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Ron Paul is America's leading voice for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies. The Ron Paul Revolution continues.

Playing God With The EconomyDecember 2

The unholy alliance between self-important bureaucrats and failed bailout bankers continues to wreaks havoc upon the economy. Only a gold standard can prevent these charlatans from poisoning the entire world with their increasingly worthless dollars. In his latest column Ron Paul speaks truth to power and calls for the abolishment of the Federal Reserve. But can reasoned arguments alone win this epic battle for sound money? — tmartin

The Neo-Alchemy of the Federal Reserve

by Ron Paul

As the printing presses for the bailouts run at full speed, those in power are no longer even pretending that the new giveaways will fix our problems. Now that we are used to rewarding failure with taxpayer-funded bailouts, we are being told that this is “just a start,” more funds will inevitably be needed for more industries, and that things would be much worse had we done nothing.

The updated total bailout commitments add up to over $8 trillion now. This translates into a monetary base increase of 75 percent over the last two months. This money does not come from some rainy day fund tucked away in the budget somewhere – it is created from thin air, and devalues every dollar in circulation. Dumping money on an economy, as they have been doing, is not the same as dumping wealth. In fact, it has quite the opposite effect.

One key attribute that gives money value is scarcity. If something tha

Oh No, Not Another Bailout!November 24

By engaging in bailout after bailout, government bureaucrats subsidize failed but well-connected losers by effectively confiscating the necessary resources from productive and successful members of the economy. Ron Paul explains why such bailouts are a bad idea and why we should allow the natural incentives and regulations of the free market to pick the winners and losers in our economy. –tmartin

The Bailout Surge

by Ron Paul

[Last] week the bailout of the Big Three automakers was under heavy consideration in Congress’s lame duck session. I have always opposed government bailouts of private organizations. Back in 1979 Congress had hearings about bailing out Chrysler and I was on record pointing out that these types of policies are foolish and very damaging to the long term economic health of our country. They still are.

There was also renewed pressure [last] week to bailout homeowners and send another round of stimulus checks to “Main Street” to balance out all the handouts to big business. It seems that eventually the entire economy is going to be blanketed over with Federal Reserve notes. Most in Washington are completely oblivious as to why this model of money creation and spending is so dangerous.

We must remember that governments do not produce anything. Their only resources co

Ron Paul: End the Fed!November 23

Saturday afternoon Ron Paul addressed a crowd of about 500 people in front of the Fed building in downtown Houston. They had come together for one of many End the Fed demonstrations throughout the country.

Here’s a partial transcript of Ron Paul’s speech (slightly edited for clarity):

“It is a great event, and I understand that there are a lot of events like this throughout the country. And this should be very significant. We won’t be on the evening tonight, I’m quite sure of that around the country. But we are on the evening news every single night, every single day, and we’re on the minds of the people every single day because there is a crisis in this country that is as bad as, if not worse than the crisis of the Depression of the 30s. That’s on endlessly [on TV], and we know who caused it. It was the Federal Reserve that gave us all this trouble.

Concern and interest about monetary policy comes and goes. When things are in the boom phase of a cycle, everybody loves it, and they ignore it and they don’t care because they’re getting a free ride. We’ve had an especially good free ride for decades now, because we’ve had a system that was devised where the dollar could act as if it were

Ron Paul Answers QuestionsNovember 20

Ron Paul was recently interviewed by the New York Times’ Freakonomics Blog. The interview was published in two separate posts, Part 1 and Part 2.

Highlights:

Why Ron Paul didn’t run as a Libertarian or Independent

Q: Even before the primaries, you said you would not run in the general election. Why specifically did you not run?

A: I was running for the Republican nomination, and I would have run in the general if I had won. I had little interest in running third party due to the inherent biases against such efforts. I also signed legally binding agreements not run third party in 2008 if I failed to win the G.O.P. primary. That was the cost for ballot access in several states, 11 total I believe. So even I had wanted to, it would not have been possible to run in the general after I lost the primary.

Steps Ron Paul Would Immediately Take to Heal the Economy

Q: What would your plans for economic stimulation look like during this slumping economy?

A: [...] During the presidential campaign, I released the following four-point plan, and would stick by it while at the same tim

Ron Paul questions Ben Bernanke about World CurrencyNovember 18

Ron Paul questions Ben Bernanke about his secret meetings with other central bankers. What have they been talking about? Is the dollar finished and is there a new world currency on the agenda? What role is gold going to play, if any? Bernanke, while remaining evasive about the details of his meetings, denies the rumors and asserts that the dollar is not dead.

Ron Paul: The Austrian free market economists had predicted all these problems would come, and they were certainly correct in everything that they said. Of course they’re not very satisfied including myself with the so-called solutions, because it looks like we’re spending a lot of energy and a lot of money trying to patch a system together that is unworkable.

So we have Congress spending a lot of money, we have Treasury very much involved in trying to pick and choose which worthless asset that we’re going to buy, and of course the Federal Reserve is involved in injecting trillions of dollars that nobody seems to be keeping track of.

But what we’re failing to do I think is to recognize that the system no longer works, but I can understand why we do this because if Congress couldn’t do this and if the Fed couldn’t do this and Treasury couldn’t do this, it would make us all irrelevant. And instead of looking at the causes of this, and then finding the solutions aren’t going to be found here, we have to make ourselves feel pretty important.

But I think there’s another reason we think we’re pretty important, it’s because in a way our interference in the market corrections that tried to come about since 1971 seem to work. I mean, the failure was established in 1971 with a system that had no way of automatically correcting the balance of payment and the current account deficits.

And that’s where the problems have been, and economists - whether they were left or right or middle - over the last several decades have always said, this current account deficit is a big problem. And now it’s totally out of hand. So here we are struggling with all these rules and shifting back and forth and really getting nowhere.

My question is directed toward, when we come to the full realization that the system is unworkable, what are we going to do, what have you thought about doing, and already we see talk in the newspapers. We see articles about a new international world reserve currency, and to me that’s pretty important, because the fiat dollar reserve system is not going to work anymore, and that’s the information that we have to accept and decide what we’re going to do in the future.

Also, this is not new in history. Currencies have failed, financial systems have failed, and generally, to restore the confidence that everybody is talking about, they usually have to go back to a currency with integrity to it, rather than just fiat money.

And, you know, the stages is there. It’s not impossible, already the central banks of the world still own 15% of all the gold that was ever mined in all of history. So they hold on to this gold for some reason, and therefore something has to give, or are we going to keep trying to waste more money and time patching this system together.

Just last week there was a report that Iran purchased 75 billion dollars worth of gold, took their reserves out of Europe, bought gold and put it in Asia. So is that a sign of the times, is that moving on?

My question is, in your meetings, and you had a meeting just recently with other central bankers, does this thought come up about a new international world reserve currency, and if so, does the subject of gold ever come up?

How do you restore the confidence? Have you recently had conversations with any central banker, and is there a move on to replace the dollar system, because the dollar system is essentially declared dead, because it’s not working, but this indeed was predictable because of these tremendous imbalances that were never allowed to be corrected, and they were always patched up. We always came in. We’d spend, we’d inflate, we would run up deficits, and since ‘71 we’ve been able to correct these problems.

Could you tell me what kind of conversations you’ve had regarding a new reserve currency?

Ben Bernanke: Yes, Congressman. I don’t think the dollar system is dead. I think the dollar remains the premier international currency. We’ve seen a good deal of appreciation in the dollar recently during the crisis precicely because there’s been a lot of interest in the safe haven and the liquidity of dollar markets.

And the Federal Reserve has been engaged in swap agreements to make sure there’s enough dollar liquidity in other countries because the need for dollars is so strong. So I think the dollar system remains quite strong.

I do agree with you very much on one point, which is about the current accounts. The current account imbalances have proved to a very serious problem. It was in fact the large capital inflows in those current accounts which created a lot of the financial imbalances we saw and have led to some of the problems we are seeing, and one of the silver linings in this huge grey cloud is that we’re seeing some improvement and greater balance in our current account deficits.

Ron Paul: But does the subject of a new regime ever come up?

Ben Bernanke: No, it doesn’t.

Ron Paul: And does the subject of gold ever come up in any of your conversations?

Ben Bernanke: Only in terms of the sales that the central banks are planning.

Ron Paul later released the following comments: