ENDOFAMERICA
I remember Doug Casey was on the Donahue Show. It was like the forerunner of Oprah. And Donahue was talking to Doug Casey about medical policy. This is how long that Americans have wanted free health care, right? And Doug was explaining that somebody has to pay for health care. One member of audience stood up and said, “Well, I think the government should pay for health care,” and everyone cheered. And you could see Doug up on the stage just knowing how completely lost the audience was. My biggest fear is not elections. And believe it or not, it’s not the collapse of the monetary system, because I think that’s just inevitable, and when something’s inevitable, you can hedge for it. My biggest concern is the way that special interest groups have not only now been able to capture elements of Congress and elements of the administration, but they’re now able to actually affect significantly very powerful civil agencies. The corruption of the FBI in particular just really scares me. As you probably know, I was involved in a civil lawsuit with the SEC for almost 10 years. And when you get involved in a regulatory battle like that you realize it’s scary. These bureaucrats, they don’t care at all about what actually happened. They care about winning, and it becomes like a turf war. And the idea that they’re serving the public is absurd. They’re out there to advance their regulatory goals, whether that’s good for the country or good for people or not. And seeing that a law enforcement agency was behaving that way was really frightening to me.
Ron Paul: As you know, I think that is so true, and we talk about the bureaucrats and the Justice Department and the others. But when I looked at the members of Congress that I visited with each day, some of them are decent people and they’d talk and pretend nothing’s wrong. But I think they’re in many ways almost infected with sociopathy. They’re sociopaths. They don’t seem to have a conscience at all, or sometimes a brain. But I think that it’s still worthwhile to have those conversations. Because somedaywhen things get worse, I think there’s an opportunity. For example, I had favorable responses from college kids on what I thought were very liberal campuses. And I talked about howuncomplicated thiswas and how important it was for them to own their life, to run their life as they see fit, and then still have a better financial living by doing this. And as far as I’m concerned, I think the libertarian message of non-aggression is a powerful message. And I think in a way, freedom and prosperity backfires on us because it just invites the bureaucrats and the government to distribute. Everybody thinks it’s the government, but then they use it and then they destroy it. And we’re in the process of that, so we might have to come down with fundamental reform on what our beliefs are. I think that’s what the founders did. They were pretty well-informed and they, too, read the Old Testament about the danger of that. So I think that we’ll
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September 2020
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