Interview with Congressman Ron Paul With Audio Clip

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Mike Church Interviews Ron Paul

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio & Transcript – “[P]eople are desperate to hear something different, to hear someone who will challenge the status quo.  It isn’t just another Republican challenging the President, but somebody who’s willing to challenge the establishment of big government. – Ron Paul” Listen to a highlight of the interview and read the transcript for the entire interview!

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

(N.B. this post originally appeared on 09/13/2013)

Mike:  Speaking of Rand Paul, on the Dude Maker Hotline now is Rand’s father and candidate for the presidency on the Republican side, Congressman Ron Paul.  Congressman Paul, good to have you back with us.  How are you?

Congressman Paul:  Thank you, Mike.  Good to be with you.

Mike:  Good to hear that you’re still in [technical difficulty].  Congressman Paul, a couple of quick things to get to.  I’m sure you probably are receiving this question an awful lot.  What can you say to people who are proponents, supporters, fans of yours who have been with you maybe going all the way back to 2008, heck maybe back to 1988, that it is your full intention to wage your campaign all the way to the end, which would be the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, or maybe the end, election day 2012?

Congressman Paul:  Well, I think that’s making an absolute prediction of the future, which I can’t do.  All I know is the race is not over.  I entered it to win the race.  I’m not running ahead.  In theory, I can still win it.  I am very much involved.  So I’m not thinking about one month or two or three from now; I’m thinking about this particular week, going to Connecticut and New York and Pennsylvania and then back to Texas.  That’s what I’m concentrating on and we’re getting good news out of the various states on delegate counts.  There’s no reason to make the decision of exactly when the campaign ends.  Surprises may come along.  As long as we’re doing well, as long as the support is there, as long as somebody will come out and hear a message and as long as there’s money in the campaign, the campaign is going to continue with a serious attempt to do our very best to win the race.

Want to hear more on Mike’s 16 interviews with Congressman Paul? Click Here and for my exclusive video interview click here to begin.

Mike:  Your rallies seem to be building in size.  Recently out in Los Angeles, you spoke to a crowd of almost 4,000.  You went north to Berkeley, California and spoke to a crowd of almost 6,000.  It seems that the crowds are getting larger and larger.  In Fort Worth, Texas last week, you spoke to a crowd of 4,000.  Your crowds are getting larger and larger, or at least they’re staying the same size and the arenas are growing larger.  Yet it seems that the term “candidate Ron Paul” is not out there in the public as much as you would think.  Do you have any comment on that?  What is it that you think is driving the attendance being so well for your campaign stops?

Congressman Paul:  I think people are desperate to hear something different, to hear someone who will challenge the status quo.  It isn’t just another Republican challenging the President, but somebody who’s willing to challenge the establishment of big government, whether it’s Republican or Democrat.  I think young people are very independent-minded.  They don’t have firmly fixed views and they’re willing to listen to a different approach.  Of course, there are so many independents who are independent for good reasons.  Their numbers are growing by leaps and bounds.  There’s a lot of disgruntled Democrats right now.
If everybody that comes to the rallies, which there are so many and the numbers, as you say, are growing, they’re not quite into the Republican camp.  A lot of them don’t look like they’ll end up as a Republican primary voter.  I keep remarking, when I walk through an airport or meet somebody spontaneously in a crowd, they don’t look like Republicans.  They look like they’re very independent or Democrat.  That is discouraging in the immediate effect of if they’d only vote in the Republican primary, it would be so different.

I think the ignoring is not an accident.  I think it’s a message where we’re not just challenging the power structure of the Democratic Party, it’s the Republican Party, too, the financial institutions, the Federal Reserve, the banks, the military-industrial complex.  It’s on and on.  So those who have money are very interested in not hearing an alternative message and therefore they keep saying, “Where’s Ron Paul?”  The real question is where’s the media?  Why don’t they give fair and decent coverage to something that, from my viewpoint and the viewpoint of the supporters, deserves a little bit more attention than we get?

Mike:  I would concur with you on that.  Where’s the media?  Congressman Ron Paul is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  Here’s a question that several people had agreed that I should ask you, so I thought I’d give it the try.  Would you like to have one more shot at debating Governor Romney, one on one, Ron Paul-Mitt Romney?  What do you think?

Congressman Paul:  I think it would be a lot of fun.  I think it would bring out the differences.  I think it would be issue oriented, because most people accuse me of being too friendly with Mitt Romney.  Personally, we do get along together, but I also do add that philosophically, there’s not a whole lot we agree on when it comes to foreign policy or the Federal Reserve or spending, maybe on taxes.  But a debate on the finer points for the Republican Party, I think it would be very, very interesting and why I think the Republican Party is going to have trouble unless they change their views.  A lot of people would agree that it’s not going to be a slam dunk for Romney or any other Republican candidate unless they have different views and maybe challenge Obama, his base as well as for the independent vote.

Mike:  At a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, I believe, Governor Romney was allegedly overheard by an NBC news reporter that he said, and I’m quoting from the story, “Things like housing and urban development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later.”  That’s in quotation marks.  Is that your conversation with Governor Romney coming out in the Romney campaign or is he just waking up?

Congressman Paul:  I wonder what he’s talking about.  You mean on purpose or will it self-destruct?  Is he indicating he wants to get rid of it?  Is that it?

Mike:  That’s what he’s inferring, I guess.

Congressman Paul:  I think some of these programs won’t be around, just like people can argue that Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security might not be around.  It won’t be because we worked our way out of it and gradually transition away from a dependency situation on government and taxation.  A lot of this stuff is going to go by the wayside.  The war in Afghanistan is probably going to end, too, but I’m not sure it’s going to be because of wise choices.  It’s more likely to end the way the Soviets ended it.  They had to leave because of financial reasons.

Mike has interviewed Senator Rand Paul on numerous occasions from his early days as a Senator to his famous filibuster, it’s all here at mike church.com

So yes, I think a lot of this stuff is going to end.  I work on this assumption, but I also work on the assumption that if you work your way out of it and have priorities, maybe you won’t have to have chaos.  At the rate we’re going, unless we change, we’re going to see financial chaos, and it won’t be just the United States mimicking Greece.  It’s going to be the United States leading the charge around the world with a financial crisis that is going to be very difficult to handle, and might lead to a lot more political chaos in the world.

Mike:  Congressman Ron Paul, running for the Republican nomination, is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  Congressman Paul, you and I have talked about this the last four or five times we have spoken, if not longer.  Has anything happened since the campaign began that has changed your mind or leads you to believe that what Senator Tom Colburn calls the debt bomb, which is what your son Rand calls, that a debt crisis is not still looming?

Congressman Paul:  Absolutely.  It’s building by leaps and bounds.  Just think of what’s happened to the debt since the financial crisis hit.  The debt precipitated the crisis because it couldn’t be sustained.  So what did they do?  They tried to solve the problem of debt with more debt.  It just can’t be done.  They tried to solve the problem of too much paper money and inflation, so they inflate even faster.  Everything that caused our problems, they accelerate it.  There’s no way in the world that economic law would accept this as a solution.  So yes, we’re marching rapidly toward this.

I don’t think there’s very many countries, I guess you could argue maybe China is solvent, but there’s not many countries in the world that are truly solvent and could pay their bills.  We’re not solvent.  The official bankruptcy hasn’t been declared because that’s when they would reject the money.  As long as there’s this trust in the dollar, it’s going to perpetuate.  All it does is perpetuate the debt bomb, which to me is a dollar bomb.  It’s a bubble.  It’s a bubble with the dollar and the bond.  Eventually the attitude will change and you’re going to see some rapid changes when it happens.

Mike:  Congressman Ron Paul is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  Congressman Paul, today is the day that the American people are supposed to trudge off to the post office, if they haven’t already done so, and file their taxes.  Is there a better way to fund the general government?  Would you be for flat tax, fair tax, elimination of all income tax?

Congressman Paul:  I don’t think in those terms.  I don’t think in terms of the problem of how to fund the federal government.  The federal government is the problem and I don’t want to fund the federal government at the size it is.  The whole thing is, I want to change the government so collecting taxes becomes a less significant event.  Therefore, I want to get rid of the income tax and all these things.  If on the short run you have to answer that question, could you make it a little less painful?  My promise to my district has always been I would never vote to increase taxes, always vote to decrease taxes, but do anything conceivable to reduce the power of the IRS.

Some of these alternatives, I would consider them, whether it’s a flat tax or a sales tax.  The change might be disruptive, which I think could be positive.  A sales tax, I’d hate to see a sales tax used to balance the budget.  A sales tax might wake up the people and say, “Man, I didn’t know I was paying that much in taxes.”  So yeah, those kind of changes are probably worth trying.  Spending is the tax.  That’s the tax that I’m concerned about.  Once you spend the money, the people are taxed one way or another.  We either have to get direct taxation or we have to borrow or we have to print the money.  The difference isn’t all that much different.  It’s spending.  You get ripped off because they take the money.  You get ripped off when they spend the money, writing regulations to control us.

Mike:  Speaking of being ripped off and spending money, you famously told Jay Leno two weeks ago, when he asked you why you had declined secret service protection, that you thought just because you’re a member of Congress didn’t mean you still weren’t a citizen and you ought to pay for your own security.  With the scandal that’s going on with what happened with the Secret Service agents down in Colombia, would you care to update what you said and maybe apply it to the Secret Service agent scandal?

Congressman Paul:  When that first broke, I thought boy, that reassures me I made the right decision, even for practical reasons.  Of course, if you think about the controversy with our CIA and other agencies that are designed to give government protection and take care of us all, there’s been lots of stories out, some proven and some not, about the CIA.  This is, I guess, the first one where Secret Service really has been involved.  This typically is what happens with government.  Even an agency that seems to be well run, they get into trouble.  Secret Service, I think, is originally supposed to also help prevent counterfeiting of the money, but they’re not doing anything to regulate the Federal Reserve.

Mike:  A question that came in from a listener via our Twitter feed, I think it’s a good question.  If you have any information to share with your legions of followers, how many delegates do you think you have won since the, I guess you would call it the mainstream or lamestream media, began counting?  One network says you have 51.  One says you have 71.  One says you have 67.  Your count is totally different, though, isn’t it

Congressman Paul:  Yeah.  Matter of fact, I asked the staff that question.  You can’t give a firm answer.  All these victories that we’re having now through the process, it might be at the county level, might be at the state level, it hasn’t been finalized.  It’s in the hundreds.  I don’t know that number.  All I know is we’re seeing more and more articles.  In spite of the fact that they don’t want to talk about our campaign, they’re conceding that maybe our strategy is working, maybe there is a lot more Ron Paul support in these delegations than anybody realized.  I think there’s room for optimism.  It will be a lot more than what the media is reporting.

Mike:  A final question, and this just goes out to the many people that were looking forward to hearing from you today.  What would you tell folks that Ron Paul is currently reading?  Are you reading any books or do you have time to read anything anymore?

Congressman Paul:  Matter of fact, since the author of Black Swan gave me such a strong support on TV, somebody had sent me the book and it was sitting there, but it was one of those unread books.  I’m just about finished with Black Swan.

Mike:  That’s Michael Walsh’s book, right?

Congressman Paul:  Taleb, I think, is the way you pronounce his name.  He’s an American citizen but from Palestine, a great investor.

Mike:  Congressman Paul, it’s always great.  Thank you for letting us graciously use some of your time here.  Best of luck to you, my friend.  We’ll keep tabs on the campaign.  Godspeed to you

Congressman Paul:  Thank you very much.

Mike:  You’re welcome.  That’s Congressman Ron Paul there, folks.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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