Is the govt a failure?

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Ron Paul: Government Is A Failure
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Steve Watson
Thursday, August 6, 2009

Texas Congressman Ron Paul, founder of the advocacy group Campaign for Liberty, spoke on a number of issues yesterday including the growing opposition to socialized healthcare, the threat of martial law, his ongoing effort to audit the Federal Reserve and the prospect of running for president in 2012.

Below are the highlights of the Congressman’s comments followed by video of the full interview.

Ron Paul on the Obama administration’s healthcare proposals:

“It is nationalized healthcare, this pretence that it isn’t completely just means that there is some transition involved. Their goal is to have one party payer, which means that they control everything. And there’s a lot of other bad things in too like this effort to consult with anybody who’s over a certain age and talk to them about end of life type of procedures.”

“This bill is just such an outrage, the American people see it for what it is, it’s going to cost a lot of money, their care is not going to be improved, and special interests will be served.”

Ron Paul on the spate of protests at town hall meets:

“I don’t remember seeing the people so angry as they are now, but I think what they have discovered is that the government is a failure… I think a lot of people have come to the realisation that you can’t trust government.”

“That’s a healthy start. It is our job now to fill the void and tell them what the role of government ought to be, so that we can take all this energy and anger and redirect it.”

Ron Paul on government use of fear tactics:

“Up until now they have been able to use fear as their best tactic, and whether it’s on foreign policy issues or domestic policy issues, that’s how that first TARP fund went through… If things get worse, they’ll say this is more reason than ever for the government to take over and of course we still have the threat of martial law coming in because they havn’t forgotten about that and I don’t think they’d hesitate to use it.”

“It’s pure propaganda to get us involved overseas, it’s war propaganda saying someone is going to attack us with a nuclear weapon if we don’t go in and invade other countries. The same way you domestically scare people.”

“When you hear these stories about the use of force and the use of martial law and the tremendous invasion of our privacy, that to me is scary, nothing is private anymore, everything in the government is secret and your privacy is non existent, that is where the real problem is, we need to reverse that sentiment.”

Ron Paul on talk of mandatory swine flu inoculations:

“I don’t like the mass treatment of people, it’s just bad medicine. That doesn’t mean I have an attitude that inoculations are never good, matter of fact I think polio was truly eradicated by inoculations, well a small part. But the question is should government be making massive decisions, when in the Constitution there is not supposed to be any government involvement at all.”


Ron Paul on the effort to audit the Federal Reserve:

“We worry about how much pressure and how much authority the Fed has, but because we’ve done our grassroots work, we’ve gotten the large majority of members of Congress to support our auditing bill. And that didn’t come from me persuading the Congressman, that came from exactly what is going on at these town hall meetings, people being upset. In this way I think we are harnessing the energy in the correct way.”

“Once we hit the 290 cosponsors, which means we’ll have two thirds vote, or the 300, right in that area, I think that’s the time I’m going to really start putting pressure on the leadership to bring this up. So far they’re indicating that they are going to bring the bill up in a mixture of other bills, but they might get bogged down, so I think after we go back you may be hearing some announcements on where we want to direct our energies because we have such great momentum on that issue.”


“It’s a little bit more than Bernanke shaking hands with somebody… it’s the immorality of the system, the violation of the Constitution, the idea that you can print money, the idea that gold is evil, and that deficits don’t matter. It’s a philosophical argument that is so crucial, and we’ve suffered from it.”

“I think eventually they are going to use national security as an excuse to keep the books closed. A lot of times what the CIA does is use national security… because they do use funds to get involved in foreign affairs, because they can make deals with other governments, other central banks, other international financial organisations, and that’s the kind of stuff they don’t want us to know about.”

Ron Paul on the future of the economy and false optimism:

“There is a limit to how long they can fool the people, if you’ve been out of work and you don’t have enough money to feed your kids, and you listen to this you just don’t buy into this stuff. I’ve always argued that the people are always ten to fifteen years ahead of Congress.”

“There will be a time when the psychology changes, when it turns into a rout, and that’s what they can’t control. But I don’t think there will be a bank holiday, that will help cause panic… they’re not going to close the banks, they’re going to keep the presses running. They don’t default by not paying the bills… if they can inflate by 50% they’ve just defaulted on half of the debt.”

Ron Paul on Obama’s plummeting ratings:

“I don’t think he’ll be reelected but it’s way way to early to know that for sure, his circumstances are much more difficult. I often thought early on whether he would be like Roosevelt and never get blamed for anything… but I think Obama is going to receive some of the blame and rightfully so.”