Changing the World

0:00He started reading the Austrian Economist when he was in medical school. Those of us who were a certain age, I think, can remember the day that had such a strong impact on him when Richard Nixon imposed price and wage controls and closed the gold window on August 15, 1971, and that was when Dr. Paul decided he was going to dedicate his life to the cause of freedom, to the cause of economic rationality, to the cause of the and the free market and sound money and what a life it's been. But I want to talk about something else about Dr. Paul that doesn't usually get talked about. You know, there's a phrase that political correctness tells us that we're not allowed to use.

0:45And the phrase is that behind every great man stands a great woman. And even if that upsets the feminists, I'm going to say that and we know that it's true. And I might even add from, even for us non-great men, there's oftentimes a great woman and I do want to thank Marty Rockwell for her 25 years of work for the Mises Institute. But as you might guess from Dr. Paul, he didn't become a star, and he is a star, he didn't When he started reading Austrian economics, he was a star in high school. He was the best student. He was a straight-A student, of course. Working his way through high school and college, he worked for his dad's dairy.

1:35He was also a champion athlete. This is in the suburb of Pittsburgh. He won the statewide 220 and other track titles. He was still a great athlete, of course, today. But there was a young lady in that same class in the high school. Her name was Carol Wells. Her dad was an international coffee broker. She was known as the smartest girl in the class, just like Ron was the smartest boy. And you'll learn about just how smart she was in just a second. But she was known, among other things, for her ability to sing and very wonderfully sing every popular song of the day and was called upon by her fellow students to do that. But the class held a Sadie Hawkins Day dance and she asked the young man who had caught her eye, Ron Paul, and I think lucky for all of us he said yes and they've been together ever Ever since they've been married fifty years, five children, successful smart children,

2:54seventeen grandchildren, one great grandchild. And all the work that Ron has done ever since that day in 1971 when he decided to devote

3:34before others would see it. And a very valuable person to me. There's no way he could have done what he's done had he not had the home front secure, had he not known that his children were so wonderfully cared for, his home cared for. And I'll just mention one thing about Carole Paul's home. It was always the headquarters for all the kids in the neighborhood. And you know when you have that kind of a home where the other parents feel very comfortable having the kids, where all the kids want to be, That's the kind of mother Carole Paul was and is the kind of grandmother she is today. And she had some health concerns recently in Iowa. She's doing much, much better, but she's Ron Paul's partner.

4:19And again, this presidential campaign would not be happening. All of Ron Paul's achievements would not have happened if it hadn't been for Mrs. Carole Carol Paul. So I mentioned Ron. He started his work in 1971. Of course, he's been elected to Congress a number of times. Now we have, I'm sure everybody would like to hear the man, so let me just say that Ron Paul is compared by many to the founding fathers, and I think that's an appropriate, a very appropriate comparison, but I must say I think of him as the new founding father of the restored American Republic. Dr. Ron Paul. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you Thank you very much. What a delight and what a fun program today and what a neat celebration.

5:52It is really wonderful to share in this. Now, my wife says that it's not too bad to compare me to a founding father, but she says, doesn't that make you a lot older than you really are? So, no, I'm not quite that old, but you know, there's something about what's been going on and I like in a very, very soft way compare myself to somebody who made a statement a long time ago about speaking softly. Sometimes I do get upset, especially in debates and I speak more harshly than I really want to when they really annoy me, but I sort of like the idea about speaking softly and carrying a big idea. I think that's much more important.

6:39And that's what the Mises Institute is all about, is carrying a big idea. The message of liberty in particular in relationship to economic policy. And to me this has been crucial. I have devoted a lot of time in trying to understand to the best of my ability how the market works and how it's connected to personal liberty. And I am so pleased that we are getting a very receptive ear to this message. For too long, we have lived with a situation in this country where the principles and the ideas of liberty, the liberty idea has been divided.

7:26And I think that's what has happened, they have divided us and conquered us. The founders clearly understood that personal liberty and economic liberty were one in the same. and Separate. And one thing that I do emphasize in our current activity is bringing this back together. If you believe in personal liberty, you believe in economic liberty. If you believe in economic liberty, you have to believe in personal liberty as well. And this to me is crucial. For too long we have had one segment of the political system defending personal liberties and Civil Liberties and the other Defending Economic Liberty. And right now there seems to be a tremendous opportunity for making this point and bringing people together and it seems to be happening. But it doesn't happen by accidents. There is no doubt about the statement made that ideas have consequences and that is what the Mises Institute is all about. The Mises Institute The Institute has been around now for one generation, and let me assure you that it's had an impact.

8:40I've always known it has had an impact to a large degree because we knew we were reaching a lot of young people, more professors, more researchers writing and talking about free market economics in the very sound manner. But in the current activities that are going on now, and no matter where I go, no matter and the Mises Institute and Lew Rockwell.

9:21So what is happening today is less about me than the consequence of what has been happening for 25 or 30 years. There is truly a revolution going on, it's a revolution of ideas. It reminds me of a famous quote that I used to read so I wouldn't mess it up, but I can say it pretty well, from Mises. And Mises talks about the obligations of all of us, we all have responsibilities. And there are some people who are more inclined to be involved in the academic sense, writing Research and doing work in an intellectual fashion to write down the ideas. But then he said there is another group of people whose obligation is to take these more or less complex ideas and make them palatable to the people.

10:15So he recognized that taking ideas and writing about them is very, very important and they They have consequences, but he also said there was a responsibility for all of us to make these ideas palatable and understanding by the average person. Because the type of government any nation gets is a reflection of the people's attitudes. Even when it's totalitarianism, it's the fact that there's not enough dissent and the people are more tolerant than they should be. So this to me has been a goal of mine. To the best of my ability to read and study and take these ideas and make them palatable and understandable so that the people will vote for liberty out of their own self-interest because it is the best system of government.

11:06Now the one thing that we have failed as constitutionalists and conservatives and libertarians over the

11:41and you have to be in favor of socialism because it's the only system that shows compassion and caring about their fellow man and yet we know and once we understand the economic process it is a total failure and yet up until recently I thought we were absolutely losing this fight and yet today we have come to the realization and this is the message I think the people are receiving that you You can be truly for individual liberty. You can be truly endorsing the idea that we fight for life, we fight for liberty, we fight for our right to pursue our happiness, and we fight to retain our fruits of our labor and we have a right to it. At the same time, it's not narrowly selfish design with lack of compassion.

12:30It should be the compassion that compels us to do it, because even if we retain and hold Everything we earn for ourselves, we still serve ourselves, our family, our friends and our community. But, if we truly want to have enough prosperity to help those who are unfortunate, you have to have freedom, you have to have free markets, you have to have sound money, so that you have something to be compassionate about. During this campaign, I have come to the full conclusion that the ideas of liberty really bring diversity together. Together, people come together on these views. And it is very true that when we have our rallies, this we can verify, the people coming together are diverse.

13:22Frequently I will bring up the subject in the rally and I make this point and I said, You know, it brings together some Republicans, some Democrats, some independents, some moderates, and even some anarchists come to our rallies. But I think there's a very special reason that freedom is popular among the many diverse groups because it's non-confrontational. It's not designed to present the case and say that we want to run your life and we want to tell you how to spend your money and we want to run the economy. And quite in contrast, the welfare, warfare, socialist system is designed to give all control to the government.

14:11We have people in Washington that want to legislate morality and pretend that they can promote virtue, which they cannot. And we have others who think that we can promote perfect equality in economic terms. But when the government takes over that rule, they then have to assume control not only of our lives, but all the fruits of our labor. That is why the principle of the personal income tax is so atrocious because it's based Based on the assumption that the government owns our lives and owns everything that we produce.

14:59Now, that is fine for a while because you can go for a while working on the momentum of freedom and the prosperity that it has generated, but what is happening today is is more people have become aware of the fact that there is no permanent prosperity in this country, that the prosperity is superficial, that already we have a large segment of our economy suffering from the inequalities that develop in a system of money where there is the destruction of currency and wealth is transferred from the middle class to the wealthy. And once it's recognized that productivity is going down and the pie that the government is controlling, all of a sudden is shrinking. So instead of many resorting to the idea, well, it's a failed system, let's go back to freedom and the marketplace, too many of them become more aggressive.

15:52And this is what we're witnessing in Washington, a shrinking pie with more aggression than ever before to come to Washington to control those who control our lives and the wealth of the country. But the challenge is, and the real revolution now is, those of us who believe and trust and understand how freedom works, that that should be the goal, the goal should never be to legislate morality and never to legislate equality. And under those circumstances we see socialism and welfareism absolutely divisive and freedom and absolutely the only way you can bring people together.

16:44You know, closely aligned with the spending of the welfare state that is out of control is also the foreign policy that has been adopted by leadership in both of the major parties and of course this is detrimental. There is no doubt about it that Randolph Bourne was absolutely correct when he talked about war being the health of the state. And this is what has to be changed, because whether the motivation is domestic welfareism or the international welfareism of the militaristic state, it means that all power and control gravitates to a centralized, overly powerful government at the neglect and at the sacrifice of Personal Liberty. So it is for that reason that it might not be economic prosperity that is on the top of the list of our desires, because the top of the list of my desires is to promote and understand personal liberty.

17:44Liberty is what we need. If we have our liberty, we will have our prosperity. And even in the debates just recently it has been emphasized that what we need to do is be willing to give up our personal liberties because we live in trying times and we live under threats and therefore the sacrifice of liberty is necessary. Whether that is said in terms of military or economic, it is a surrender to the totalitarians and the rejection that we understand and have full faith and confidence on how free people operate.

18:29Now, our foreign policy has become a great deal of a huge, a huge sore spot for all Americans because most Americans now are coming to realize that we no longer can afford it. Even those who think we should continue to police the world and run an empire, this is impossible because of the finances. We're going broke like all empires do and therefore we are at a time in our history where we can offer the alternative and the alternative ought to be, very clearly, reject

19:41Maintaining in our empire. We do know now from the research of individuals that attend this conference that we now have an empire that is costing us nearly a trillion dollars a year to maintain. Our production is going down and we can't afford it. So even if those individuals want to continue it, something is going to change because we can't afford it. But how do we get ourselves into this situation? Because there's always a limit to how much the people are willing to be taxed. and we of course have met that limit and therefore they have to rely on other methods. They tax us to the hilt and then the next thing they do they borrow the maximum and of course if they continue to borrow interest rates would rise and that would cause some problems.

20:27So where are we today? We now for many, many decades and especially since 1971 since we've had no linkage of our and our currency to gold. We've had unlimited authority given to the Federal Reserve to create new money and credit out of thin air to finance this irrational spending. This is the reason that we cannot solve our problems without addressing the subject of money and that means that we have to follow in the footsteps of Jefferson and Jackson I've come to the conclusion that we are making progress. In Washington, they still laugh plenty, at my emphasis, on the monetary policy, but we will have the last laugh on the monetary issue, because we will have to make progress.

21:26to deal with it. But I knew we were making progress when students are coming up to me on the university campuses and talking about the Mises Institute, but I think it's rather fascinating now that when you talk about the Federal Reserve on college campuses, you get the loudest applause when you criticize the Federal Reserve. What's going on around here? Now in days past it was traditional to burn something in your hand to make certain points. Have you objected to the draft? You burnt your draft card. But today on college campuses they're getting up and they're burning Federal Reserve notes. You know, it's not too infrequently.

22:19Individuals come up and they'll want my autograph. I'm not sure why, but they'll ask me for my and some will bring a Federal Reserve note, and they want me to sign a Federal Reserve note of all things, but I'm hesitant to sign something like that, and I said, now do you think the value is going to go up or down if I deface this currency? They said it would go up, so I decided I'd go ahead and sign it anyway. Anyway. But I am delighted to report to you that the ideas of liberty are alive and well, much more so than I ever dreamed, and that the remnant of those of us who have been struggling for many, many years, that group is much larger than we ever thought, and the ideas of liberty are being well received by the young people and the campuses of this country are coming alive because they are excited about this message and I think for that reason we should

23:20be cheerful about what is happening.

23:31The fact that the Mises Institute has been around for 25 years means that it has a great, This we can't ignore. This we continue with. We continue to change the hearts and minds of the intellectuals. So as time goes on, they become the economists that are representing and talking to people in Washington, the people in the media where they can finally come around to asking good economic questions. And maybe someday we will eventually have people who are doing the interviewing on international presidential debates The progress has been great. There is something very significant going on in this country, something that I never dreamed of, something that I didn't anticipate a mere 10 months ago.

24:28Everybody knows that I have been a reluctant candidate. I consider myself a reluctant warrior. and I have a lot of individuals in groups like this that have written and encouraged me to do this and I don't know whether to thank you or what, but anyway. And then I also have another person to either thank or blame and that's my wife because she keeps encouraging me. She says you need to do it even if you are tired, get out there and do it. But there's so much happening spontaneously around the country that it is actually getting very, very exciting on what's going on. And I see this as a consequence not so much as what I do as what has happened through these change in ideas and what has happened in the last 30 years.

25:23When I first went to Washington in 1976, this couldn't have happened. They weren't ready. They didn't have the vaguest idea of what I was talking about. They didn't have the vaguest idea that there was a precise philosophy that defended personal liberty and economic liberty and limited government and sound money and a non-interventionist foreign power. But it is truly coming together now, which means that we are really just getting around to the point of putting it back together again. The understanding that we were blessed with by the founders of this country that understood that freedom was a unit, it came together, it was all one package. And we had this grand experiment, they knew about money, they condemned inflation, they did not want paper money, they dictated to us that we should only have gold and silver as legal tender, and we had all these ideas put together.

26:18Of course it was an imperfect document, the Constitution, and there was immediate erosion to a degree, but really the great erosion didn't come until this last century, for the last hundred years. But instead of going backwards, we have to go forward. People accuse me, oh, you'd be a great candidate for the 19th century. But they don't understand history. The 19th century was just the beginning. The founders were just beginning to understand economic and personal liberty. And it is now that we are going to take those steps that were made back in those days in advance. There was a gold standard in the 19th century, but it was far from a perfect gold standard. There was a constitution, but we know it was imperfect.

27:03But the concept of personal liberty is a new and wonderful idea that has only been around a short period of time when you look at all of history. So if you want to go backwards, you go backwards with totalitarianism. That's what has existed in our country and throughout the world for thousands of years. So it is up to us now to decide which way are we going to go. The one thing that we can be absolutely convinced of, the status quo will not be maintained. Things will change, no matter what. The goal that we must have is to change it for the better.

27:49Because if we do nothing, we will have totalitarianism again. The Washington is still infiltrated and dominated, yet, let me tell you, not around the country. And the young people are rejecting the status quo, and they are our greatest allies in this This fight for liberty and we have to recognize that. This is of course why the Mises Institute is so vital, because they have basically addressed the issues to the young people, to educate a new generation. And we have now seen the fruits of at least the first generation of this intensive effort to teach about liberty and free markets and laissez-faire capitalism and the true intent of the Constitution.

28:44So we are seeing these results, though there are plenty of problems out there. We see something going about. I am utterly amazed, impressed and so pleased because when I speak around the country, I talk about our problems. I feel like it's too negative, it's too negative, and why would people walk out being depressed? not walk out being depressed, but exactly the opposite is happening. Everybody says, wonderful, now we are recognizing our problems and you give us hope because the hope is found not in more tyranny and more taxes and more war, the hope is found in the fact that we have to be true Americans who believe in liberty, believe in the marketplace and believe that the answers are there.

29:29We just have to quit doing the wrong things. We have great traditions, they're available to us and we are so much better off in so many other countries because if we can just revive the interest in sound money, property rights, contracts, limited government, personal liberty, what has built America, what is traditional, these are all good and wonderful things, then we can be optimistic about the future. This to me is the great message that we're hearing. We don't know how long this transition is going to take. As a matter of fact, there may be a great transition in a short period of time, because sometimes we can't predict when we have a financial crisis. Financial crises are so often the issue, the event that changes a nation completely and totally.

30:21The end stages of a currency comes rapidly and dramatically. Today, the dollar is under attack. The real bubble we ought to be concerned about is the dollar bubble, because every single thing we have done now since 1971 is resort to the inflation, to creation of new money, the debasement of currency, and this of course offers these tremendous benefits to the special interests who now control our government. But when the dollar goes down, the opportunity is going to be there, and I am a lot more optimistic now than I was 12 months ago. The country is in a lot better shape, so all I say to you is keep up the fight, keep up your interest, keep up your support for the Mises Institute. Everybody dedicate themselves to promoting this cause, everybody has a responsibility and we are moving rather quickly to an event that it will require all our efforts.

31:14I thank you very much and congratulate Lew and the Mises Institute for your great work.

31:24Thank you very much.