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Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know. You're listening to the Tom Woods Show.

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Hey, everybody, Tom woods here, episode 2737 of the Tom Woods Show. And I've been seeing being spread around a. I guess we might call it a meme saying that Ron Paul was right about everything. And I thought, why not do an episode on exactly that? I mean, I think by instinct, we have a sense about what he was right about, but not everybody does. And, you know, another episode on Ron Paul is not the worst thing in the world. So I want to run through it. I've thrown some items together from the past. A lot of them have to do with predicting the future. I mean, the guy could see the future, but also just about being right about things in the present. So I think if we cast our minds back to the two GOP Ron Paul presidential campaigns, we will recall that it was very common to hear Dr. Paul called crazy. He's a kook. He's crazy. Now, why is he crazy? He's crazy because I've never heard this idea before. The New York Times hasn't told me I'm allowed to think this. Or neither Barack Obama nor John McCain is talking about this. So how can it be right? How can this be a legitimate position if neither Mitt Romney nor Hillary Clinton takes it so implicitly? People had been kind of conditioned to think that way. Well, I don't hear that being talked about on cable news. So, yeah, I know the country is in bad enough shape that I'm afraid it's gonna take ideas that are not on cable news, that are not endorsed by the New York Times in order to fix it. And it took a long time, like, way longer than it should have for some people more or less on the right to figure that out. Back in 2008 and 2012, they were just looking around for a guy who sounded like what Republicans are supposed to sound like to them. They wanted to be flattered and told they're the greatest people in the world, and the only reason anybody around the world might not like the United States is that they're envious losers, and they like to be spoken to like this. They liked everything to be simple, dumbed down. And here's Dr. Paul talking about monetary policy. Well, he must be some kind of a kook, because Ted Cruz doesn't talk about that. And I sure do like Ted Cruz because he flatters me and uses the familiar slogans Dr. Paul didn't speak in slogans. And so there were a lot of people, people who really thought of themselves as being cheeky. You know, we're against the liberals, but. But there are some views we absolutely will not accept. There's nothing wrong with the dollar. There's nothing wrong with this monetary system we have. Only a crank would think that. Why? Well, because I've never heard anybody in politics say anything about it. And that's my entire frame of reference. Well, eventually some of these people on the right will realized that they had been wrong about that. They realized, wait a minute, why was I letting the New York Times, who can't stand the sight of me tell me who's allowable to listen to and who isn't? Like, that was a dumb mistake. Why was I taking dictation from them? Why was I letting them set the boundaries for what was acceptable and allowable? So at the time, Glenn Greenwald, who agrees with me on this whole use of crazy to dismiss people who aren't in the Hillary to Mitt Romney axis of evil, he agrees with me about how that's been used. He says those who support countless insane policies and or who support politicians in their own party who do love to spit the crazy label at anyone who falls outside the two party establishment. This behavior, he says, is partially driven by the adolescent high school version of authoritarianism. Everyone who deviates from the popular cliques, standard Democrats and Republicans, is a fringe loser who must be castigated by all those who wish to be perceived as normal, and is partially driven by the desire to preserve the power of the two political parties to monopolize all political debates and define the exclusive venues for sanity and mainstream acceptability. But regardless of what drives this behavior, it's irrational and nonsensical in the extreme. And Greenwald continues, I've been writing for several years about this destructive dynamic whereby people who embrace clearly crazy ideas and crazy politicians anoint themselves the arbiters of sanity simply because they're good mainstream Democrats and Republicans and because the objects of their scorn are not. For me, the issue has nothing to do with Ron Paul and everything to do with how the crazy smear is defined and applied as a weapon in our political culture. Perhaps the clearest and most harmful example was the way in which the anti war view was marginalized, even suppressed in the run up to the attack on Iraq, because the leadership of both parties supported the war and the anti war position was thus inherently the province of the crazies. That's what happens to any views not endorsed by either of the two parties, if I may share a memory of my own. In 2008, some of you will remember that Dr. Paul held in the Twin Cities where the GOP convention was being held, in one of the Twin cities, I think, St. Paul, and then in Minneapolis, the other of the Twin Cities, Dr. Paul simultaneously held his rally for the Republic. And I spoke there. And part of what I had to say in my speech, I made reference to the so called Austrian theory of the business cycle, which is something Dr. Paul believes in and thinks it helps to account for why the economy moves in this sort of sine curve way of up and down and up and down. And it has to do with central banks manipulating interest rates and thereby sending throughout the economy the wrong signals to everybody. I don't mean to use the signal's not the right word, but interest rates are used by entrepreneurs everywhere to decide on what investments make sense, the time horizon for an investment that would make sense in particular conditions. And if you interfere with them, as if you were to interfere with any other kind of price, you would expect there would be disruption, economic disruption. Same thing holds when you interfere with interest rates. Now, there's a lot more that can be said about that. In fact, I said more about it in the Rally for the Republic speech. But Matt Iglesias, you know him, I guess he's an influencer or a guy something, and he commented on my speech without mentioning my name, don't mention, don't mention Woods's name. And he just thought it was kooky because this was right at the time that Dr. Paul had become chairman of a monetary policy subcommittee. And he said, you know, look at it, Ron Paul's event, there's somebody talking about Austrian business cycle theory. And now the guy who hosted that event is becoming chairman of this subcommittee. Oh my gosh, the earth is going to break free of its axis. We get to entertain an idea that does not rest between Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. You know, we actually get to consider alternative ideas. And it so happens fa Hayek won the Nobel Prize for that theory in 1974. Well, anyway, that's an example. We're all kooks because we don't just accept the way things are or they're okay. If we want to make 3% changes, you know, let's, let's change the tax code 3% or you know, modify this or that policy by 2.7%, they're okay with that. But if we say the whole thing stinks and the whole thing is based on dumb Arguments that we've accepted just because they're mainstream. Well, they don't like that. I don't really like that. So why don't we start there talking about Dr. Paul being right about everything. Now, one of the areas in which basically everybody has to hand him some respect here is the housing bubble that began in the years leading up to 2008. And we have a speech from Dr. Paul on the House floor in July 2001 in which he said, you know what the Federal Reserve is doing? We're having the unwinding of the dot com boom which has turned into the dot com bust. And what they're doing with their interventions is instead of letting the economy readjust after it was taken on this crazy ride during the dot com boom, instead of letting it adjust and figure out where resources and labor and money need to go. No, the Fed wants to intervene. Intervene and in effect throw energy drinks at it. Just keep it going, keep it going, keep it going. And that's not what the economy needs. The economy needs to adjust. It needs to figure out what's really profitable as opposed to what's profitable. If the Fed keeps pumping money into the economy, well, you know, almost anything's profitable. Then let's try to figure out what the really profitable things are. Let's get resources adjusted across the economy so that we can now build on a sound foundation. That's what we want to do. But the Fed can't let that happen. So at a time when, if I may use this analogy, the traffic lights should have been red, the Fed made them all green. And there were particular incentives to get into housing at this time. And I talk all about this in my book meltdown from 2009. Dr. Paul wrote the foreword to that. But we had this housing boom that Dr. Paul on the house floor said was happening. He said, this is what the Fed is doing. They're replacing the dot com bubble with a real estate bubble and it's gonna burst the way all bubbles burst now at the time, you know, nobody credits that, but they should have. If they'd been paying attention, they would have known something is screwy about the economy right now. That recession, that dot com bust, that was the first recession we have in recorded history in the US in which housing starts did not decline. Typically, housing starts decline during a recession. This was the first time housing starts actually went up. Something was fishy here. Well, it was the housing bubble. And Dr. Paul called it right then. And then in 2002, we can find him saying the artificially low interest Rates will lead to another bubble, that this time it will be in housing and ho, ho, ho, ho, what does he know? People just ignore him. And you may remember Herman Cain, who was an opponent of Dr. Paul in one of the GOP primaries and the week before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The GSEs, the government sponsored enterprises which were supposed to prop up housing a week before they had to go into conservatorship at the hands of the federal government because they were such a mess. One week before that canary in the coal mine hit, Herman Cain was saying there's nothing wrong with the economy. Anybody saying there's something wrong with the economy is just a liberal who doesn't like George W. Bush. That was pretty mainstream among Republicans at that time. That's how clueless they were. None of them saw this coming. None of them could even understand the narrative by which this would be coming because none of them have studied how many of these people have studied Ludwig von Mises. Now, Ronald Reagan knew who Ludwig von Mises was and he wrote a beautiful letter to Margaret von Mises that you can read. He was an admirer of Mises. He wasn't the world's greatest genius, but at least he was familiar with the basic names of his own movement. Whereas if you ask somebody like Sean Hannity or, I don't know, just pick any who would have been a senator back at the time. Dr. Paul was wrong. I'm trying to think, who is that socially conservative senator? It's on the tip of my tongue. Everybody's gonna be screaming it at me and I can't think of his name. I think he did really well in Iowa. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Cannot think of his name. Rick Santorum. That's his name. Doggone it. I mean, none of these people have even heard of Ludwig von Mises. They may have heard of Hayek. They don't exactly know why they think they might have heard of Hayek. But Dr. Paul read these people, so he understands the step by step process by which mal investment occurs. The economy gets put on an unsustainable trajectory and eventually a lot of this stuff has to be liquidated and the economy has to reassert itself. The real economy, not the pumped up economy that's made possible by the Federal Reserve. The real economy producing real goods and services that real people actually do demand and that can be created given the existing stock of resources we have. So that's a big, big, big one. Nobody else saw that coming. Dr. Paul saw it coming very similar to that was Dr. Paul predicted again as early as 2001 but then continue to predict it. We have more stuff he had to say in 2003 and other times he talked about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and these were, this was like a public private partnership that was supposed to help make homeownership more widely available. But because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a special line of credit with the U.S. treasury, it was limited but everybody knew if it ever came to that it would be an unlimited supply of credit from the U.S. treasury, which is exactly what happened. And Dr. Paul said what happens now is if you have institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that have special privileges from the US treasury, they can borrow more cheaply because everybody knows that they're basically riskless because they basically have the US treasury backing them up. That's what everybody basically understood. And that's in fact what happened when push came to shove. So Dr. Paul warned about that in 2001, that that's going to happen, that these institutions are going to get big and bloated and they're going to become riskier and riskier because of the moral hazard that everybody knows that losses will be picked up by the taxpayer. So don't worry about it, just go nuts. And that's exactly what happened. And Dr. Paul said if housing prices fall the government sponsored enterprises will be in serious trouble. And in fact that's exactly what happened. Both of these entities were placed into federal conservatorship. So he identified systemic fragility years before the collapse gang. I just spent five days in the Virgin Islands with my mastermind and Matthew Sersley and I stayed at the same house together. He makes a mean breakfast taco in the morning. And I'm telling you if you're a business owner or you're a high W2 earner paying at least 40k a year in taxes, Matthew is someone you need to meet. He is a brilliant tax attorney and he loathes the IRS as much as you do. And he's one of us. He's been on my cruise, my murder mystery parties. I just spent days and days with him at my Mastermind. He listens to the Tom Wood Show. You don't have to explain or justify yourself to Matthew Cersley and your conversations with him are protected by attorney client privilege because he's a tax attorney, not a cpa. So if you're running a business or doing a side hustle, you're flipping real estate or you just don't like handing over half your paycheck to evil sociopaths. The great Mr. Sersley helps you stay smart, compliant and and legally minimize what you pay the IRS. So your next step? Go to www.agoristtaxadvice.com woods that's a G O R I S T taxadvice.com woods and grab your free Agorist Tax toolkit. It's full of powerful tools and templates you can use to get your business in order, track your expenses and reduce how much the IRS takes from you. Without crossing any lines, we talk about taxation being theft time we acted like it. Get in contact with the Great Matthew Sersali. Agoristaxadvice.com woods another area where people are inclined, if they're being fair, to give Dr. Paul some credit was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. We were being told this would be a quick victory, limited cost, democratic transformation of the Middle east and Dr. Paul said no. He said a preemptive war against Iraq will not likely be a short, pleasant undertaking. It's going to increase anti American resentment, going to destabilize the region. Well, what actually happened? It went on for years and years and years, cost trillions of dollars, triggered insurgency and sectarian conflict which we were told would not happen. So Let me contrast Dr. Paul with somebody else in particular. Bill Kristol. K R I S T O L Not Billy Crystal the comedian, but Bill Crystal. I don't know what Billy Crystal's opinion of this was, but it couldn't have been as bad as Bill Crystal's opinion. Bill Kristol was the son of Irving Crystal, one of the original neoconservatives. He's much smarter than his son. Son is a profound disappointment. And his son was the editor of the now defunct Weekly Standard magazine, which was a neocon magazine. And despite being wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, he still would make appearances all over cable news programs. It just didn't matter how wrong he was. For some reason made no difference. They would keep featuring him. It's one of the liberating things about the Internet is that people now can find people who are right about things. You can actually watch people talk who have been right about things. You could not do that before. They would invite on people who had just been as wrong as wrong can be. So when we go through what somebody like a Bill Kristol had to say, we can appreciate even more what Ron Paul had to say. So Kristol assured everybody the war would be short. He said, I think this will be a two month war. Not an eight year war. And he said we have overwhelming military superiority. I think the idea this is going to be a long drawn out war is mistaken. All right. Well, he made that statement shortly after the invasion began. The the war formally lasted from 2003 until the withdrawal of US combat troops in 2011 and then renewed military involvement beginning in 2014. So that wasn't quite right. And Dr. Paul predicted that it would not be short. So Crystal, you know, Ron Paul won. Crystal, zero. Then Iraq would not descend into chaos, said Kristol. Ron Paul said that the invasion could, quote, lead to chaos and civil strife. Kristol rejected this. He said on this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there's been a certain amount of frankly. And then he's, this is all. He's speaking to somebody. So he interrupts himself and he says it's assumed that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. He says there's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular. Or this one, March 1, 2003. Crystal says we talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they've never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis and a lot of them live perfectly well together. He went on to say, we will be greeted as liberators. Now we associate that with several people. We associate that with Donald Rumsfeld is one of them. But he felt the same way. Crystal felt the same way. And he said, look, if we free the people of Iraq, we will be respected in the Arab world and I think we will be respected around the world for helping the people of Iraq to be liberated. Okay, this is obviously all. Every bit of that is fantasy talk. Every single bit of that. Then there would be a big democratic domino effect in the Middle East. It would transform the Middle east to go into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein. That was central to the neoconservative strategic case. Also the financial cost, said Kristol, would be manageable. He says we're not talking about a hundred billion dollar war. He says that the war is not going to require massive long term expenditures. Well, how'd that go? Where'd the long term costs go? Well, including interest, including veterans care. The cost ran into the trillions and Crystal was saying it's not even going to reach 100 billion. You would think that would be enough to make a person retire out of shame and just stop talking. But we're not dealing with a normal person. Here, then the insurgency would not be sustained. I think the predictions of a quagmire are overblown. By 2004-2006, however, a sustained insurgency had developed, followed by the exact sectarian civil conflict that Kristol had assured us could not occur. And then, of course, he says that the war will enhance the US Strategic position. He said that it would improve the US Position in the war on terror. But other people, looking back on the consequences of the war, said, well, for those people who care about such things, the war ended up strengthening the regional influence of Iran, which these very same people claim to care about. But as with all their foreign policy for decades and decades and decades, it's always, well, let's smash this thing and then see what happens. Okay, well, now they found out also contributed to the rise of isis. They're supposed to care about stuff like that. They can't think beyond just one thing. They're like the COVID people. Everything's Covid. Shouldn't think about anything else. Even though there are collateral damages going on that are far worse all around us, but we don't bother to look at them. Then there's the blowback argument. I remember Dr. Paul saying in that early GOP presidential debate that the US winds up being hated and being in conflicts because of things it keeps doing, the US Government keeps doing. Now, nobody wants to believe that because they want to think, well, what we're dealing with is just plain evil, and they would attack anybody. And so, yeah, okay, but they don't, is the thing. Not really. Not really. And in particular, the United States used to have an excellent reputation in the Middle East. One of the arguments that these people who dislike the emphasis on blowback don't want to hear is that the United States had an excellent reputation in the Middle east until the late 40s, until it began more and more to side with Israel, and then it acquired all of Israel's enemies. But for example, after World War I, the King Crane Commission found that Syria and other areas from the former Ottoman Empire wanted to be governed as League of Nations mandates by the United States. Could you imagine that today? Impossible. Obviously, all that goodwill has been destroyed. So that's exactly what Dr. Paul was talking about. That that will happen. And of course it did that. You do things, and they. They often have consequences. People respond to the things you do. We have also the issue of the Patriot Act. Now, the Patriot act at the time it was passed was very popular and certainly politically very popular. It passed overwhelmingly. It was supposed to be necessary for national security. But Dr. Paul says it will not provide more security. It will only erode liberty. And he warned that emergency powers have a tendency to become permanent beyond the emergency. Or what more typically happens is they just declare the emergency to be ongoing permanently. The emergency is never declared over. So all the emergency measures can just persist indefinitely into the future. Well, we have the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden in which he exposed mass data collection. And so Dr. Paul foresaw that we would come to normalize expanded surveillance authority. And of course, that has been and will be misused. Let's see, am I about halfway? I'm almost halfway done. So let me take a quick pause and tell people. As a reminder, I host murder mystery dinner parties around the country for my listeners because it's a very unusual thing and nobody else does it. And they're a lot of fun. They're a wonderful evening out with like minded people in your area. And if you live in or don't mind traveling to Philadelphia or Denver, I'm having parties there this year. Coming up May 20th for Philadelphia and October 9th for Denver. They're a ton of fun and I hope you'll join me for one of them. It's kind of an off the wall thing to do, so why not give it a shot? You don't need to know anything about how these parties work. Everything's explained to you that night. There are no cheeseball actors. This is not like a dinner theater. We are the suspects and we together are going to try to crack the case. So check out the details on those events@woodsmystery.com all right, let's say a little bit more about the money because Dr. Paul emphasizes money quite a bit and that it's the monetary system that is the explanation for why it is that you find prices going up. It is not an inherent feature of a market economy that prices just go up. When I was a kid, I just thought that's how it worked. Prices just go up because things get more expensive and so prices go up. But why are things getting more expensive? I never even bothered to ask that. You know, like businesses, their costs go up so they have to raise their prices is the way everybody understands it. But why is it like part of the natural order of things that their costs should go up? Where'd that come from? In fact, prices, when we had the system we're not allowed to talk about because it's crankish and only kooks support it. When we had the, dare I say, gold standard, prices consistently fell. Now today Dum dums tell you that that's a bad thing. If prices fall, that's a bad thing because businesses will go bankrupt. And this, that, and the other thing. It's the role of the entrepreneur to anticipate price movements. So that is not a problem. And I explain all this in my book, Meltdown. I have some episodes on deflation. That is nothing to worry about. There's nothing to worry about. The people who want to impose inflation on you by saying the Federal Reserve should have a 2% inflation target every year. You know what happens in a generation with a 2% inflation target? You lose a third of your savings, 30% to a third of your savings. But that's their target. That's what they're aiming for. That's the best case scenario is they want 2% inflation every year. So these are the kind of people, yeah, of course they're gonna tell you that falling prices is a bad thing because they want to acclimate you to rising prices. But there is no reason, though, you should not want falling prices. Every argument that's made against falling prices is made by an enemy of mankind and is made by a dope who probably read it in some textbook written by another dope. When you look at how many economists at one time or another have been indirectly or directly funded by the Federal Reserve, it's unbelievable. You think, woods, that sounds like a conspiracy theory. Look into it. Look at the economics journals. Look at how much of monetary policy and monetary theory, academic work in one way or another is connected to the Fed. It's ridiculous. I mean, it is right out in the open for anybody looking at it. But we've all been conditioned to think that anybody who talks about money is automatically a crank. Well, anyway, it is monetary inflation that causes the rise in prices. And yet, just the other day, I think it was BuzzFeed. I was reading some article about things that people are having trouble affording, and the woman who. I think it's a woman who wrote the article was saying that, yeah, you know, greedy corporations just have a way of doing this. I mean, come on, are we still gonna believe this? Greedy corporations, the people who are actually causing the rising prices, are laughing their asses off at people who blame it on greedy corporations. Why weren't they greedy three weeks ago? You know, or when some things go way up in price, they're greedy then, but then the price falls. And what, they're not greedy anymore? Like, what the. I mean, what kind of a child could be satisfied with that explanation? Some prices rise because let's say there's a sudden supply shock, you know, let's say there's an earthquake and it destroys a lot of lumber or something. So lumber prices go up. That explains that one thing. But if I have to spend more money on lumber now, I have less money to spend on everything else. And so that would put a very gentle downward pressure on the prices of everything else. And so it would be a wash overall. How could you sustain high prices in everything? You know, if the price of gas goes up and I have to buy gas to get to work, I spend more money on gas. That means I have less money to spend on other things. So I have less money to support high prices in other things. How could we have high prices in everything simultaneously? What is sustaining that if not a consistent increase in money and credit in the economy? And what institution can do that? What big corporation can do that? You know, it's not Apple Computer, it's the Federal Reserve System, the institution that you're a crank if you talk about. But on the other hand, if you were pulling a massive scam on the public and you had an institution that created all kinds of crazy instability in the economy, but of course you want to portray yourself as the source of stability. You don't want to go back to the 19th century, do you? Okay, get my free book our enemy the Fed at our enemy the fed.com and that will help answer the. Well, what about, I mean, it's way better now than it used to be. I answer all that stuff our enemy the fed dot com. Anyway, if you were pulling a scam like this on the American public, you would want the situation to be that if anybody talks about you, that person's probably a nut. You know, look everybody, that person's a nut. That person doesn't know that the Fed, which was created when a bunch of wealthy bankers met under assumed names at a secret meeting in Jekyll Island, Georgia and more or less drafted the legislation that created the Fed. Those people were just out there to support the well being of you and me, right? Doesn't that sound like people who gathered together to fight for the common man? But that's what progressives are forced to believe because they believe in the establishment. You know, the progressives. It is bizarre how establishment friendly they are. But if there's an established existing authority, they support it. Forget about question authority like they used to say in the 60s. They never believed that they're not gonna question the Fed. Well, it says right here in my textbook that it creates stability for the economy. I know it says. I know it's tragic that it says that in your textbook, but once in a while, you gotta have. I don't know, you gotta have an open enough brain to think beyond dumb slogans in a textbook, especially when they obviously bear zero connection to reality. All right? And of course, we have seen substantial increase in prices, and people are waiting for those to go back down. They're not gonna go back down. This is the new normal now. Because of what they've done, they'll go back down. If I were in charge of the Fed, I'll tell you that. But don't believe I'm in the running. Hey, everybody. Insurance is supposed to make you feel secure, but you know what? Ours didn't. When Our Premium hit $3,000 per month for a health insurance policy that didn't even include my wife, the woods family stopped playing the rigged insurance game. And I invite you to join us by joining CrowdHealth, a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly. No middlemen, no networks, no nonsense. A lot of people advertise for crowd health. The woods family uses it and loves it. We're talking healthcare for under $100. You get access to a team of health bill negotiators, low cost prescription and lab testing tools, as well as a database of low cost, high quality doctors vetted by crowd health. Something major happens. You pay the first $500. Then the crowd steps in to help fund the rest. And of course, you'll join that crowd, a group of members just like you who want to help pay for each other's unexpected medical events. The system is betting and hoping you'll stay stuck in the same overpriced, overcomplicated mess. Well, this is your liberation year. This year, take your power back. Join crowd health to get started today for $99 a month for your first three months, using code woods@joincrowdhealth.com that's joincrowdhealth.com Code Woods Crowd health is not insurance. Opt out. Take your power back. This is how we win. Join CrowdHealth.com code woods friends, we're living through historic deficits, persistent inflation, and a Federal Reserve that can't unwind what it's created. That's why gold is back in the spotlight. Not as a trade, but as real money. But here's the problem. Most gold just sits in a vault. It protects purchasing power, sure, but it doesn't generate income. Monetary metals changes that. They let you earn a yield on gold paid in gold. I lease My gold through monetary metals and earn a return of around 4% annually paid in physical ounces. I keep my gold and I get more gold over time. That means I benefit from rising gold prices and I grow my holdings in ounces. No paper promises, no fiat payouts. Gold becomes a productive yield bearing asset again. I like earning income from doing things that I was going to do anyway. I'm going to own gold anyway. Might as well generate an income from it. The Fed can print dollars, they can't print gold. Learn more@monical metals.com woods and see how you can start earning a gold income. All right, how about, how about Afghanistan? Now Afghanistan is supposed to be the good war, right? The Iraq war. Everybody kind of admits, yeah, I guess we probably shouldn't have done that. That was probably a mistake. But, but Afghanistan, you think? Well, I mean, you know, Osama bin Laden and caves and Al Qaeda training camps and whatever. I mean that was the, that was a good war. All right, well Dr. Paul said it's quote, it is much easier to get into a war than to get out. Well, how about that? The war In Afghanistan lasted 20 years and ended as you know, dear listener, with the Taliban regaining control. So let's look back. What was Dr. Paul telling us at that time? In November 2001, in a speech on the House floor, Dr. Paul warned that if you just declare war on terrorism, which is an abstract tactic rather than a specific enemy, that's a critique a lot of people made that would make the conflict, in his words, elusive and ever enlarging. And it could potentially wind up targeting who knows how many more countries and unnecessarily prolonging it. Well, what ended up happening? It did exactly that. It enabled operations in multiple countries beyond Afghanistan and sustained the longest war in US history with no definitive victory. Dr. Paul said that the mission is going to shift from targeting Al Qaeda to which he favored, using letters of mark and reprisal to just go after the individuals involved. He said it's going to turn into nation building, futile nation building. In fact, early on, already in 2001, Dr. Paul was telling us that the US was already diverting from pursuing the actual perpetrators to as he said, building a pro western UN sanctioned government in, in Afghanistan driven by murky motives, potentially including oil interests. And he said this is going to provoke resentment and it's going to fail. Ten years later, 2011, he said that efforts to change Afghanistan were fruitless and beyond the moral or constitutional authority of the US government. So how'd that end up going? Well, Trillions of dollars were spent on rebuilding institutions, on training more than 300,000 Afghan forces, and promoting democracy, only for the government to collapse within weeks of the withdrawal. In 2021, we all saw this happen, with the Taliban regaining control as if the intervention never occurred. Then Dr. Paul said in 2011 that the war would drag on for decades without clear success. So he said, if we don't leave Afghanistan, we. We'll be there for another decade. Okay, so it's a. A decade we'll be there for another decade would be my prediction. He said the whole thing is fruitless and we should withdraw. Well, how'd that turn out? Well, from 2011, when Dr. Paul said that US forces remained for exactly one more decade until the 2021 withdrawal, the war ended in chaos with no stable outcome, and the Taliban stronger than before. Now, think about the words Dr. Paul used. Fruitless, all the words he used to describe this venture, and ask yourself, how could a person be more vindicated than that? How could you be more vindicated than that? Not to mention the occupation radicalized segments of the population, which helped to contribute to the resurgence of the Taliban. And there's a huge debt burden that the United States bears. And as a result of that, Dr. Paul warned about that quite a bit. Dr. Paul frequently referred to the graveyard of empires reputation of Afghanistan. Of course, there were British failure, Soviet failure, and he said that no foreign power can conquer or remake it, and so we ought to just march out. Well, so again, what happened? The U.S. like the British, like the Soviets, failed to impose lasting control. So the withdrawal in 2021 showed how hollow that Afghan regime was, the military and the government. Because as soon as the US Withdraws, it's a humiliating US Exit and a swift Taliban victory. Okay, well, again, how much more can one guy do? Then, of course, Dr. Paul has been warning over and over about the debt. Now, that's not very fashionable. Nobody really cares. They feel like I don't really feel the consequences of the debt. And a lot of people have been warning about the debt for a long time. Nothing seems to happen. And I don't want to cut any spending, which is how almost everybody feels. Nobody wants to cut spending. I mean, nobody. Conservatives say they want. They don't want to cut spending. Be real. Let's be realistic here. Nobody wants to cut spending. Unfortunately, that's the one thing that would fit, you know, might be able to fix the problem. So Dr. Paul warned that the interest on the national debt would get to a point where it would start crowding everything else out now, today, the debt exceed, you know, we know it's 30 something trillion dollars. And the interest payments on the debt now, rival military spending now, okay, Donald Trump wants to spend a huge amount more so that maybe now that statistic doesn't quite work anymore. But that's not how we want that statistic to not work anymore. We want the debt and therefore the interest to go down. But that is a major, major problem he's been talking about forever. And we could have listened to him and been adults and tried to deal with this when it would have been easier to deal with. And now here we are. And also Dr. Paul told us that emergency powers like, so we talked about the Patriot act, but also we've got the tsa, we've got Homeland Security. When the government assumes emergency powers, it rarely relinquishes them. That's what he said. Well, decades later, where are we? We have the expanded Homeland Security and surveillance frameworks whose track records are not very good if you look them up. In terms of what have they prevented from happening, how much money have they spent? It's a racket. The whole thing's a racket. So here we have Dr. Paul, who stood to gain nothing by saying any of these things, right? If he had, if he had just shut his mouth, particularly about foreign policy, particularly about foreign policy. If he just shut his mouth, he could have been the most popular guy in the party, among the grassroots. He could have been the most popular guy because he had the best voting record you have ever seen. You have ever seen. That's why he kept winning the Taxpayer's Best Friend Award, had the best record you've ever seen. But he felt like, I have to tell the truth, even if it's not what people want me to say, I have to say it. I have to explain, first of all to conservatives that the least conservative thing on earth is this insane foreign policy. I mean, this sounds like it was invented by a French revolutionary leftist. This is not conservative. And you've been snookered by not very smart people like, I'm sorry to keep picking on Sean Hannity, but I say not very smart. A certain name pops into my head. I can't help it. Dr. Paul could have been the biggest star in the world if he had just said what they wanted him to say. But he couldn't live with himself. And he is a truth teller and he had to tell the truth. And the result of that, now, I know a lot of people say, how many bills did he pass? I don't know how Many bills. Rick Santorum got passed in the U.S. senate, you know, but I couldn't even remember his name. And I used to write about this stuff, you know, semi for a living. I couldn't even remember his name. I bet some of you had forgotten about him until I mentioned him in this episode. And still others of you never heard of him before. He was a US Senator. Maybe he passed a bill. I don't know. It was probably dumb. Whatever it was, as most of these things are, nobody remembers Rick Santorum. Nobody's going to say, I better read that Rick Santorum book 50 years from now. I don't know if Rick Santorum has a book. I think he might, but it probably was in the remainder bin, and then that's the end of it. Whereas Dr. Paul not only writes books, but he recommends them to people. He recommends big, big, big, complicated books like Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. And young people set out to read those books because they believed. This guy's telling me the truth. No, he's not polished, and he doesn't speak in slogans, and he's not repeating to me words that he got from a focus group. But believe it or not, that's why I like him, you know? See, I don't want somebody who sounds like a plastic man. I want a real person who's going to tell me the truth. And this guy seems like he's telling me the truth. He doesn't seem rehearsed. He doesn't seem like he memorized something that he keeps saying to me over and over. He seems like a real guy. And so the things that he said and wrote and recommended will be listened to and read for many, many years to come. Like, people can listen with profit to a Ron Paul speech today because it's not just the same old bunch of 17 slogans that somebody memorized from a focus group. You listen to some of these speeches, and they are extraordinarily prophetic. And when he stood on that, it doesn't even matter if you agreed with him. It doesn't matter if you agreed with him when he stood on that debate stage and said that the US Is gonna get attacked if it insists on being a global empire. And if you're willing to accept that price of empire, that's one thing. But you owe it to the American public to be frank with them and tell them that this is the risk you run by playing Empire and by acting like war is a cool video game that you can cheer on from the comfort of your home while other people are dying. We need to be honest and frank with the American public. And we also need the American public to understand that this foreign policy was put together by Democrats and Republicans together. There's a reason it's called the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. It's not like if you support the military, you're being conservative. Yeah, okay, sure. This foreign policy has nothing to do with you and your well being at all. Nothing. Nothing. It only harms you. It only harms you in multiple ways. He said these things, and at the time that first, I don't know if it was the first, but it was one of the first of the 2007 GOP presidential debates took place. Either the first or the second one, I can't remember, that was when Dr. Paul gave his famous blowback remarks that the US is going to be attacked in response to things that its government does. Notice I don't say things we do. There's no we involved in this. You and I have nothing to do with what the US government is doing around the world. It's what they're doing, not we. We never say we. That's ridiculous. I do not identify with this regime. But he was saying that that's going to happen and that's completely predictable. Like any dolt could predict that that's what's going to happen. And at the time he stepped off that stage, he believed based on the, the boos he was getting from the chumps sitting in the seats at that thing that, you know, he had lost the debate and in terms of public opinion, so he left a little bit discouraged. But his view was, well, I gotta tell the truth. This is not about making me into a superstar. I have to tell the truth. In fact, if anything, he was almost humble to a fault. You would never hear Dr. Paul say, as president, I, he never even spoke that way. That just sounds arrogant and dumb and he just wouldn't speak that way. But anyway, it turns out that he reached a huge number of people who had become apathetic, who would look at the kinds of debates that existed in the US and think, this is too dumb for me even to get involved in. And now suddenly you have this man who stands up against the entire studio audience and for all he knows, the whole country, for all he knows, given the response he's getting, and says, no, sorry, what they're telling you is a cartoon and it's an insult to your intelligence. And the response was, suddenly he created a movement, a movement. That presidential campaign. There was a tax forum held in Iowa that was put on by two Iowan conservative groups. And they invited all the presidential candidates to this tax forum except Dr. Paul, who had the best record on taxes of anyone in the history of the United States. Why didn't they invite Dr. Paul? Well, you can speculate on that, but so Dr. Paul's people decided, well, what if we hold our own tax form right across the hall from this tax form and we'll have just one candidate? And I was there. And they had as many people. They had as many people at Dr. Paul's thing as the event for all the other candidates put together. So he created something like he woke people up. He changed the lives of an enormous number of people who now think and act differently from how they did before. So he will be remembered and his cause will be remembered. And he's made it possible for what we might call the right wing to say, I'm anti war, because all these wars are counterproductive and dumb and expensive and do an enormous amount of damage, not only to ourselves and to our own troops, but also, believe it or not, you are allowed to think it's a bad thing for foreigners to die, too. You know, you're allowed to think that you don't have to be a dehumanized peon of the empire. This is a man who said, peace and prosperity and sound money. This is what we need. Not dumb neocon propaganda that would insult a third grader. What we need is, in effect, we need to do a reset. We need to do a great reset, but a good kind. A good kind. We have to start over because we've gone down so many bad roads. We gotta start going down some good roads. He inspired people. Nobody ever said, my life was changed forever when I discovered the philosophy of Mitt Romney. But people did change, and opinions now suddenly became allowable that had not been allowable. The Federal Reserve is under scrutiny now that it was never under before. The foreign policy establishment is under scrutiny that it was never under before. That the official narratives behind everything, behind the Homeland Security apparatus, behind every official thing that we hear from these people, is under more scrutiny than ever. And a huge portion of the thanks for all that goes to Dr. Paul. So thank you, Dr. Paul. Thank you for being right about everything. And thank you for being a beacon of truth and honesty and decency for all of us to follow. So I hope you enjoyed this. I got a whole bunch of free books on forbidden topics that are all Ron Paulian in nature. You can get them all@tomsfreebooks.com that's where you can also find our enemy, the fed. Check out tomsfreebooks.com you can get one of them, you can get all of them. Whatever you want to do, there's a whole bunch of them there. And of course, join me for what is probably going to be the very last cruise I host for a long, long time. Join me for the Tom woods cruise sailing this year in August. My little son, only two months old, little Henry woods is going to be one of our special guests as will Scott Horton and Clint Russell. So I hope you'll head right over to tomwoodscruise.com and sign up so I can see you on board. Thanks for listening, everybody.