“Question: …you believe the Fed shouldn't exist… make the case.
Ron Paul: First reason is, it's not authorized in the Constitution, it's an illegal institution. The second reason, it's an immoral institution, because we have delivered to a secretive body the privilege of creating money out of thin air; if you or I did it, we'd be called counterfeiters, so why have we legalized counterfeiting? But the economic reasons are overwhelming: the Federal Reserve is the creature that destroys value. This station talks about free market capitalism, and you can't have free market capitalism if you have a secret bank creating money and credit out of thin air. They become the central planners, they decide what interest rates should be, what the supply of money should be…
Question: How does the gold standard solves that?
Ron Paul: It maintains a stable currency and a stable value. If the Fed concentrated more on stable money rather than stable prices… They push up new money in stocks and in commodities and in houses, and then they have to come in to rescue the situation. They create the bubbles, then they come in and rescue it, and they do nothing more than try to do price fixing. Capitalism depends, and capital comes from savings, but there's no savings in this country, so this is all artificial. It creates the misdirection and the malinvestment and all the excessive debt, and it always has to have a correction. Since the Fed has been in existence, the dollar has lost about 97% of its value. You're supposed to encourage savings, but if something loses its value, why save dollars? There's no encouragement whatsoever. […] Gold is 6000 years old, and it still maintains its purchasing power. Oil prices really are very stable in terms of Gold. […] Both conservatives and liberals want to enhance big government, and this is a seductive way to tax the middle class.”

CNBC debate with Faiz Shakir, March 20, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k94VWPjUQSM <br class="br">2000s, 2006-2009

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Ron Paul148

American politician and physician 1935

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“Ron Paul: …you have to develop the transition, and eventually the next step would be to prohibit the Fed from monetizing debt. This is the real evil. The politicians spend for war, welfare, and they don't have to do it responsibly.
Question: When you say monetize the debt, you mean they would only be able to spend the cash that they had on hand. They couldn't write any cheques for which they don't have in their account any money?
Ron Paul: That's right. And that is the key to it. Because when the Fed comes along, and there's starvation for capital and liquidity, and politicians are spending too much, the Fed can create 20, 30, 50 billion dollars in a day, just like they did trying to bail out this housing bubble crash. So they create money out of thin air endlessly, eventually that has to stop because that drives the value of the dollar down.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Fox Business Network, October 16, 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXfDHXpP87o <br class="br">2000s, 2006-2009

“Ron Paul: What's happening is, there's transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy. This comes about because of the monetary system that we have. When you inflate a currency or destroy a currency, the middle class gets wiped out. So the people who get to use the money first which is created by the Federal Reserve system benefit. So the money gravitates to the banks and to Wall Street. That's why you have more billionaires than ever before. Today, this country is in the middle of a recession for a lot of people… As long as we live beyond our means we are destined to live beneath our means. And we have lived beyond our means because we are financing a foreign policy that is so extravagant and beyond what we can control, as well as the spending here at home. And we're depending on the creation of money out of thin air, which is nothing more than debasement of the currency. It's counterfeit… So, if you want a healthy economy, you have to study monetary theory and figure out why it is that we're suffering. And everybody doesn't suffer equally, or this wouldn't be so bad. It's always the poor people -- those who are on retired incomes -- that suffer the most. But the politicians and those who get to use the money first, like the military industrial complex, they make a lot of money and they benefit from it.
John McCain: Everybody is paying taxes and wealth creates wealth. And the fact is that I would commend to your reading, Ron, "Wealth of Nations," because that's what this is all about. A vibrant economy creates wealth. People pay taxes. Revenues are at an all time high.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

GOP debate, Dearborn, Michigan, October 9, 2007 http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071009/NEWS02/71009073 <br class="br">2000s, 2006-2009

“There are then, at least two dialectical truths. The first is that you and I are reasonable creatures; the second that you and I ought to be reasonable. Because of the second, we can say not merely that we cannot reasonably deny the first, but also that we ought not to deny it. If these dialectical propositions are errors, they are irrefutable errors: there is no way for men qua rational creatures to find out what is wrong with them, just as there is no way for men qua rational creatures to cast doubt on their truth.”

Frank Van Dun (1947) Belgian law philosopher

"The Logic of Common Morality" http://web.archive.org/web/20060616233942/http://www.stephankinsella.com/texts/vandun_philosophy_argument.pdf, from E.M. Barth and J.L. Martens, eds., Argumentation Approaches to Theory Formation: Containing the contributions to the Groningen Conference on the Theory of Argumentation, October 1978 (Benjamins, 1982; original from the University of Michigan, digitized Mar 12, 2007. ISBN 9-027-23007-2, 333 pages).

“To me a Tory is a person who believes that authority is vested in institutions—that's a carefully honed definition. We have made the law, not for extraneous reasons, not because it conforms with a priori specifications; it has been made by a particular institution in a particular way and can be changed by that institution in a particular way. A Tory therefore reposes the ultimate authority in institutions—he is an example of collective man.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Interviewed in Winter 1992, quoted in Naim Attallah, Asking Questions (Quartet Books, 1996), pp. 354-5
1990s

“And if your parents have you for a reason, then that reason better exist. Because once it's gone, so are you.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

“Some people say that we ought to audit the Fed. Here's what I do know. The Federal Reserve already has so many internal audits it's ridiculous. I don't know why people think we're gonna learn this great amount of information by auditing the Federal Reserve. I think a lot of people are calling for this audit of the Federal Reserve because they don't know enough about it. There's no hidden secrets going on in the Federal Reserve to my knowledge.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

The Neal Boortz Show
2010-12-29
Radio, quoted in [Herman Cain: Federal Reserve Audit Unnecessary, 2011-10-10, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q18jMzTWJ9A]

“Then what you find out is, what humans then do is, they create institutions - that's where institutionalism has a tie with Post Keynesianism - they create institutions which limit outcomes, which permit you to control outcomes as long as the society agrees to live by the rules of the game, which are the rules of the institutions. Now, if society rejects those rules, then society breaks down. What are the rules of the game? Well, money is a rule of the economic game. There are lots of human economic arrangements which don't use money. The family unit solves its economic problems, of what and how to produce within the family, without the use of money and without the use of markets. All the 24 hours of the day are either employed or leisure. There's no involuntary unemployment in the family. So you can solve the problem, but it's a different economy. We are talking about a money-using economy, and money is a human institution. You have to ask yourself, why was it created? Why is it so strange? You see, in Lerner, in neoclassical economics, money is a commodity. It's peanuts, with a very high elasticity of production. If people want more money, that creates just as many jobs as if people want goods. Then you have to say to yourself - and this was the question that Milton Friedman asked me in the debate - he says, 'That's nonsense; Davidson says money is not producible. Why are there historical cases where Indians used beads as money? Aren't beads easily producible?”

Paul Davidson (1930) Post Keynesian economist

But not in the Indian economy. They didn't know how to produce them.
quoted in Conversations with Post Keynesians (1995) by J. E. King

“In the first place, it is not improper to observe, that the law of cases of necessity is not likely to be well furnished with precise rules; necessity creates the law, it supersedes rules; and whatever is reasonable and just in such cases, is likewise legal; it is not to be considered as matter of surprise, therefore, if much instituted rule is not to be found on such subjects.”

William Scott, 1st Baron Stowell (1745–1836) British politician

The Gratitudine (18 December 1801); as published in Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Admiralty, Commencing with the Judgments of the Right Hon. Sir William Scott, Michaelmas Term, 1798, Vol. III (1802) http://books.google.com/books?id=-vcvAAAAYAAJ, p. 266.

“Question: If you could pick one cause that has gotten us here, what'd you say it is?
Ron Paul: Easy money. The Federal Reserve artificially lowering interest rates, deceiving the people, the investors, the savers, into believing that there's a lot of savings out there, and that we should invest more, build more houses, more cars. It's the malinvestment, which is every bit as dangerous, from the inflation of the money supply, as is the high prices that usually come.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Fox Business Network, March 24, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkJ1sa9mxCU <br class="br">2000s, 2006-2009

“There’s a reason why the French are on their fifth republic, and we are on our first, and that’s because we did not have a worship of reason at the beginning of the Founding as the French did, and then discovered that the purity, the Rousseauian idea is simply not one for the real world, or not one that avoids the guillotine…”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2015, Interview with Bill Kristol (2015)

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