Saturday, May 2, 2015

In Defense of Ron Paul

By Robert Wenzel

I have received numerous emails and even a question from an  EPJ Daily Alert reader about a Ron Paul video being promoted by Porter Stansberry,

The emails point me to various attacks on Dr. Paul for doing the video. One attack comes from Buzzfeed another from The Hays Daily News.

Buzzfeed quotes one ad where Dr. Paul says:
Hi, Ron Paul here. Today I have an urgent message for every American who’s retired or thinking about retiring soon. You see, our own government’s disastrous policies have now put you, me, and everyone over the age of 50 at great risk. Sometime in the near future, we’re going to have yet another financial crisis. This one won’t be solved with bailouts, and it will hit seniors the hardest. I fear there will be civil unrest, a drop in stock prices, pension fund collapses, big changes to Social Security and Medicare, the erosion of personal liberties, bank and brokerage closings, and ultimately a major crisis, as the U.S. dollar is rejected for almost any non-paper alternative.
Well. these are things that people who are concerned about their retirement should take into consideration. Is not BuzzFeed aware of what has already occurred in Ferguson or Baltimore?

Do BuzzFeed people seriously think that we are now on a sound financial footing in the US? If they do, well good for them. They should put all their money in 30 year Treasury bonds.

I personally believe that long-term bond investments right now are the worst investment possible and the more people that Dr. Paul is able to reach with his message the better. The Hays piece attacks Dr. Paul for recommending the purchase of gold, as though gold has never been a very successful long term investment.

Here's the a graph of the long-term performance of gold.


Here the Hay's commentary:
Let’s say you purchase the gold bullion Paul recommends, because he is successful in scaring you to death. Understand you cannot take this gold bullion to the counter at Walmart to pay for your goods. It will have to be converted into this worthless dollar bill Paul talks about. So now you’re right back where you started.
Oh yeah, looks like a gold investor would be right back where he started. I guess you are better off in those long-term US government Treasury bonds, now paying, wait for it, 2.82%.

As for Porter Stansberry, he appears to be a very successful marketer of financial material. But, I only know of what he is promoting second hand. His videos are much too long for me to sit through, and you can't skip ahead. Who has the time to listen to this?

According to the Hays piece, Stansberry promotes a book at the end of the Dr. Paul commentary. So get this, Ron Paul gets to promote his ideas for a full hour warning about the fragile state of the Fed manipulated economy and all hell rains down on him for a book offer that is at the end of the video.

Meanwhile, we have total nutjobs, promoting absurd platforms calling for government coercion to resolve "gender inequality," "carbon footprints" and plastic waste, who are treated by almost all media as one step from sainthood.

Is there something wrong with this picture? You bet. The establishment media is never going to give sound money, free market advocates a center stage platform.That's only a place for silly putty ideas that promote the programs of the elitists.

I learned a long time ago by observing Dr. Walter Block that you must take every opportunity you can to discuss your views. You have to, of course, be careful with the establishment elite, such as the NYT, but pretty much everywhere else you will get a fair shake when delivering your message, I have seen Dr. Block on Russian television, on webcasts and in debates with neocons, Stanford professors and black socialists. If the idea is to get the message out, then what is wrong with attempting to get the message out in every possible way?

Hays tells us that Stansberry was once sued by the SEC. Well what the hell does that mean? As far as I am concerned that is likely a badge of honor, which tells us that he is not part of the crony establishment. The crony establishment break laws on a regular basis and is never touched by the government. In fact, if an investment advisor hasn't been sued by the SEC he should be suspect.

But again, what does this have to do with Ron Paul? Given Stansberry's apparent savvy as a marketer, it appears to me that Dr. Paul doing a video with Stansberry is a great opportunity for Dr. Paul. (Hey Porter, call me anytime.) Portrer's  marketing savvy means that Dr. Paul's 's message will be put in front of thousands who may have never been exposed to a commentary on the dangers of  the current financial structure.

Ronald Reagan has often been called the Great Communicator. But I believe this is a mischaracterization. He was a Great Deliverer of Lines. He was a smooth and polished, well, actor. He delivered the establishment message with the help of the establishment media. But if you want to learn how to communicate a message, Dr. Paul is the man. He literally has expanded the libertarian movement by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in the face of an establishment that was against him. That's skill, that's a Great Communicator.

When it comes to getting the message out, Dr. Paul is many steps ahead of us in  understanding how to do it. And I am just glad there is someone like him who has come along to deliver the message and who knows how to expand the libertarian base using every nook and cranny of opportunity that is out there.

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher at EconomicPolicyJournal.com and at Target Liberty. He is also author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics

9 comments:

  1. Ronald Reagan talked about freedom at every opportunity. Politics is the science of the possible, I can see he made little headway in advancing freedom, but he did drastically reduce personal income tax rates. Since his exit from the public stage I haven't heard a single person with a national megaphone say a word in favor of freedom for every person. It is all about what is best, and forcing it on people. You may advocate freedom but you reach many fewer people in a year than a single Reagan speach reached in a day.

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    1. ...but he did drastically reduce personal income tax rates.

      So what? He didn't eliminate it. Whether your rate when from 37 to 34 percent, you're still being stolen from. Moreover, all that spending Reagan heralded in led to the perverse inflation we suffer with today. I'm so glad we get to keep such a marginal amount more of our money that's been made less valuable thus counteracting the "benefits" of such "reduced" personal income tax rates."

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  2. Have any of the these armchair geniuses criticizing Ron Paul's take on retirement funds, and state and local bonds recently looked at what is happening to the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and many other states. Just because people like Meredith Whitney and Ron Paul were years ahead of ahead of the crowd does not mean that their objective look at the mathematics was faulty, but that they were rather prescient.

    In the summer of 1987 I scoured the bowels of UCLB and UCLA looking at demographic data on women car buyers and a future "Crossover Market", when I stumbled on the fact that baby boomers would start retiring in 2006, and the effect that would have on the housing market. Fast forward to 2002 and I started creating an early database on housing, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, title corruption, banking leverage here and in Europe. The end result was that I fully understood what was going to happen starting in 2006 but the local radio personalities I knew were scared to death by what I had to say because they were dependent on local home loan companies for ad revenue.

    Over four years ago I built a massive database on 400 points in the economy and shut it down after two years of constructing it because what it showed was an American economy that was increasingly parasitic, but the hosts family structure could no longer support the oligarchies withdrawals. I saw an economy that was so frail that if it was a human being I would have considered it ready for hospice care. The media is the CIA's "Great Wurlitzer" and it's job is to make the public think an economy that should be in hospice care is ready to return to work. The problem is now the economy is on it's death bed and it is time to gather the family round for a final goodbye.

    So while I have a huge problem with the entire Paul family I have to back him up in this instance because if anything he is seriously underplaying the severity of the coming contraction. The only way to properly convey what I saw in my database is to compare the situation to a bridge that is so riddled with rust that one day it utterly collapses, and the people who used the bridge every day for years never saw it coming. You have to know where to look or you are literally blind to what could befall you.

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  3. Could Ron Paul have won the nomination if he hadn't been kneecapped by the Establishment Republicans? I guess we can argue that for hours.

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    1. Ron Paul had no chance and he was not making a serious attempt at getting the nomination. Smarten up.

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  4. The advertisements are the typical we see so they aren't anything remarkable with the scaremongering language because we see that a lot. They aren't fundamentally out of step with Ron Paul's views. None the less I a disappointed in seeing him do these ads because it is the sort of doomsayer stuff that turns people off and discredits the liberty movement in their eyes.

    What made Ron Paul so effective is that he would calmly explain the consequences of policy without presenting things this way. He would just be shown to have been correct. His famous speech of predictions on the house floor for instance. It wasn't scaremongering. It was these are the policies and this is what they will likely do. He would deliberately disarm any scaremongering interpretation by saying he hoped to be wrong and he wasn't selling something.

    Ron Paul makes some blunders from time to time like we all do and these ads are one of them IMO.

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    1. I would not associate scaremongering with Ron Paul's appearance in this video because one of the unspoken keys to the coming contraction is the severely attenuated nature of the American family in 2015. The media and many evangelical churches like to live in a make believe world where American families have not changed all that much from the 1950's television shows of "Ozzie and Harriet", and "Leave It To Beaver". But if they took a look at the 2010 Census maps of intact families, divorced parents, and single person households, they would see an unprecedented unraveling in the American landscape since 1990.

      In 2015 over 55% of births are outside of marriage for women under 30, and of those new mothers over 70 percent have not graduated high school. Births outside of marriage have seen an over 1,000 percent increase since 1950, and the trend is still accelerating. The only state of the union where intact families survive in reasonable numbers is in parts of Utah, but all you hear from the MSM is a glossy benign neglect that borders on total silence.

      Unwed mothers now make up a majority of young parents in America and their children are doomed by familial ignorance, and a severe lack of time and money to put into providing a strong and loving foundation for their children to thrive in. We are witnessing in stoney silence a generation of children who are sadly nothing more than tomorrows cannon fodder, who are roaming the halls of America's schools with very little hope of ever sniffing long term attention or real freedom.

      Many people like to attack teachers, but they are the first eye witnesses to what is happening to students who's parents are indifferent, or too stressed out to focus on their children nearly as much as they should if they want their offspring to have a prayer of knowing how to learn.

      Yes there are too many scaremongering articles, and videos out there on the internet, but those carnival barkers who sabotage liberty by losing control of their wits when being interviewed by mainstream media outlets have names like Rand Paul, and Alex Jones. Sadly the real scaremongers will never talk about the real canary in the coal mine of housing, household creation, and household debt; millennials.

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  5. Brilliant, Robert!!! Thank You for standing up for good old Ron Paul. There are so many snakes out there trying to drag him down. Character and integrity are not much loved in today's USA.

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  6. This article lost me right here, "Is not BuzzFeed aware of what has already occurred in Ferguson" What happened in Ferguson had nothing to do with anything financial and everything to do with the militarization of the police and the police getting out of control and murdering unarmed Americans. Simple.

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