The Crisis Is Upon Us - Ron Paul

I have, for the past 35 years, expressed my grave concern for the future of America. The course we have taken over the past century has threatened our liberties, security and prosperity. In spite of these long-held concerns, I have days – growing more frequent all the time – when I'm convinced the time is now upon us that some Big Events are about to occur. These fast-approaching events will not go unnoticed. They will affect all of us. They will not be limited to just some areas of our country. The world economy and political system will share in the chaos about to be unleashed.

Though the world has long suffered from the senselessness of wars that should have been avoided, my greatest fear is that the course on which we find ourselves will bring even greater conflict and economic suffering to the innocent people of the world – unless we quickly change our ways.

America, with her traditions of free markets and property rights, led the way toward great wealth and progress throughout the world as well as at home. Since we have lost our confidence in the principles of liberty, self-reliance, hard work and frugality, and instead took on empire building, financed through inflation and debt, all this has changed. This is indeed frightening and an historic event.

The problem we face is not new in history. Authoritarianism has been around a long time. For centuries, inflation and debt have been used by tyrants to hold power, promote aggression, and provide “bread and circuses” for the people. The notion that a country can afford “guns and butter” with no significant penalty existed even before the 1960s when it became a popular slogan. It was then, though, we were told the Vietnam War and the massive expansion of the welfare state were not problems. The seventies proved that assumption wrong.

Today things are different from even ancient times or the 1970s. There is something to the argument that we are now a global economy. The world has more people and is more integrated due to modern technology, communications, and travel. If modern technology had been used to promote the ideas of liberty, free markets, sound money and trade, it would have ushered in a new golden age – a globalism we could accept.

Instead, the wealth and freedom we now enjoy are shrinking and rest upon a fragile philosophic infrastructure. It is not unlike the levies and bridges in our own country that our system of war and welfare has caused us to ignore.

Read the full article here.

It's a long read, but I think it's important that everybody sees this.

Ron Paul makes a great case for a new economic policy and explains why we need to change things now, before it's to late.

It's a shame that he didn't have more support in the presidential elections, he's one of the few politicians that actually cares about the constitution.

[edit on 9/7/2008 by Alien42]

It's not about the constitution, it's about knowing history and learning the lessons, it's about logic, wisdom and reason.....our leaders have none of this therefore they think they can compete with all the above virtues without actually having any virtues to speak of...it's about a war between the smart ones and the corpses, the corpses are winning, so good luck to everyone.

Originally posted by bubbles75
It's not about the constitution, it's about knowing history and learning the lessons...

And not forgetting the ones we learned when the world was on a gold standard. One of them was that eventually you need so much money in circulation that you had to start adulterating the coinage. This happened in ancient Rome (when they went through several monetary reforms.)

Several provinces made their own coinage because official coinage was in such short supply (which meant that the people of that province could exchange tokens... but no one else would take them). Some governors secretly produced fake Roman coins and base metal coinage was everywhere:
www.saudiaramcoworld.com...

History has a lot of lessons about the abuses that happened with a "gold standard"... but this is often shown as a "one side only" issue and a modern problem. The other side of the coin (so to speak) is seldom if ever acknowledged.

I don't know. E-gold was doing just fine until the government shut them down. They were warned to get out of the country with their operation and they just kind of went it is OK nothing will happen and then an article comes out in Foreign Affairs magazine saying that electronic gold clearing houses have the potential to give people a shelter from the dollar devaluation. Then just like magic the feds come in a close down e-gold and freeze all of their US accounts. To get out of facing a long court battle they plead the deal out and forfit all of their cash and much of their depositors gold to stay out of jail.

They had done nothing wrong mind you they just represented a threat no matter how small to dollar hegemony so they had to go. The same can be said for the Liberty Dollar. They offered a fractional reserve backed barter exchange currency and were shut down by the feds. What did they do wrong? Nothing really they just offered an alternative to the dollar and were shut down for fully bogus trumped up reasons.

This is to say that gold money will work if it is done right and the electronic form is likely to do well if it is not in the United States.