Ed. Note.
From Ron Paul's Facebook page May 12, 2011:
"Tomorrow
I'll
be
on Good
Morning
America around 7AM. I'll also be making an important announcement at
the historic Exeter town hall in New Hampshire at 10AM. If you are in
the area, please stop by, or tune into the live stream of the
announcement at www.ronpaul2012.com"
[At the
event, about two dozen supporters were seated on a small bleachers
behind Paul].
Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX)
Announcement of
Candidacy
Exeter Town Hall
Exeter, NH
Friday, May 13,
2011
[DEMOCRACY IN ACTION
REVISED TRANSCRIPT
Copyright © 2011] / C-SPAN
video
SEN. JIM
FORSYTHE (R-STRAFFORD):
Thank you. Friends today is an important day for
liberty. As I stand on this stage I am overwhelmed at how far we
have come in the last four years. Through the hard work of you,
the committed activists, we have truly turned the tide at the state
level. It's particularly fitting that this event is taking place
in Exeter as the New Hampshire House of Representatives has not been
this packed with defenders of liberty since Exeter was the state seat
of government in 1775. My own election to the State Senate last
year is also the result of hard work of many in this room and for that
I am incredibly grateful. And in fact Molly Brown actually sang
the National Anthem at my kickoff event over a year ago. So it's
good to see you here again.
None of this would have been possible
without the 40 years of
steadfast service, unwavering principles and patience that Congressman
Ron Paul has exhibited. For many of us in this room he has served
as both a hero and a role model, showing us what can be accomplished if
you refuse to back down, refuse to go along to get along.
And while those of us in New Hampshire
have been busy these last
four years so too has Dr. Paul. He has continued to speak of the
dangers of overspending, overtaxing government that tries to solve all
problems by printing more money.
And people are listening. For
perhaps the first time in modern
American history phrases such as gold standard, Federal Reserve system
and monetary policy can be overheard in everyday conversations in
restaurants, in grocery stores, on college campuses and even in the
State House. People see the government growing, the debt growing
and the inflation of food and energy and they are justifiably
worried.
No one, literally no one in the country
can be more credible to
stand up at this point and say I told you so than Ron Paul. But
of course he doesn't say that, he does what he's always done: calmly,
honestly, consistently stand up for sound monetary and economic policy,
for a rational foreign policy and for the rights of the individual and
that's why we are here today supporting a man who has been a staunch
defender of the Constitution, the man who never voted to increase our
debt, and who turned down his government pension. The man who
inspired the Tea Party movement to call for lower spending. The
man who served in the Air Force and has delivered over four thousand
babies. Please welcome Congressman Ron Paul.
[Music]
RON PAUL:
Thank you very
much, thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank
you very much. We're on a schedule you
know so. But that was very nice and Jim, I certainly want to
thank
you. I am very pleased to call Jim senator. That is
great. And Chris thank you for your efforts, and I want to
acknowledge
all our special guests behind me; thank you very much for
attending and thank you all for coming. I am so delighted
to see you involved in our revolution. (Applause)
I have one update about the
revolution. The revolution is
spreading and the momentum is building. (Applause) Our time
has
come. It's been around for a long time, but the momentum is here
today, not because of what I have done—I happen to have been in an
important place and energized some, but it is necessary that the
grassroots people understand what the issues are. A generation of
people need to know, and I am delighted that the young people are with
us in this revolutionary spirit that we have. (Applause)
But a lot of other work has been
done. It's been the
intellectual work. I am convinced that a nation does not change
just for partisan political reasons. What has to happen is there
has to be an intellectual revolution to energize people and get people
to understand the problems from economic and political terms as well as
foreign policy. That is what has been happening now for quite a
few
decades. There's quite a bit of difference about attitudes about
economics and foreign policy today than there was in 1976 when I was
first elected. There's a big difference, and it involves a lot of
work from a lot of people. And now that so many people in this
country have come to understand that government so far in its pretense
that it can take care of us from cradle to grave and police the world,
it is so evident to this growing number of people that government isn't
the solution—government really has created the problems.
(Applause)
And what our opponents so often we like to
do is say oh, you people
don't even want any government. But you know in our society with
our Constitution there is a role for government. But the
Constitution wasn't written explicitly not to restrain your behavior
and your life and the way you spend your money, it was written to
restrain the federal government. (Applause)
But because of the educational effort and
the work that so many have
done, but also the strong evidence that there is a failure out there,
especially since we saw what happened with the housing bubble—and that
was a predictable event—that the housing bubble would burst. It
did as the Austrian free market economists had predicted. And
because of all this they have come together and people are now
listening to this revolutionary spirit that is spreading across this
country. (Applause)
It's great that I am able to announce in
this state, a very special
state, because there is so high respect for the spirit of liberty here,
so I am very, very pleased that I am once again able to say that I am a
candidate for the presidency in the Republican Party primary.
(Extended Applause)
There are many who would like to belittle
this effort, but let me
tell you, there is an old saying, three's the charm. (Applause)
The conditions have certainly changed,
even from four years
ago.
When I think back of the first year that I came up here, it must have
been like end of '06, '07, the atmosphere was a lot different.
There was an '06 election, an '08 election, and it did not make all of
us who believe in liberty all that happy. But boy I'll tell you
what. There has been a significant change. The people have
awoken and they have sent a message, elected a lot of new people to
your state legislature, and I'll tell you what. I am convinced
that the spirit of liberty is alive and well in New Hampshire.
(Applause)
You know there's a lot of talk about what
you should seek in a
president, and I'm not one that is prone to talk about I do this, I
will do this, but I can talk generically what I think a president
should be able to do and should do. One thing the American people
want, and I agree with them, they want a strong president. There
is no doubt about that. But the question you should ask, where
should those strengths be directed? Should the strength of the
president be directed toward building the TSA and homeland security and
policing the world? [Audience: No!] No, the strength and
the character of the individual should be directed toward standing up
for freedom, standing up for liberty and restraining government.
That's where the strength should be. (Applause)
There's been a lot of challenges already
today and yesterday and
this last week because of certain positions. I find one very
fascinating and something other candidates may well desert. And
that has to do with the drug issue, because it is so symbolic of
understanding what liberty is all about. When you think of my
position—my position is that you have a right of freedom of choice with
your bodies. That I believe is a basic principle of
liberty. What does that mean? If you have civil liberties
and a right to your life and a right to your property? Well it
means that you can make very, very important choices. And for
most of these most Americans agree with it. They say yes, the
most important thing in my personal life is that I and my family and
others, we make our decisions about our spiritual life and about our
salvation, which cannot be done by government and we have to provide
the maximum amount of freedom for individuals to make those decisions
so the government should always butt out of our spiritual lives.
(Applause)
Also, intellectually, we're fairly good at
that—the political
correctness movement has tried to undermine it—but basically most
Americans believe in the First Amendment and say that we have a right
to talk about controversial issues. As I have often said, the
First Amendment wasn't written for us to be able to talk about the
weather. (Applause) It's written so that we can discuss
controversial issues
and actually read very controversial and very dangerous literature,
especially the literature that promotes big government and welfarism
and socialism and all the mess. So we recognize that to be the
case, but all of the sudden people have lost respect for liberty, the
understanding of liberty, and we have conceded way too much to the
government to decide what we put into our own bodies. If we can
control what goes into our spiritual life, what goes into our
intellectual life, why should we concede to the government that they
decide everything that we do with our own bodies? (Applause)
I take a strict, a strict constitutional
position, and the
government has very little authority to get involved in our economic or
our personal lives. So that excludes the federal government from
being involved if and when we become strict constitutionalists.
The federal government shouldn't be involved. But that does not
prohibit the states from doing some of the things that they do.
Even though we might disagree with it at the national level under the
national law and the Constitution states have more prerogatives and
more
choices.
But if we looked at education as an
example, the Constitution gives
no authority for the federal government to run our educational systems
and they shouldn't be doing that; it should be a state matter.
(Applause)
But at the state and federal level what we
should be guaranteeing is
the protection of freedom of choice. We should always be aware of
the fact that it is very important that individuals who want to opt
out—whether
it's opting out of ObamaCare or opting out of the educational system—
we have to protect the right of individuals to home school and go to
private schools as well. (Applause)
Now this freedom of choice should lead to
other choices about what
we put into our bodies. For instance, your right to take things
into your body, such as nutritional substances, should never be
regulated by the federal government and absolutely never regulated by
the United Nations. (Applause)
And I don't know what's so bad about
getting the federal government
out of the business of regulating unpasteurized milk. Now that's
a real radical step. (Applause)
But why should we be so intimidated if
they want to use the issue of
somebody using hard drugs as the reason that we have to give up all our
freedoms, it's wrong. It's better to defend the position that
says you do have freedom of choice what you do with your body, but you
also have to have responsibility for what you do, and if you do harm to
yourself, you can't go crawling to the government to penalize your
neighbor to take care of you. (Applause)
I see this position of the government
controlling all those
decisions as detrimental to progress in medicine. So often there
are alternative treatments for cancer and other diseases that are not
approved for years and years and years because we have to have the FDA,
which is controlled too often by other drug companies, deciding when
and what we can do. We as individuals, making decisions with our
own physician, ought to decide about all alternative care as long as
people are up front and tell you the truth and tell you the risk and
can't defraud you. (Applause)
So in all that I just explained about
personal choices, in
everything I've done in politics, I've never introduced a bill in
Washington, DC to emphasize heroin. So they take all of what I
said and turn it around and say, he would legalize heroin. Well
you know the plain truth is is that heroin at one time in our history
was legalized and there was essentially no abuse of it, and it's only
in our recent history. And there was a long time in our history
that marijuana was legalized. I happen to have a personal real
disgust with the abuse of drugs, but it's all drugs, those that are
considered illegal, and I think physicians prescribe way too much
medications, get too many people addicted. (Applause)
Now the line that caught a little bit of
attention down in South
Carolina was when this came up and they wanted to paint me as this
monster about heroin, I didn't get a chance to say well I've never
mentioned that word. I talk about liberty and freedom. But
the interpretation is correct that I do want people to make
choices. So in my less than 30 seconds left to make my point, I
said alright, if it would happen to become legal, how many of you would
all of the sudden be using heroin, you'd all become heroin
addicts? No. People make decisions and they make good
decisions for the most part. But what I don't like is when
government makes the decisions and it violates the principles of
liberty, it's a blanket decision, it affects us in everything that we
do to the point where you don't even know if you're allowed to drink
the milk that you can buy from your neighbor farmer. (Applause)
So when they challenge you and want to
paint a negative picture,
stick to your guns, defend liberty, defend the free choices, defend our
Constitution, defend states' rights. Regulations if they're
necessary, as they are. On alcohol, there's a few regulations in
this state in alcohol, so it's different in different states, but at
least there are different states that handle this and children are
generally protected. In alcohol, you know the kids in high school
today can get hold of marijuana easier than they can get hold of
alcohol. So it's not like you just turn it loose and dump it out
there in the streets and the kids—
But ultimately even that doesn't solve the
problem. What
really solves the problem is good family relationships, families that
teach their kids what's right and wrong. (Applause)
Now because of my understanding of the
Constitution and economic and
moral policy, I have taken a position for as long as I can remember,
since I've been in Congress, since 1976, so it's nothing new. And
that is that I don't like the federal agencies breathing down our neck
and regulating our property even under the guise of they're there to
take care of us and help us.
So for this reason I have opposed the
federal government's insurance
programs because they cause moral hazard. And the one that they
quizzed me on today was the insurances that take care of everybody in
the midst of a natural disaster. Well natural disasters are very,
very bad and they're very, very damaging, and I believe that they can
be taken care of without the federal government going further into
debt, but through this system of liberty and separate governments and
state government because the point was about flood insurance. I
live on, very near the Gulf Coast; I used to have a house right on the
beach. Now you can't buy private insurance because it's dangerous
there and it's too expensive. So what happens? They have to
tax you in North Carolina so I can have a beach house in Texas, and
then the house gets blown down and the taxpayers pay. But they
want
to turn that into saying, oh, you don't care about the people suffering
from a natural disaster. Well you know free markets
economics and law really helps us sort these problems out. If you
want to build a house on the beach and you love it, yes, buy
insurance. Oh. Can't buy insurance. Well that's
giving you a very important economic lesson. It's saying it's
dangerous to live on the beach. (Applause) But the
people that don't
live on the beach shouldn't have to pay for those of us who take the
risk and live there and get a guarantee from the government.
In other ways, our society and our
country's been great. We
have been very generous when people really get hurt. Not only in
this country we go to help people, but around the world. I mean
when there are earthquakes and other things we as a people have been
very, very generous.
I'll tell you what. That's going to
end because our economic
policies in this country is destroying our wealth. We're not
going to have any money hardly to take care of ourselves let alone help
the world. (Applause)
I am convinced that you think things
through you can figure out how
the free market and sound economic policy and sound morality and the
Constitution will help us. Does that mean no government?
No. The government should be providing a sound currency; they
should enforce contracts. They should not be destroying your
property rights; they should be protecting your property rights.
(Applause) And obviously one of the most important property
rights that we should
always defend is the right to own a weapon to defend our self.
(Applause)
Other questions that have come up this
week has to do with foreign
policy, and it should be expected because I am so radical that I want
to go back to the Constitution and have a foreign policy which is a
pro-American foreign policy and not do the things that we're not
authorized to do. But because the status quo, including many
Republicans in the past has drifted over to the assumption that we have
to be the policeman of the world. Now I don't think the American
people ever fully endorsed that idea. Because even in recent
history, our candidate in the year 2000, he ran on a humble foreign
policy, not going into nation building and of course that is what I'm
running on, but let me tell you: I believe it and we should do
it. (Applause)
A lot of people would like to label us who
believe in that: oh,
you're a bunch of isolationists. Well I'll tell you what, if you
believe in freedom of choice, you believe in trading with other people,
believing that you have the right to buy goods from anybody you
want. It's your money. Why can't you buy the cheap
goods? And so you don't have to be an isolationist, it just means
that we stay out of the internal affairs and all the conflicts and the
civil wars and the religious civil wars especially going on in the
Middle East. I don't believe we have to be involved in
that. I think we make more enemies for it and it is bringing us
down financially, and therefore we need to reassess it and have a new
foreign policy. (Applause)
You know it gets a little trickier,
because when bad policy brings
bad events to ourselves, such as what happened on 9/11, it's very
difficult to say oh you know if we wouldn't have had that foreign
policy that we had, we wouldn't be under such attack. That you
cannot handle that easily because we have been attacked, there are
limits. No matter how many mistakes we make in the past when a
country's attacked a president and a country and the Congress should
respond. So for that reason, I did respond by voting for the
authority in 2001 to go after the individuals involved and responsible
and go and get the Al Qaeda and gave that authority. But what
happened was the authority was abused. Matter of fact it was
abused and ignored. The authority to go after bin Laden was
ignored at Tora Bora. bin Laden was allowed to get off the hook
and escape. At the same time, oh we didn't worry about it too
much; we decided well maybe they're Al Qaeda. Or at least they
said there is Al Qaeda, and there are nuclear weapons aimed at us, so
we have to go in and fight this war in Iraq.
So what did we end up with? Ten
years. Ten years of
thousands of our people being killed, tens of thousands having been
wounded with serious injuries. Believe me, there's information
coming out now that the Persian Gulf War Syndrome with the first
Persian Gulf War, which took them a long time to acknowledge, is going
to have massive number of people with those conditions coming
back. Head injuries. We have a big, big problem on our
hands. And that's a cost. Trillions of dollars, thousands
of lives, casualties that we have and to go after a group of people
who deserved to be gone after, but the cost, as far as I'm concerned
was way too high. (Applause)
Though I supported that authority, I had
deep reservations with fear
that it would be misused and therefore I was looking around for another
option, and that is when I reviewed what I've learned about the
Constitution and they have a provision in the Constitution that maybe
we can have a narrow defined war. Since we can't declare war
against a government when it's a band of criminals that are attacking
us, that is when they provided the principle of a letter of marque and
reprisal. And that is target the enemy, go after them, and get
them. Now the good example of how this might work is what Ross
Perot did. When he had some of his employees taken into hostage
in Iran, he didn't go to the federal government and say go in, attack
and declare war. What he did, he got some special forces retiree,
he got his people in there, he went in and got them out and brought
them out. (Applause)
Now if this principle had been ingrained
in our system and we had
used it, we could have well paid $500 million or a billion dollars to
capture the individuals that were responsible, and yet of course we
didn't do that. That would have been cheap compared to the
trillions of dollars that we're involved in now.
Not only do I see some of that as a
conflict in not doing well,
every time we occupy a country, every time we kill a civilian.
And it continues. When we lob these bombs into Pakistan,
civilians get killed too. They get angry at us. What would
we do if that happened? They say there's maybe Taliban in there;
we have to go and get them. The Taliban is not the Al
Qaeda. The Taliban are a group of people who are very determined
that they don't want any foreign occupation. That's their
religious and political belief. And we joined them when they were
so annoyed with the Soviets occupying Afghanistan, but we were on the
side of those who said no occupation. So it shouldn't be so
unusual for us to come to the conclusion that if we're involved over
there that they wouldn't turn on us, and that certainly is what
happened.
But if you want to demonstrate the
futility of our foreign policy,
just think about Pakistan. We're lobbing bombs into Pakistan,
innocent people are getting killed, maybe a Taliban member is killed
whose only argument [is] that he wants his country back, and at the
same time we give them billions of dollars. I mean we give them
money. I used to say that you know our problem in this country is
we have only two foreign policies. One, if they do what we tell
them, we give them money. If they don't do what we tell them, we
bomb them. In this case, we're doing both. So there is a
lot of room for a sensible, common sense foreign policy, and it goes
back to the Constitution.
But not only is this a detriment to us
militarily and for our
national security, it's a great detriment to us economically. You
can't ignore these dollars that we're spending. Besides, I see
politically, the real opportunity is cut hundreds of billions of
dollars out of the military-industrial complex that doesn't help our
national defense. (Applause) And then we don't have to take
this politically
unpopular stand that many have on our side and say what we need to do
is cut medical care for the children. I mean that's not a good
point to make; it's more difficult. I think all the programs
should be cut. I don't vote for them because they're
unconstitutional, but I still think emphasizing big cuts overseas you
could alleviate some of these problems in a political way that would be
more, more acceptable.
But this is going to be worked out in
Congress. Today they're
trying to figure out whether we should raise the national debt, and
they're arguing once again if we don't—like if we didn't come to the
rescue and bail out all the rich guys in '08 it would be a
depression. Sure there would have been a depression for Wall
Street, but the depression was dumped on the people instead.
(Applause)
So instead of making the correct economic
policy changes like lower
taxes, less regulations, a sound currency, property rights and paying
off the debt, a few things like that, what did we do? We've had
all these problems from too much spending and too much taxing and too
much regulation, too much borrowing, too much printing press money, so
oh yeah we're in trouble now, the bubble has burst so we really have to
pump harder. I mean we have to put more money in, spend more
money, borrow more money, tax more money, regulate more and print more
money. And guess what? We're not out of the
recession. We're still in recession, and it's going to get
worse.
This foreign policy is related because
it's a significant amount of
our spending, and the printing of money is an important thing.
There's a lot of, there's going to be a lot of talk about inflation
because inflation is here. But it's very important that we define
inflation the way free market economists do. Inflation is when
they print money and increase the money supply. The consequence
of inflating a monetary system will be higher prices, unpredictable
where the money goes and when it happens and to what degree because
there's a lot of elements built in, but inevitably when you devalue the
currency the prices will go up, and we're at the beginning of a big
siege on inflation.
They say that we have to vote you know for
the debt increase—by the
way, I'm not going to vote for the debt increase. (Applause)
Their argument is it would be a disaster
if we defaulted. Well
it is a disaster if we defaulted, but we're in the midst of a
default. We've done it before. We've done it from the
beginning of our history. We defaulted with the Continental
dollar. We defaulted with the greenbacks in the civil war
period. We defaulted in the 1930s when the American people
were denied their gold from their gold bonds that they held, and the
gold was confiscated from us. Then in 1971 our promise to all
foreign holders of dollars, could repatriate their dollars for gold, we
just closed, went in and said we're broke; we can't do it any
more. So we default constantly. Now they're talking about
defaulting that there won't be enough cash.
That's not the default to worry
about. The default is on you,
because the default is they're going to print the money, the national
debt will
probably be raised, they're going to continue to print the money which
means that they're going to devalue your dollar and they're defaulting
on you. Because if you have a savings account or a Treasury bill,
if you have a thousand dollars in it this year—and right now prices are
going up closer to 10-percent a year so in one year you could lose a
hundred dollars out of a thousand. And when it gets going, it's
going to be a lot worse than that. That is a default, but they
don't count it that way. They don't count it that way; that is
just price adjustment. As a matter of fact it's a deliberate
policy of the Federal Reserve to depreciate the currency. That's
what their business is. That is why our dollar since 1913 has
lost 98-percent of its value. That's dishonest, it's immoral,
it's unconstitutional and the reason why we ought to get rid of the
Federal Reserve. [Audience chants "End the Fed"]
Now there's a lot of reasons why we
shouldn't have a central
bank. It isn't authorized in the Constitution. It devalues
the currency; that's immoral. It's bad economic policy. But
the one issue that really is dangerous to our cause of liberty is that
it allows the expansion of government. If we did not have a Fed
to buy the debt—that is a moral hazard provided to the Congress.
We don't have to be responsible because ultimately the Federal Reserve
will keep the interest rates from going up even when we can't tax and
can't borrow, the Federal Reserve will print the money and keep
interest rates low. So it's always there to do that. And
then that facilitates the growth of government, whether it's the growth
of government to fight wars that we shouldn't be in or providing a
cradle-to-grave entitlement system. So the Fed is a culprit and
we have to address that. We cannot solve our problems without
looking at the monetary issue. (Applause)
The great thing about what has happened in
the last four years is
all of the sudden the Federal Reserve and monetary policy has become an
issue out on the table. That is a great victory and I thank so
many of you who have helped. But we did not get our "Audit the
Fed" bill passed—although we did get it passed in the House, but it
wasn't passed in the Senate—but a lot has happened. We got a
partial audit and some court cases have been beneficial. We are
getting more information. And it's astounding. As much as
I've anticipated it would be very, very bad, but more than a third of
these trillions of dollars that they have pumped in to help out their
friends, a third of it went to overseas banks. Not to the
American who's losing their mortgages. One bank got bailed out
and guess who was one-third owner? Gadaffi was one third owner in
the bank, and we went over and bailed them out.
So this is the reason that we should
direct our interest to the
preservation of liberty, to the people in this country and taking care
of ourselves. Be prosperous, set a good example and others will
want to emulate us. We cannot spread our goodness with a gun, and
using a gun violates our goodness. (Applause)
Liberty should be our cause. I
believe for myself all
political activity is for the promotion of liberty with a deep
conviction that liberty and freedom is not perfect. It will not
solve all our problems, but it will do more good than all the
government intervention in the world.
A lot of times terms are thrown
around. Conservative,
libertarian, liberal and all. I like the word intervention.
I don't like to have a government that is an intervener, that
government doesn't come in and tell you what to do with your life; they
don't tell you what to do with your money, and we don't tell other
countries what to do with their problems either.
That is the— In many ways, I believe
a good president would
work in the direction of saying that I want to do less. But I
want to firmly and courageously stand up to those who want to do more.
They use an authoritarian approach, and when they do, everything
that they do it undermines your personal liberty. So it
undermines everything that was good and great about America. We
were never a perfect nation. We don't have a perfect document,
but I'll tell you what. We had the best. We were the most
prosperous ever. And there's still a lot of spirit left in this
country.
So we are now in a struggle; we are in a
struggle against those who
are saying, and they're angry, we want more; don't cut our
benefits. To our group who are saying, we've had enough; what we
want is we want our freedom back. (Applause)
The reason I work so hard for personal
liberty is a very important
reason. It's for myself, it's for my family, my friends, my
neighbors and our country. Because I believe if we did have our
liberties we would have more prosperity. It is truly a
humanitarian argument, because the other side, they do not
produce. But more importantly, I think a free society offers
tremendous opportunities. It really releases us. Gives us
the time and the wealth to release more creative energies. And
it's in these creative energies— Then we can deal with our
problems, whether it's our personal habits, whether it has to do with
our economic conditions and helping other people or whether its dealing
with other countries. We will have, have the wealth. And
with
this effort, then we can work on our own imperfections to improve
ourselves, to work on becoming more virtuous and more compassionate and
this is the society that I want to live in. So regardless, and
from the very beginning it was regardless of what happens, the goal is
a very important goal.
And I am so pleased to see what's
happening in the country, not only
the interest in the Federal Reserve and the foreign policy but the
interest and the understanding of liberty. And where I go the
numbers are growing. And where I really get excited is when I go
to the university and talk to the young people. They
understand. They understand what they're getting, and they
understand that something different has to be done. And they also
understand that whether they're in high school or college the burden
will be falling on them. No matter what happens in the next
election, this cannot be changed immediately. It can only be
changed—one
individual can't do it—it can only be changed if the people endorse the
changes and our representatives, they get sent to our legislatures,
understand it, and do it. And that is where I think we're making
great progress. When I first started, I had difficulties in the
1950s even finding the literature. I had an inclination to study
and read, but it took a long time. There was no Internet; the
books were hard to find. Today it is so great to use the Internet
to find out what's going on. More think tanks than ever
before. And also, if I need a book now, I can get it in about
five, ten seconds off Amazon and off the Internet and it's in my house
the next day. So big things are happening and we have to take
that an use it. Use it for a just cause and that just cause is
promoting the greatness of America and promoting individual liberty in
our country. Thank you very much. (Applause)
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