Daily Bell: Is the
US, like Rome, doomed to fall or can the pre-Civil War laissez faire republic
be brought back?
Ron Paul: I work
on the assumption that you can save the republic and it can come back but not
in a conventional way. Although I’m involved in political activity, in trying
to help people get elected and stay involved, I do not believe the republic is
going to be saved by electing two or three or ten more members of Congress who
are very sincere about doing the right things. I think it’s good. I think it’s
beneficial only in providing answers for the long term.
So I see the republic and our liberties being much further
undermined – because they are constantly being undermined. If you think of what’s
happened since 9/11, our liberties have been taken away constantly and I think
that’s going to get much, much worse and we’re going to have a lot more
violence, not only around the world but here at home and the economic problems
are going to get much worse. And indeed, our liberties and our republic will be
threatened and in many ways we don’t have the fundamentals at all anymore.
But on the positive side, I think there are a lot of people
waking up. For once in the history of Keynesianism more and more people, and
and the young people I’ve talked to at the college level, are realizing that
there’s something seriously wrong with the economic model of Keynesianism, this
idea that you can print money and run up debt and it doesn’t have any consequence. So we have a tremendous
opportunity. The failure of
Keynesianism in the 20th century shows that fascism and communism are evil
monsters and they don’t work and they’ve finally collapsed. And
authoritarianism doesn’t work, and telling people how to run their lives. And I
think there’s a growing movement. The freedom movement is alive and well.
Now, how we go from here to having a much better system it’s
hard to tell but it’s not going to be gradual and smooth. I think we’re going
to have things get much, much worse here, more attacks on our liberties and
maybe a total breakdown of our economy, with then an opportunity if we lay the
groundwork for having a generation of individuals realize what can replace the
system we have.
That’s
exactly what the left did, the Keynesians and the socialists. For years and
years they controlled the thought processes and the thought leaders and they
were teaching and preaching all this government intervention, the Federal
Reserve System, pushing of interest rates and economic planning. I think the
wave is different and I believe that if we continue the momentum we can pick up
the pieces and have a much better society than we’ve had in a long time.
