 And now the man of the hour, the man of every hour, our great leader, our great moral leader, as well as our great leader in economics and in politics and philosophy, Dr. Ron Paul. Thank you, Ron. Thank you, Lou. Thank you, Ron. Very nice. Thank you very much. As Lou's leaving the stage, I might mention one thing that I don't have a speech because that Tom Woods tricked me today. He tricked me and I gave my speech already. That's what you have to always watch those media people. They know how to handle it. So I have to think up a new speech, but I might have a few words to say because I always argue that the crowd makes the speech. And we have a good crowd here today, so I might be able to wing it a little bit, but I am so pleased to be here. And I have to be very thankful for all the support and especially for Lou's very nice introduction and his statement. And of course, Scott Horton has done a little bit of work on that subject, too, all of you have. And I think one has to be cautious about helping their head gets because I don't think you gain a whole lot from that. And the people frequently at rallies would come up to me when I was still in Congress. And they would say, Ron, you're the best congressman in Washington. And that's compliment. But I would have to get a little easy. And I say, yeah, but just think the competition isn't all that tough. So we have to be a look at it in the proper perspective. One thing in Washington that people often would ask me about Washington is, how come I just never got really frustrated? Because I was there for six years, seven years. I had three terms. And then that was in the early 80s and late 70s. And there were various personal reasons for that. I really didn't like the job. I really didn't think I was going there in the first place. And I was missing medicine. And I still had kids in school. And a few things like that. So I just said, I think I'll go back. I gave it a pitch. And then I was out for 12 years and practiced medicine for that time. But the frustration level is I never felt that frustrated because I never had the same goals set as others. The first thing that happens when you get to Washington is the leadership of your party comes, especially if they're in charge. What committees you went on? And what are you going to give me? If we put you on this committee, what can you promise you'll do for this? And I listed my committees and this sort of thing. But that was not my goal. I had enough seniority if you looked at it, the old fashioned seniority. I had a lot of years eventually. I went back in 1997 and was there until 2013, so I had a lot of seniority prior, a lot more than the ones that ran the committees. But there was absolutely no desire on my part to get there because I knew what it would take. You'd have to deal with lobbyists. You'd have to deal with leadership. You'd have to vote according to leadership. I often wonder, I would kid some of them, but it was serious on my part. There would be a group of us that would vote together, six or eight or so, pretty solidly with the Constitution. In one day, one of the members of the groups voted the wrong way. He was voting with the leadership position. And I said, what's the matter? We're losing you. How come you're voting this way? He says, I'm in leadership now. So he was directed how to go. But to be a chairman of a committee, I don't know how many millions I can't keep up. It's not a million dollars you need to raise for the party. It might be 10. It might be $20 million. You'd actually have to talk to lobbyists and get that money. That, to me, I had no desire for. But I also never had any desire for the confrontation. My personality, some who do very well and they vote well. But personally, I just didn't enjoy confrontation. I didn't want to get into some battle over who's going to get nominated for speaker and this sort of thing. And there was no interest at all for me to do that. So I actually just had goals of, in a social way, just talking to people and asking about their kids or something else. I didn't want to get into it because I didn't see a victory in that. The victory, to me, was always thinking about you. And getting a message out, I know last time, the first time I was in, a lot of financial newsletters were going out to gold newsletters because of the excitement of gold in the 70s. And I communed that way with a lot of people. But I was always thinking of another audience and realized that the audience was in Washington. And the other one other thing that I came to a conclusion to on this was the two-party system. And my topic today is two parties. Who really cares? Doesn't make a difference. And a lot of people, people outside of Washington, would come up to me. And media people would come up when the third party idea came up. And they said, well, do you think we should have a third party? And I said, yeah, I think, matter of fact, though, but I think we have to get a second party first. But I am a member of two parties, even though I'm not a very party person. I don't belong to the Democrat Party, but I do belong to the Republican Party, technically speaking, and to the Libertarian Party. And when I joined the Libertarian Party, I joined as a lifetime member. And I paid with my membership with one ounce of gold. But the parties are very secondary. And I would get into trouble with the Republican Party when I thought, I indicated, the party is very secondary. It's a vehicle. It's the way you do things. But they're not very philosophic, either party, even though that's a lot of what they make of the noise that they talk about. But I thought it was better not to be in a confrontation with people. It was more that part. I sort of separated my mind. That was a social thing. And the other part was I wasn't much interested in it because I never wanted to get into a fight that the results had no meaning. And that's about what goes on up there long term. Just which parties in charge and head of the committee, it really didn't make a lot of difference. In 2012, there was a convention. And we were doing very well. But we didn't get all our votes kind of. They slipped through the cracks some place. So our votes weren't kind of. But we had our own convention. I think we had probably as many maybe more than were at the other convention. And there was a lot of excitement. Of course, I remember giving my probably very typical speech at the time and typical political speech would be 45 minutes or an hour. I'm not going to go that long today. Don't worry. It would be, and I think that day it was an hour and 15 minutes because there was a lot of excitement, a lot of people. And somebody from the media came up to me and they said, you've talked for an hour and 15 minutes and you never once mentioned the opposition, Obama or Mitt Romney. And I said, who are they? To me, I didn't do it deliberately. I wouldn't do that. I'm a nice person. So I excluded them because they didn't seem to be that important. And but they said that you never mentioned their name. But concentrating on what I thought was important in a scheme of things long term, I think it'll turn out that they're fairly irrelevant. And I think people like you who think and have ideas, people who support the Mises Institute and these other groups, I think that's what has real value. And that is where I can get energized and not expect a political fight there. So I wasn't kind of out for politics. I didn't like those kind of fights. I never thought that I could be successful. So I was always surprised how well we did. But I tend to think that people shouldn't be arrogant and boastful and that people should think that a little bit of humbleness doesn't hurt you. And at times I learned that in campaigning. I don't know if my wife has arrived here today. But she might be, yeah, I hear she is in the back there. She snuck in. But she would do a lot to humble me, not by lecturing me, but just getting recognition. But I remember one time when we were in our district here and we were leaving a restaurant and I was in the car driving and she was sitting next to me. I see a lady coming out of the restaurant running over toward the car. So I rolled my wind down. She didn't even stop. She went immediately over to the other side. She wanted to talk to my wife. Boy, I lectured her after that. There's a limit to how much of this you can do. I'm a congressman. But she was pretty important in all of that. Because in 1997, 1996 and 7, that was the campaign I had been on for 12 years. And the Republicans weren't anxious to have me back. I couldn't understand it. Because I'm an ice guy and I never fought with them. But boy, they didn't want me back. So I went to the group of Republicans by that time. When I first went to Washington, there were three Republicans in all of Texas. And at this time, there were about 15. So the Republican Party was growing. So I went and had a meeting with this group. And that was when Delay and Army were in charge of the Texas delegation. So it was a courtesy call. This is what I'm thinking about doing. There was a Democrat in the seat. And I usually didn't fight over leadership positions. I said, they shouldn't expect that. And I would give the Republican a vote on leadership. So I went in there thinking, well, I can sell them this. Look, I think I can beat this Democrat you had in there. I think we can make this a Republican seat. And I'm thinking about running. But you know, I was shocked after I decided that I was going to run. The seat changed a lot sooner than I realized. I went and bribed the guy to switch over to become a Republican. And they gave him everything. So to my surprise, everybody else, because I didn't think I could overcome that, because Newt Gingrich came to campaign against me. Both Bush's campaign against me. Both Senators' campaign against me. And I think the House of Representatives had about 65 House of Representatives donate some of their campaign money to beat me on this. So I thought, well, I was sort of, you know, stoic about the whole thing and let it be what has to be. But then we did accomplish that and we won that seat. But it was something that probably was a big surprise to them and to me. But it also says something because the whole issue was I had been a libertarian in 1988. And one of my issues, because even then, that I thought was so ruthless was the war on drugs. And I took this very strong position of abolishing the war on drugs. And so when I announced I had talked to friends, I said, you know what they're gonna hit me on? It's gonna be the war on drugs, you know. So the Republican, then I had to have a Republican primary race and the establishment, the NRCC put in the money and did so many other things. And they put some of the worst ads up against me, ugly, mean, nasty stuff. But how these drugs are hurting babies and we counteracted that by me delivering a baby and holding a newborn and nobody believed their demogonking about what harm I was going to do to these kids. But they spent a million dollars and they then win. And you'd think that would tell the Democrats then I had to run against a Democrat. But they said nobody can be against the war on drugs in the 1990s, maybe today they can. But back then nobody was opposed to it. They all opposed it, you know. And they would tell me that we'd have token votes in Washington. They said, I know you're right, but oh, I couldn't handle how would I explain this to my district? So the Democrats spent a million dollars too and it didn't do them any good. And it was still a pretty strong Democratic district in many ways. But it is something that you just don't know. And I came out of that with the conclusion that a lot more people had been damaged, families damaged by the drug law. That was back when it was not unheard of to take teenagers and put them in prison with hardened criminals and just make real criminals out of them. And I think all you'd have to do is have one individual treated that way and how many family members and neighbors would understand the stupidity of the whole thing. So I think that was lying there, but nobody ever talked about it. But I have to give Carol a little bit credit for this too, because she really worked on the assumption she didn't know too much about this political stuff. She was interested in raising kids and girl scouts and all those things. So she says, you know, with all these horrible ads out there about how horrible person you are, we have to do something about it. And I said, what are we gonna do? She says, well, you know, I think we should do a family cookbook. I said, family cookbook. Who wants to care about our family cook and our recipe? Because some of them had too much fat in them or something. So she said, no, we should do that. And she put this together. And I said, nobody wants this. They wanna hear me talking about the Federal Reserve. And the exchange stabilization fund. But anyway, I caved in pretty easily. I said, go ahead, do it. But there was really nothing political about it, except it was shrewd politics. So she took pictures of our kids and some were married, some weren't, and little ones and big ones. And she'd take pictures of each one and put the kids together and have a little note about each one of them. Now, they're strangers. What do they care about our family? And so I made fun of it a bit. And I made fun of this at Republican rallies afterwards. I said, I did it. And I said, we went along with it. And I said, I have to admit, it turned out to be the best political outrage or political advertising we ever did. People loved it. And it makes a point though, that even in spite of how important philosophy is, and I put it way up here, dawn confrontation and getting along with people and being friends with people go a long way too, because most people don't pay much attention. And that's why a personal approach, if you're involved in politics, is pretty important. And it turned out that that had a lot to do with changing the attitudes because after what she described how wonderful our family was and we do have a wonderful family, they said, this guy can't be a drug dealer. So we took care of that. So the issue during the campaign was whether or not we should have a strong president and we don't want a weak president. A strong president is one that knows how to fight wars and a strong president sometimes gets credit if they even start the wars because sometimes people say, you have to be a wartime president. And I think there was a Bush that claimed that one time. I need a war to be a wartime president, which is pretty bad as far as bad morality I think. So the strong president is usually just signed with militarism, law and order, crack down, control people and all that. Some people think if you're strong you take away the guns from the people and you give it to the bureaucrats. It's all kind of a mixed bag of a strong president. But I think that there's a different type of strength and I think that's what we see in the philosophic group. The strength, I hadn't met Murray and Mises and Sennholds and Haslett, all these people. And they were strong people of character. To me, that's where I thought the strength came from not in this political demagoguing and we hear that. So resisting this temptation and pressure, resisting the deep state that gets the organization there to put pressure on the politician like in the drug war. They did admit that drug wars were bad but they were convinced that it would hurt their political career and they had to do it. So I think of strength in politics as the willingness to stand for what you believe in and not be intimidated and it's not a violent confrontation. It's just a philosophic strength and that's distinguished from that of the people who are militant and think that the greatness of American exceptionalism is our willingness to spread our goodness around the world and have the people accept our way. Well, I don't happen to accept that. I think that's a terrible thing to do and I believe that America is a great country, has been, has some great ideals. But if they're worth anything, we as a people should be practicing those qualities and people should want to emulate us and then I think we could spread the goodness of American rather than thinking you spread it with guns and killing and wars. You know, I want to just mention a few things that does motivate me and I mentioned that a little bit earlier when Tom was quizzing me about what my speech was all about. The thing that I really find as a great selling point about liberty is that it's not divisive and it brings people together. You say, what do you mean? You know, how can you bring these far leftists? Well, some you can't do it, but some conservatives you can't do it either. But people with an open mind, you can and there are people from the left or whatever you can call them, but honest progressives, progressives who believe in civil liberties and believe in a non-confrontational foreign policy. So you can reach people, but what people have to realize that in liberty the government is out of the way. People get to choose totally and completely how they're gonna use their liberty. And the hardest thing to accept is the fact that once you get your liberty, the responsibilities is on that individual, on all of us to do what we think is right and you can't depend on the government. So if you wanna use your liberty to do dumb things, what if you aren't very good at reliable working and you waste your money and you gamble and do a lot of dumb things like that? Shouldn't the government be there to take care of you? And I say, no, you should suffer the consequences of what should happen if you waste your liberty. And this whole idea that you have to have government there to make it safe and secure, whether it's socially, religious-wise or economically, this isn't true. People should be allowed to use their liberty any way they want. That means that in a free country, you can have any religion you want and you don't have to have one if you don't want. And you say, well, you don't care? Yeah, I care, but I just don't think the government should be involved. And that's a big difference. And if you have personal, moral and religious beliefs, they should be expressed in your own way in a voluntary manner, but not through the government. The government shouldn't be there for that. The government should be there for one thing, and that is the preservation of liberty so that we can make our own decisions about our life, our money, and allow in other countries to do the same thing. But bringing together means that the crowds should be diverse. The more diverse they are, I think the better. But the problem really is, is that their diversity that the opposition wants means they want the upper hand in what we do. And I think the best answer for people that talk about this is if the, see, I believe socialism should be legal. What the heck? There's been socialist type, you know, enclaves, but they should be legal. But they don't have a right to make you participate in their socialism. So a good libertarian society should tolerate people who believe in economic socialism. They should be allowed to do that, but they're not allowed to use force to do this. And that's, of course, if you're a, the conventional wisdom of socialist is, no, we don't want any voluntary capitalism. We need your money. And that's the whole thing. They want to use force. And they have all the guns. We should work much harder at talking about getting rid of guns. I think guns need control. We need to really crack down on the guns that are used to modify our lives. That means I want to eliminate all the guns of all the federal bureaucrats in the whole country. So we're for gun controls, but we're for self-reliance too and self-defense. So that's a big difference. And yet today, every year, we have more and more police force. And not only do we have the federal police force, we have the militarization of local police departments now too. And even our current president brags about, you know, how much weaponry and military weaponry we can, you know, put in. But this was a consequence and still probably is to a degree of the war on drugs. You know, you need tanks to go after these bad guys and they have all kinds of equipment. And so that's the opposite of a voluntary society. So I think of volunteerism as a good example of what we should do. If we have our freedoms, all associations are okay. One strong rule is no lying, no cheating, no stealing and no killing. That's not too complicated. You know how long that's been around? Probably about four or 5,000 years, they've been talking about that. So why aren't we doing better at this? And one thing I think has happened over the years is technologically, think of what has happened in technology, especially the last 200 years, especially in the last 100 years, especially in the last 30 years and it's moving rapidly. And so often who gets control of it or helps design it and that is the government. You think of, I remember at the end of Second World War when the jet aircraft came out and they were talking about, well, they'll be, and they did, they made jet fighters, one of the first things. You know, the first wheel was discovered and used probably 30,000 years BC. And it was, the first wheel was a potter's instrument to make pottery. And the first wheel for movement was used on chariots, military chariots. So it's this moral attitude that so much is conceited to the government, too much power to the government and technology is used so much to perpetuate what they're doing. Even today, just think how much money goes into the military and all this technology. And right now, you know, I thought the internet was the greatest thing in the world and I still do. I think it's wonderful, but I don't like the part where they're in bed with the government. They just collect information for the government and that's getting worse. You know, this super patriot act that's coming in, they're going to accumulate more and more information ever and the attorney general and the president all for this thing because we have to find out the potential bad people and put them away without trial. You know, that sort of thing. So that this technology is wonderful, but it can be used the wrong way. And for some reason, we have, you know, in spite of this challenge we have from the government, just think of all that has advanced in the modern age. Tremendous advancement that we have. Even in the last 100 years, I mean, 100 years ago, there were still, you know, horse and buggy days. And so that we do get in spite of the government, but can you imagine what would happen if we had a government or a lack of government or a minimal government where people made all the decisions and that you had to follow these rules? I think it would be a nice place to live, you know. And it would be a safe place to live too, but it wouldn't be perfect, but the imperfections now are magnified because it's the government that coerces us into doing things and the collection of the revenues to be paid for. But of course that is the calamity that we're working toward and that's why our message is so important. And the calamity is that we have taught people to believe that entitlements are morally proper, that they are entitled thing and they are victims and we have to take care of them. And they think of that as a moral principle as strong as we think of self-reliance and hard work and effort is a good moral principle. So they think that this moral principle of entitlement is the thing that we must go along with. And I say, no, that has to be reversed. And you can say, well, wouldn't this make the world a lot poorer and more dangerous? No, I don't think so. I think there's all forms of being protection. But what we have done is we've slipped away to thinking that the government, and I don't know how people could accept it, is omnipotent and they can make us safe and secure. So they will always make us safe from harm and they'll make a secure economic exchange. Well, the economy is on the verge of becoming like Venezuela or worse. So it doesn't make us safe and secure. How many policemen do you think you need? John Baza would tell us how many, how many policemen would he have to engage if he wanted to just go into the homes of all the people just in this room to make sure that there was never a harm done to anybody on your property? You'd have to have about six policemen at each household. The whole thing is ridiculous. They can't make us safe. So what do we do on the inner city where most of the crime is? That's where the strongest laws are against the guns where they might do something for themselves. Self-reliance, self-reliance is great. There's a motivation and people are inclined to do more and more. And then you say, well, what is this all about? Can't we just send good people to Washington and they'll take care of us? And I say, no, you can't do that. It won't work. But one of the reasons, and this is very personal and other people will have other reasons why we want to live in a free society for economic reasons or whatever. But I think ultimately a free society that I talk about and I envision is something that is very personal. I think our freedoms are very personal. They come to us in a personal way, in a natural way, or a God-given way. And that we're responsible for that. But we should then have to deal with our lives not only of safety. We might not even need the FDA. We could maybe put them on a business and we might even learn better eating habits. And in the campaigning, one of the examples I used to throw out to the crowd and I thought it was just as a spur of a moment and everybody would think it was silly. I said, in a free society, we are supposed to have a free society and we're not even allowed to buy raw milk. And there was some applause and as it went on it was sort of a joke but there's a lot of people who believe that things like that, what you can drink and eat. But I think the goal should be, for me personally and suggest for others, is that in a free society, you're more, the responsibility falls on us as individuals with the help of family, friends and neighbors and churches. And that is that hopefully we can get people to think that it would really be pretty neat living in a solid society where everybody's goal is to seek excellence, work for excellence, do the best we can. And I think the rewards, no matter where you are on the scale of IQs or what your abilities are, I think the rewards are not that way just because somebody has more ability that they have greater rewards. But I think when people work for their excellence and do what they can to take care of themselves, the satisfaction that people have for self-reliance is not related to the size of somebody's pocketbook or anything else or basic intelligence. It's just assuming this responsibility. But I think that the free society offers that or puts pressure on people to seek excellence but also to seeking virtue. But virtue is something it's not that easy to define. I think everybody has a pretty good idea about it. And there's a lot of people in Washington assume that you have no virtue. You don't behave yourself, you have habits like this and you do this, so we want you to be more virtuous. So they take over this whole issue of making people virtuous and make them work for excellence and make them prosperous and make them safe. I would say that's all wrong. We should limit it strictly to the role, if we are to have government, the role of government ought to be narrowly limited to the protection of your liberty. I think the founders understood that and they made that point and they understood it. I always marvel at reading about the founders when you think about their intelligence and how well educated they were. You know, they really were educated and they didn't even have an internet, you know? They had books, they read books and they probably most all weren't educated in a government school either. But it was, they were well educated. They knew their history and they brought together the ideas of liberty that had been around. And of course Adam said that we've given you a constitution but the truth is it won't work if the people are not moral. And that's back to the virtue and excellence. So in an immoral society, and that's our real challenge today is because we see more and more immorality. It might be more challenging to accept my optimism that there's still a lot of people out there about that care about this and that we can still win this. And I really do believe that and my goal is to take all this wonderful technology that we have and instead of building more tanks, maybe we need more ambulances and more good medical care coming out of the market. But everything should be voluntary. Everything should be peaceful. And I would think that that would be a worthy goal. It's probably a little bit, you know, a dream. But believe me, that dream of living in a free society is a lot better than a nightmare that we're facing and it's going to get a lot worse because we have to resolve all the mistakes made, the financial mistakes. And if people think that modern monetary theory is going to solve the problem, just run the presses faster. And they're in a dilemma right now and the end stages are coming because even those on Wall Street and in the banks and the Federal Reserve, we have never heard any time in all of history where people had negative interest rates, figure out what does that mean, you know? Interest rates are key because it tells the price of every transaction and the price of money. But this whole thing that the price is down to negative, that's going to be resolved. It's not workable. So that's what we have to prepare for and see it as an opportunity. We may have to be frugal for a while and take care of ourselves, but we'll all survive and we'll all do well if we can live in a free society. Thank you very much. Thank you.