do the things that we should not be doing. The government is making further intrusion in personal liberty and a further expansion of military power around the world.

To turn that tide and get us disentangled we would have to have a different type of Congress. Unfortunately, we don’t have a different type of Congress so it will continue. The next group in will be influenced by the same people who think it is our oil over there and we have to keep a navy in the Persian Gulf and so forth. I don’t think in the next generation that Congress will become wise enough and brave enough to do the right thing. We could just deny them funds and then it would be all over! That may happen anyway. It could be during that next generation that we will go broke and not be able to afford it. That is the way it will most likely happen. The government is only going to be held back when the people tell them they won’t put up with them any more.

Technically we are broke now but our credit is still good. A lot of people are broke and lots of companies are broke but they keep going. Enron was broke but they functioned rather well until September 2001. They said they were making a lot of money but it was all fictitious. There were not any real assets. That is the way the country is. There is a false confidence in our economic system, our dollar, and our military might. The economy perks along, although slower. We can borrow and tax. We have a strong currency because there is a lot of trust in it. If people decided that there is something seriously wrong and panicked, they would dump our dollars. That would give us a huge inflation and no matter how much we taxed, we would never keep up with taking care of all of the people on welfare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and subsidies. There is no way that just printing money would save us if the confidence in our dollar is lost. Now we are moving into a new era. Our homeland has been attacked and that means that we are more vulnerable. If our dollar gets attacked there will be major changes. I would not be surprised if those changes come in the next ten years.

Individuals have to live within their means. You and I are limited by the market, and limited much faster. For example, banks stop loaning to us or we lose our job or something like that. The government doesn’t live within its means because it has two tools we don’t have. They can print money and they have guns to collect money. If we did either of those we would go to jail. The government gets away with running huge deficits for a lot longer but the economic principles are the same. When it finally hurts and there is a correction they cause a lot more harm. What you do to yourself is only hurting yourself. When governments mess up and suddenly it doesn’t work, that is really dangerous. We have people dependent and conditioned to think they are entitled to the benefits from the government. When the government can no longer take care of everyone getting benefits, many are really hurt. They will demand it and there will be riots, screaming and gnashing of teeth because the politicians have not taken care of them.

In an effort to curb welfare dependence, they are trying to link more job placement and marriage requirements to the welfare system. You might be able to find people here and there that claim these measures are effective. I think they are dangerous because that is social engineering by giving and withholding. You are saying, “Do as we say and then we give it to you.” When our government comes in and has these conditions, they are saying that welfare is there if you believe and act in a certain way. That is bad because it shows that they can give or withhold depending on what you do. Even if I agree with the ideas like employment and marriage, this is all based on the person doing what they tell him to do. You should never be tempted because the conditions being set up sound so nice. Sure it sounds good that people should go to church every week and maybe they would be better people. It might later become some evil monster that might make the conditions something that I really detest. That is even more mischief than before. Force is not the way to change people.

Recently, I heard a government ad on radio. A young man comes in an office and wants a job. They ask him if he has registered for the draft. When he says he has not, they close the door on him. Next he goes to a bank to ask for a loan and they tell him, no, you haven’t registered for the draft. This is the notion that if you do what we tell you, then you can get ahead in the world and you will be taken care of. This reminded me of a story told to me by someone who came from the Soviet system. I assumed that if you spoke out or had an unapproved meeting that you immediately would go to prison. He said that is not the way it worked. Certainly, at one time there were purges and prisons. In these later years everyone was controlled through economics. If you challenged the government, they would not come and arrest you. Instead, you would lose your job and apartment and become destitute. They punished you through economic means.

Now we are criminating certain thoughts. For example, if we think the motive is hate, we have designated hate crimes. The danger is that the government assumes they know what you are thinking and can understand peoples’ motivations. They are determining that some peoples’ lives are worth more than others. Consider the killing of a heterosexual in contrast to a homosexual. The penalty is greater for those who killed the homosexual because the motive is assumed to be hate. Instead of saying that it is a horrible crime to kill anyone, they are saying it is a worse crime than killing a heterosexual; that the heterosexual’s life is worth less. It also introduces an arbitrariness that is horrible. These are “thought crimes” and that to me is a dangerous trend.

Ron Paul is a physician and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas’s 14th district. He was the presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party in 1988 and a candidate for the Republican nomination in 2008.