Review of book

“We’ve had lots of Coast Guard members in the Persian Gulf, because they’re over there protecting terminals and things. If we’re thinking about the responsibility of the federal government protecting us, why wouldn’t we have the Coast Guard in the Gulf of Mexico around our ports, checking on unusual things? I think that the emphasis should be, are we protecting our country or are we policing the world?”

“We should concentrate on freedom, not only because it’s morally correct that government shouldn’t be telling us how to live our lives, and we don’t have a right to tell other countries how to live, but for the very practical reasons that if you want peace and prosperity, you have to vote for liberty.”.

“When I talk to groups, both conservative and liberal groups, I always acknowledge and say, ‘You may well disagree with me on this. But I’m going to win the argument. Not so much that I’m going to convert my colleagues here in the Congress about the foreign policy, but we’re going to run out of money.’ Eventually, empires just collapse, as did the Soviet system. They collapse because they can’t economically be supported, and finally, they just run out of wealth. That’s what will happen to us.”.

Horton: Well, and that is sort of a common symptom of empires, right? As more power gets centered in the executive branch, the congressmen know that really their power comes from being close to the president, rather than standing their own ground against him?

Paul:  The fact that some of these candidates will be able to raise $100 million to run their campaigns tells you that as far as companies are concerned it’s a good investment. A Halliburton has a lot of incentive to pump in money to the campaign. What about a drug company who gets monopoly control over sale of drugs? They must think it’s a good investment as well. There are many companies involved in the military-industrial complex. The real evil isn’t the spending of somebody’s own money to help a candidate. The real evil is the fact that the government is so big and has so much to auction off, and there is such an incentive and there are so many benefits by being friendly to the people who are in power, that government is bought on a continuous basis.

They try to separate them into two factions. One is the foreign policy and one is domestic policy. I argue that you can’t separate the two. So if you want more money in our economy and the retired people to take care of themselves, and you have a free market, you want less war and less spending overseas.

We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody did it to us.