KING: He’s made three runs for the White House, and now his son, US Senator Rand Paul, is aiming for the Oval Office. Ron Paul, former Republican member of the House of Representatives. And one time Libertarian presidential nominee is my guest on this edition of PoliticKING.
Welcome to PoliticKING, I’m Larry King. He is always outspoken, opinionated, and one of a kind. He’s Ron Paul. He joins me from Clute, Texas. Former congressman, he’s a physician. He’s made White House bids twice as a Republican, once in 1998 as the Libertarian party’s nominee. He’s the founder of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, he’s an outspoken advocate for limited government, personal liberty, and low taxes, and you can catch him as he hosts the “Ron Paul Liberty Report” and you’ve seen ads for a latest thing that he’s got, about you and your finances about what this country’s going to, or coming to. We’ll get to that in a minute. What are your thoughts about your son’s success in the Senate?
PAUL: Well, I think it’s wonderful because I know how tough of a job he has. You know, because it’s not nice to be in a place where you really want to get along, but you have to stand your ground, and everybody’s yelling and screaming at you, you have to believe in something to do that. Too often people just capitulate, and go along to get along because that’s how you advance in Washington. So I thought he did a great job because he was dealing with something very, very important. I think he realizes the obstacles and also what might happen in the future. But he made the point very clearly. I thought he handled himself very well.
KING: Now as I understand it, we are still going to have some sort of USA Freedom Act, right? It’ll be somewhat diminished from what it is now.
PAUL: Well, that’s what they’re telling you and that’s why a lot of people are voting for the reform act, but actually it’s making things worse. Because, the first thing is it’s making government a partner with big business, as you know. Verizon, and AT&T, so they’re doing the government’s work. I don’t like that. I don’t like the mixture. But the other thing that is very, very bad, is that they’re cancelling, or they’re working toward the court ruling. The court ruled that the Patriot Act, the way it’s written, did not legalize this collection of data, and now what they’re doing in the reform package is making sure that the law says this. When the court ruled, they did not rule on the Fourth Amendment, they just ruled and said, well the Patriot act is pretty vague on that, it doesn’t say that you can’t do this, so they’re correcting that. So, one thing in Washington, when they have a reform of something, you cannot trust them. Because reform usually means that they’re making things a lot worse, and also you have to be very, very cautious about anything about a Freedom Report or the Patriot act. I thought that was very unpatriotic, what they were doing, but everybody after 9/11 said, oh, well we can’t vote against the Patriot act, so I think the reform act is a very, very dangerous thing to go. It’s not a slight improvement, as some people argue.
KING: It’s a dilemma to many people. He said – your son said yesterday, “I acknowledge a need for a robust intelligence agency, and for a vigilant national security. I believe we must fight terrorism. I believe we must stand strong against our enemies. But we do not need to give up who we are to defeat them. In fact, we must not. There has to be another way.” Do you agree totally with that statement?
PAUL: Well, probably just, very, very close to everything, but the point is very important. Why do we give up our liberties? We go to war, we send our kids over there, fight wars that are undeclared, they make no sense whatsoever, and they’re made to protect our liberties and protect our Constitution. Well, why would we do to ourselves what we’re claiming they might do to us from coming overseas. So we in this process, undermine our Constitution. It wasn’t a lack of–it wasn’t because we had too much freedom that was the problem, but now we have less freedom and the way we are fighting the war on terrorism, and I think they have made a lot of mistakes.
KING: The problem is, isn’t it, Ron, when you deal with fear, when you instill fear into people, in Hitler, in 1937, discarded warrants, and his argument was, if you have nothing to hide, what are you afraid if we don’t need a warrant to come into your house? We have troubles in this country and we should weed out the bad people. And that appealed to Germans.
PAUL: Well it appeals to a lot of Americans right now, I hear it all the time. It’s very scary because people, when they’re fearful, and that is a technique and a tool for those who believe in a lot more government than I do, they want to make the people fearful, but they can do this in economic policy too, well if the government doesn’t take care of you, there will be poverty, and everybody’s going to suffer. But the government has these programs, and look at how many people are suffering right now, the middle class is getting wiped out so that hasn’t worked. And of course, the fear around the world is that we have to spread America’s greatness, we have to have a program of promoting democracy around the world, and what do we end up with? A lot of constant wars if they do have an election and they don’t elect the person that we want, we go get rid of them. So I think the idea that we are exceptional and we can tell the world how to live is the wrong approach. I think we can be an exceptional nation, we have been an exceptional nation, but we should set a standard. We should practice civil liberties, we should have a good economy, and let people say, hey America is great, I wonder what they’re doing, maybe we ought to follow them. But for us to use authority and force and guns and threaten people, I claim we’ve only had two kinds of foreign policy. If other countries would do exactly as we say, we give them billions and billions of dollars. If they don’t do exactly as we tell them, we turn on them and we kill them. And I think there’s a third option, and that is a little bit of diplomacy and a little bit of common sense.
KING: Your son’s party, though, is the one that probably most favors the Patriot Act. He ran against his own party, in a sense. How will this affect him, do you think, in the Republican primaries?
PAUL: Well it’s a challenge, but I found out that we were able to do quite well by inviting people in who otherwise wouldn’t vote in the Republican primary. But I also believe you don’t sacrifice truth. If you believe in something, and you if you believe that the Constitution is right and the Fourth Amendment is right and privacy should be protected. You know, that individual who promotes it isn’t the problem. The problem is that too many people wimp out and say, well you know we have to be safe and we have to give up our liberties if we don’t have anything to hide. And to give more and more authority, let the government go into business with big business, and that of course is bad, and let financial situations just get worse. No, if that’s what they believe, to go along with them would be, in my mind, criminal. It would be sacrificing your whole soul to go along because you think you’re going to do better. But what we need to do in this country is make sure that the majority of the American people really want their freedoms back again. And quite frankly, I think we’d be a lot safer, there’d be a lot more peace, and this economy would be a heck of a lot better considering the trillions and trillions of dollars we spend on the war machine, military investor complex and how about that many, many trillions of dollars we spent bailing out the rich when the economic crisis hit. That can all change, we could have such a different situation, and I just sort of am sad that more people don’t wake up and listen to the truth.