What a delight and what a wonderful honor. Thank you very much. Appreciate that.
Now you each so far came up and said that you were supporters of Ron Paul,
but there's another supporter of Ron Paul here, and I'm also a strong supporter of hers,
and that's my wife, Carol, who's sitting here.
But it is great to be here, especially to get the applause.
So I get a lot of speeches in Washington, I don't even get to get lost.
So this has worked out real well, that's why I have to leave up there once in a while.
They do give me time or I take some time on occasion to give a speech here and there.
But too often there aren't too many in the auditorium, but I tell them I get some time.
And a lot of people now who have read the Neocon speech, they find it a little bit fascinating.
How many people were there? And some who had watched said, nobody was there and listened.
Why don't you make them stay and listen? Well, that's not the way it works.
And I said, well, that's not true that nobody was there because there was one guy who had to sit in the chair and listen to the whole thing.
But then one other member of Congress, I don't know if there's anybody from Tennessee here,
but there's a member of Congress that is in our Liberty Caucus that I have, I have 18 members there,
and that is Jimmy Duncan who is very much coming our direction and I work very
closely with him and he came across it read it and was determined that this
thing really ought to be published and spread around which is a real honor from
another member of Congress to first have read it and then to say they understood
it and wanted to print it so that was a real compliment but the numbers are going up
if you care about whether members of Congress are paying attention to what
What are we trying to do? Because just this last week I was on my way to Washington and I got off the plane.
There was a liberal Democrat that was coming up on the airplane with me from Houston.
He got off and said, Ronnie, I want to tell you, I just read that speech you gave in July.
Is that that neocon speech? He said, yeah.
He said, one of my staff members came across this thing and insisted that I read this and gave it to him, you know, on the airplane.
He said, that was really interesting. I said, true too. He said, yeah, yeah. So now we're up to three other members.
So we're making progress, slowly but surely. My title for my talk tonight, given to me by my friend Lou, is called The Trouble with Washington.
You know, the other way you can put that is, what's good with Washington? I mean, do we have to describe what the problem is with Washington, the trouble with Washington?
Well, there's plenty of trouble up there, and I know you're aware of it, and I will tell you a little bit about my experiences up there and why we do have these problems.
problems, but it does give us a lot of trouble. There is no doubt about it. We in Washington
have a group of people, and this to me is the main problem we have in Washington, is
that this is the place where the politicians come to live. I mean, that's basically it.
The politicians go to Washington to live, and they never leave until they die.
And this isn't just on occasion, the Congress is a training ground for lobbyists.
And they come, they're elected, they're appointed, they get a job, they're bureaucrats, they
get appointed, and they love it, and they train themselves not to be better legislators
are better defenders of liberty, but they are in training for a good job.
And they brag about it, they have bragged to me, directly to me, I think inadvertently,
not realizing what they were actually saying, but members have gotten ready to leave Congress
and said, boy, next year I'm going to make a million bucks being a lobbyist.
And I've heard others say, you know, it's just a few more years and I'll have my credentials
and I'm going out there and I'm going to make this money.
You know, basically we shouldn't be opposed to lobbyists.
We are.
That's petitioning our government.
That's OK.
But the big problem is that the petitioners today
are always the lobbyists who are looking
for something for nothing, something from you.
And that's quite a bit different.
So we can't attack the principle of individuals
coming to Washington to petition.
But it's so sad to see that so much energy and time and money and power and influence is directed toward
how do you influence this government to their benefit?
And this is whether it's welfare at home, welfare for the poor they say,
but lo and behold there's sometimes, or most of the time there's another intervening corporation
that's going to make some money off that, whether it's foreign aid in the general sense or a war going on.
going on. Somebody's going to make some money off it and it's big bucks. And there are a few who will come to Washington out of self-defense and they certainly have a right to because it's pretty hard to exist in this country today without having, you know, an exposure to the federal government.
But it is certainly a dilemma that we all face.
You know, I wanted to use a quote from our House leader on the Republican side, and that is, you know, Tom DeLay.
Tom DeLay happened to have taken my old seat. I was in District 22 and I left and Tom DeLay took that.
And I had somebody come up, I think he was an anarcho-libertarian, he came up to me, he says,
He says, you have performed the worst disservice in the world, I said, what's that?
He says, you voluntarily left Congress and allowed DeLay to get your seat, so you're
responsible for everything that he has done.
But you know, DeLay is a conservative and comes to Texas and talks conservative and
gets re-elected.
But his foreign policy has tended to annoy me a bit, seeing that his foreign policy is
not our foreign policy, it's 100% opposite our foreign policy, and it's also the foreign
policy of whatever George Bush tells him to do, and he comes down there and makes sure
it goes through the Congress.
In order to explain exactly what we're dealing with, I wanted to use the quote that he made
when he was talking to the Knesset in Israel when he went to visit.
So he was explaining there on what our position is here in America.
And to their legislative body he says, standing up for good against evil is very hard work.
It costs money and blood, but we're willing to pay.
I mean, that tells you the story. Is it his blood and his money?
It's your money and our kids, and they're willing to make these commitments,
whether it's in the Middle East, the Far East, Africa, Central America, Iraq, Iran, North Korea,
and it's been going on for a long, long, long, long time.
for a long time. And yet, we as a people, I think, have not quite grasped what's going on.
Fortunately, though, more and more are. Washington can be a fairly depressing place.
A lot of people ask me, you know, aren't you awfully frustrated with Washington?
And I tell them, actually, really, I'm not. I just have very low expectations in Washington.
And I guess, if anything, I'm pleasantly surprised that we get a little bit of attention because
I don't really expect that tomorrow they're going to all of a sudden pay attention to
what I'm saying and what we're doing, but always hoping that we'll make a little inroad
now and then.
For instance, the Liberty Committee is something I started, sometimes by being invited, and sometimes the other members invite themselves to join, because they find out that when they go home, they hear from their constituents back home and say,
Why aren't you working with Ron Paul? So they get their political cover by saying, Tom, I just want to be a member of your committee. We allow them to become members, but it doesn't change their voting pattern in it.
But even with the weak areas in the Liberty Caucus, we have some members, and back again to Jimmy Duncan, has come and he says we need to meet more often, we need to talk more often.
In the last seven weeks we've had a meeting every week, not all the members show, sometimes it's four, six, eight or ten.
I usually try to get a Libertarian speaker over and get them exposed to some of the views we have on money and foreign policy.
and they're very, very open and I saw that as a tremendous positive because it wasn't
me begging and pleading, please come and see me, this sort of thing, but it came from those
other members of the committee and I see that as quite positive.
You know, it wasn't too long ago that we had a vote on the House floor that I think we
It was a vote on an amendment that I was a co-sponsor of with Butch Otter, and this amendment was to repeal the sneak-and-peek provisions of the Patriot Act, and I thought, well, you know, let's do it, but for a while the leadership fought it and wouldn't allow a vote on it, and we finally got a vote on it.
And to my surprise, pleasant surprise, the amendment passed 310 to 120, something like that.
It was a tremendous vote to repeal a portion of the Patriot Act, which tells us something.
Because first off, the Patriot Act was passed within six weeks of 9-11.
Although there was some discussion, both in the House and the Senate, the version that
we ultimately voted on in the House came up without it being available to us.
We had been discussing one bill, they slipped in another bill in the middle of the night,
they stayed in session all night in order to manipulate the rules, and so it was voted
on with during the hysteria of post 9-11 and it was overwhelmingly passed and I thought
well there will never be any resistance to this.
To my surprise we have gotten to the point where the average American is being punished
by the Patriot Act, but there's been a lot of discussion, there's been a lot of discussion
on radio shows and the internet and who knows where.
So that vote to repeal is a reflection of the fact, not that all of a sudden we have civil libertarians in Congress.
That hasn't happened, but it means that enough people around the country have started getting their message to the members of Congress,
there was something wrong with that bill.
Now it's not likely that that repeal is going to hold up, because I doubt that the President would sign it, I don't know if the Senate would pass it.
And if something happened that they got that part repealed, I wouldn't be surprised if they're able to circumvent it with some executive order or something else.
But the optimism on that is the fact that enough people had heard about this in order to vote to repeal some of that.
You know, I have a certain reputation in Washington, and some thinks it's negative, some thinks it's positive, and I think it's interesting.
And there is, you know, the political reporter who writes in Roll Call by Stu Rothenberg, he mentioned me in one of his write-ups the other day.
And he said he was having trouble with AT&T. I guess he wanted to call him. He was trying to get a real person on the other end of the phone and talk to this individual, AT&T.
And he was frustrated in that, so he finally wrote in the book, he says, I think it would be easier to get Ron Paul to vote for a tax increase than for me to talk to somebody at AT&T.
But my answer to that is, don't bet on it.
We had a vote six or eight months ago, and it wasn't one of my easier votes.
But I still, of course, believe it was the correct vote.
But I think I got into a little trouble with my wife. She wasn't sure whether I voted correctly on that because I was a lone vote. I was a lone no.
And that was the bill that came up to say that the government should make another list.
Make another list and say, sign up on this list, and nobody's allowed to call you and try to sell you anything unless you're a politician.
If you're a politician, you can call and try to sell your bill of goods, and you're a politician's example, but somebody else wants to sell.
and we're all pestered by these so-called, but you and I decided, what the heck, why should we have another government federal law, another government list
and the only problem is we have, the American people have forgotten how to just hang up the telephone.
You know, they can't hang up the phone so they come to Washington and they want to pass the law.
But I saw a neat cartoon as a follow-up from this, and the cartoon essentially said,
why don't you put me on the don't wiretap me list?
Now that's the list we need.
You know, Walter Block for months, or not a year,
has been asking me to write a little blurb about how I became a libertarian, and I've
totally ignored it, and I've always thought I shouldn't ignore it, but then I got to
thinking there's nothing I can write.
You know, what can I write?
If you're born a libertarian, if you're born to love liberty, that's it.
But I think the real story is, the story you have to write is, how did I and how did others overcome the barrage of propaganda from grade school on up to beat in our heads that we aren't supposed to be libertarians?
You know, that seems to me to be the transition that I went through.
that everything seemed to be so natural that I'd be left alone, just leave me alone.
And governments should be small and taxes should be small and governments should be very limited.
We shouldn't go to war, we shouldn't have welfare and all these things and have honest money.
That just makes a lot of sense.
But the pressure on us, whether it's our schools and our government and our media,
is constantly beating it into our heads that this isn't right and proper.
Now I do know that in the late 50s, I was influenced by the Fee Foundation, came across
some good literature and was introduced into Austrian economics, is how I got more interested
in it and led up to me wanting to run for Congress.
But you know, if you have interest in economic liberty, if you're interested in prosperity,
then you realize that this leads to the understanding of personal liberty.
And if you go from there, you can easily leap into understanding very clearly, if you read
Austrian economics and Murray and Mises and other, you realize that the greatest threat
to our Economic Freedom and Personal Liberties is in the time of war, and therefore war becomes
a key issue in our study of personal liberty and as far as free markets goes, because it's
certainly under wartime conditions that our personal liberties are most threatened, at
the same time our economy is most threatened because of the spending, and just look at
what's happening right now, the budget is exploding, and it seems like the people I
I see on a daily basis are totally oblivious to it. They seem to have absolutely no concern about it, because they'll figure out some percentage point and say, well, it's still not as bad as World War II as far as GDP goes, you know, and think it's no big deal, and then they talk themselves in to say, well, we won't count what we take out of the trust funds, even though the national debt went up nearly $600 billion last year. They said, well, it came in better than we had predicted. Three months ago, we said $405. It came in only
Pre-75s, though, looks like we're doing pretty well, you know, and that's the kind of talk you hear.
They never give any real thought to the fact that they spend all this money and that we have a Federal Reserve that prints the money to cover the debt,
and that every time we do this, that means more intrusion into your wallet and then your personal liberties, and it just never seems to cease.
But from the very first time I went to Washington in the 1970s, I asked to be on Banking Committee, and I was on there, and I spent all my time on Banking Committee, but it was only in the second tour of duty, which was back when I restart was 97, and I asked to be on Foreign Relations.
Now, when I went to the delegation, you do this through your state delegation, and I went to them and I told them I went on banking and international relations, and they said, oh, it's no big deal.
Those aren't very important committees. It's ways and means and rules committee and budget and all these kind of things that are so much more important.
So, you shouldn't have any trouble getting on that. A week later, they came back and they said, sorry, Ron, you can't be on international relations.
and National Relations.
Why is that?
You told me it would be easy.
And they said, well, and these are the Republican leadership, they said, well, they talked
it over and they decided that they assumed you would probably not vote for any foreign
aid.
They said, is that right?
I said, yeah, that's right.
So they wanted somebody that would vote for foreign aid and I don't vote for foreign aid.
I only vote for aid for the American citizens by law and keep more of their own money and
You know, but I did wait. I was patient and after four years I finally did get put on just in time to deal with the issue of war in Iran.
And that, of course, had to go through our committee. And when that resolution came up, it came up by direction of Karl Rove.
It came up in October of, I guess, 2002, right before the election, and they were pretty
upfront about this behind the scenes.
We got the Democrats now, you know, and this is a big campaign issue and that sort of thing.
So the vote was 30 days before the election, but it came to the committee and the resolution
essentially said that we need to do this because the U.N. is not doing its job and we have
all these resolutions and we have all this great danger and therefore we have to enforce
these resolutions.
They cited the United Nations 16 times in the resolution.
They did not cite the Constitution once or any congressional authority.
Congress did not declare war.
was merely transferring the power to go to war to the president, saying to the president
he could do it when he wanted, under what circumstances, and that was the issue.
So I decided that I would at least bring up the subject of the Constitution.
And so I introduced an amendment, a substitute amendment that said this is a declaration
of war.
You could declare a war, a second world war, a first world war, there's just one sentence that we're now in a state of war with such and such.
And so I introduced him and I said, well, I expect the rest of you to defeat my amendment because I have no intention on voting for it.
But if you want war, you're supposed to vote for it.
And since World War II, we haven't voted for war, we haven't won a war since then, and we're still fighting most of them.
We're still in Korea after 50 years. We've sent nearly a trillion dollars there and they're a bigger threat to us now than they were 50 years ago.
So that's when they got a little... I got their attention.
And we have a chairman of the International Relations Committee by the name of Henry Hyde.
He's a nice guy, conservative, but he wasn't very pleased.
So I want to read to you what he said when I brought this up, because it tells you how the system works and how they're thinking.
And Henry said, after he expressed some annoyances, he said,
There are things in the Constitution that have been overtaken by events, by time.
Declaration of war is one of them.
There are things no longer relevant to a modern society.
Why declare war if you don't have to?
We are saying to the President, use your judgment.
So to demand that we declare war is to strengthen something to death.
You've got a hammer lock on this situation and it's not called for.
It's inappropriate, it's anachronistic, it isn't done anymore.
I mean that is what he says about the Constitution and about what somebody thinks that we should use it.
Now, Tom Lantos is a ranking member on the Democratic side and he was not a whole lot friendlier to this.
and he said what I was doing and you know he was a little bit firm about it he said this is frivolous
to make us deal with this take this time and vote on this he said this is just a frivolous act on
your part and of course we voted on it and then you know it was voice voted down and then I said
we're going to have a recorded vote and then they sighed and fussed and then we had a recorded vote
And the issue of war is pretty darn important. That was an important issue for the founders. It was not to be done by the king. It was not to be done by the executive department. It was not to be done by our presidents. And yet, too long it has been. I mean, Korea went in under a U.N. resolution, and we haven't finished that. This first was awful. It was awful. It was awful.
War has been going on for 13 years and it started under the UN. Even this transfer of power was based on the fact that the UN resolutions weren't being followed.
So that is a major, major issue. One, because war is so important and we were pursuing a war that I had so much opposite, I felt so opposed to.
but the bigger issue probably is where's the rule of law what is left if you let
them get away with that I mean what part of the Constitution do they care about
what part will they follow if they will flaunt the Constitution in this regard
and that's really where our problem is is that we have no rule of law because we
have not only the Congress reneging on their responsibilities I had one member
I remember one chairman of a committee when I brought this up on education and suggested that what we were doing might not be constitutional, you know, like the federal government absolute control of all public education and the chairman, who's a nice old guy, from Pennsylvania, and he said, he's not there now, and he said, he was very friendly about it, he says, well I understand the gentleman's concern, he says, but that's not our concern, let the court sort it out.
down. You know, what's the oath of office? What are our responsibilities? If we say let the court, well, and even if the courts, even if you did it that way, can you trust the courts? I mean, the courts don't follow the Constitution, the Congress doesn't follow the Constitution, our executive branch issues executive orders that go to war without declaration. We don't have the rule of law, and that's what the real problem is. I mean, there was a reasonable respect
for the Limitational Government Power in our early years, but that has long gone,
and it's not an accident that we now face a major crisis. We face a major
crisis in our foreign policy, our civil liberties here at home, and economically
speaking. So what have we done for these young people? We're dumping it on their
laps. And that bothers me. It bothers me that we haven't been fair in
In many ways we as a generation have lived beyond our means and the next generation is
going to live beneath their means because when you have the benefits of a currency you
get away with printing money and it being used as a reserve currency you can run up debt
and get away with a lot but it eventually ends and then there's catch up and the catch
up is the next generation and the threat is not only to their economic well-being but
The threat is to their personal well-being because of the wars that are going on, but to their personal liberties and the rule of law.
So what should we do about all this?
One reason why I'm such a strong supporter of the Mises Institute is, I think what the Mises Institute is doing is the right thing.
Because I don't see my role as being all that important.
Because I am a politician and I don't change legislation and you know I'm there if I have
value it might be for getting people a little bit interested in an idea but not as a legislator.
The ultimate change will occur when we change people's opinions and attitudes and this was
This is so clearly spoken by Mises and the other Austrian economists, you have to change people's opinion.
And this is why the work that Lew has done with the Mises Institute, in getting those professors out there,
quite a few in the room here, and the young people, students who have been exposed, this is what gives me encouragement.
In my district at home, that district has a lot of homeschoolers, and homeschooling gives me a lot of encouragement.
A couple weeks ago I was in my district and I stopped in one rural county and I visited
with some homeschoolers.
It was a small group, probably 20 or 30 total, you know, with their kids and their parents.
We just talked about it and I complimented what they were doing because they so often
get a much better education.
A few hours later, I went to a luncheon to a retired school teacher's organization, public schools.
And there was a large crowd, and it was a dining room like this, and the person who was getting ready to interview me, she said,
Where were you this morning?
And I said, I was with the home schoolers.
And that school teacher was not very pleased.
She lectured me, and she says, don't you know the harm they're doing to our young people?
They don't teach them, and then all of a sudden they dump them back into schools, and then
we have to solve all their problems, and they're all social misfits, and just, ah, boy, I can
see where there is a conflict, you know, between what's happening, where the solution is, and
what some of our teachers, there are a lot of teachers in our family, so, in public education,
So it's not a blanket accusation, but it's a generality that many of us are aware of.
But on the whole, I'm encouraged, I'm encouraged because there are more young people getting
exposure.
And the other thing that we should be encouraged about is the internet, and what is available
to us there.
So we're getting more information out.
The big question is, is why aren't our numbers being reflected in the change of policy in
Washington?
Well, we're not there yet, and I don't think it's coming soon.
I don't think it's going to be gradual.
I don't think we can get the ammunition and enough people up there quickly enough to have
a sensible transition, and that's sad.
I think we should always work for it, and that's why I'm there, always suggesting to
them what they might do to improve things.
But it's not going to happen. The momentum, you can see it, take a prescription drug program.
I mean, Republicans can't wait till I do the Democrats in starting a new welfare program.
Is it going to happen in Washington today on foreign policy? Not likely. If I can only find three or four, I found,
I guess there were six Republicans that voted against the war resolution.
And three of us voted for one reason, the other three voted because the UN wasn't included enough.
And so we have a long way to go, but we should be encouraged.
I'm encouraged when I meet young people like this at camp and are interested,
and that Lew is reaching and that the professors are reaching,
so we have every reason to think that our efforts are worth something.
I did want to read, since I'm a strong opponent of the United Nations and I would think that the proper treatment for the United Nations would be to pass H.R. 1146, which would just get us out of the United Nations.
I want to read a short quote from Mises from Human Action on the chapter on the economics of war.
He says, it is futile to place confidence in treaties, conferences, and such bureaucratic outfits as the League of Nations and the United Nations.
Please, potentiaries, office clerks and experts, make a poor show in fighting ideologies.
The spirit of conquest cannot be smothered by red tape.
What is needed is a radical change in ideologies and economic policies.
It could be better spoken because that's exactly what we need, that's exactly what all of you
are contributing to by supporting the Mises Institute, and it is achievable.
They've achieved their goals exactly the same way, because they took over the university
and they knocked my natural instincts out of my head until later on I was able to recover,
because they dominated.
So it is an intellectual battle that's going on.
And we're all involved and we have our obligations.
One young person tonight asked me, you know, exactly what should we do?
Well, what you and I do can't be exactly the same, but it's different than I do, and yet we work together, and there are other organizations, there's all kinds of organizations, so some people are able to organize, some people run for Congress, and some people help other people run for Congress, but everybody has a job, everybody has a job, and I think there are two reasons, one, not to do anything is folly, the other thing is it should be for fun,
We don't know exactly what will happen tomorrow. We don't know that it will be more successful than some of us think.
That means that the collapse of our next state will be in charge.
But in the meantime, and I think that's why I really enjoy coming to places like this,
because I get to be friends with you, and you get to be part of my speeches, you know.
And in Washington, it's different. I have to leave Washington. There's no doubt that I cannot stay there for long periods of time, even though on one-to-one basis, that's why I get along with all my colleagues, except behind the scenes, I'm not quite sure what they really say, because, you know, at times I get, I hear stories about them thinking that the country would be much better off if I weren't in Washington. And this made me stop and think about
What was going on with redistricting in Texas? I guess you heard there was a little redistricting going on down there.
We have 15 Republicans and 17 Democrats, and the courts did the redistricting after the
census, and so the legislative body had the chance to come back and redo it, and that's what
they're doing, and it's a legal maneuver. And there is an argument that Republicans deserve
more than 15. Democrats shouldn't have 17 because this state's about 60% Republican.
and so they are redistricting. Now they have designed districts where they
believe they have 22 Republican districts and they have listed them and
they presented the list to me, I just got to see them, and they put them in the order of
the best districts, 82%, 70%, 70%, 60%, 58%, 57% and based on a base vote for Republicans, like it was 1998,
lo and behold I finally found my district number 22 so I have the worst Republican
district it is winnable the president has carried that district I can win the
district but it's been urbanized I have the city of Galveston rather than all my
rural counties it'll be about 70% new people and so it will be a real real
Challenge, but its base vote is about 45%. So we still have to wait. The courts will be working on this and deciding, you know, what's going to happen, but I have a suspicion that it could be delayed if we don't present it in this space for another two years.
But you know, I've been talking a lot about attitudes and how Washington operates and how they pass Decorations of War and how they pass the Patriot Act.
But you know, there's something else that I think is important, and that is the inside, what they call the inside the beltway mentality.
It does exist. Members of Congress very often come to Washington very idealistic.
Many of them are very young and they have been talking down Washington and they've been, you know, talking conservative and how they're going to limit government and they come and within a couple of weeks the president calls them over,
I need your vote, I need you on my team and the pressure is too much and they immediately, you know, go on.
This was, they did some really, really heavy-handing lobbying to get the votes for the 87 billion dollars.
I mean, heavy, and it was evidently pretty tough, pretty strong-armed, and most, I guess, most of them capitulated.
But you know, I felt really disappointed. They never even called me over there to talk to me.
But the inside development about way mentality also exists outside of congress and there's
a libertarian think tank in Washington that recently issued a statement on monetary policy
and maybe this has been mentioned, maybe you know about it, but I wanted to read one paragraph
because this tells you another problem that we have and it's a problem for me
because I try not, you know, I think we're small in numbers, the libertarian
movement, the freedom movement, so I'm anxious to bring as many together as
possible but sometimes it's a challenge because there are some who call them
them, sort of like we call libertarians now and free market people but they're
This statement that came out on monetary policy tells you a little bit of the work that we have ahead, especially in monetary policy.
They were talking about what the Fed ought to be doing. The Fed can always buy longer-term government securities.
The main point, however, is to increase the money supply enough to achieve the demand-level target on sustainable basis, whatever the maturity of the government bonds that it chooses to buy.
The objective, again, is to stabilize the path of aggregate demand, not to stabilize inflation, interest rates or the rate of money supply.
That is, print all the money you want, don't worry about prices, don't worry about anything at all, except increased demand.
You know, that almost makes the supply sider sound pretty good, you know.
But I think the Austrians have it much better, that maybe we as politicians and central bankers should never be involved in pretending that we know exactly how much demand and how much supply you have.
you know I think the market works pretty well and unfortunately though it seems
that many people are compelled that they have to participate now you might wonder
why if the politicians all go to Washington to live and stay till they die
why aren't there more libertarians and I think I think there's a pretty good
reason for that because I think he is by our very nature that we don't want
We don't want to tell people how to live, we don't want to police the world, and we don't want to regulate the economy, so therefore, those individuals who delight in the power that they gain in this pretense that they know what is right for everybody, for the world, for the economy and your personal lives, I mean, it is a natural attraction.
They see this as a lucrative move on their part. They also see this, I think, as ratifying because I think they are emboldened by the fact that they know more than the rest of the people and the people need them.
And the natural tendency of the true libertarian is, you know, I want to be left alone and they don't have this tendency to believe that they have to take over and run the show.
But the economic problems that we're about to face I think are rather serious and I am convinced that the natural consequence of economic interventionism and fiat currency always leads to trade problems and we certainly are seeing that right now.
Now, there is a bit of hysteria among many members of Congress today, as well as in the administration,
that is, manufacturing jobs are all leaving, and that's true.
It might have something to do with our monetary policy and some other things, tax policy and regulatory policy, a lot of different things.
But the President, for political reasons, have been very willing to accommodate some of the states like Pennsylvania and Michigan
and others to put on tariffs, and of course to help with the steel industry, but there's
a bill now floating around in commerce getting a lot of hearings, and it coincided with the
president going to the Far East, and that deals with China, and it's all China's fault.
We don't have any responsibility for any of our problems, it's China because they have
cheap labor, and that's it, that's the only reason this is happening.
And also, the Chinese, can you believe this, the Chinese actually keep their wand artificially
low and therefore they're criminals.
Of course, all they did was tie their wand to the dollar, but no, they're still the monsters.
Now, the other day we had hearings on this and I said, well, I don't like capital controls
I don't like tariffs, and I don't like telling Chinese what to do.
I said, but if we're dealing with the value of the Chinese yuan, why don't we do this
with the Chinese?
They qualify now for between $3 and $4 billion of export-import bank credits, a unilateral
transfer of credit to the Chinese.
What does that do?
That lightens up their pressure with their dollars that they get when they buy from us,
and then they can do that to prop up their currency or whatever.
Why don't we just unilaterally stop sending any subsidies to China and everybody else?
Now, the individual from the administration was smiling and nodding approvingly, and then when I pressed him hard enough, he said,
I don't think the administration would go along with it.
But I think he himself was very sympathetic to what I was saying, but obviously it wasn't the administration's position.
But the bill goes on to say that if China doesn't do as we tell them, we're going to put on high tariffs.
Now the neat thing about this, and Austrians will understand this because you're so good at mathematics,
is that they have calculated that the Chinese yuan is 40% undervalued.
and they exactly 40% not 42 it's 40% and therefore there can change the value by
40% and if they don't the appropriate treatment punishment is to put 40%
tariffs on every goods that we bring in from China and that's going to make
everybody happy and as that's the depth of their discussion but I think it does
does show you, though, there is growing sentiment for this type of talk, tariff and competitive devaluations and I am convinced, as I have been for quite a few years, that the monetary system is very fragile, it's going to give us a lot of grief one day and that we have been able to get away with a lot, mainly because it's been a reserve currency and they who were arguing
for this weaker dollar and stronger yen and all this stuff don't realize what temporary benefits this country is getting by being able to print money and having these foreigners take this stuff.
But when it comes, when they get what they want, I think they're not going to be very happy.
The big question, of course, is when that is likely to happen.
You know, over, in my life, in my personal views, I have had some identification with the Christian right.
There's no doubt about it. Socially I'm conservative. And I have met Pat Robertson. He's been interested in the gold standard.
He doesn't like the UN and a few other things. So, we've got along pretty well.
Well. Now, I have had sort of part of company with him philosophically, especially since he came out being such a strong supporter for the war.
And I haven't seen him since then, and I probably won't see him soon, but I've been on his program several times and have not felt, not been that uncomfortable with working with him.
But, you know, even though I've been very upset with him about his position on the war,
I was just having some more second thoughts about him after he decided what he wanted
to do with the State Department.
He suggested that maybe what we ought to do is nuke the State Department.
But, of course, you know, that's risky stuff, even poking fun at that, because somebody's liable to take something like that and twist it around, but maybe he'll come around yet, but as of now, I think that there are many that I have worked with, will continue to work with when I can, if it's a money issue or homeschooling or civil liberties or whatever, we build coalitions, especially in our district, but also
I always hope that by working with them they'll at least respect the views of ours when it comes to civil liberties as well as on the issue of war.
But I want to sort of close with a quote that I think is a real informative quote from my first teacher really in a sense of getting hold of the literature.
That was from Leonard Reed, because you know, in the 50s there weren't very many organizations,
there weren't a whole lot of books, and I bet you there's a lot of people in here that
may have started like I did by reading Bastiat and a few others, and so I have a lot of respect
for what Leonard Reed did and how he kept that organization going.
But he was always optimistic, he always tried to look on the brighter side of things,
In every society there are persons who have the intelligence to figure out the requirements
of liberty and the character to walk in its way.
There is a scattered fellowship of individuals mostly unknown to you and me, bound together
by a love of ideas and a hunger to know the plain truth of things.
That's the story of the remnant and Isaiah's job.
The people are out there and I'm getting to see them, maybe more than you do, although
I wish I could see more in Washington, but I do see them.
And there's a reception out there for those who might not have believed or understood
about what we're trying to do because I feel good about what we have been able to do in
one single congressional district. Although it's a great district and they have good instincts,
a lot of them probably never heard of Mises and don't know too much about non-interventionist
foreign policy and these other things, but their instincts are good and when you present
them with the plain truth of things, they will respond. So there's every reason to believe
the effort's worthwhile. The effort's worthwhile. Even those who are not even in the remnant,
But they're out there, and the numbers are growing, and for that reason, we should all
be grateful.
We should all be grateful that we still live in the greatest country.
We live with a lot of freedoms, even though most of us recognize they're endangered, but
we live in a place where we can still get together, we can meet like this, we have access
to the Internet, in spite of the threats coming from Patriot Act No. 1 and possibly Patriot Act No. 2 and an economic crisis.
But there's still a lot of opportunities, and as long as those opportunities are there, it's up to us to deal with them and use them.
The thing that we must not do is to not make use, a maximum use, of all the liberties that we have to do the job to promote the cause of liberty.
Thank you very much.