COLLAPSE OF FAKE ECONOMIC SYSTEM (Uncut) 04-10-2025

COLLAPSE OF FAKE ECONOMIC SYSTEM: Threat of Iran War & Surging Debt Send Final Warnings| Ron Paul

Start with really slashing the militarism and the military industrial complex, starve them out because you say, oh, then we’re going to be invaded. And that’s just a scare tactic. It’s very accurate to say what they’re doing makes no sense.

It’s very harmful. It’s going to hurt the middle class and the poor the most. And it’s going to lead to less peace and less prosperity.

And how fast it comes and how long it lasts depends a lot on how the people react to this. And we would have to have change of policy if we ever expect to get back to strong economic growth. Welcome, everybody.

We’re joined by an absolutely fantastic guest today. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation. I’m so honored to be joined by Dr. Ron Paul.

Dr. Paul is a former congressman, United States presidential candidate and the founder of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, an organization that supports a foreign policy rooted in peaceful relations and trade with all. Dr. Paul is the host of the Ron Paul Liberty Report. It is such a great show.

I’m a big fan. I will share the link in the description below. I cannot recommend the show enough.

Dr. Paul, thank you so much for joining me. It is such an honor. Welcome back.

Thank you. Nice to be with you, Elena. Dr. Paul, there is just so much going on recently.

There’s so many recent events that I would love to get your thoughts on. We’ve got new tariffs, the one trillion dollar Pentagon budget, and of course, you know, the risk of a war with Iran. So maybe we can begin with tariffs today.

The global trade war is clearly escalating. Donald Trump approved a 104 percent tariff on Chinese imports on April the 8th. And then the following day, on April the 9th, Chinese authorities actually retaliated and imposed an 84 percent tariff on U.S. imports.

What is your take on these escalations in trade tensions, in economic tensions, and their impact on U.S. consumers? Well, my simple answer to that question, in my first reflection, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s bad economic policy. And I don’t know why grown-ups who pretend to know a lot propose ideas like that.

I thought tariffs were outdated a long time ago. Morally, they should be. And also, you know, economically, they provide no benefit.

Only harm. It’s just, it’s just more mischief by the managers that want to take care of everybody and pretend they’re in charge. So tariffs, in principle, are not necessary and very dangerous.

Cutting government spending and focusing on lowering national debt was a hot topic in January, several months ago. Same as the calls to verify the existence of gold at Fort Knox. However, since then, since January or early February, it appears that have not really been any meaningful discussions about any of those things.

But the most recent data shows that the United States spent nearly $1 billion, with a B, $1 billion since January of this year bombing Yemen. Then the current administration approved nearly $12 billion in weapon sales to Israel. Now we’re in April and President Trump is requesting a record-breaking $1 trillion, with a T, $1 trillion in Pentagon budget.

So previously, Trump promised to cut military spending. Now he’s actually increasing it. Many people are quite disappointed and shocked and confused, unsure what to think about it or whether they just need to give it more time and see how it goes.

How does one make sense of such a stark difference between the current administration’s activities, the implemented policies with respect to government spending and quite interventionist position versus the promises to cut government spending and to end wars, to end conflicts that we all heard during the election campaign? Well, it builds distrust and the distrust is justified. And sometimes it’s healthy. When people lose confidence in all the false promises, they might get together and start talking about changing things and what should they do.

So it’s something that it’s very hard to believe that they go ahead and do this. You mentioned the trillion dollars that by the end of this year, they’re going to spend on militarism. Well, there was another person from the administration, they seem to be bragging about it, representing the administration, that possibly in the next year, it’s going to be $2 trillion.

It makes no sense at all. It’s so immoral because they’re printing the money. There are counterfeiters that are doing this.

It’s fraud. It leads to no good result. And it just leads to, just think how much money has been used and the money, the $1 trillion we’re talking about here, and that’s going every place, the Middle East and Ukraine.

How many people died? How many people were innocent bystanders? They were civilian. And again, it’s almost all our money. People say, yeah, but the Americans aren’t dying.

Well, but the Americans are suffering from it because we’re paying for it. So, but it’s a terrible, terrible foreign policy to do this and then do it in the name and pretense of getting elected. I’m going to stop wars.

And so, we had to be a little cautious because maybe some good will come of it because on the watching, as bad as this plan to cut the budget has been, it hasn’t really worked out. It’s still, if you look at what USAID has been revealed, people say, holy man, we didn’t know it was that bad. So, information is important.

And we ought to do that, find out what’s going on with the Federal Reserve and find out how they’re spending all the Pentagon money. A lot of more people will wake up. Right now, people are just struggling to get by and live on what they have.

And that makes it difficult to get them excited about some of the things they consider esoteric. Dr. Paul, recently you posted on Axe former Twitter, quote, one trillion military budget coming. Watch the demise of the fake economic system.

So, we’re clearly, you know, starting to see the cracks, if you will, in the financial system. Gold recently hit $3,000 per ounce. Tariffs crashed the markets globally and continue crashing.

The dollar is losing value. And we’re learning that countries of the so-called global South, some people prefer to refer to them as the global majority, they’re actually actively developing alternative financial settlement platforms to protect their own economic sovereignty and to lessen their dependence on the U.S. policies and United States politics. How longer is there before this fake economic system crosses the point of no return? Or have we already crossed that point of no return? Well, it’s hard to say.

I think we’ve at a point where you can expect it to get worse before it gets better. And you can’t run this system. The Soviet system was held together, you know, for decades.

But, and we who were living in that period of time, we were fearful of an exchange of nuclear weapons. And fortunately, it didn’t come. But the Soviet system just melted away.

It was like a non-event, which was fantastic, but it was bankrupt. It didn’t work. Communism doesn’t work.

And that’s hopefully the way this, our system disintegrate is that it doesn’t work. And it’s not working very well. The things that you just talked about describes a two front war.

We have this war we declared against ourselves by putting on tariffs on other people, inviting a tariff war. And this is a big deal. And a lot of people are suffering.

And just think of the trillions of dollars that people have lost. And some of them are very rich people who thought they were too rich to get hurt. But there was a lot of average people had their savings in stocks and bonds, and they too have suffered severely by that.

So, we have that economic war dealing with tariffs and interference and the debt that we’ve run up. But we are also using all this money that is not really money. It’s just credit because, you know, we’re complaining about maybe they’re going to spend a trillion dollars this year, but we don’t have it.

There’s no money in the treasury. So, they have to borrow that money. And basically, they’ll borrow it by printing it.

And they’ll take treasury bills to the Federal Reserve. And that’s how they get the credit. And up until now, the world has been very willing to accept dollars, and they still are, and they still probably will to some degree.

But I think what you’re saying and talking about is the hedging is looking wobbly, and how long is it going to last? You know, when you look at economics, if you look at, say, the monetary system, you can predict bubbles, and you can see bubbles. You don’t have to be a genius. And, you know, whether it’s a housing bubble or the Bitcoin bubbles, all these things, you can see them, but you don’t know when something’s going to come along.

Look real quick, something happened three days ago. And you don’t know how. I’m sure Trump and his crew didn’t expect this kind of trouble, because if he did, they wouldn’t do this on purpose.

But people cannot predict, you know, when the market gives up on it. And that’s what happens with a currency. And there’s hints that they’d like to attack the dollar, and they are.

And the dollar is less popular, but still, people operate with the dollars. We still have more weapons, more wealth, and more credibility, but we’re losing it quickly. And when the final blow comes, it’s unpredictable, because I thought maybe in 1971, when we severed the link of the dollar to gold, that it wouldn’t be too long after that.

Well, we had a lot of problems in the 70s. We continue to have these problems. So it’s lasting longer than a lot of people would predict.

But I don’t think we can say, well, let’s forget about it. The system is viable. And something like what happened to the Soviet system, it was so bad that people just gave up on it.

The world gave up on it, and they were bankrupt. They couldn’t fight their wars. It was all over.

That will come. It could come out of this thing going on now, with this dual war going on, us expanding the war against Iran, and the Middle East, and Ukraine, and all these places, and also this tariff war. So this could be something that will lead up, maybe in one week from now, you might have another collision course.

But they might pull it out of the fire, and talk people into doing it. And they already start talking, well, we’ll solve our problem by raising the minimum wage. That’s crazy talk.

But that’s what they’ll try to do. But it’s very accurate to say, what they’re doing makes no sense. It’s very harmful.

It’s going to hurt the middle class and the poor the most. And it’s going to lead to less peace and less prosperity. And how fast it comes and how long it lasts depends a lot on how the people react to this.

And we would have to have a change of policy if we ever expect to get back to strong economic growth. Dr. Paul, before we turn to several points in geopolitics, if you were president right now, which would be absolutely amazing, I wish it were the case. But if you were in the Oval Office right now, what would be your top priorities, maybe your top three priorities, as far as fixing the economic mess that we’re in right now? Well, ultimately, you know, you can’t do a thing unless the people accept it.

You know, let’s say, we could say, let’s cut the budget 10% a year until we get it in balance or 2% a year. Even the slightest hint, inefficiently, they’re talking about, you know, the efficiency committee cutting back. And there’s a lot of resistance, a lot of angry people, people rioting over it.

So, that is a problem that you have. You know, the most important thing, and this is not like I could write an executive order. The most important thing are having more people like you, interested in the subject, young people looking at it and spreading a message, because that has to happen.

Because if I were in the office and said, you know what, we have to cut back, we should cut back all welfare and all warfare. And we’re going to start with these wars and the military. That probably, you know, could work to a degree.

But if you say, I’m going to cut back on food stamps, it would be bad. So, you could devise and say, okay, we’re going to work out a system where you could do this deliberately. We’re going to cut back on welfareism.

But what we’re really going to do is stop all the wars and bring all the troops back. And you could do that with executive order. Instead of under these conditions, talking about a $1 trillion DOD budget going to $2 trillion in a year, that’s crazy.

So, something terrible is going to happen before the end of next year. So, that is a problem. So, no matter what a person like myself would do, if right now the conditions are so bad, even Trump has run into the problem that they’d like to get to the bottom of this, and the courts are so packed with, you know, bad ideas and bad people, and you have people at the universities, you’d have to really have a change.

You have to have a change of what’s happened in the university system for 110 years teaching all this nonsense. But you still could do it. You could do by executive order, probably the one that’s the biggest thing, but we can’t solve all the economic problems because it has to be paid for one way or the other.

There’s going to be a default. But you could with an executive order because the president does have authority to move troops around and there’s no official war going on. I would say, just bring the troops home.

Bring them home and save billions and billions of dollars and quit this expansion of it. That would be a healthy boost to the economy. But I would say, yes, on the same day we bring the troops home, we’re probably not going to get rid of all food stamps and all welfare for poor people.

I think, you know, the last thing you could do, the worst thing you could do is cut the financing for poor people, children who are sick, you know. If we don’t take care of our problems, it will be cut because the money will quit working. So either way, there’s going to be a problem.

But if we so desire to get the people to go along with it, you know, start with really slashing the militarism and the military industrial complex, starve them out because you say, oh, then we’re going to be invaded. And that’s just a scare tactic. And they’ll say, no, we can’t do that.

But I’ll tell you what, right now, it would be very difficult to do it because the conditions aren’t right. So what I think is, I work on the assumption that the malinvestment where people made mistakes because they thought they were richer than they really were, and also the malinvestment and the things that happen with inflation, you know, prices are way too high. The market right now is saying they are too high.

That’s why the stocks are going down. That if you can have a system that you could do gradualism, but it won’t be acceptable. So I would condition the American people, I think telling the people the truth about what’s going on and what to expect and give them their freedom back in one way or the other as quickly as possible because they, you know, stop the income tax and let people, but tell people, yes, it’s going to be hectic, but you’re going to have, and you’re going to have a lot more money, but you’re going to have to take care of yourself.

And you can’t ever go crying to the government to ask the government to go and steal the money from somebody else because your business failed. So it’s a big problem. And there’s not a, you know, even if I were there today, tomorrow and said, well, we want a real, you know, an examination and have an audit of the federal reserve.

There’s so many people involved. It’s worldwide. And that’s what they keep very secret.

And so it’s not feasible, but I think you could do a lot of good if you set the standard by saying, look, we have to cut. If we don’t do it, you know, in a deliberate fashion, it’s all going to come down on our heads. But I would start with the military and then try to encourage the people to understand, but what we really need a lot more people on the radio and doing videos and talking about it like you are.

So the more people understand why we’re doing it, because if they don’t understand, you’ll see more of what’s happening today. There’s a revolt against any pretest of cutting that doesn’t even exist. Dr. Paul, I support every single word you said.

So as military spending is increasing, unfortunately, we can sort of turn to several geopolitical questions that I had for you. The U.S. just deployed about one-third of its B-2 bombers, based on my understanding, among other high-value military assets to Diego Garcia and increased its military presence in the region. So we’re doing exactly the opposite of what non-interventionalism would want us to do, right? And is this merely an offensive posturing to force the revival of the JCPOA with Iran? Or is there a risk that the Trump administration is indeed positioning itself to intervene militarily in the region, with Iran specifically? Well, I think they are.

How fast they’re going to go. They work in collusion with Israel and you know what Israel’s desires are. So no, they’re preparing for that.

Let’s hope and pray they don’t get that far. But we’re doing it in Yemen. Look how dangerous that is, because that’s considered an outpost for Iran.

And yet we’ve been in there killing a lot of people, spending a lot of money. That’s where that billion dollars was spent. And how many Americans even could find Yemen on a map? So that’s why, you know, the bankruptcy of this country is a blessing in disguise, because there’s going to be a lot of suffering.

But if the governments of the world, the people of the world, continue to trust the dollar and let us endlessly continue to ignore our deficits and spend it and run our military industrial complex and satisfy them, and then also get involved in this foreign policy, I think things will get much worse. But eventually, though, people give up on the currency. And that is the big unknown.

We know it’ll happen, but we don’t know whether it’s going to be this year or two years from now or whenever. It seems that many people here in the United States struggle with one simple question as it relates to the events in the Middle East. And I would just love to get your perspective on this.

So the question is, does Iran pose a threat, a security threat to the United States of America to warrant these activities? No, I don’t think the average American would walk down the street and ask an honest question. Are you worried today about Iran coming here and hurting you? There would be 1% of people that said that. They said that about Saddam Hussein.

They were all lies. They build up the hatred. And that shows you that the control of the media and the propaganda is very, very powerful because big governments like this that act out of the law have to work on fear-mongering.

They have to scare people. And yet they have to know the truth and they have to realize that the policies have to change. But you cannot expect it to happen gracefully.

That is the problem. So there’s a lot of errors. If we look at it more close at home, if a husband or a wife spends and gets into debt and they get up to a million dollars in debt, and how are they going to get out of it? They have to declare bankruptcy or they have to get another job and all these things.

But if today they go to the government, the government will probably bail out most of the people because they caused the problem. So that’s a pretty big problem not easily solved. The revival of the JCPOA with Iran seems to be the top priority, based on my understanding.

So Trump now wants to sign a deal with Iran, and it is the same deal that he tore up in 2018, where Iran agreed not to build a nuclear weapon that it says it never actually wanted to build in the first place anyway. So in other words, we’re back to the same sort of deal seven years later. So what is driving this pivot back to the agreement that President Trump chose to abandon during his first presidential term? See, I sort of lean in a direction of not overcoming the distrust in government.

So I tend not to put a lot of weight on those things, because who knows, they’ll change their mind. And it has to be a much more philosophic decision. And mine is that more people have to know about what natural law is all about and not accept the laws of governments, because that’s propaganda and that’s authoritarianism.

They want to cancel out telling the truth. They are nihilists themselves, so you don’t know the truth. In my case, I just sort of blank them out, because what I want people to do is to realize that laws and morality have dictated to the human race for 6,000 years, even in the most primitive cultures as they were developing, they did grasp and they understood the natural instinct that you can’t go out and kill people, you can’t rob people, you can’t lie to people.

And those things were developed even a long time before the 10th Amendment, so those things were known. And so that’s what has to be done. So that’s a much bigger, broader question.

And so I don’t have a whole lot of faith that all of a sudden, especially, you know, this distrust that is generated, you know, because they changed their mind. And the other day, I was talking to somebody, and we were talking about the JFK assassination. And I said, you know, when that happened early on, I was with everybody else, Oswald did it, 80% of the people thought Oswald, maybe more, even more than that, lone gunman killed JFK.

But as the years went on, and that’s a long time ago now, as the years went on, more and more people heard a different story. Now, 80% of the American people don’t believe the government. So I made a comment, it was serious, I said, and that’s good news.

So the person interviewing me sort of just laughed, like, how can, how can having a government that you can’t believe it? Well, if you know, the Soviet system, eventually, there were a lot of people, they had all kinds of jokes, they told in the Soviet Union, you know, ridiculing, everybody knew how bad it was, but they were, they were powerless to overcome it. And I think that’s where we are now, people, people know about it. But they don’t, there’s a lot of people who don’t believe our government.

So I don’t work on the assumption that all of a sudden, we’re going to convert the government, because they’re all in for it for power. And I think cultural Marxists has a technique, which I think you have to realize, and that is that they work on producing chaos. And they’re pretty good at it.

If you look at what happened on, you know, COVID and, and different things, how the riots are on the street, how they have operated with, you know, the invasion at our borders, and come people coming in. And, and that, to me, it was like letting people just come into your house and do what they want. They come, come in.

So all of that has happened. And, and then they’ve done, then they don’t know what to what they have to do. And they have to change those policies.

Because that is what’s set up by this permissiveness. But if it to me is a is a big mess, that’s why I gravitate to something that is a little bit broader, but I think fundamental. And I think that you have to have people with faith, the basic principles of morality, and the founders understood it.

They even talked about it. Yes, we’re giving you a republic, but you’re not going to have it if, if you don’t remain a moral people. So they were convinced the American people at that time were much morally directed.

The founders were not perfect, but they were geniuses at understanding history. And there was all, and I cared about it, but seriously, I said they were geniuses, so well read and educated. And they didn’t because they didn’t have to go to government schools.

And that’s what we need more of. And that’s why I’m an optimist because I look around and see all the organization that exists. And I have my little organization, but there’s a lot of good example organization.

I’ve always admired what the Mises Institute has done. You know, they provide the literature and they’ve converted thousands of people. But the other thing is, is do not get discouraged is the fact that the numbers are important to a degree, prevailing attitudes are important, but it really narrows down to a smaller number.

You don’t have to wait until 51% agree with what we’re doing. We need the core rate of the leadership in a country, because even for our revolution, less than 10% of the people in the colonies endorsed the war. But the leaders do it and understood it.

And it could describe it in intellectual terms, like in the declaration and in the constitution. So that is very important. So you can’t get discouraged because you don’t have, we don’t have control of the media.

We don’t have control of the courts, but we have control of one thing that people knew about. And that is that an idea whose time has come can’t be stopped. So we should look at this.

The idea of liberty, I think is there. The chaos is those on the street. The carceral Marxists think it’s a blessing because they’re going to introduce to all of us now a strict adherence to socialism, it’s communism.

And I think, no, I look at it as an opportunity. The streets are in riots and people are concerned and people woke up with the COVID nonsense and the more and more people have awakened. So I think that’s good.

And that’s the way I work. I can’t think, I can’t deal with a single, if I was there and I had the power and I did this, all of a sudden it would change because they’re trying to do that just miniscule, you know, with a doge. They want to fire some people and do this and there’s riots in the street.

So I just don’t think that the people have to get ready for that. And that to me comes through education. And that’s why I admire the people who are out there trying to, you know, change people’s mind and have people understand what natural law is all about and understand why these people are not bashful saying, yeah, I don’t believe that you can find truth at all.

So they don’t even try to find it. So that’s where the problem is. Dr. Paul, I fully agree with you.

I think education is the foundation. And I think that your wonderful program, the Liberty Report is absolutely perfect on a daily basis to watch, to get that, you know, information in a very condensed and very sort of easy format to understand what’s really going on and to get a good sense of, you know, what expectations we may want to have moving forward if things don’t change. Dr. Paul, thank you so very much for this conversation and for your time.

It’s been such an honor and pleasure hosting you today. Your thoughts and perspective are very much appreciated, and I certainly look forward to an opportunity to connect with you again. Very good, Lina, and I thank you for the opportunity to be with you today.

Thank you.