Ron Paul on the next economic collapse, America's future, and universal basic income (Pt. 1/2)

as a new administration takes over the white house what the whole world wants to know is whether or not america is heading in the right direction here to discuss policy and the future of the economy is ron paul former congressman and host of the liberty report dr paul welcome back to kikko happy new year thank you it's real nice to be with you again uh i think before we start first of all how are you doing sir i think we would like to know that you're in good health i am doing quite well i've gotten out this morning as usual and got my walk in two to three miles so i do that routinely no i i am uh doing quite well oh that's good to hear thank you now uh let's start with policy so biden on his first day has already passed 10 executive orders some of which have been reversals of what president trump has done including joining the paris accord so what is the uh priority that america should have right now and do you agree with some of these legislations and policies that biden has proposed well of course uh what i think and what i would promote is quite a bit different than the two major parties because you know when you look at the very big picture the two parties aren't that far apart even though there's a lot of pretense that there's a lot of competition there but if you're thinking about a constitutional government a free society and austrian economics everything is different so i would say long term we're going the wrong directions all my life and government keeps getting bigger and more violent and we have these problems and they're the things i don't like are endorsed by both parties you know whether it's it's deficits the irs is effort to collect taxes the federal reserve and the these sorts of things so they're there but uh people who you mean their people will say do you mean then that uh there's no difference between trump and biden well obviously there has to be some differences because trump had some things he he changed and now biden is anxiously changing them back and they're all not in a neat category everything trump did wasn't right or wrong and uh unfortunately i would have to say that if i was pinned down that most of the time what the democrats promotion are more wrong than right but uh there's there's a lot of activity going on there and we're sorting it out and that's what we do in our program try to sort out what's happening but quite frankly uh spending is going to continue i mean look at what it did under the you know trump administration skyrocketing spending and deficits and uh one thing though though under trump maybe the big difference is that uh trump did a good job on uh not raising taxes and that's good and he did reduce some regulations and he did not start any major conflict around the world although he wasn't quite with us as libertarians to have a non-interventionist foreign policy because if that were the case you know our overseas presence would shrink and uh people say well then it would be then we wouldn't be safe we have to have our presence to be safe no i think we're safer if we just minded our own business you know us fighting those wars in my this have happened in my lifetime anywhere from uh korea to vietnam the middle east all those wars that didn't make us safer it made us more vulnerable and certainly a lot poorer yeah you brought up spending and i'd like to address that last year in 2020 we saw record amounts of stimulus and spending to alleviate some of the um the pain that americans were seeing as a result of covet now unemployment still remains high 900 000 was the latest reading for the unemployment jobless claims and so with with this high of a number dr paul what is the policy that the government should take to bring this number down because clearly stimulus had limited effect well the proper policy is really tough under these circumstances because the uh proper policy in a free market is just radically reduce the size and scope of government but then you say well what would happen would the checks quit well if you were going to do the right thing they would have never been started because you'd have to accept the principle that creating money and creating debt does not create more wealth people think if they just print a lot of money and pass it out the country will be wealthier but i just think uh whether it's since the uh recession 10 years ago or what's gone on uh in this past year people haven't gotten wealthier by government just passing out more money so to do that is politically not feasible because people would object because you could they'll point out well he saved this and saved that but but also what was created there was the debt went up but we still dealing with thousands if not tens of thousands of people out of work and little businesses that they don't look like they're uh you know going to open up soon so we have this combination even before coronavirus hit my turn was the inevitable downturn of the economy due to the outrageous spending and interference uh with interest rates by the federal reserve and there has to be a correction and uh it started to correct and then the coronavirus hit and everybody panicked and i would say that one thing for sure is that president trump was very very effective in in you know interfering and influencing the federal reserve they all do it uh most of the time it's a little bit behind the scenes and you know get the interest rates down a little bit but no uh president trump was very uh very adamant about it and i'd have to concede well on the short run you know it sort of helps help some people it certainly helped wall street that and that that's really how monetary policy is designed uh they are the plunge protection team for wall street very very effective but the reason why you can't endorse it it's just blowing the bubble bigger and since the new money doesn't create wealth there has to be an adjustment the debt will be paid for it's not going to be paid for by americans working harder and sending more money to washington and running the debt down that that's not going to happen but real debt has to be liquidated in order to ever get back on our feet again in a true sense of the word and it gets liquidated by inflation and that's what they're working on and they've it to me amazes me that our government especially the federal reserve announces that the policy is deliberate devaluation of the money and sticking it to the poor people and anybody who suffers from prices going up oh well we have to get prices going up at two percent a year well they achieved that and i think it's a lot worse than that and when it really hits they'll have no no control of it see that makes no sense whatsoever how do you think we'll be able to pay off our debt both domestic and foreign debt to countries like china for example uh one of the one of the things i've heard from economists is that the government wants inflation because that would just erode the value of the debt away do you agree with that that's the only choice they they have our government is not going to stiff them they're not going to go default there'll be some of that in the free market some people will be denied but take student loans the students are uh have been told that they're never going to have to pay they're not and they're backing off why why pay it because we're going to get excused especially on their biden so that that debt will uh you know be liquidated in the sense that they won't owe it anymore but uh since the government guaranteed it is going to add to the national debt so the debt is going to be there and the only way i see that this debt will be liquidated which is absolutely necessary uh over a period of time to get the market working again in a true sense of the word and that is going to be through liquidation of debt by inflation they're working hard at it and the tragedy is is they're going to be successful about it i every day i get another article of prices have gone up steel prices have gone up and they've never admitted to the prices that have have gone up before and this whole thing if they don't restore sanity to the most important price in the whole economy the economy and that is the is the cost of borrowing interest rates interest rates are very very important if you want to have any market economy you know in a soviet type system they don't have a market rate of interest and they also had no production and the system had to collapse but now we don't have that and that's why i think the country is going to get much much poorer and we will have to someday go back to the idea that savings and market interest rates helps decide what consumers do what investors do what entrepreneurs do and uh instead of having all this male investment but right now we're under the gun the debt has to be liquidated but along with the debt the malinvestment all the mistakes made the six trillion dollars we just spent you know bailing out people that when it was a temporary reprieve to me that's like giving a a patient a shot of morphine uh because they're addicted and uh we're addicted to this type of economy and that's why they can't stop and that's why it's going to get much worse but we have a job those of us who are in the business of spreading a message as you are to to talk about sensible economics and uh hopefully they'll come to their senses i think the collapse will come it's going to surprise everybody because i was really surprised what happened to the soviet system i was in the service in the 60s and watched the cold war very closely and then all of a sudden boom it it disappeared so let's hope and pray for our system to change uh as peaceful as that was where were you when they're when the berlin wall fell what were you doing remember that day not as much i would have been i would have been back back in congress that time that was 89 90 is when the berlin wall uh went down uh now let's see i i got to get my dancing twice in in the uh in the congress now i was uh i was a matter of fact back practicing medicine again and i wasn't and i had my letter going but uh i wasn't in congress but i remember that the other day that i remember very vividly is uh august 15th 1971 and that is when uh when the gold window was closed and waging price was going on the bretton woods system broke down that that is going to go down in history is probably one of the biggest monetary history days ever but you said you were surprised when the soviet union collapsed i mean what what what surprised you about that it was a system that according to your philosophy was doomed to fail from the beginning that's right that's right i guess i should add to it that is it it felt it fell it broke down uh without a nuclear exchange or something because the conditioning i had was it had to be violent and and what did the soviets do over all those years they suppressed any any challenge at all quite frequently with violence they were they were a powerful dictatorship so i uh i i assumed it would break down just like i assume that our system is not uh perpetually viable we can't keep doing this but i don't know exactly when it's going to happen nobody does or it's actually the consequences but i also know that ideas are important in understanding monetary policy and understanding why debt is bad and under trying to get people to understand and cherish and want to preserve liberty and you can find most of your answers there in freedom of choice and volunteerism and private property that's the message that has to be heard you know you brought up the fact that americans are likely going to get poor it is kind of ironic dr paul that whenever we do get poorer the government tends to intervene more but you're arguing that more intervention will just lead us to a cycle of becoming poorer does it not yeah but all that money the trillions of dollars that they passed out last year uh you know a lot of those people who they were so far behind already they they caught up on their ransom and things like this so they're still poor and more people are unemployed you know since they were doing that yeah you know there was this up and down business but uh no the people are structurally unemployed and and the people aren't better off and if you look at debt has exploded and uh i i think i've done a little booklet on uh on bankruptcy you know the financial part but the moral bankruptcy too i think is important because of the dependency people have thinking that government and politicians can take care of themselves and and that's the purpose of the political promises republicans and democrats and they have to out promise each other we're going to take care of you it's going to be okay but it isn't that easy there's still there's still some rules and laws in nature and economics that prevail and that is that the work i think is pretty important there has to be production and there has to be free choices and one thing is is you can't get a healthy thriving economy sorted out if you don't have the price of money in the interest rates that's an important price probably the most important price that we can talk about what do you think of the concept of universal basic income would that alleviate some of the poverty that we have in the nation for a day or two you know after a couple checks no it'll make it it'll make it much worse they virtually do that now you know in the old days uh the subject of the minimum wage would come up and and there shouldn't be any rules like that they should be able to make you know when they put a weight in price controls on 971 they restrain the working people from getting their their wages no it should it should be the market uh that that decides that but the market the the uh minimum wage uh a guaranteed wage i can't work uh because uh you have to you have to equate you know productivity in order to know whether they can get more money but we in the old days would say all right the minimum wage is three dollars and we wanted to go to florida and some of us would say why not eight dollars why not ten dollars why not fifteen dollars and we were thinking they said they would nobody would ever conceive of that so what are we gonna do it's up to fifteen dollars but it it doesn't work that way by the time it gets to fifteen it's still two dollars and fifty cents in purchasing power or whatever you you have to deal with purchasing power not these nominal numbers that the politicians are attracted to and a lot of people say oh fifteen dollars would be wonderful uh well it's not the answer you have to have sound money and you have to have free markets and you have to have rewards for what people do and you have to a free market price of money and interest rates otherwise you just build the bubbles bigger and bigger and when the inevitable correction comes it's going to be more violent than ever before and uh i don't know uh we're probably obviously getting closer every day but uh but as long as they can print money if they are i imagine we can limp along but i don't think that we can reverse the big problem the social problem is that the middle class and the poor are worse off and the wealthy are getting much wealthier there's no doubt about and that is just fodder for the for the socialists and the marxists saying look how horrible it is and unfortunately the people in charge don't argue the case but that has nothing to do with the freedom they argue okay see freedom doesn't work and they use that to bash what we believe in but that we don't have free markets we have interventionism and we have inflationism and all these deficits and all the special interests going on if we don't pin the blame on that see in the depression they were able to do it they said we had that terrible depression because we had the gold standard and we were you know interfe you know not interfering enough and they and they said it lasted too long because the government didn't put enough money fast enough but what they did was they got rid of the free market because they said the free market and the gold standard was the cause of it all right now they're still saying well they're not saying the free market they're saying the market we have now is that fault and it is it's at fault but we never better sort out the definitions because if people accept what we have as an expression of freedom of choice property rights and freedom to contract now you know we're in big trouble so it's a it's a it's a word game it's understanding words it's understanding economics i think we're in better shape than we were in that area than we have before ever before because there's a lot of people uh people like your program you have right now you talk a lot about freedom and sound money so that's pretty good and uh i i think that uh uh you know the mises institute and others teach austrian economics and that wasn't available in when i went to congress first time in 1976 they thought that what are you doing why are you voting this way they were dumbfounded and they never heard of austrian economics but now people do know about it and uh and what we have to do is make sure that that system of thought and that freedom serves the interests of the people that they're better off that way that's why people eventually get together and reject something like soviet communism because they weren't better off and they thought there was a way to be better off that's why they rejected it you brought up the fact that the wealth gap in the u.s is widening now i remember watching some of margaret thatcher's older videos and when she argued in parliament in the uk that her policies were sound because although uh the wealth gap may may widen all people from the poor to the wealthy are better off even though the wealth gap is wider and and if you actually aim to close the wealth gap she argued at the time everybody will be poor and worse off are you seeing that in the states are we seeing everybody better off even though the wealth gap is wider well in a free market uh the wealth gap shrinks uh but you can't legislate it and say well your responsibilities make everything equal that would be that would be horrible but uh no i think it's much better i think yeah uh when when we had a freer market we had the biggest middle class ever and uh and and the poorer much wealthier but i think that uh it's a source of a great deal of social friction right now because i do believe that people really are suffering and uh i mean just the whole idea i i'm dumbfounded to think that uh we have tent cities and and all the mess that's going on in our cities these aren't people that are just a little bit poorer there are people who are destitute and they say well there's no inflation of course there's a lot of inflation depends on whom you talk to and it's a inflation uh is there and it hurts the poor people more than the rich people uh and and the figures that they pass out of from uh from the monetary authorities it's never very bad no we don't we we don't we we're trying to get the inflation rate up to up to two percent what if they measured inflation by by the price of stocks and bonds that are skyrocket what if they measured it by the stock of cryptocurrency uh maybe there's some inflation there for all we know so no the money goes somewhere uh but uh it uh it doesn't serve much purpose if it comes out of thin air it has to come as a consequence of work [Music] you

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Keywords: gold, silver, finance, news, investing, investing news, finance news, financial news, economy, precious metals, gold price, silver price, gold price today, ron paul, david lin kitco, macroeconomics, biden, gold price forecast, economic collapse, ron paul congressman, ron paul congress speech, recession, free trade, economics, china us, trade wars, economic depression, janet yellen, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, us dollar, fiat currency, reserve currency, monetary policy, jerome powell

Id: 5MHJL-jc-Io

Length: 20min 36sec (1236 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021