Having spent decades in Washington serving as a member of the House of Representatives, Dr Paul is intimately familiar with both the institutions and the individuals currently running our country. And he has "zero" confidence that they will competently handle the major challenges facing America today.
2020 has given politicians a golden moment to capitalize off of the old DC strategy to “never let a crisis go to waste”. And they are making the most out of the current anxiety and uncertainty, using it to justify increased government intervention in nearly every aspect of our lives.
More monetary and fiscal stimulus has been injected this year than ever before in history, by a long shot. Same for Federal borrowing and deficit spending.
More limitations on how we’re allowed to conduct commerce, travel and gather with our families – even what information is permissible to voice publicly – have been imposed than at any time since WW2.
Dr Paul sees this accelerating grab by the government for expanded power and control as exactly what we DON’T need to effectively and sustainably tackle the truly massive tasks ahead of us, such as beating the coronavirus and addressing our nation’s truly massive debt overhang.
The solutions to those, and nearly every problem a society faces, are rooted in expanded freedoms, self-determination, and fair systems that allow the best ideas to prevail.
Here is a different emphasis from Sen. Paul, covering much of the same territory. This one was conducted by Bitcoin podcaster Stephan Livera on December 6th. Paul anticipates a difficult immediate 2-3 years from here unwinding debt and mal-investment; but a decade to process the whole mess. “The question is: what are you going to replace it with?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVpXK1NC9i4
Ron Paul is a great guy. I am not a libertarian but I love the guy. He has integrity. If only one out of every five people in Congress was like him, we could not have the problems that we do.
2020 has given politicians a golden moment to capitalize off of the old DC strategy to “never let a crisis go to waste”. And they are making the most out of the current anxiety and uncertainty, using it to justify increased government intervention in nearly every aspect of our lives.
And to highlight Dr. Pauls message - why the government thinks bussinesses should dtay closed!
Ron Paul is a great guy and preaches well to this choir. But…
I think that we are missing the real issue. We need something other than “give the people freedom to consume and build… and we can get back to good`ol growth again”
From the viewpoint of long term survival and environmental destruction on this planet (and ignoring a commenced multi-year horror show, particularly in the cities of a collapsing empire affecting ca. 10% of people on the planet), perhaps it might be better to follow the present course of complete economic destruction as preferable to “get back to real growth.” What was that about the insects, temperature changes, etc? Fossil fuel depletion? Mass starvation?}
“Real growth” is over, even if we wanted it and “went back” to previous slash and burn for profit unrestricted appetite satisfaction via the recommended growth. The problem is deeper than the temporal collapse of the American empire and lack of “growth.” As bad as the Exceptional American collapse will be, the collapse of the ecosystem etc. is a much bigger deal and affects not just the 5% exceptional Americans who have been living high off the hog the last 50 years but also the billions who recently are getting out of poverty and finally emerging into the middle class in places like China, India, Nepal, Eastern Europe etc. even now, while America is collapsing.
How about interviewing someone with proposed solutions that can merge freedom and liberty without having to “get back to real growth.”
I suggest that the past American empire and its exceptional life styles are dead meat and it is useless and even counter productive to fix a system that was DESIGNED and structured for consuming an exponential increase in resources. The issuance of money for example fit exponential resource growth very well. Going back to the past system to “get back to real growth” as Dr. Paul urges is inconsistent both with a. natural collapse of an empire, and (especially) b. limits to growth.
How about interviewing someone who knows how to juggle human freedom with an economic system that suits a non-expanding money supply/resource world? Agorism anyone? Small resilient community formation?
Lamenting lack of growth and discussing how to tinker with a totally inapplicable economic system to “get back to real growth” impedes our ability to think clearly about the serious problem, which goes beyond abandonment of this ism for that ism.
Finally, arguments that the real problem is government getting too involved with the economy etc are ridiculous because we do NOT have a “government.” We have fascism, the merger of state and corporate power. There is no “government” here. Just one matrix of overlapping racketeering systems that pretend to have our consent to dictate to us with make believe choices of theatrical actors/puppets.
Again, it just feels listening to this that we are still being played like a bunch of fools. “If we can only get the politicians to do the right thing!!!” is horseshit and counterproductive thinking.
Energy is everything. Politics is nothing. Lets talk about energy…
Too much of the wrong kind of government and too little of the right kind.
So many Americans have this weird Jones for freedom, a concept that evades definition. The word gets thrown around, bounces off a wall of reality, and ends up hitting the ‘freedom loving’ square in the mouth. And that hurts.
“Freedom” has been used to promote laissez faire economics, fast food, fast relationships, fast people.
Proper government should be there to encourage people to be adults, in the true sense–to eschew excess, manage expectations downward if they are wealthy and increase their community networks and shrink their environmental footprint.
As Motts said, there is no going back to the way it was.
I have always listened to Ron Paul and wish his perspective would work. Personal freedom is a beautiful idea. Small government is even more appealing.
But, I do not believe that the majority of people, given complete personal freedom, will make decisions that are sustainable and ecologically sound. Humans have not evolved that way any more than any other living organism on the planet. Humans, left unchecked, like all living organisms, will grow and expand until we outgrow our resources and overwhelm our planet. That’s what’s happening and probably will continue to happen, whether we wind up with reset, or personal freedom.
Just to be perfectly clear, I do not stand behind any government mandated reset. They will get it wrong.
Then you can’t trust them with power.
“Humans, left unchecked, like all living organisms, will grow and expand until we outgrow our resources and overwhelm our planet.”
LOL. Who’s going to do the checking, Les? Other humans. Lets put a rat in charge of the cheese to keep the mice from eating it.
LOL. Who's going to do the checking, Les? Other humans. Lets put a rat in charge of the cheese to keep the mice from eating it.
I didn’t say I had a solution, or even that a solution is possible. Frankly, I’m skeptical.
Individuals and small groups can live sustainably. Some do. Our species has not demonstrated that capability.
To be honest, my lifestyle times 7.5 billion is not sustainable on our planet.
It is a great thing that you bring up Mots, the natural environment. I’d read some comments on this site in the last few weeks that upset me so much that I had vowed to stop reading the comments. In particular, America’s uber-nerd, Bill Gates is being vilified in some conspiracy theories that I do not subscribe to. People think the man is lying when he says something with that smirk, but the smirk is just part of his nerdiness, the man really believes that vaccines are good for Africans and the world. Because we live on a finite planet, reducing the human population is something that will happen… yeah, I suppose I’d have to agree that I don’t want “nerds” or “elites” or “the government” to engineer a reduction in population… but then again, an engineered reduction in population over a period of decades would be far more merciful than keeping business as usual running until many millions or billions will just have to starve. Did you learn about “carrying capacity” in grade school? The idea is that any ecosystem (including the whole earth) can only “carry” a limited population (of any species, human beings included). Right now we’re already past the number of people that our planet can support without agriculture being heavily subsidized by fossil fuels.
Anyway, forgive me for going on something of a rant, but I’ve been on this site a long time and I do think my views are consistent with the crash course while some of the comments that frustrate me aren’t consistent with it.
The original point I was going to make before going off on that (for me) much needed tangent is that we need both. We need to work on what Ron Paul talks about - monetary sustainability, and what Mots was pointing to - environmental sustainability. It won’t be easy to get there, but we need to have both!
The problem in front of us is exactly what several have mentioned, above: that whether our numbers are reduced by nature or by government it’s going to be horrible. I honestly don’t know which would be worse, either physically or morally; I’d prefer neither, though it appears we’re choosing government, since we don’t even question the economic system that mandates expansion in order to keep its wheels turning.
A “good” or “better” standard of living is subjective. We don’t agree on what makes for the “good life,” so no government mandated behavior is going to satisfy everyone, or even very many. The course we are on is sure to breed ever-broader discontent. But if we do nothing, we will soon collapse by natural means. Indeed, we’re edging past the tipping point already, with no apparent inclination to dramatically change our consumption patterns and desires, despite clearly understanding what we’re doing.
That’s because our inflation-centered economic system incentivizes us to consume today rather than postpone, because tomorrow our money will afford less.
I don’t think we can improve our standard of living, even if we stabilize our numbers, as long as we measure “standard of living” in terms of things owned or, more broadly, consumption, as long as we persist in exercising an economic system built on inflation.
I favor transition to a deflationary economics anchored in the natural trend of advancing technology to reduce costs of goods and services. I don’t pretend that such a transition would not also be hurtful, but at least I can see a better world on the other side. As long as our economy has to keep growing exponentially to continue, it doesn’t matter how much we reduce our numbers, we’ll eat up the rest of the resources.
A tech-powered deflationary economy, however, makes goods available at steadily reduced cost, meaning we need less income year over year for the same standard of living. It also requires a hard money base so that monetary inflation cannot be used to offset deflationary pressures - which is what happens now.
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome,” right?
When an inflationary policy is tied to a randomized liquid supply of money, purchasing power is always better today than tomorrow. Result: no incentive to reduce/reuse/recycle, nor to put off until tomorrow what you can buy more cheaply today, nor to avoid debt-fueled consumption.
When tech-powered deflation is embraced and tied to a hard money regime, money is worth more tomorrow than it is today. That incentivized reduced consumption, reuse/repurposing, and recycling. It creates demand for products that last as long as possible to avoid spending on something today that will be cheaper tomorrow or next month. It promotes savings, frugality, and rational investments in sound ideas because interest has to be high to be larger than the natural increase in purchasing power enabled by deflationary forces over time. With such frugality comes a decreased notion of how many things one needs in order to feel life is high-quality.
In other words, with a high time horizon we’re more satisfied putting off until tomorrow what we feel we “need” today when we have a low time horizon.
I can imagine that in a tech-enabled deflationary environment even family planning would become more thoughtful and conservative, as the cost of having and raising a child gets cheaper the further conception is pushed into the future. Families would naturally become smaller; population would shrink at the same time consumption declined, resource depletion slowed, and time spent working for money declined. Free time would increase, with all that means in terms of life quality.
Government would certainly be put on a diet, because taxes will always cost more purchasing power tomorrow, so everyone would agitate for constantly lower real tax rates. Plus, as everyone gets more today for a dollar than yesterday, everyone gets steadily richer; by postponing spending we’d increase savings rates, too, thus personal wealth. Who, then, needs ever-metastasizing government programs?
Align economic incentives with desired outcomes. Animal spirits will do the rest.
Steve Daly posed this question. “Would Japan be a model of stagnant numbers but improved standard of living?”
I moved to a small island in Japan and my wife and I are working on trying to find a modern equivalent of Japan’s Edo period where 30 million people lived sustainably in an area the size of California between 1650 and 1850. A complex society was built without exponential growth and with massive recycling of wastes etc.
The Japanese people I talk to hate that history because they had an entrenched elite. I dont have an answer to that problem but am working with the puzzle of how to get a modern Edo on technology steroids of high comfort/convenience while living sustainably. My results so far recently are published in my book “Take Back The Power!” with me Marvin Motsenbocker as author on Amazon.com. I am only mentioning this as a public service message since I dont expect to make money on this and have learned that long term friends suddenly hate me when they find out my true feelings about big corporate and US law (my last vocation). Only a few really care enough to build a resilient life and are a tiny minority and are the intended target of my book. But if you are interested I can help with circuit boards and parts.
We need to think about children and must come up with a structure to discover the wide ranging talents of each child at an early age and then specifically help each to reach their potential as a big way to achieve social mobility. In my opinion this is our biggest problem because the elite are destroying OUR future for the benefit of their lazy children’s future. Jerald Kushner is a prime example of this evil that I would like to see a system designed to prevent. Why aren’t we addressing this problem? Guillotines only are effective for a couple generations cause much distress and the assholes grow back like so many cockroaches. We need to eliminate evil in a better manner. How to prevent or get rid of these assholes?
What did Dr. Paul mean when he said the market will “crash up, boom?” Did he mean it will crash up like a rocket? Or did he mean it would crash down?
I did not understand his terminology.
We need to think about children and must come up with a structure to discover the wide ranging talents of each child at an early age and then specifically help each to reach their potential as a big way to achieve social mobility. In my opinion this is our biggest problem because the elite are destroying OUR future for the benefit of their lazy children’s future. Jerald Kushner is a prime example of this evil that I would like to see a system designed to prevent. Why aren’t we addressing this problem? Guillotines only are effective for a couple generations cause much distress and the assholes grow back like so many cockroaches. We need to eliminate evil in a better manner. How to prevent or get rid of these assholes?–Mots
Prevent generational accumulation of wealth, which equals power by taxing the hell out of it. Raise capital gains tax on investment income, and rental income. Tax inherited wealth as a capital gains and prevent offshoring of wealth in tax shelters.
Then defund the military. Take all of that money and pour it into schooling, hospitals and healthcare and make sure healthcare is completely divorced from big pharma.
It could be done, but people have been successfully brainwashed into equating higher taxes with the “evils of socialism” that the will to take appropriate action has evaporated.
Thank you Agitating, for thoughtful comments.
Yes, “it could be done” in a functioning democracy with checks and balances.
We are way past that. Fascism is fascism and things are not the same.
I used to work for an extremely ethical giant pharmaceutical company. We were very ethical because our profit was affected by the fourth estate. Exposure to bad image and lawsuits created a very ethical situation. Even now in Japan, image sensitivity creates a good climate.
But America has become way too rotted out. Fascists control “truth” and image. Your money cannot compete with their funding and control. Fascism will grow until the whole thing is destroyed. Talk to an honest lawyer who has worked as a lawyer for the last 30 years (or a real journalist) and listen to what they say about the changes. You seem to be stuck in an America-golden ages of the past. Germany too used to be good before the 1930s.
You seem to be stuck on a first step to figuring something out.
A crack-up boom is the crash of the credit and monetary system due to continual credit expansion and price increases that cannot be sustained long-term.
In the face of excessive credit expansion, consumers' inflation expectations accelerate to the point that money becomes worthless andthe economic system crashes.
The term was coined by Ludwig von Mises, a noted member of the Austrian School of Economics and personal witness to the damages of hyperinflation.
But America has become way too rotted out. Fascists control “truth” and image. Your money cannot compete with their funding and control. Fascism will grow until the whole thing is destroyed. Talk to an honest lawyer who has worked as a lawyer for the last 30 years (or a real journalist) and listen to what they say about the changes. You seem to be stuck in an America-golden ages of the past. Germany too used to be good before the 1930s. You seem to be stuck on a first step to figuring something out.–Motts
As someone who moved back to Canada from the States in 2003, in part to remove myself from what I saw as encroaching fascism–a perfect merging of state and corporations, a la Mussolini, I don’t think I am stuck in the fifties at all, nor am I just figuring things out.
I’ve lived in Europe, the Caribbean, for a short time in England, the U.S and my home country is Canada.
I admire the economic system of co-operatives in the Basque region and would like to see it duplicated world wide.
I favor neither current party in the U.S. Biden could be as much a problem as Trump. They are both corporatists. It’s a good cop, bad cop situation.
Marxists, right wing fascists, and even the well-intentioned will take their shots at it, though.
Down here in the cheap seats it will be watch your six and be prepared, like survivors throughout history have done.
This may be the best comments thread I’ve read on PP this year. Thanks to Mots for setting the tone (and shifting the focus, properly), and to all who chimed in with respectful and enlightened comments. My faith in this “tribe” has been restored today.
