A libertarian is somebody who believes, of course, in personal liberty. And liberty is a personal thing; it is not collective. You don’t gain liberty because you belong to a group. So we don’t talk about women’s rights or gay rights or anything else. Everybody has an absolute equal right as an individual, and it comes to them naturally.
There are two rules you have to follow if you are a libertarian, and this is a job for a lot of people. One, you can’t ever initiate force against somebody else. You can’t be an aggressor. You can’t steal from your neighbor. Most people recognize that, but nobody wants to consider the fact, “well, if I send the government — the IRS agent — I can steal all I want from my neighbor.”
No, no aggression. We can’t aggress against each other; we can’t use the government to aggress against each other. We have to live up to our promises. And this works in foreign policy as well. We can’t have preemptive war where our government decides, “Well, we’ve got to attack them and kill them because some day they might come here and do us harm.” That’s aggression, and the libertarian says “no initiation of aggression.”
If you have a contract, which is so key in a free society, … then you agree to something, and you have to follow through. You can’t lie, cheat, or steal — or kill.
Paul’s CCTV interview is focused largely on Paul’s thoughts concerning US presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Paul notes that “we are entering an era that we are recognizing that the system that we have in the United States isn’t working well.” But, Paul also says he sees, for the most part, “the current crop of politicians offering only more government — not less government, which is what I was offering over the many years.”
Paul further expresses in the interview little hope of a candidate from an alternative party doing well against the Republican and Democratic Parties that are essentially “one party” that endorses the “financial system, the Federal Reserve System, the foreign policy, the attack on civil liberties, the welfare state.” An alternative party candidate does not “get a fair shake,” says Paul, who in 1988 was the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in addition to his 2008 and 2012 presidential runs as a Republican. “The process is in many ways rigged,” concludes Paul, including via excluding Libertarian, Green, and other alternative candidates from debates and making it hard for them to even be listed on election ballots.
Watch Paul’s complete interview here:
Paul is chairman and founder of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
Ron Paul – You don’t gain liberty because you belong to a group
WRONG! I you don’t stand as group and DEMAND liberty , you will most certainly lose it. Tribe Up.
Wait, I shouldn’t use government to get stuff without working for it, damn, Hillary, Bernie and Krugman tell me that it is morally superior to steal from others that way.
Ron Paul is semi delusional, or he is owned. He is absolutely correct on his foreign policy stuff concerning military adventurism, and our meddling in the affairs of other countries. Trump and sanders both agree with him on that, he doesn’t seem to be aware he is winning that argument. He’s a total fruit loop on economics. He thinks trade with china is doing great. He should look at the little photo tour of Baltimore Jim posted. We lose a billion dollars a day to china. Seven days a week.
I listened to his whole presentation. My question is this. How can he square reining in the feds counterfeiting operations with our trade deficits? If you’re going to run the country as a money losing operation, you have to print, or we would crash. He seems to think free trade plus hard money equals prosperity. He’s mad. Worms have eaten his brain.
starfcker
You’re an intellectual giant compared to Ron Paul. Your understanding of economics is unquestioned. How could anyone match your brilliant tariff plan to save America? God help us.
Libertarians are all over the place on issues like immigration. We must stop this mass third world immigration or we will become third world. Also we can’t retreat from the world . Especially South East Asia . Korea is still is a state of war.Taiwan is being threatened daily by China.Europe will probably have major social unrest as a result of Muslim immigrants. We can’t just pull out .
Jim, I’ve always been a fan of dr.paul, this free trade kick he’s on is new, and it’s nuts. I would like very much to see the return of sound money, we agree on that. But if you return to sound money, you can’t bleed trade deficits. You end up bankrupt. We’re 20 trillion in debt, and we’re printing mountains of money. You can’t have both.
Not new. Free trade has been part of libertarianism from the beginning. It’s been part of our country from the beginning. I think one of the early proponents was a founding father.
“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations…entangling alliances with none” – Thomas Jefferson
I’m sort of a small-l libertarian, I guess. Fiscal conservative.
Anyhow, full-bore Libertarianism can’t work for an entire nation. It relies very heavily on individuals taking responsibility for the consequences of their decisions and actions. I don’t think that even society as it was fifty or sixty years ago could have dealt with that. Today? No way, Jose.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2016/02/21/after-south-carolina-heres-why-donald-trump-will-be-americas-next-president/#343851e9e8e8
Trump ain’t going to win.
That would be turning the WH into a set for a reality show.
But just in case the impossible happens:
He can appoint Megan Kelly as Secretary of State.
Maybe Trump can run with Larry David to capture the Jew vote.
Maybe he will appoint Kanye to some cabinet post to make sure blacks understand that he cares.