Ron Paul On The Situation In Afghanistan

Liberty, Limited Government, and the Vaccine Mandates

Welcome back everybody to another episode of Apologia Radio. This is the gospel heard around the world. You get more at ApologiaStudios .com. A-P-O-L-O-G-I-A-Studios .com. I'm Jeff. They call me the Ninja.

That's Luke the Bear right there.

What up?

And you read the title right. We have an epic show today. This is the show where we talk for the second time to Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Ron Paul, you know, ran for president three times. Should have been president three times.

He's our favorite liberty loving Texan and we're grateful to have him on the show. Dr. Paul, thank you for joining us.

Thank you. It's really nice to be with you today.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. We're excited. So I know we have limited time with you today. So Dr. Paul, I wanted to launch right into it. Two specific things to talk to you about today. One is I wanted to talk to you from the standpoint of liberty and the standpoint of the principles that actually built this nation.

I want to talk to you about the vaccine mandates. And I'd also like to talk to you about sort of your perspective right now, what's going on in Afghanistan. So to start with the vaccine mandates, I'd love to hear you and your perspective in terms of how do you feel about this when you see places like New York mandating vaccines and masks to go into restaurants and public areas and you see certain states making the move that looks like they're going the direction of vaccine mandates.

You have businesses right now letting people go, people having to quit their jobs because they don't want to take the vaccine. How do you feel about that from the perspective of liberty?

I strongly disagree with it. I'm not totally surprised because it's a smoldering problem that we've had and it's been going on for a good many years. And that is the shifting away from limited government being there for the purpose of protecting liberty to that where the government is supposed to manage our lives, our medical care, our education and just about everything and telling other people how to live and getting involved in other countries that we've more or less sold out to the basic principle.

But this is just, you know, one more big lop of it, you know, coming down hard that even though the government's been involved in medicine, you know, in a free society and even under our constitution, you're supposed to have a separation of the government.

We know about religion, separation of church and state, and a lot of people still, you know, at least pay lip service and understand that. But that should apply to economic matters. It should apply to social matters.

It should apply to medical matters. The people should make their own minds up. People say, oh, that'd be terrible, terrible. The government has to take care of us. The government's there to protect us.

And that's where the flaw is. Government is not there to protect us and make us safe and secure because they're incapable of doing it. And any effort to do that has to be done at the sacrifice of liberty.

After 9 -11, of course, there was a big move on to expand the government, which they did, and they passed the Patriot Act and other legislation like that. And we would I'd have people that knew me well and liked me and liked less government.

They said, Ron, under these circumstances, the government has to keep us safe and secure. But under these conditions is when you better be really careful about protecting our liberties because when our country is at war, technically we didn't call that a war, but if we're at war, people say, well, for national security purposes, you have to sacrifice your liberty.

But I counteract that by saying I don't believe that you ever have to sacrifice any liberty to be safe and secure. Besides, the government's not very good at making us safe and secure. As a matter of fact, they get in the way and interfere with our choices, especially right now in medical choices and international choices.

And what about all the military operations? They haven't made us safe and secure. They've endangered us mainly because they shouldn't even be making efforts. They should be protecting our right to take care of ourselves and our obligation to take care of ourselves.

And I think if we follow those rules, we'd all be a lot better off.

The Founding, the Constitution, and the Progressive Turn

That's right. Dr. Paul, it's a good point. You mentioned two things there I guess would be good to talk about. One is you mentioned limited government as though that meant something, as though there's some principle or some foundation that that comes from.

You also mentioned economic matters. So on those two points, one, limited government, when you say limited government, Dr. Paul, what do you mean by limited government? Where does that come from? Why is that important?

Well, it comes from the founding, and that is what the founders wanted. And that's why they made an effort in the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence is a little clearer on exactly what they wanted.

They wanted to get rid of the authoritarians from across the ocean, telling them how to live. But the Constitution was meant to restrain the government and tell us what the government can't do. And now it's turned into they're allowed, those who object to what we're talking about, they object to it and they say that the government can do anything that they want unless there's a prohibition in the Constitution.

Defaulting the Constitution is a good step in this direction. And the whole problem is that government has a tremendous momentum. And now with the momentum we've had now for 100 years, where we more or less rejected this, you know, 100 years ago, the progressive era really had a climactic entrance in 1913 when they said, well, we have to have an income tax.

We have to have a Federal Reserve. We have to print money. Deficits don't matter. Our obligation is to make the world safe for democracy and this sort of thing. So we went off on a tangent. And the worst part of that was that the moral and the intellectual fiber of the country was shifting.

And that is when these ideas were put into concrete in our universities. And now we're seeing the consequence of that because they want to make a step forward. And it's now not even embarrassing for a politician to say, well, you know, I believe in Marxism and I believe in socialism.

And it's straightforward. It's coming out of our university. So we have a moral, we have a financial crisis, but I think we have a moral crisis too. And both are facing bankruptcy.

That's right.

Honest Money, the Fed, and the Moral Case for the Gold Standard

Bankruptcy. That gets right to the economy. You have been the champion of just taxation in your work over decades. You've also been a champion of ending the Fed. Just give me like 60 seconds here. Why would that be important in terms of ending the Fed, getting back to the gold standard?

Why are those principles important?

Well, if you grant those to the government, the government welcomes them. And there's always not the majority of the people, but there's a lot of noise comes from those people who like it and they become leaders.

So all they need is five to 10 of the people promoting interventionism and they entice you to join in because it's just moderation. It's just we don't want authoritarianism. We don't want dictatorship, but we have to have government.

So they move in and then there's this momentum of growth of government and they get involved. And I think it has to be a rejection on principle. So if the government's not supposed to take care of us, say, okay, say all our medical problems, then you can't do a little bit because if you have a little bit, all of a sudden it's too big.

If you have a little bit of an income tax, hmm, yeah, just tax the rich. All of a sudden it runs out of control. Okay, we're having a problem. We're having an interventionist problem. We have a war to fight.

We have to have a little bit of inflation, just for a while and then we'll quit. It's 100 of the principle. And before you know it, it's out of control. And we've been incrementally allowing our governments to do this incrementally.

And now we have a mess because it's totally out of control. And yet I'm still an optimist about it because I think we're waking up a lot of people and I'm glad to come on radio programs like yours because I think you're trying to do the same thing.

Thank you. Absolutely, sir. And just quickly, people don't understand really. When you say gold standard, how is that meaningful? What for? What's wrong with paper money?

Well, because it's dishonest. It's considered immoral because people can counterfeit it easily and it can be manipulated. The founders were so determined to have a moral principle on money that they actually issued the death penalty in the Cornish Act of 1792 that if you were a counterfeiter of government papers, including the money, they thought it was so bad that they would issue the death penalty.

I doubt if it was ever used that way, but that's how strongly they felt about it. But it's an honesty thing. It's stealing because if I'm in charge of the government and I have control of the printing press and you've saved up a couple hundred dollars and you want to use it later on, well, what if I have power to counterfeit the money?

Then all of a sudden the money you have has become less valuable. Instead of being worth $100, it's worth $50, and yet if I get to do it, I get to use that money immediately. To me it's a moral principle.

It's theft that's going on. I think instead of saying printing money and increasing the money, we should always use the word counterfeiting. Counterfeiting people understanding because it's dishonest.

The fact that if the politicians had to hold their feet to the fire, they couldn't expand without permission of the people. They would at least have to grant the taxation or whatever. But this way it's a sneaky way to tax and expand the role of government, expand and create the welfare state, and get involved in the world empire, which we see and we're witnessing some of the rural blowback from that with what we're seeing in Afghanistan.

Honest money is a great tool for putting pressure on those who are in government to be honest about what they're doing. One of the first things they do, the dictators get in, is they take over the money supply.

Just think of what happened early on. A month after Roosevelt was elected president, he took over the gold. He stole the gold from the people because he knew that they had to spend a lot of money, there'd be wars coming, and there'd be a welfare state, and this gives license to dictatorships.

And even though they don't call that dictatorship, it's a license to enlarge the government. So all governments drift that way. The world now has been operating since 1971 with a total fiat currency. It's impossible to operate this, anything with fiat currency, for prolonged periods of time, and eventually it undermines liberty, the society breaks it down, and then they have a choice, either rolling over and doing exactly what the dictators want you to do, or the people wake up and say, what we want is honest government.

And that's what the founders tried to do, but there were some flaws in the Constitution that didn't quite work out as well, and there were too many loopholes, and all of a sudden, and the biggest loophole came from the people.

And Adams would warn that, if you don't have a moral people, this Constitution's not going to do you much good. And all of a sudden, it's the people that endorse the spending. They want part of the action.

Christian Just War Theory and the War in Afghanistan

Yes, and so this problem with the monetary system is, ultimately, our money is lying to us. People are lying to us about the money, and that's why it's an important issue to address. And so you have inspired me so much, sir, in that you've even gone before Congress and the people, and you've stood up for what, in your words, before Congress, Christian just war theory.

Oftentimes, you were going against the grain of people in your own party, and they were seen as conservatives. You were talking about the fact that we need to have a declaration of war according to the Constitution.

We need to do this in a way that is just. And again, you even invoke the terminology of Christian just war theory, which I so value and so highly respect. Now, you were speaking against the way that we entered into the conflict in Afghanistan.

You were speaking against the way that we were spending money there for so many years, and you were saying, as you were running for president, that you would get us out of Afghanistan. What is your perspective on how President Biden actually did this in terms of pulling out of Afghanistan, leaving behind weapons?

Donald Trump, President Trump said that he would have at least gotten the Americans out and our allies out first before he pulled out troops. How would you have handled that? Because you wanted this conflict to be ended in a just way, and you wanted us to enter into any war in a just way.

What's your perspective on what's happening?

We shouldn't argue the case. It would be simple, and there'd be no problems and no ramifications because it wouldn't be. It would be difficult. The best thing is to avoid that prevention. The best way was with the argument we made 20 years ago.

Say, let's not do this. This is bad news. Even after the 10-year period, I would say, look, you've got to stop. And that is the biggest thing. But the longer it goes, the more difficult it is. You know, what's the best thing to do about the monetary system?

Quit inflating. But the immediate result of quit inflating, it collapses the whole system that is collapsing on its own at a different pace. But if you do that, if you just closed it down, there'd be blood in the streets.

There'd be revolutions and killing and a total breakdown of society. But it's going to happen anyway if we continue to do it. So the thing of it is, I mean, in theory, and I'm pessimistic that we won't get enough people in Washington to do it, that you could just, you know, spend 5 less money every year.

5 just cut it. It doesn't seem like much, but we're always increasing it 20%. Then we hide it. Matter of fact, it's tremendously increased. Just think of since COVID came out, they've literally created trillions of dollars that goes out through the banking system.

It's not even on the books. It's the disobedience to law and order, not only with the monetary system, but the way they get involved and the people, you know, suffer the consequences. So it, to me, is a very, very serious problem, but I don't think the problem is overwhelming.

I think it's rather simple. It's the transition that is tough, but you have to get the people to believing they'd rather live in a free society than in a slave society. And right now there's a lot of confusion because still, there's a lot of people who say, Ron, you're okay.

Everything is there, but we have to have government keeping us safe and certainly take care of us if we get sick and certainly have to, government has to help educate us. Well, I disagree with that.

Dr. Paul, thank you, sir. You're a hero of freedom and Liberty, and it's an honor again to speak with you. Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you. It's great being with you.

Thank you, sir.

God bless.

Well, there you go. Dr. Ron Paul. Thank you so much.

A lot in short amount of time.

No, he's good at that. He's good at the good, solid responses that will actually get you thinking. He's written books on this.

He has a book called,.

And I think the book is called End the Fed.

Very direct.

Yeah.

Christian Just War Theory, the Military, and Afghanistan's Collapse

And so I've, you know, the last couple of days we knew we were getting Ron Paul on.

So I was,.

I was looking back at some of the greatest hits of Dr. Ron Paul.

You know,.

It's interesting because one of the things I think it's important, and I want to just say, as we start this conversation, all respect to the men who, and women who risked their lives, and even some that sacrifice their lives going to these wars.

I want to encourage everybody. We'll put a link underneath this show in the description. So you guys can go check this out later and get more on this. Our friend, Douglas Wilson did an excellent lecture on Christian just war theory.

And he actually, in that lecture, not only lays the foundation of historically, what Christians from scripture developed in terms of Christian, just war theory.

I mean,.

It goes all the way back even in part to like Augustine, the development of this. And they didn't just do it willy nilly. They were saying like, how would God have us fight a war? Because we live in a fallen war world.

Yeah,.

That's right.

People,.

People are murderous. People are evil. People come and invade people's communities, people killed and destroy and rape. And so Christians understood that if you love your neighbor and you have a government that has yielded to Jesus Christ, you want the government fighting a war in a way that's pleasing to Jesus.

And Doug's point in there, I think it's really important is that we don't have a prophetic word from God in terms of like Luke's, the living prophet today speaking for God, who's delivering actual current revelation from God.

We don't have that benefit today in Israel. They have God specifically telling them exactly how to wage a war and fight it.

And whatnot.

We don't have that.

And they still didn't get it right.

They did.

Yeah. Oftentimes.

So what do we have today?

Well,.

We have this revelation from God given to us in scripture, so we have to think hard thoughts. And so I just want to encourage everybody as you're thinking about Christian, just war theory,.

All that,.

I'm going to make sure you guys listen to that link to get a good, a good full lecture. And Doug deals with a lot of principles. He also deals with a lot of the conflicts. Like what if you, what if you find yourself being a Christian fighting in an unjust war,.

Right?

Doug talks about that in terms of principle.

And so,.

But I want to say to all of the people who are in armed forces,.

I'm an,.

I'm a military brat. I'm an air force brat. Grew up my entire life until I was an adult going base to base. My father was in the military. I do love our military. And so I, but I think it's important as Christians that we think about this in terms of a Christian category.

How would God have us wage a war? What's pleasing to him? Because in the end, and this is one of the things Doug points out is that,.

You know,.

The,.

The military is doing what they're doing to serve their neighbor and their country to, in their mind, fight a just war. The people who are going to answer to God primarily for the waging of a war are the leadership.

And so is there stuff in terms of like Christian leaders and, and Kings and everything else in the past,.

You know,.

Invoking the name of God when they go to wage a war, like let, let me die if I'm doing this wrong. Cause you're thoughtful.

Like,.

Is this pleasing to God? Is this right? Is this right? Intentions? That sort of a thing. Do we have a proper goal?

Like,.

Do we have an aim and a goal and an end in mind? Because that would be immoral to just kind of go into a war with no real end in mind. You have people's lives at stake. You're talking about,.

You know,.

I know many people listening to this show are probably going to have family members who even died, wives that lost their husbands, children who lost their fathers fighting the war in Afghanistan. And so all, all love and honor and respect to the armed forces.

But like moving forward,.

I think we have to say like,.

This is chaos.

Oh,.

Totally.

It's absolute chaos. It's mayhem.

I mean,.

I was just reading a story today of a man who was, was in Afghanistan. He's dead now. He was, he was captured by the Taliban. He was known to be somebody who was working with the U S so they burned his badge into his chest, cut his arms off and killed him.

You know, this is a mess,.

But in, in,.

In talking to Dr.

Paul, my,.

I'm going to hear what I have to say to this. My concern was,.

Okay,.

We can all have a million answers as to what was the, what would have been the best way to pull out?

You know,.

God bless Trump. Trump has been trying to pull us out of, out of Afghanistan for a long time. He even said that in an interview last night,.

You know,.

He was trying to bring down the troops and get us out of there for American lives. So that's a good thing. And everybody agreed. If you were a fan of Trump and a supporter of Trump as president, everybody agreed,.

That's good.

That's good.

Get us out.

But he,.

His argument was, I wouldn't have gotten us out of there without first getting out the American citizens and our allies and all of our weapons and all of our weapons and vehicles and black hop helicopters,.

All that stuff.

Like Miller, he would say the military would have been last to pull out. So whatever your opinion is about us moving and how we would have gotten out of this in a better way. I think Dr. Paul was really onto something.

And I,.

I respect his boldness that he said before the U S Congress, we need to get back to tradition. And he said specifically the words, Christian just war theory. You don't wage a war unless it's a, unless it's a defensive posture and you,.

And again,.

There's more principles involved in the Christian just war theory in terms of right intention, have an end in mind. It has to be a just cause all that stuff. So what do you think right now?

Cause it's a big,.

Obviously it's a big deal right now.

I mean, there's a lot, a lot to digest and obviously we don't know a lot of the facts yet. It's just, like you said, it's just complete chaos at the moment. But I mean,.

Our,.

Ultimately our nation was founded on a, on just war,.

Right?

Like we wouldn't exist if it wasn't for a just war.

Yeah.

You know, and obviously we're, we're very careful to say the war for independence and not the revolutionary.

War.

Cause they weren't forming a revolution in the way that Marxists see that.

Today.

Exactly. So they were fighting for liberty and their independence, which we find ourselves very similarly in this situation in many ways today. So yeah,.

I mean,.

So we can't ignore it.

Um,.

But I mean, as far as what's going on right now,.

What,.

What I hate is when people, I see people on like Facebook and social media approaching this like it's a black and white issue and it's not, you know? And so there's people I see that are even very like-minded with us where they're like,.

Well yeah,.

We shouldn't be there. Glad Biden's right for pulling this out. And it's like,.

Well,.

It's not that simple. We can't just say that when it's, especially the way he's handling it.

And that's a good point.

Sorry.

I don't want to, I want to keep you on the same track, but that's what I think what Dr. Paul was referring to when he said like,.

Well,.

Let me bring the discussion back to the monetary issue.

Yeah.

Is it a moral?

Yes.

But you can't just stop it right now.

Yeah.

You can't cut it off immediately with,.

You know,.

Let's just do it right.

Let's just do what's right.

Right.

Because the consequence of the ripple effects of like doing that to you, that the economy is mayhem.

Yeah.

And when you're fighting a war, even if it was unjust to begin with,.

You know,.

And people are losing lives, you still have to say,.

Okay.

And that's one of the things Doug talks about as well is like your exit out of the war has to also be just,.

Has to,.

You know, you're fighting even has to be proportional. Like you don't, you don't kill ants with a baseball bat sort of thing.

Yeah. Well, yeah.

Cause now he's the way they're handling it is there's going to be untold amounts of innocent lives lost.

Right.

Because of the way he's handling Christians.

Well,.

That's, that's the thing we've talked about this before too. Like, you know, should we be over there? Essentially what we've been doing is acting as police.

Right.

And it's not our business. We would all agree that we shouldn't be doing that. But now he's pulling out the police horse and there's an opportunity for rescue missions, especially if they're literally going to exterminate Christians,.

Kill Christians.

And they have been, you know, like I, I heard there was even, was it yesterday? There was a woman out, out in public, not wearing a job and they just shot her like in public, you know? And so like there's an opportunity to rescue people and get them out.

You know, like there's, they're literally military planes leaving and there's people hanging off the planes. So they need to rescue and falling to their death.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, and then, and it's just because it was such a, like a brash decision, you know?

And I guess we were supposed to leave. So let's leave.

It's like,.

Well,.

There's some stuff you should do first.

Yeah,.

Exactly. Make sure.

Oh,.

And here's our guns. You can shoot us as we're leaving.

The Christian and Secular Claims to Ultimate Morality

Yeah.

So the,.

The,.

The point that we're making is that, you know, we need to pay attention to Christian history in someone like even Dr.

Ron,.

Ron Paul, who says we need to get back to the tradition of Christian just war theory. We're saying, amen to that.

Yeah.

But we've got one of the longest wars in, in history,.

Us history.

Uh,.

We got ourselves into it. We lost American lives and spilled American blood. People lost family members because of,.

Because of this.

And,.

And their intentions were, I'm fighting something that's just, they were trying to do it in the right way. And so there's, there's something do in terms of the honor to their memories and to their sacrifice to make sure that this is done in the best and most appropriate way possible.

I think leaving behind military equipment, billions of dollars of military equipment,.

And, and,.

And leaving behind Americans and allies and everything else to suffer. And even considering the Christians who are going to be abused there, you have a, you have a moral responsibility to do it in a way that actually is most.

Effective.

And I just say,.

Everyone,.

Everyone's going to agree with this. It's not most effective to leave behind all your weapons.

Yeah.

Um,.

And even things like, I think,.

Um,.

You know,.

Uh, uh,.

Donald Trump said on his interview, I was trying to see what was his perspective. How would he respond to those sorts of things? And I also wanted to get the position of even Dr.

Paul,.

But he said,.

You know, when you leave behind that kind of equipment,.

Uh,.

China and Russia love to get their hands on it.

So now they can figure out where they drive and pick it up.

We'll,.

We'll pick it up. We'll buy it. We'll buy it from the talent. Cause now we get to see American technology and figure out how it works and try to upgrade our military. So there's just so many consequences.

And I will,.

I will say this Christians. I think it's important for all of us. We all make mistakes. We're not always going to get everything right, but I think it's important for us to not look like absolute hypocrites,.

Uh,.

To acknowledge when resident Biden,.

Um, uh,.

Says,.

Uh,.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Resident Biden, when he says,.

Um,.

Look,.

We're not, we didn't go into this to build a nation. We're not in the nation building business.

I'd, I'd say,.

Well,.

I'd like you to be more consistent with that in the future and around the rest of the world. But it is true. We're. It's actually not what we're supposed to be doing in a, in a war like this is building a nation.

Like that's not what we got into it for.

Right.

So that's not what we're supposed to do. So he's right on that. You got to at least say, acknowledge truth. When truth is spoken, even if it's coming from the mouth of your enemy,.