And then you talk to young people and they look into twenty trillion in debt, ten times that in unfunded liabilities, depending on how you count. Maybe two hundred trillion total. Totally unpayable, a crumbling infrastructure, no corporate loyalty, no political loyalty because our jobs have just been sent all over the world and all of those sorts of things. So the young people might say they have nothing to gain by preserving the status quo. That feels like a generational storm, like there’s two parties here. Is that a fair way to look at it? And if so, how do we begin bridging that gap?

Dr. Paul: Well, we have to be realistic because we’re not going to make a decision saying we should change the status quo. The status quo is going to be changed because of the bankruptcy and the unaffordability of what they have. But while you were talking about that it reminded me of a story. Pretty early on in my career, because my message is all the same – that we spend too much money on the problem and I’m not even going to vote for large debt for our District which I thought would make sure that I never go back into office, but to my surprise and others, people kept electing me. And I ran into a guy that says, he says, you know Ron, he says, I don’t like what you do. He was in city government. He says, because you won’t vote for anything, and that really annoys me. But he says, I want to tell you something. He says, I agree with everything you say, and the reason I argue the case – he said, what we have to do as individuals and constituents is to get as much as we can before this whole thing comes down. And I think I know what he as alluding to.

People say yeah, this is a great system, status quo is going to give me Social Security. Yeah, if it lasts and how long will it last and right now we’re up against a wall. There’s not enough people paying into it. There’s a lot of inflation coming, and the standard of living will go down., And his argument was get what you get while it’s coming. But, of course, my argument is I know what we have to do – is invest in the protection of liberty, making the argument that if all of us lost every single thing in a material way and we had to start from scratch, but we had our liberties and some money and property rights and contracts, no more wars, protection of civil liberties - I think the country and all the individuals would be back on their feet very, very quickly. Of course, that’s not acceptable now because nobody can cut anything.

That’s why Washington is at a stalemate. A lot of people don’t like Obamacare, but there’s enough people who do like it, and they think they’re going to get free medical care, and if they don’t think it’s working well then, we have one payer system and that sort of thing. So it’s very hard to get rid of a program. And I’m also suggesting that the tax reforms will not lower taxes. They never do because they believe in this revenue neutral - if we cut your taxes we have to raise the taxes on somebody else. And they won’t say where the real problem is – and that is spending and monetizing the debt and taking over the whole world through the monetary system, financing the wars and financing welfare and the military industrial complex and yes, I can preach the gospel and say why we shouldn’t do it. It’s going to continue until this whole thing comes apart. That’s when our efforts, including what you do in trying to spread the message, how successful we are in preparing people to argue the case for return to liberty. And not only just the return to the old days when liberty was respected, but to advance the whole understanding of liberty.

Liberty is better understood now than it was at the time our country was founded. Monetary policy is better understood and markets are better understood and globalism in a very favorable sense. Free trade and free travel and this sort of thing, that’s better understood, too. So I think that we’re going to have a wonderful opportunity because we’re not going to have to crash the system. The system will crash itself just like communism crashed itself. We never – I keep marveling over this – I was in the military in the 60s and the Cold War was on. I was drafted during the Cuban crisis. We never had to fight the Soviets. The Soviets defeated themselves, and that’s what we’re on the verge of doing. This system that we have today is not as ruthless as communism or fascism, but it’s very, very destructive, and so we have a tremendous chance to move the cause of liberty forward rather than just drifting and accepting more totalitarianism.

Chris: Well, I agree and very well said. So I want to turn to one aspect of that. You mentioned a couple of times that when this comes to an end – I’d love to get your views on what you think that end looks like, but for me, my beginning and ending point for economic discussions really starts with monetary policy because we make money out of nothing. And we started on this crazy experiment late 70s, early 80s, which ran like this: we’re going to borrow money at twice the rate on a percentage basis as our economy was growing. So, we’re borrowing at eight percent, economy is growing at four percent, and that’s just a math problem. Nothing personal.

So this was enabled by a very interventionist, increasingly interventionist Federal Reserve. Love to get you thoughts as somebody who sat on the committees. You asked the best questions, by the way. So monetary policy – arguably the nearly ten-year monetary intervention – most recent one – by the world central banks has created just two things: a massive financial bubble and the largest wealth gap on record. What are your thoughts here?

Dr. Paul: And debt – went into debt. It proves one point, and the most important point is wealth doesn’t come from the creation of money, especially a fiat system. And fiat money and all this credit - finally the economy gets exhausted and it’s engulfed with debt. And now investments. And so when you have a downturn like we had, and we really haven’t recovered from it, that the treatment for this is a correction. You have to allow the debt to be liquidated. You have to get rid of the mal-investment and you have and to start all over again for economic growth. But that wasn’t permissible in ’08 and ’09, and that’s why there’s been stagnation, and that’s why, as we move into the next recession, we’re – what are they going to do this next time? Lower interest rates to minus five percent or something? We have negative interest rates. Real rates are negative, and people still aren’t grabbing them up. It isn’t a shortage of money, it’s a shortage of understanding and market conditions.

We’re overtaxed and overregulated and this is giving us this destructive system, which really has divided the country because there are two groups: those who haven’t recovered and many in the middle class versus those who get richer and very rich because they're on the receiving end of this new money created by the Federal Reserve. The people who get to create the credit get to distribute the credit, and it’s always going to be a situation where it’s unfairly distributed, and it won’t be dependent of productivity. So although conditions, according to the government statistic things are doing somewhat better, we haven’t changed anything. We still have a system where we have encouraged people to borrow money, and debt doesn’t matter, and we’re not going to cut taxes, and we’re not even going to admit that we spend too much money. And we don’t even really emphasize the fact that in Washington they should be talking about how are we going to protect personal liberty and let people take care of themselves? That isn’t even discussed. It’s always how are we going to redistribute wealth? Are we going to take care of everybody? Everybody from the business community to the people who want more food stamps. And it’s failing, and we’re going to see, within the next several years – nobody knows when it’s going to come, but it’s going to come - and then we’ll have to have something to put in its place.