by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
Many of us don’t know whom to support for President. Brain-dead Biden is of course impossible. Donald Trump is better but he supports many bad policies, such as Covid vaccines and high tariffs, and his term as President was almost a total disaster. Robert Kennedy, Jr. is still better, but he is unsound on economics. There is only one person in the United States today who has the intellectual substance, homespun eloquence, charm, and charisma to galvanize the American public, who are tired of politics as usual and want a change. We know he has this ability because he has demonstrated it already in past campaigns, and he is 100% right on all issues. I refer of course to the heroic Dr. Ron Paul.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Some may worry about Ron’s age, but as an athlete, he is in far better physical and mental condition than his main rivals. A presidential campaign need not be unduly time consuming. Ron can deliver speeches from his studio, and several of his supporters stand ready to fly him to any location in their private jets.
Many of us, including myself, have been involved in the Ron Paul movement for many years, Here is what the great Murray Rothbard said about him:
“Ron Paul is a most unusual politician – in many ways. In the first place, he really knows what he’s talking about. He is not only for the gold standard. He knows why he is for it, and he is familiar with the most advanced and complex economic insights on the true nature of inflation, on how inflation works, and how inflationary credit expansions brings about booms and busts. And yet Ron has the remarkable ability to take these complex and vital insights and to present them in clear, lucid, hard-hitting terms to the non-economist reader. His economics is as sound as a bell.
But, even more important, Ron Paul is an unusual politician because he doesn’t simply pay lip service to moral principles. He believes in moral principles in his mind and heart, and he fights for them passionately and effectively. High on his set of moral principles is the vital importance of individual freedom, of the individual’s natural right to be free of assault and aggression, and of his right to keep the property that he has earned on the free market, and not have it stolen from him by confiscatory taxes and government regulations.
Ron Paul, in short, is that rare American, and still rarer politician, who deeply understands and battles for the principles of liberty that were fought for and established by the Founding Fathers of this country. He understands that sound economics, moral principles, and individual freedom all go together, like a seamless web. They cannot be separated, and they stand or fall together.
Ron Paul understands that all three parts of this system of liberty have been under grave attack for decades, and that the main problem is the federal government itself. The government has systematically eroded and invaded property rights, has piled on ever higher taxes, ever more onerous regulations, and, most sinister because most hidden, has eroded the value of the dollar and of all our savings through inflation. Ron Paul is an unusual politician because he is not content to shrug his shoulders, to “go with the flow,” as Californians say, or to go along in order to get along. He is a man of honor as well as a man of principle, and so he has, ever since he got into politics, been doing something about it. He has fought, sometimes single-handedly, for our liberties and for our savings.”
What I said in 2020 about Ron’s mini-book The End of Unearned Opulence is even truer today than in was then:
“America today confronts an unprecedented crisis. Our economy is collapsing, and the fake coronavirus “epidemic,” with its draconian restrictions, is destroying our liberty. What can we do? We’re fortunate that Dr. Ron Paul, our greatest living American, has provided a masterful diagnosis and offers us hope for a cure—if only we will listen.
The End of Unearned Opulence sums up and extends the message that Ron has given us in his many years of devoted service. In the book, he speaks of the “Faustian bargain” that Nixon imposed on the American people when he abandoned convertibility of the dollar into gold in 1971. He offered us fifty years of fake prosperity, but, inevitably, the bill from the devil came due. In telling us about this, Ron talks about the great German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe and how he modified the Faust legend. As I read this, I thought about Goethe finishing his great play Faust in the wisdom of his later years. Ron has in like fashion offered us his mature wisdom in this book.
What is Ron’s message for us? He says, “The opulence of great wealth has been exposed. The grave danger we now face can no longer be denied. What we are witnessing today is what happens to a society when counterfeit wealth dissipates….A Ponzi scheme mentality which has existed for decades allows for constant pyramiding of debt as part of our fiat monetary system. This policy is a predictable event and is instrumental in the creation of financial bubbles. Fractional reserve banking is a major contributing factor in creating money out of thin air, which inflates the debt bubble. Much of the malinvestment that results appears as wealth, but is in reality an illusion that disappears with the bursting of the bubble.”
The Austrian business cycle theory of Mises and Rothbard shows irrefutably that this policy won’t work. Why, then, has it been imposed on us? Ron gives us the answer. It benefits the crony capitalists—the opposite of genuine free market entrepreneurs—who are in bed with the government. He says, “The humanitarian claim of the welfare/warfare proponents is that their efforts have always been designed to care for the poor. The only problem is that as financial bubbles develop, the already wealthy receive most of the benefits….The huge bailouts in the 2008 recession saw the banks and mortgage companies benefitting while individuals lost their homes. With today’s lockdowns we see the large corporations avoiding the worst regulations and permitted to operate, while the mom and pop businesses go broke.”
Why do people allow that mad and evil policy to continue? Ron answers that the government deludes people with crusades against imaginary enemies, in order to gain more control over us. First and foremost, Ron is a critic of the warfare state. Ron is not a pacifist – an ancient charge against those who oppose constant war. He believes in the right to self-defense, but he does not believe in the initiation of violence, whether by private criminals or the state.
