Why Ron Paul Is Right

 

Why Ron Paul Is Right

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

February 13, 2023

 

The great Dr. Ron Paul has been right about all the major issues that confront the world today. He is right about the Fed, the Ukraine war, the FBI, and so much else. How he managed to do that? What has given him wisdom unique on the political scene today? The answer is simple. He has consistently applied to teaching of the greatest political thinker of the twentieth century Murray Rothbard. Ron Paul is a consistent Rothbardian.

Let’s look at a few cases where Dr. Paul has been right. Here is what he says about the Ukraine war last October: “Last week the New York Times ran a shocking article claiming that the US intelligence community believes the Ukrainian government to be responsible for the August attack that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian philosopher.

Surely the established narrative that Ukraine is a model western democracy standing strong for our shared values against an aggressive Russian invader is damaged with reporting that Kiev conducted an al-Qaeda style attack on an innocent civilian inside Russia. The murder of Dugina was a textbook definition of terrorism, which is, ‘the use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals.’

Just over a month later, the Nordstream pipelines were blown up, seemingly ending at least in the near term the possibility that Germany may find a way to save its economy by mending fences with its main energy supplier. A leading Polish politician thanked the US for doing the job.

Then over the weekend, the bridge connecting mainland Russia to Crimea was bombed, killing at least six civilians and leaving part of the bridge under water. Traffic was restored hours after the attack, but Russian President Vladimir Putin placed the blame on Ukraine’s intelligence service. We all know that Ukraine relies on its US masters, so we can assume the US provided the intelligence allowing the targeting of the bridge.

There is a pattern here. More and more brazen attacks are being launched against Russia and Washington is doing little to hide US fingerprints. Why?

The Biden Administration seems to be moving us closer to nuclear war over Ukraine and Biden himself seems to know it. Last week he said, Putin ‘is not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons…’ For the ‘first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use [of nuclear weapons] if in fact things continue down the path they are going.’

So the question is if he knows that his proxy war against Russia is moving us closer to the unthinkable – nuclear annihilation – why does his Administration persist in crossing red line after red line? Apparently, Biden’s ‘experts’ believe that Putin is bluffing and will do nothing about the Dugina assassination, the Nordstream pipeline sabotage, and the Kerch Bridge attack.

But what if they’re wrong?

Normally foreign policy action should be weighed on a cost/benefit basis. Will adopting one particular policy benefit the United States more than the risks involved? In this case there is absolutely nothing on the positive side of the ledger. Will the security and prosperity of the United States benefit more from regime change in Russia than it would suffer should nuclear war break out?

It doesn’t seem all that hard. No.

So what’s going on here? Why does the US Administration – with the support of most Republicans in Congress – continue to send tens of billions of dollars in military aid and move us toward nuclear war over a conflict that has nothing at all to do with the United States?

The time to end US participation in this war is yesterday. And if it takes millions of Americans in the streets peacefully protesting while demanding that their representatives stop this madness, then bring it on. Tomorrow may be too late.” The situation has only gotten worse since Dr.Paul wrote, and now brain-dead Biden has further increased the chances of nuclear war by shipping more weapons to the Ukraine.

Here he is on one of the themes of his career in Congress, the dangers of the Fed: “The Federal Reserve was no doubt troubled by July’s decline in the US unemployment rate to 4.5 percent and increase in job openings to 11.2 million. This is because the Fed’s strategy for reducing the historic price inflation now plaguing the economy — caused by the Fed’s unprecedented low or zero interest rate policies — is to increase unemployment in order to decrease consumer spending. In his speech to the annual monetary policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Fed Chair Jerome Powell reiterated his commitment to increasing unemployment, or, as he puts it, ‘softening the labor markets.’

Powell is correct that reducing price inflation is urgent. He is also correct that doing so will increase unemployment and slow economic growth. The Fed’s efforts to bring down inflation by increasing interest rates will also make it harder for average Americans to obtain home mortgages, purchase a car, or even pay their utility bills. Those hardest hit by the Fed’s ‘softening of labor markets’ are also the primary victims of the Fed-created price inflation. This demonstrates the insanity and cruelty of the fiat money system, which enriches the elites while impoverishing the masses.

Well-connected members of the financial elite and crony capitalists benefit from the Federal Reserve’s money creation, as they are the first recipients of the new money. This enables them to increase their purchasing power before the new money has caused general price inflation. By the time the money creation has impacted the middle and working classes, the economy is racked with widespread price inflation. Therefore, a nominal gain in wages is not enough to compensate for the real price increase. So average Americans suffer from both Fed-created inflation and the Fed’s attempts to rein in that inflation.

It is amazing that more individuals do not question the idea that inflation, recessions, unemployment, and booms and busts are necessary features of a sound monetary system. Even many otherwise staunch defenders of free markets maintain a child-like faith in central banking. Some conservatives support ‘reforming’ the Fed by making it follow a ‘rules-based’ monetary policy. These conservatives do not understand that the problem is the existence of a central bank with the power to manipulate the currency.

Many progressives recognize the damage the Fed does to average Americans when it increases interest rates. However, their ‘solution’ is a cure worse than the disease: make the Fed maintain low interest rates (and thus high inflation) in perpetuity—or until the continued devaluation of the currency via inflation causes a dollar crisis, leading to a major economic calamity. The main victims of this crisis will, of course, be the very Americans progressives claim to care about.

The Federal Reserve’s failure to fulfill its dual mandate of producing stable prices and full employment, combined with the damage it inflicts on the American people, make the best case for changing our monetary policy. A stable currency, safe from manipulation by politicians or central bankers, would provide the basis for long term prosperity that benefits everyone, not just the crony capitalists and the power-hungry politicians. The first steps in this transition are to finally pass audit the Fed legislation and continue the efforts to pass state laws recognizing precious metals as legal tender.”

Unlike the pretentious “Dr.” Jill Biden, Ron Paul is a real doctor—a physician—and thus is in an excellent position to expose the lies behind Covid: “After two years of unprecedented government tyranny in the name of fighting a virus, the prime instigators of this infamy are walking free, writing books, and openly pretending they never said the things they clearly said over and over.

Take Trump’s White House Covid response coordinator Deborah Birx, for example. She was the principal architect of the disastrous ‘lockdown’ policy that destroyed more lives than Covid itself. Birx knew that locking a country down in response to a virus was a radical move that would never be endorsed. So, as she admits in her new book, she lied about it.

She sold the White House on the out-of-thin-air ‘fifteen days to slow the spread’ all the while knowing there was no evidence it would do any such thing. As she wrote in her new book, Silent Invasion, ‘I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.’

She was playing for time with no evidence. As it turns out, she was also destroying the lives of millions of Americans. The hysteria she created led to countless businesses destroyed, countless suicides, major depressions, drug and alcohol addictions. It led to countless deaths due to delays in treatment for other diseases. It may turn out to be the most deadly mistake in medical history.

As she revealed in her book, she actually wanted to isolate every single person in the United States! Writing about how many people would be allowed to gather, she said: ‘If I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a “lockdown”—the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.’

She wanted to prevent even two people from meeting. How is it possible that someone like this came to gain so much power over our lives? One virus and we suddenly become Communist China?

Last week in a Fox News interview she again revealed the extent of her treachery. After months of relentlessly demanding that all Americans get the Covid shots, she revealed that the ‘vaccines’ were not vaccines at all!

‘I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection,’ she told Fox. ‘And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization.’

So when did she know this? Did she know it when she told ABC in late 2020 that ‘this is one of the most highly-effective vaccines we have in our infectious disease arsenal. And so that’s why I’m very enthusiastic about the vaccine’?

If she knew all along that the ‘vaccines’ were not vaccines, why didn’t she tell us? Because, as she admits in her book, she believes it’s just fine to lie to people in order to get them to do what she wants.

She admits that she employed ‘subterfuge’ against her boss – President Donald Trump – to implement Covid policies he opposed. So it should be no surprise that she lied to the American people about the efficacy of the Covid shots.

The big question now, after what appears to be a tsunami of vaccine-related injuries, is will anyone be forced to pay for the lies and subterfuge? Will anyone be held to account for the lives lost for the arrogance of the Birxes and Faucis of the world?”

One of Dr. Paul’s greatest features is that he is willing to adopt a radical position outside of “mainstream” opinion.  For example, many people have criticized the abuses of the FBI. Ron wants to get rid of it. “As we learn more and more from the ‘Twitter Files,’ it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.

The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the ‘private’ social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.

The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like.

US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.

This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear are crickets.

What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.

Tyrants hate humor and cannot withstand satire. That is clearly why the FBI (and CIA) was determined to see a heavy hand raised against any American poking fun at the deep state.

There is good news in all of this, however. As Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote over the weekend, a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll found that even though the mainstream media has ignored the ‘Twitter files,’ Americans have not. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that Twitter was involved in politically-motivated censorship in advance of the 2020 election. Some 70 percent of those polled believe Congress must take action against this corporate/state censorship.

As Professor Turley points out, although the First Amendment only applies to the US government, ‘it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.’ So now we have proof that the FBI (along with US intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security) have been acting through ‘private’ social media companies to manipulate what Americans are allowed to say when they communicate with each other.

Is there anything more un-American than that? Personally, I find it sickening.

We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us as the enemy and attacking our Constitution. End the Fed…and End the Federal Bureau of Investigation!”

How has he managed to be right so often? As I said at the start, it’s by his consistent application of the teachings of Murray Rothbard. He is a brilliant expositor of basic Rothbardian principles about the free market and a noninterventionist foreign policy.

It’s Ron’s truth-telling and his urge to educate the public that should inspire us as we carry on into the future. Little did he know that those thankless years of pointing out the State’s lies and refusing to be absorbed into the Blob would in fact make him a hero one day. To see Ron speaking to many thousands of cheering kids, when all the while respectable opinion had been warning them to stay far away from this dangerous man, is more gratifying and encouraging than I can say. I was especially thrilled when a tempestuous Ron, responding to the Establishment’s description of his campaign as “dangerous,” said, you’re darn right — I am dangerous, to them.

Even the mainstream media has to acknowledge the existence of a whole new category of thinker: one that is antiwar, anti-Fed, anti-police state, and pro-market. The libertarian view is even on the map of those who despise it. That, too, is Ron’s doing.

Young people are reading major treatises in economics and philosophy because Ron Paul recommended them. Who else in public life can come close to saying that?

No politician is going to trick the public into embracing liberty, even if liberty were his true goal and not just a word he uses in fundraising letters. For liberty to advance, a critical mass of the public has to understand and support it. That doesn’t have to mean a majority, or even anywhere near it. But some baseline of support has to exist.

That is why Ron Paul’s work is so important and so lasting.

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.