"The Revolution" by Ron Paul

• In the American political lexicon, “change” always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.
• Every election season America is presented with a series of false choices. Should we launch preemptive wars against this country or that one? Should every American neighborhood live under this social policy or that one? Should a third of our income be taken away by an income tax or a national sales tax? The shared assumptions behind these questions, on the other hand, are never cast in doubt, or even raised. And anyone who wants to ask different questions or who suggests that the questions as framed exclude attractive, humane alternatives, is ipso facto excluded from mainstream discussion.
• Every four years we are treated to the same tired, predictable routine: two candidates with few disagreements on fundamentals pretend that they represent dramatically different philosophies of government.
• There are no matters of substance.
• Freedom has a unique power to unite us.
• I believe individuals have a right to life and liberty and that physical aggression should be used only defensively.
• The principles enshrined in the Constitution do not change.
• Anyone who advocates the non-interventionist foreign policy of the Founding Fathers can expect to be derided as an isolationist.
• It is unreasonable, even utopian, not to expect people to grow resentful, and desirous of revenge, when your government bombs them, supports police states in their countries, and imposes murderous sanctions on them.
• That revenge, in its various forms, is what our CIA calls blowback -- the unintended consequences of military intervention.
• The point is a simple one: when our government meddles around the world, it can stir up hornet’s nests and thereby jeopardize the safety of the American people.
• The requirement for a just war varied to some extent from commentator to commentator, but those who wrote on the subject shared some basic principles. The war in Iraq did not even come close to satisfying them.
• First, there has to be an initial act of aggression, in response to which a just war may be waged.
• Second, diplomatic solutions had not been exhausted.
• Traditional just-war criteria also demand that the initiation of war be undertaken by the proper authority.
• Under the U.S. Constitution, the proper authority is neither the president nor the United Nations.
• When individuals want a war any pretext will do.
• Foreign aid is not only immoral, since it involves the forced transfer of wealth, but it is also counterproductive, as a ceaseless stream of scholarship continues to show.
• The so-called debates between pundits they see on television or read in the newspaper carefully limit the range of debate to the point of insignificance. The debate is always framed in terms of which kind of interventionist strategy our government should pursue. The possibility that we should avoid bleeding ourselves dry in endless foreign meddling is not raised.
• Americans have the right to defend themselves against attack; that is not at issue. But that is very different from launching a preemptive war against a country that had not attacked us and could not attack us, that lacked a navy and an air force, and whose military budget was a fraction of a percent of our own. A policy of overthrowing or destabilizing every regime our government dislikes is no strategy at all, unless our goal is international chaos and domestic impoverishment.
• In early American history the Constitution figured heavily in political debate. People wanted to know, and politicians needed to justify, where the various schemes they debated in Congress were authorized in the Constitution. In the twenty-first century, by contrast, the Constitution is like the elephant at the tea party that everyone pretends not to notice.
• An executive order is a command issued by the president that enjoys his authority alone, not having been passed by Congress. He [the president] can thereby circumvent the normal, constitutional legislative process.
• Yet another abuse, though, and all the more troubling for being unknown to most Americans, involves the use of something called presidential signing statements. When the president signs a bill into law, he sometimes accompanies the signing with a statement, not necessarily read aloud at the signing ceremony but inserted into the record all the same. (These can be used) … as a vehicle either for expressing the manner in which the president intends to interpret certain provisions of a law (his interpretation being frequently at odds with the one Congress obviously intended), or even for making clear his intention of not enforcing the provisions in question at all.
• Americans must remember that the Constitution was designed not merely to prevent the federal government from violating the rights that later appeared in the Bill of Rights. It was also intended to limit the federal government’s overall scope.
• Article I, Section 8, lists the powers of Congress. Common law held such lists of powers to be exhaustive.
• Now, isn’t our Constitution a “living” document that evolves in accordance with experience and changing times, as we’re so often told? No -- a thousand times no.
• If we feel the need to change our Constitution, we are free to amend it.
• Congress was supposed to declare war, and the president in turn was to direct the war once it was declared.
• Congress has no constitutional authority to delegate to the president the decisions regarding whether to use military force.
• The draft is a totalitarian institution that is based on the idea that the government owns you and can dispose of your life as it wishes.
• We should not think in terms of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and other such groups. That kind of thinking only divides us. The only us-versus-them thinking in which we might indulge is the people -- all the people -- versus the government, which loots and lies to us all, threatens our liberties, and shreds our Constitution.
• Economic freedom is based on a simple moral rule: everyone has a right to his or her life and property, and no one has the right to deprive anyone of these things.
• By “legal plunder” Bastiat meant any use of government that enriched one group of people at the expense of another, and which would be illegal if private individuals tried to carry it out themselves.
• The income tax implies that same thing: government owns you, and graciously allows you to keep whatever percentage of the fruits of your labor it chooses. Such an idea is incompatible with the principles of a free society.
• What we should work toward, however, is abolishing the income tax and replacing it not with a national sales tax, but with nothing.
• There are far more interest groups lobbying in Washington for special benefits and privileges than most Americans can imagine.
• Economic freedom and personal liberty are not divisible.
• The Patriot Act violates the Constitution by allowing searches and seizures of American citizens and their property without a warrant issued by an independent court upon a finding of probable cause.
• History demonstrates that the powers we give the federal government today will remain in place indefinitely.
• If the history of American government teaches us anything, it is that the time to fight oppressive and absurd programs is before they are established, since once they are in place they are essentially impossible to dismantle.
• Where does the Fed get the money to buy the bonds? It creates it out of thin air, simply writing checks on itself and giving them to banks. If that sounds fishy, then you understand it just fine.
• By increasing the supply of money, the Federal Reserve lowers the value of every dollar that already exists.
• When the money supply is increased, prices rise -- with each dollar now worth less than before, it can purchase fewer goods than it could in the past.
• All right, some may say, prices may indeed rise, but so do wages and salaries, and therefore inflation causes no real problems on net. This misconception overlooks one of the most insidious and immoral effects of inflation: its redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the politically well connected.
• When the value of Americans’ savings is deliberately eroded through inflation, that is a tax, albeit a hidden one.
• Congress could not get away with spending beyond our means year after year if we did not have a Federal Reserve System ready to finance it all by purchasing bonds with money it create out of thin air.
• Any government that inflates the money supply runs the risk of hyperinflation, which occurs when the money supply is increased so much as to render the currency completely worthless. It can occur very quickly and suddenly, and has a very rapid snowballing effect.
• We need to rethink what the role of government ought to be, and fast.
• Sanctions hurt the target population but rarely do serious harm to the targeted regime.