Ron Paul was interviewed on the Jason Lewis Show by guest host Rod Grams this evening. They talked for about 16 minutes and covered several topics but in the end focused on auditing and potentially ending the Federal Reserve.
Paul specifically discusses why he doesn’t think the way to get HR1207 to a House vote is through a discharge petition. He suggests continuing to drum up grassroots support for HR1207 is the best method.
Grams allowed Ron Paul to speak until he was done on each topic. He even pointed out that his niece convinced him that Paul was a great candidate during the 2008 election.
Listen to the interview in it’s entirety below.
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It’s Friday again. Here is this week’s installment of “quick hits”.
It has been quite a busy week. The news outlets have had a lot to talk about. At least 4 people died this week, one of them politically, the other 3, physically.
Ed McMahon died earlier this week. There are three things I think of when I hear his name, other than being Johnny Carson’s sidekick on the “Tonight Show”.
The first is the impression of Ed McMahon on the “Carsenio Hall Show“, an SNL skit with Dana Carvey playing Carsenio and the late great Phil Hartman playing McMahon. Next, I recall McMahon hosting the talent show “Star Search“, an 80’s version of “American Idol” with several other talent categories. Finally, and perhaps most of all I remember McMahon as being the guy in the “American Family Sweepstakes” commercials (see one here). RIP Ed.
The next “death” of the week was purely political. I’m talking, of course, about Mark Sanford. There’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said. I realize many people liked Sanford and thought he may be the guy in 2012, but I was never completely sold on the guy for some reason. Now, we all have a reason.
Quote of the Day: “This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations, and most of humanity, will be at or above today’s Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.” — Julian Simon
The 1970s were bad. We had high inflation plus bouts of high interest rates, high unemployment, and high oil prices punctuated by severe gasoline shortages. Major American companies struggled to survive, factories closed, and the industrial north became known as the Rust Belt.
Major intellectuals talked of limits to growth and a bleak future that might even include an ice age. It was common in those days to think that things could only get worse, but a man named Julian Simon thought otherwise…
If Ehrlich was right, and limits to growth were near at hand, then prices would rise as resources depleted. But Simon argued that our greatest resource is human ingenuity — the power of billions of human minds to constantly devise ways to do more with less.
Ehrlich bet that the price of five metals would be higher a decade later. Simon bet that they would be lower.
Simon won the bet. And so did humanity.
Things got much better after the 1970s, exactly for the reasons Simon proposed. Human minds figured out how to do more with less, but…
It’s important to note a stipulation of Simon’s bet with Ehrlich. The resources on which the bet was based had to be non-government controlled. The reason is simple…
* A few hundred politicians, or a few thousand bureaucrats, cannot possibly have sufficient knowledge to manage complex economics, solve complex problems, or match the brain power of billions of people operating in a free market.
* But politicians do have the power to distort the price signals that coordinate the free market, and that provide the incentives to accomplish more with less.
Simon won his bet because the free market is nothing less that the combined operation of billions of human minds coordinated by free floating prices. The bleak 70s turned into the prosperous 80s and 90s precisely because politicians and bureaucrats, both in the U.S., and around the world, stopped doing specific things to hamper the many-minds of the free market. Here in the U.S. …
Recently, many said we were wrong to oppose the TARP bailouts. It was a crisis after all. Sadly, our fear that TARP would be the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent, seems also to be coming true. Get this…
Will they get the $1 billion they’re asking for? Many say no, but we’re not so sure. Here’s why…
YRC’s problem is its union pensions, not its trucking business. The Wall Street Journal says “roughly half of YRC’s contributions to a multi-employer union pension fund cover the costs of retirees who never worked for the Overland Park, Kan., company.” This matters because…
The Democrats, like the Republicans, work for big special interests. Unions are among the most important clients Democratic politicians have. So you can expect the Democrats to bailout unions, just as the Republicans wanted to bailout banks.
We’re not taking sides. Many bad decisions have been made by all the BIGS — big business, big labor, and big government, but . . .
YOU shouldn’t have to pay for any of those mistakes! Instead…
The politicians need to let the bankruptcy process do its curative work. This process wouldn’t necessarily . . .
Ron Paul had a great appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning. Scarborough and the other host praised Ron Paul for being one of the only people to predict our economic crisis.
Joe reads Ron Paul’s own words in 2003 in amazement and asks how he knew what was going to happen when the others did not. The answer is quite simple really, two words: Austrian Economics. Paul then cites Keynes as the one person responsible for our current woes.
Health insurance is too expensive because the politicians have made it that way. They’ve bowed to lobbyists who want to use the coercive power of government to mandate coverage for . . .
The medical equivalent of oil changes and tire rotations
Or things like maternity care for single males, infertility treatments for people who don’t want families, and alcoholism therapy for people who don’t drink.
These laws corrupt the very nature of insurance. Insurance is supposed to cover unlikely but expensive procedures, NOT simple blood tests, or massages, or acupuncture, or chiropractic adjustments, or anything else we could afford to pay out of pocket, if only so many of us weren’t being gouged by legally inflated insurance premiums. Read More »
We liberty lovers went into a bit of withdrawal last week when Freedom Watch aired a “best of” show. Yesterday it returned in stellar form with guests Ron Paul, Daniel Hannan, Lew Rockwell, Tom Woods, Peter Schiff, Shelly Roche, and Tom Palmer (CATO) joining Judge Napolitano.
Ron Paul and Daniel Hannan united in a one two punch fighting for liberty. They spoke about nullification, secession, and then compared Europe and America on the road to socialism. Another topic that they and the other guests discussed was protectionism. Peter Schiff seems to believe the U.S. need not worry too much about protectionism. Tom Palmer disagrees. Woods and Rockwell delve into the prospects for liberty in our lifetime.
Quote of the Day: Do not let these 545 people (Congress, President, and Supreme Court) shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take it. . . . Those 545 people and they alone are responsible. – Charley Reese
Every year, politicians and activists unveil plans to make taxes more simple and fair, but they never say anything about the worst tax of all.
It doesn’t take into account one’s ability to pay.
It doesn’t increase revenue or decrease the deficit; actually, it increases deficits by depressing the economy.
You might not have heard about it. The tax is hidden. Not everyone pays it the same way:
Everyone pays at least some of it through higher prices on goods and services
Some, like small business owners, pay it through reduced profits and even bankruptcy
Others pay it through depressed wages or unemployment
We may even pay it through higher state and local taxes, or reduced state and local services
It’s the Regulation Tax, the cost of complying with federal regulations and unfunded mandates. Each regulation will cost an affected business some money, and that will translate into reduced profits, higher prices, or both. And so everybody pays: owner, employee, customer.
And contrary to popular belief, regulations are almost always unnecessary. A free market would have laws against violence, fraud, and theft. What it wouldn’t have is needless government intervention. In a free market, producers would be forced to serve the public interest by delivering safe, quality goods at ever-lower prices.
If they cheat workers and customers through fraud, they would be prosecuted.
If they do harm through sloppiness and negligence, they could be sued.
If they deliver poor quality, they will deservingly lose business.
In a free market, firms have built-in incentives to provide safe working conditions and safe, quality goods and services. The federal government makes this difficult by imposing one-size-fits-all regulations – and businesses are still usually liable for accidents and mistakes that escape regulatory supervision. So at best, regulations dictate what businesses would have done anyway; at worst they impose additional, unnecessary, and costly restrictions and burdens that actually make it harder to deliver safe, quality goods and services.
So who’s to blame for the Regulation Tax? Consider . . .
Ron Paul appeared for another interview on Fox Business News earlier this evening. He hit on the insanity of the latest and greatest budget deficit and his belief that inflation is coming. Here are a few choice quotes:
On the deficit:
“I’m not a bit surprised. In fact I think it’s going to be bigger than 1.8″
“Sometimes I just think they are delirious!”
“We are liquidating debt.”
The host then plays a clip of Ron Paul questioning Bernanke from last week and asks Paul for a reaction to the clip. Watch it below for his answer.
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