Speech given five days ago in St. Paul, Minnesota before an audience of 2,500 by Ron Paul, Republican candidate for President. by Walt Thiessen
(libertarian)
Thursday, November 10, 2011
(Note: This is a transcript of the first 10 minutes or so of a stump speech given by Ron Paul before 2,500 supporters in St. Paul Minnesota five days ago. In a few places, the verbiage has been cleaned up a bit to make it read better, but the essence has been preserved in all respects. You can view a YouTube video of this portion of the speech.)
What a nice reception. It got my attention. It sure identifies the fact that the Revolution is alive and well, even up north, here! Wonderful! A few weeks ago they told me there would be a nice crowd here, and I said, well, don't over-predict. It looks like they under-predicted. This is fantastic. Thank you very much for coming!
The country and the world is in a mess today, and I'm quite convinced that we know exactly how we got here. We know exactly what to do. One thing for sure is we don't need more government. Every single day we wake up to more news. This week, it has been the international debt crisis. All they're proposing is more bailouts. Right now they're talking about bailing out Greece through the European banking system and the European countries, but at the same time our own leaders in the Treasury, as well as the Federal Reserve, are relatively quiet. Believe me, we're going to be in hock as well. So we have to be very alert to what's happening, because there is no way you can bail out a world deeply in debt with more debt and more spending. It makes no sense.
This week, unfortunately, we had an historic event. Earlier in the week, our national debt, which went over $15 trillion, went over our GDP for the first time in the history of our whole country. But it's not only our country that's facing this. The world has a GDP of $195 trillion, and guess what? Their deficit this year is the same amount! This is absolutely unsustainable, and we have to recognize this. It's been going on for a long time.
I had talked about this for many years and anticipated we would end up with a world-wide crisis like this, but I got energized in the early 1970s, realizing that our change in monetary policy would lead to this. This is the reason I talk a whole lot about reigning in, auditing, and eventually getting rid of the Federal Reserve System. When a Federal Reserve System comes into being and promises to be the lender of last resort, they usually are the last resort, and it'll be the last thing we do. The real evil here is in 1971 we severed the last link of our dollar to gold, which ushered in this new age we have had since 1971. That meant that the politicians could spend money without any responsibility.
They could tax, but there wouldn't be enough. They could borrow, but that would never be enough. Then they resorted to inflation. Now, the flack didn't come in the 1970s, although that was a rocky period of time, but it ushered in this age where there is endless spending. Conservatives and liberals said, “Deficits don't matter.” Deficits do matter. They matter to you as an individual. They matter to us as a country. They matter to the whole world.
We ushered in this age where we depended on the Fed to create the money when we had to pay the bills. Now, when a country is very wealthy, they can do that for awhile, but then eventually they have to borrow a lot more money and live beyond our means.
During the Great Depression, we were a creditor nation. Now, since the 1970s, we've been a debtor nation. We are the biggest debtor nation in the history of the world. We owe over $3 trillion to foreigners. And they think we're going to bail out everybody else! It makes absolutely no sense. It's the Federal Reserve. By interfering in the monetary system and monkeying around with interest rates, they create the bubbles. For awhile, they can create one bubble, and patch it up again. But eventually, the big bubble bursts. This is what we're witnessing right now. We're witnessing the end of an economic era. This is a tremendous opportunity for us to believe in liberty to get our message out.
It is well known by all those who are pretending to patch this network and financial system together again. They know what we know. They know it is unsustainable. It is not a viable system, and they are making plans. They are making plans, and they are not too secretive about it. They're talking about a world-wide fiat currency system. Instead of the dollar standard, they want to use the United Nations and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and whatever. But you know, we ought to stay old-fashioned. We ought to believe in national sovereignty and that we deal with our own problems, not a world government. This whole idea about depending on sovereignty, the most sovereign part of government should be us over the sovereignty of our own lives. That's where it should originate. Then it should be with our families and friends, our neighbors, our communities, and our local governments.
Obviously, we've had too much drift toward Washington. Our federal government is way too big. Our constitution: the people have failed the Constitution. The Constitution was written not to restrain you in any way, but to restrain the federal government.
Sometimes it amazes me how long the system lasts. There's a lot of momentum to a free society. Wealth is gone. Our liberties are being undermined. It is coming to an end, but I'm amazed it's lasted this long. Take, for example, the ineptness of what they did when we invaded Iraq. They said, well, we have to influence the dissidents. There are some people who don't like us being in their country, so we need to go over there with a lot of cash, because American cash still has some value. They packed up car loads, plane loads of cash, to the tune of $60 billion, and guess what? They can't even account for it!
It is utterly amazing that the system tolerates this and that we who ran a program like that are going to bail out the world.
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