Monday, September 29, 2008

Ron Paul's Interview with Glenn Beck

Today Dr. Paul had an interview with Glenn Beck in which Beck forced some very blunt honesty from Paul in regards to how he sees this crisis playing out in the long-term. I listen to Dr. Paul a lot and he is always pessimistic, but him and his fellow Austrian economists, including Peter Schiff, have predicted this play by play years in advance, just as the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek were the only economists in the 20s to predict the great depression of the 30s.

Here are some of the quotes from the Beck interview, the full text here:

"I think it's going to be the collapse of Western civilization. I think, Glenn, you might not want to hear this. Our empire has to end, too, and our empire has to come home because that's what we do to ourselves. We destroy our ability to even promote ourselves overseas. We spend too much overseas. Our troops will be coming home. There will be a change, and the welfare state is going to end. But not tomorrow if we don't pass this bill."

"When the dollar goes, that will go quickly. I mean, the Soviet system ended rather quickly, you know. And that was an economic event. It wasn't a political event or an invasion by the United States."

"This has been building since 1971 when we gave up on the last link to the gold standard under Bretton Woods, we devised a dollar standard. We were the most powerful economic group as well as a military power and therefore they accepted the dollar and they had more trust in the dollar than it deserved. So we were privileged to print the gold and spend the money and the people accepted it around the world. So we are responsible in the sense that we had license to spend and borrow and inflate and we lived beyond our means and that is why it's worldwide because essentially all central banks hold a lot of dollars and that's why they inflated in their economy as well. So there's a lot of malinvestment and debt worldwide."

"I want local sovereignty, as local as possible, back to the individual, community, the state or at least our own country. But this international stuff is doomed to destroy the individual and we're all going to suffer. We could move into a dark age if we don't wake up to what is really happening.'

3 comments:

Christopher said...

LOL. 10% of the high-wage job market disappears in five years and Ron Paul won't acknowledge it as a primary factor that brought about the sub-prime mortgage crisis. LOL.

If Western civilization is on the decline, then were sure are in for an interesting 50 years. Guess Ron Paul's acceptance of free market ideology ultimately destroyed the American economy after all, because the big capitalists have always been trying to control the government... right from the beginning. From Hamilton forward. And ever since then the gold standard loonies have been predicting the end of the world. Will it come now? Perhaps. But chances are that it will pass, like a majority of the other "end of the economies".

Josh said...

There's a difference between a corporatist and a capitalist.

Christopher said...

Only one of size, though, because a corporatist is a capitalist.