The Last Days of the American Empire

I recently had the honor of interviewing Dr. Ron Paul. He was kind enough to speak with me about the last days of the American empire and the situation with Russia and Syria. It was a pleasure to shake Dr. Paul’s hand. No one in the last century has done more to advance the cause of liberty than this former Texas congressman.

For decades Paul has stood against the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve, a banking entity which can only be called evil. He’s been a lone voice of sanity in a wilderness of political madness. While clowns on the left worship the welfare state and jokers on the right bow down to the warfare state, Ron Paul upholds the principles of freedom. His work educating and mobilizing a new generation has led to a renaissance in the understanding of liberty. He is the rarest of all things: a truly honorable politician.

product. They deserve credit for this, they shouldn’t be punished for it. So there’s a difference between earning money by satisfying consumers and the consumers vote them this money by spending it on their items, versus those who get wealthy who know how to manipulate the system, can get the loans, easy loans and all the investments they need, and use eminent domain and whatever. That is not what free markets are all about. Free markets aren’t very complicated. I see a free market and what it does in society as a moral issue rather than an economic issue… And that is based on the principle that you have a right to your life, you have a right to your liberty, and you should have a right to do what you want with the fruits of your labor.”

(loud applause)

“A lot of time when I talk about free markets people say, Oh, you’re an anarchist—there’d be no regulations and everybody would run roughshod.”

At this remark, a pair of happy anarchists somewhere in the audience cheered.

“Well, who’s running roughshod over us right now?” Paul asked. “It’s those rich people, the bankers and big government. They’re the ones running roughshod over the middle class. But no, it’s not true that there’s no regulation in a free market… there are some rules. And the basic rules are how we apply ourselves in our neighborhood. In our neighborhoods, as bad as things are, in almost every American city, maybe not the inner city, but in most American cities, we still recognize that we can’t go into our neighbor’s house… If we need a car, we can’t take our neighbor’s car. So we know what the rules are. You can’t steal. And if you make promises in contract, you have to fulfill them. But in the system that we have, when the crisis came, the people who were benefitting didn’t get punished. So in the free market you have bankruptcy laws and they’re legitimate because they’re necessary… But this whole argument, Oh, too big to fail, so we have to take care of them—all they’re doing is taking care of Wall Street. This is the reason conservatives and libertarians get into trouble. Because they might make a blanket defense of everything that seems to be in the market. But there’s a lot of things in the market that aren’t the market. It’s a rigged market and that makes a big difference.”

Reprinted with permission from Max McNabb.