"Liberty Defined" by Ron Paul

• Liberty means to exercise human rights in any manner a person chooses so long as it does not interfere with the exercise of the rights of others. This means, above all else, keeping government out of our lives.
• The restraints placed on our government in the Constitution by the Founders did not work. Powerful special interests rule, and there seems to be no way to fight against them.
• There are only four crimes listed in the Constitution: counterfeiting, piracy, treason, and slavery.
• Criminal and civil laws were deliberately left to the states.
• Scientifically, there’s no debate over whether the fetus is alive and human--if not killed, it matures into an adult human being. It is that simple. So the timeline of when we consider a fetus “human” is arbitrary after conception, in my mind.
• A foreign policy that endorses world wide intervention and occupation requires that people live in perpetual fear of supposed enemies.
• If we are fearful enough, we are willing to tolerate what might otherwise be regarded as immoral means of dealing with the enemy.
• We are told we are at war--against terrorism. Yet terrorism is a tactic and described in federal law as a crime. The war is “worldwide,” so lawlessness by our government can be perpetuated anywhere in the world, including within the borders of the United States.
• Literally hundreds of terrorists have been tried in civilian courts in this country and convicted and did not have to be tried in secret military courts.
• The Constitution protects “persons,” not just “citizens.”
• The Austrian School champions private property, free markets, sound money, and the liberal society generally.
• Ideas are very important to the shaping of society. In fact, they are far more powerful than bomb or armies or guns. And this is because ideas are capable of spreading without limit. They are behind all the choices we make. They can transform the world in a way that governments and armies cannot.
• Democrats are largely and openly for government expansion, and if we were to judge the Republicans by their actions and not their rhetoric, we would come to pretty much the same conclusion about them.
• When the ideas of both parties are bad, there is really only one hope: that they will continue fighting and not pass any new legislation.
• So-called moderate politicians who compromise and seek bipartisanship are the most dangerous among the entire crew in Washington. Compromise is too often synonymous with “selling out,” but it sounds a lot better.
• The Federal Reserve, the regulatory agencies, and Congress have systematically taught the American people to trust the government to be there when trouble strikes and that caution in investing, spending, and debt is harmful to the economy.
• The rights of the media are not inconsequential considering how the media can make or destroy a candidate with biased reporting, especially close to elections.
• After years spent in Washington, I have become more aware than ever of the government’s ineptness and the likelihood of its making mistakes. I no longer trust the U.S. government to invoke and carry out a death sentence under any conditions.
• Whenever anything fails in Washington, the answer is more government and more money.
• The greatest benefit of civil disobedience is the publicity it generates.
• The Constitution provides no authority to draft certain groups of young people to serve in the military.
• Chicken-hawks are individuals who dodged the draft when their numbers came up but who later became champions of senseless and undeclared wars when they were influencing foreign policy. Former Vice President Cheney is the best example of this disgraceful behavior.
• Countries that conscript or have the capacity to conscript are more likely to get involved in unnecessary political wars.
• Demagogues seek influence and political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, and expectations of the public. They do not enlighten; they browbeat and play rhetorical games.
• The trouble with democracy is not so much its workings at any one time; the trouble is the dynamic it sets in place that gradually changes a small government into a big one.
• What people want, demand, need, or wish for can be declared a right by merely writing a law.
• Anytime government provides a benefit, it must first steal it from someone else who is producing it, thus violating the rights of that individual. It is important to remember that.
• Voluntary associations are better, are more authentic, and are longer lasting, than associations forced by legislation and imposed by bureaucrats.
• There are lots of people who hate us for invading their countries, supporting dictatorships, starving people through sanctions, and maintaining an unprecedented military empire of global reach. Truly, the United States is an empire by any definition, and quite possibly the most aggressive, extended, and expansionist in the history of the world.
• The war on terror is no more a true war than the wars on poverty, illiteracy, or drugs. It’s a mere metaphor to provide fear and intimidate people into sacrificing their liberties.
• It’s impossible to make our country safer, freer, and wealthier if we aren’t willing to admit the mistake and come to understand how flawed our policies are.
• We should try to emulate success, not punish it. This is the American way and a major reason for the wealth and success of Americans.
• A dictator enjoys unrestrained power over the people. The legislative and judicial branches voluntarily cede this power or it’s taken by force. Most of the time, it’s given up easily, out of fear in time of war and civil disturbances, and with support from the people, although the dictator will also accumulate more power with the use of force. Rarely does an elected leader truly resist the temptation to exert power over the people.
• Article I, Section 8, defines the limited area over which the Congress, and therefore the whole federal government, was granted authority.
• In the past ten years the separation of powers between the state and the federal government has virtually disappeared and the federal government has won.
• Since World War II, all our wars have been fought without a congressional declaration of war.
• This presidential authority [to declare war] was never intended by the Constitution.
• Though executive orders shouldn’t be the law of the land, let there be no doubt that law enforcement agencies and the regulating arm of the bureaucracy treat them as such.
• The war powers assumed by presidents during periods of conflict may well be the most dangerous assumption of power by the executive branch.
• Voting against an earmark doesn’t save a dime--it only allows the executive branch to decide how the money will be spent, which is a clear responsibility of the Congress under the Constitution.
• The solution to the budgetary crisis is to simply get enough people in Congress to refuse to fund all unconstitutional spending by following the directions of Article I, Section 8.
• Foreign aid can best be described as taking money from the poor in a rich country and giving it to the rich and powerful in a poor country.
• Fear is constantly being manufactured by our leaders, Republicans and Democrats, by invoking a current “Hitler” about to attack us: Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, the Taliban, the communists, al Qaeda, or whomever. This fear is required to get the people’s support for fighting unnecessary wars and supporting the military industrial complex. The fear is concocted.
• I’ve seen how government programs work. They aren’t designed to last more than a single election cycle.
• It bears repeating that an armed society truly is a polite society. Even if you don’t like guns and don’t want to own them, you benefit from those who do. It is better that criminals imagine they face an armed rather than an unarmed population.
• In our own country, we should be ever vigilant against any attempts to disarm the people, especially in an economic downturn.
• People have a natural right to defend themselves. Governments that take that away from their people are highly suspect.
• Our Founders, having just expelled the British army, knew that the right to bear arms served as the guardian of every other right. This is the principle so often ignored by both sides in the gun control debate. Only armed citizens can ultimately resist tyrannical government.
• Everyone by now should know that our current war on drugs makes no more sense than alcohol prohibition did in the 1920s.
• Government propaganda is a powerful weapon used to instill fear into the hearts and minds of the citizens. Once this is done, it’s easy to get the people to accept government authority they otherwise would have rejected.
• Government borrowing and spending is not the solution; it’s the problem.
• Term limits, whether voluntary or mandated, provide no guarantee that the replacements will do a better job.
• We all know about the military-industrial complex; few understand the danger of the medical-industrial complex.
• Money was once rooted in a scarce commodity like gold or silver. It could not be manufactured by governments.
• In 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve with the power to print new money. This allowed government to pay for wars and welfare, but it also generated economic instability with booms and busts.
• Since 1971, the dollar is not redeemable in anything but itself. It is nothing but a symbol, and there are no limits on the number of dollars government and the Fed can create. The result has been an unchecked expansion of the state and a brutal and long inflation that has reduced our living standards in deceptive ways.
• An individual is not better off by assuming more debt and spending more, so how can a nation expect to be?
• Paper money is a drug and Washington is addicted.
• The U.S. government has been operating without a moral compass for decades, and without a moral compass, the rule of law is meaningless.
• What moral system should government follow? The same one individuals follow. Do not steal. Do not murder. Do not bear false witness. Do not covet. Do not foster vice. If governments would merely follow the moral law that all religions recognize, we would live in a world of peace, prosperity, and freedom. The system is called classical liberalism. Liberty is not complicated.
• Government lies to us to manipulate public opinion to bring about certain results, like war and wealth redistribution.
• In Congress, I do not attend the top secret briefings for any updates on a current crisis. I’m convinced I’ll only hear propaganda (lies) and spin (for political cover). Truth can be found elsewhere. It is much more likely to pop up on the Internet than in one of our so-called top secret briefings.
• To be an American patriot means to love liberty.
• True patriotism requires supporting the people even under dire circumstances and threat of government punishment.
• PC [political correctness] is never designed to protect the dignity of individuals or groups who might be insulted or maligned. It’s driven by cynicism, scoring political points, or trying to prove that the challengers to incorrect speech are morally superior.
• The entire drug war is an arbitrary prohibition that violates the Constitution, a process that has been going on for nearly seventy-five years.
• Government should not compel or prohibit any personal activity when that activity poses danger to that individual alone.
• In a free society, the land is owned by the people, not the government.
• As we’ve seen throughout history, fear drives the growth of government. If there’s no natural or inadvertent crisis, one is easily create or imagined by those who agitate for the authoritarian state.
• Now, most Americans can’t even conceive of other countries believing the United States to be a threat. And yet, ours is the only government that will travel to far distant lands to overthrow governments, station troops, and drop bombs on people. And we are surprised that many people in the world regard the United States as a threat?
• Conditions are ripe for some form of dictatorship to emerge.
• I tend to look suspiciously at all government statistics since the really harmful ones are never mentioned.
• Protecting individual plants, businesses, homes, apartments, or condos with cameras should be the prerogative of the property owner.
• Government doesn’t want to be watched and filmed.
• Meanwhile, the government’s own use of surveillance cameras is out of control. Cameras at traffic lights are pervasive throughout the country. Many cities have been sold on the idea, supposedly for safety reasons, but the reality is that the cameras are installed with the goal of raising revenue.
• Government much too often violates our privacy and at the same time is fanatical in protecting its own secrecy.
• Nothing good can come out of permitting government to film our every move.
• What I would like to see is the very opposite: citizens who film ever more government activity, a live camera in every government bureaucracy that can be seen by all citizens, a monitor bureaucrat that can be watched by every person who pays the bills.
• Federal revenue was provided by the tariff--a regrettable form of indirect taxation but one that didn’t actually attack the property rights of the citizens directly. The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution changed that. After income could be taxed, the whole structure of the relationship between government and the citizen changed.
• The greater the government taxes, the greater the need, since government management is inferior to individual management and the money is always misallocated.
• Our public schools are grossly inefficient, and very costly.
• Politically, there are limits on the degree of taxation that the people will tolerate, but the appetite for government spending is never diminished. That is why borrowing and debt continue and grow exponentially, ultimately leading to the inflationary tax to be paid at a latter date.
• Plainly speaking, when we fight terrorism by exacerbating the very reasons for that terrorism, we increase the violence against us.
• Whenever government wages war on anything (poverty, drugs, illiteracy, etc.), it is likely to make the problem worse.
• The evidence is clear that information obtained from torture is rarely if ever of any value. Those suffering severe mental or physical pain will say whatever they think the torturers want them to say. There is concrete evidence that a more humane method of persuasion yields more information than physical torture does.
• Sanctions and blockades are extremely dangerous and should be considered acts of war.
• Unbelievably, I hear of talk in Washington that the only way to get out of a deep recession or depression is to get into a war as FDR did.
• The great irony is that, when the goal is liberty, prosperity flourishes and is well distributed. When economic equality is the goal, poverty results.
• My advice: Leave the young people alone and they’ll find out that they prefer lovemaking to warmongering and are more anxious to get along with one another than the older generations who stir the pots of war.
• The old saying is true: Old people and governments start the wars and young people must fight and die in them for all kinds of cockamamie reasons.
• Foreign aid breeds dependency and sacrifice of sovereignty and removes an incentive to promote a free market economy.
• We need to become more tolerant of the imperfections that come with freedom, and we need to give up the illusion that somehow putting government in charge of anything is going to improve its workings, much less bring on utopia.
• We need to come to see government as it is, not as we wish it to be and not as the civics books describe it.
• We need to give up our dependencies on the state, materially and spiritually. We should not look to the state to provide for us financially or psychologically.
• Let us understand that it is far better to live in an imperfect world than it is to live in a despotic world ruled by people who lord it over us through force and intimidation.
• Ten principles of a free society:
• Rights belong to individuals, not groups; they derive from our nature and can neither be granted nor taken away by government.
• All peaceful, voluntary economic and social associations are permitted; consent is the basis of the social and economic order.
• Justly acquired property is privately owned by individuals and voluntary groups, and this ownership cannot be arbitrarily voided by governments.
• Government may not redistribute private wealth or grant special privileges to any individual or group.
• Individuals are responsible for their own actions; government cannot and should not protect us from ourselves.
• Government may not claim the monopoly over a people's money and government must never engage in official counterfeiting, even in the name of macroeconomic stability.
• Aggressive wars, even when called preventative, and even when they pertain only to trade relations, are forbidden.
• Jury nullification, that is, the right of jurors to judge the law as well as the facts, is a right of the pole and the courtroom norm.
• All forms of involuntary servitude are prohibited, not only slavery but also conscription, forced association, and forced welfare distribution.
• Government must obey the law that it expects other people to obey and thereby must never use force to mold behavior, manipulate social outcomes, manage the economy, or tell other countries how to behave.