Category Archives: Monetary Policy

What Ron Paul didn’t say

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TAMPA, September 6, 2012 — There was no big announcement during Ron Paul’s appearance on Jay Leno Tuesday night. On the contrary, Paul’s appearance was somewhat anticlimactic given Mitt Romney’s nomination at the Republican National Convention last week. Of course, he still said what he has been saying for over thirty years in public life: America must stop spending money it doesn’t have, must liquidate its debts and rethink the role of government as cradle-to-grave caregiver and policeman of the world.

Ron Paul has said many memorable things during his two most recent campaigns for president. A debate moderator tried to put him on the spot regarding his position on leaving Iraq, asking contemptuously, “What is your plan to get U.S. troops out of Iraq?” Paul replied without hesitation, “We marched right in there without a plan, we can march right out.”

When asked about Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that the U.S. government explore colonizing the moon, Paul replied, “No, I don’t want to go to the moon, although I’d like to send some politicians up there.”

A few days ago, I posed a question at the end of my story on the Maine delegation fiasco. What were they really so afraid of?

It wasn’t what Ron Paul said that had them so scared. It was what he didn’t say.

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The real story behind those Ron Paul delegates from Maine

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TAMPA, September 2, 2012 – By the time of Marco Rubio’s speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC), rhetoric overload and sore feet had overcome any desire I had to listen. I sat down at a table in the corridor of the Tampa Bay Times Forum. A few minutes later, several young people sat in the other chairs.

One of them was wearing a tee shirt that read, “Texas Remembers the Alamo, and the Maine, and the Oklahoma, and the Louisiana, and the Oregon, and the Massachusetts.”

Those are the other five states in which Ron Paul had majorities one week before the RNC. Together with the three states he actually won (Iowa, Minnesota and Nevada) Ron Paul would have carried eight states had many of those delegates not been unseated at the last minute.

The man wearing the tee shirt was Chris Howe, Ron Paul supporter and alternate delegate from Texas. Rob Hinojosa was a guest and the graphic designer of the tee shirts.

One day before, both had marched out of the RNC along with the Maine delegation and an army Ron Paul’s other delegates chanting “As Maine goes, so goes the nation!”

Howe and Hinojosa went to work on their smart phones and in short order produced Ashley Ryan, 21, the youngest national committeewoman in the history of the Republican Party.

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Ryan confirmed that Ron Paul did indeed still have 20 of the 24 delegates from Maine as of the day before the RNC. They had been ready for a fight since learning of a challenge to the delegation a month earlier.

All that has been reported so far is that the delegation was contested on the grounds that the state convention did not follow “parliamentary procedure.” However, the details tell a very different story.

“The contest was filed by current national committeewoman Jan Staples and Peter Cianchette, who was the Romney state director for Maine. Those are well-known Romney supporters. They filed the contest based on the claims that our state convention lacked credentialing and lacked security. The ironic thing about that is that Jan Staples is on the executive committee for the party, so it was her job to plan the state convention. So if there was lax credentialing or if there was lax security, that would have been her fault,” explained Ryan.

Credentialing and security means that the officers of the convention ensure that all inside are who they say they are and that only duly elected delegates are present to vote.

“When they first presented their case to the contest committee, the contest committee found that there wasn’t enough evidence to invalidate the state convention or to rule against the delegates. So, instead of throwing it out like you would in a regular court of law – in a court of law if you sue someone and you don’t have enough evidence your case gets thrown out – in this situation the RNC kicked it down the line for a few more weeks and said we’ll figure it out in Tampa,” continued Ryan.

So, the convention is chaired by a Romney supporter and the national committeewoman in charge of credentialing and security is a Romney supporter. After Ron Paul supporters win a landslide victory, that same committeewoman joins Romney’s state campaign director in filing a contest based upon her own failure to ensure proper credentialing and security. The matter is put before the RNC, who are working hand in hand with Romney’s campaign.

As Ron Paul himself once wrote of the Federal Reserve System, “If that sounds fishy, then you understand it just fine.”

A call on Friday to Ms. Staples’ home phone was not returned.

Facing similar pressure, four of the five states agreed to have some of their delegates replaced with Romney supporters, but Maine held out.

“We didn’t agree to anything. We decided that we’d fight until the very end. The Committee on Contests made a recommendation to the Committee on Credentials to take 10 of our delegation off, 10 of our alternates off, so that’s 20 people total, and then the RNC hand-picked 10 delegates and 10 alternates to take their place, obviously who are all Mitt Romney supporters, all hand-picked and for the most part, party insiders” said Ryan.

So who were these unelected delegates? Are they even from Maine?

“These people are from Maine, but the people who chose these people are not from Maine. From what I’ve been told, but I haven’t been able to confirm this yet, our state party paid for them to come down, paid for their travel expenses and their hotel expenses, which a lot of people are incredibly angry about because they worked for months and in some cases years to make sure that they could afford to be here. They saved up over the four years to be able to fly down and now the state party is paying to fly down people who were never elected,” said Ryan

These details lend insight into former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s comment to Jon Stewart that the RNC’s treatment of Ron Paul and his supporters was “the height of rudeness and stupidity.”

“Why would you alienate them,” continued Steele, “get on the floor and not let them speak? Let his name go up on the board and let them see the numbers of electoral votes that he received.”

Had all of his delegates been seated, Ron Paul would also have been entitled to a 15-minute, unedited speech.

Apologists for the RNC claim that all of this was done to ensure that the convention came off as a show of unity within the party behind its nominee for president.

One has to wonder, though. What were they really so afraid of?

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Peter Schiff on The Real Crash, Austrian economics and Ron Paul

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TAMPA, August 30, 2012 – Like Ron Paul, Peter Schiff was predicting the 2008 economic meltdown long before it occurred. Schiff is the president of Euro Pacific Capital, a firm that pursues investment strategies based upon Schiff’s contrarian economic analysis. Clients who took his advice over the past decade did very well, even after the financial crisis.

Both Paul and Schiff are proponents of the Austrian school of economics, which emphasizes free markets, sound money and Carl Menger’s subjective theory of value. Asked to describe what the “Austrian school” is, Schiff quipped,

“It’s kind of like you’re asking me ‘What’s Science? Or what’s astronomy, because you believe in astrology. Austrian economics is economics. Keynesianism is like a witch doctor. It’s all a bunch of nonsense, but politicians love Keynesianism, because it justifies what they want to do to get elected, which is spend more money, promise something for nothing, play Santa Claus.”

Schiff was Ron Paul’s economic advisor during the 2008 campaign.

Schiff became a national sensation when the predictions documented in his 2007 book, Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse, came true. Not only was Schiff the darling of nationally televised financial and investing programs, but he found a whole new audience among Ron Paul supporters, who drove millions of page views to the You Tube video “Peter Schiff was right.”

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Ron Paul’s “We are the Future Rally” unlike any other political event

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TAMPA, August 27, 2012 ― Everyone knows what to expect from a political rally. Speakers recite the party line on various subjects. The audience already agrees with them and knows what they are going to say. The crowd cheers. The opposition is trashed. The crowd cheers again. The keynote speaker is introduced. Standing ovation. More talking points.

Ron Paul’s “We Are the Future Rally” couldn’t have resembled that model less. Rather than politics, the entire program focused on ideas.

His first three speakers were libertarian philosophers Lew Rockwell, Walter Block and Butler Shaffer. There were no talking points. Instead, attendees were treated to intellectual arguments for individual liberty from three of the most powerful libertarian thinkers alive.

Not everyone agreed, either. Block’s controversial argument for a new libertarian stance on abortion actually drew boos. Block argued that a woman has a property right in her body and thus can evict a “trespassing” fetus from her womb, but does not have a right to take the fetus’ life. Block claimed that this was possible now during the third trimester of pregnancy and that as the science advanced, it would be possible earlier and earlier.

Some of the more conservative among Paul’s following weren’t ready to hear it.

There were speeches by politicians Barry Goldwater, Jr. and South Carolina State Senator Tom Davis, but even these were atypical. Goldwater read from and commented on passages from his father’s Conscience of a Conservative, while Davis focused exclusively on attacking the Federal Reserve System.

Paul’s official campaign blogger and rising conservative star Jack Hunter continued with a talk on conservative philosophy, citing Ronald Reagan, Russell Kirk and other noteworthy conservatives. Hunter reminded supporters of Reagan’s “three-legged stool” theory of conservatism: equal parts national security conservatives, religious conservatives and economic/libertarian conservatives. Hunter argued that it was the absence of the libertarian leg that led to the profligacy of the Bush years. He quoted Reagan saying, “libertarianism is the very heart and soul of conservatism.”

None of this is to suggest that the affair was a quiet seminar with attendees nodding their heads and taking notes. Right from senior campaign advisor Doug Wead’s opening remarks, the atmosphere was electric and the applause thunderous. As usual, remarks on the Federal Reserve System and Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy got the most enthusiastic response.

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Repealing Glass-Steagall did not create the banking monster

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TAMPA, August 22, 2012 – As we approach the Republican and Democratic National Conventions with two major party candidates that don’t substantively disagree on anything, debate about the causes of the housing bubble and what should be done about it will inevitably recur.

Both candidates advocate massive government intervention. They just disagree about the details.

Neil Barofsky weighs in with the generally accepted argument that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was the creator of what he calls “the monster,” highly leveraged investment banks taking extraordinary risks that led to the 2008 financial meltdown.

Barofsky is right about Wall Street being a monster, but the repeal of Glass Steagall wasn’t its Frankenstein. As Tom Woods explains in his bestseller, Rollback,

“But did the repeal of two provisions of Glass-Steagall allowing affiliation of commercial banks with securities firms through their control by the same holding company contribute to the losses and risk that permeated the system? Certainly not. For one thing, commercial banks bought mortgage-backed securities for their AAA rating, their attractive return, and the minimal capital requirements associated with holding them; they did not acquire these assets because they were connected to investment banks that were trying to unload them.

Moreover, severe regulatory firewalls essentially prevent this kind of affiliation from contributing to losses or increased risk on the part of the commercial bank involved. The reverse problem, that affiliation with a commercial bank might bring down and investment bank, is exceedingly unlikely, given the relative magnitudes of assets held by each institution. The commercial banks’ assets were only a tiny fraction of those held by the investment banks they were affiliated with. These banks were in no position to cause the investment banks any serious problem, much less their complete downfall.”

If that’s true, then why was that “sucker going down,” as President Bush so eloquently put it?

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Audit the Fed first shot in Ron Paul’s revolution

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TAMPA, August 3, 2012 – “When I was your age, I went to the movies for a dime and bought a big bag of popcorn and a soda for a nickel.”

My father said that to me a hundred times when I used to pay $2.75 to go to the movies and another $1.25 for the popcorn and soda. For five generations, Americans have understood steadily rising prices as an immutable law of nature. Yet history shows that this just isn’t true.

The Federal Reserve of Minnesota publishes historical inflation figures on its website going back to 1800. The attached chart from that website shows annual inflation rates from 1800 through 2008. I added the last column to calculate the price movements of a basket of goods that cost $100 in 1800.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in finance for the numbers to jump off the page. The basket of goods that cost $100 in 1800 only cost $58.10 in 1913 (the year the Federal Reserve System was created). For that entire first full century of American history, steadily decreasing prices were something Americans took for granted.

In the ninety-nine years since the creation of the Federal Reserve System, that same basket of goods has risen to $1,265.14.

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Exclusive Interview: Rand Paul weathers endorsement storm

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TAMPA, June 18 2012 – 218 years ago, George Washington signed the Jay Treaty, reestablishing economic relations with the British. Claiming that John Jay and the Federalist Party had sold America out to the British and betrayed France, Jefferson’s Republicans denounced Jay as a monarchist and a traitor.

His effigy was burned and one newspaper went so far as to print, “John Jay, ah! the arch traitor – seize him, drown him, burn him, flay him alive.”

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky might know how Jay felt. Since endorsing Mitt Romney for president on June 7, Paul has endured a barrage of criticism from his father’s supporters and those who consider themselves part of the larger “liberty movement.”

There have even been a few death threats.

I spoke to Senator Paul last Thursday. He was understandably concerned by the more outlandish reactions, but put them in perspective.

“The people that are over the top and even making death threats on the internet, I hope they are not serious, but they are a small number of people making a disproportionate number of the comments. A lot of those people may not even vote or may not have voted for my father. They don’t represent the majority of the people that support what we’re fighting for.”

Overlooked during the controversy is Paul’s promise to his constituents to endorse the Republican nominee. Paul won a decisive victory in Kentucky with far more than Ron Paul supporters behind him. Without promising to endorse the nominee, Paul may have never even won the Republican nomination, much less become a U.S. Senator.

“I’ve said all along that I would endorse the Republican nominee. I made that promise during my own campaign, because it was a concern for many Republicans that my dad hadn’t endorsed the Republican nominee in the past. People should understand that it doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my philosophy or adopted anyone else’s.”

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Will Ron Paul delegates make Romney flip flop again?

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TAMPA, June 10, 2012 – With all but one of the Republican primaries concluded, there are two things that are clear. The first is that unless something very improbable occurs, Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. The second is that Ron Paul will have an army of delegates at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in August.

The media continue to wonder what Paul hopes to accomplish with those delegates, although he has been clear from the beginning. His primary goal was to win the nomination. His secondary goal was to influence the direction of the Republican Party.

Paul has remained consistent in his strategy. In a June 6 e-mail to supporters, Paul said

“We stand to send nearly 200 bound delegates to the Republican National Convention in Tampa…What’s more, we will send several hundred additional supporters to Tampa who, while bound to Romney, believe in our ideas of liberty, constitutional government, and a common-sense foreign policy. When it is all said and done, we will likely have as many as 500 supporters as delegates on the Convention floor.

And while this total is not enough to win the nomination, it puts us in a tremendous position to grow our movement and shape the future of the GOP!”

Some of Paul’s supporters dispute that any of the RNC delegates are bound to vote for any candidate, citing Republican Party Rule No. 38. Obviously, Ron Paul doesn’t see it that way.

However, one thing everyone acknowledges is that no delegate to the RNC is bound to any candidate’s position on the issues. That means Paul’s 500 delegates can vote any way they want regarding the Republican Party platform.

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Why Ron Paul also matters more than Romney, Santorum and Obama

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TAMPA, April 10, 2012 – Ron Paul matters much more than Newt Gingrich in this year’s Republican nomination race, according to The Washington Post. Both men trail frontrunners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum by a wide margin in terms of primary victories.

As usual, The Washington Post was silent on the possibility that Paul may have far more delegates than most media outlets are reporting.

The thrust of The Washignton Post story is that Paul has much more leverage due to his growing following and potential for a third party run. Thus, he has already influenced Republican Party, including scrutiny of the Federal Reserve, more attention to the debt crisis and even some grudging concessions on foreign policy.

Just a few years back, none of this was part of the Republican platform.

However, the Post article misses the most important point. Ron Paul doesn’t just matter more than Newt Gingrich. He also matters more than Romney, Santorum or even President Obama. Ron Paul has already had a greater impact on America than any U.S. President in generations.

The Republicans have made unseating Obama a sacred quest in this year’s election. To listen to their rhetoric, you would think that Fidel Castro had been inaugurated in January 2009. Obama’s supporters operate under a similar delusion, although they feel differently about it.

It is apparent that both conservatives and progressives have completely lost touch with reality. Nothing has changed since Obama replaced George W. Bush. Nothing would change if Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum replaced Obama, either.

Americans elected Obama in 2008 to not be George W. Bush. Bush was reviled by voters for what they believed was an unnecessary war in Iraq, for spying on American citizens, for being too cozy with Wall Street, and for assuming executive powers not delegated to him by the Congress. Obama promised to change all of that.

Four years later, Obama has started at least three new wars while expanding the boondoggle in Afghanistan. He has continued spying on Americans and sought to expand this authority in the courts. He has filled his cabinet with Wall Street insiders and has bested George W. Bush on expanding executive powers.

Obama actually claims the right to arrest, to indefinitely detain and even to assassinate American citizens that he deems dangerous – all without due process.

Romney and Santorum both support all of this. Gingrich thinks it’s not enough. Progressives in the media who howled with righteous indignation at Bush’s depredations seem to have fallen asleep now that Obama is in.

Doesn’t anyone remember Keith Olbermann’s tirades about Bush’s dictatorial power grabs? Is there some reason that it is ok when a progressive does the same thing?

However, Obama did lead America down the path to socialism by expanding the government’s role in healthcare and imposing draconian regulations on the financial sector, right? Surely he departs from the “laissez faire” Bush here. Can you say “Medicare Part D” or “Sarbanes-Oxley?”

Nothing changes. Obama is no different than Bush. Neither Romney, Santorum, nor Gingrich would be any different than Obama. They don’t even propose to cut Obama’s spending. The spending “cuts” they propose are actually just reductions in spending increases in future years. In other words, they have no objection to Obama’s spending now. They all admit this, yet their supporters continue in their missionary zeal as if their candidates represent some sort of radical change.

Then there is Ron Paul. He doesn’t just talk about cutting spending. He published his first year budget, cutting $1 trillion dollars. He doesn’t just talk about individual liberty. He wants to end the failed drug war and repeal the Patriot Act. He promises to bring troops home from all over the world and allow young people to opt out of unsustainable entitlement programs. Ron Paul proposes real solutions to real problems, regardless of the political consequences.

Ron Paul is the first presidential candidate in my lifetime to actually use the words “role of government” as if the subject should be debated. He challenges the status quo – the whole, multi-trillion dollar monster in Washington, D.C. that purports to care for 300 million people from cradle to grave and police the entire world. Ron Paul has dared to speak the unspeakable and millions of people all over the world are listening.

That’s why Ron Paul is more important than whoever wins the Republican nomination or the presidency this year. Presidents have come and gone for decades while the federal government has continued to trample our liberties, loot our wealth, and propagate new enemies around the world, regardless of which party has been in power.

Then along came Ron Paul, an overnight sensation thirty-six years in the making. To those who understand what is happening, the presidential election seems almost irrelevant as Paul’s audiences explode into the thousands. Long after history has deemed Bush, Obama and this year’s winner indistinguishable postage stamps on the road to disaster, it will remember the man who planted new seeds during the election of 2012.

As George Washington once said, “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.”

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?