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The Fed has created the biggest artificial financial bubble to ever exist. Every bubble is necessarily followed by a proportional financial crisis. Black Swan events (like Coronavirus) often act as the fuse. The major headlines always keep the focus on the Black Swan events. The Ron Paul Liberty Report is here to keep the focus where it belongs: The Federal Reserve.
By Liberty Report Staff
Dr. Paul's segment begins at the 5min 11sec mark:
For the first time in 17 years, US troops are moving back to Prince Sultan Airbase in Saudi Arabia. The troops were removed in 2003 because they were serving as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. The Trump Administration claims they are returning to "deter" Iran...but are they telling the truth?
 By Jeff Deist Sometimes terrible things happen without any human malfeasance, and the novel Wuhan coronavirus may in fact be one of those things. It is entirely plausible the virus emerged from "wet markets" in the Hubei Province of China rather than as a fumbled (or worse, intentionally released) bioweapon cooked up by the Xi Jinping government. We may never know, of course. But easy or readily apparent answers to the question of how this could have been avoided should be viewed with the skepticism appropriate to any state propaganda. Crises of all kinds, whether economic, political, military, or health, send ideologues scrambling to explain how such events fit neatly into their worldview. In fact, political partisans often attempt to paint any crisis as having occurred in the first place precisely because their policies and preferences have not been adopted. The Wuhan coronavirus seems tailor-made for this. Alarmists who argue for (i) much more robust and comprehensive "public health" measures by national governments and (ii) greater supranational coordination inevitably point to infectious diseases as justification for increased state power over personal medical decisions. Scary and fast-spreading viruses are perfect fodder for their busybody argument that people cannot simply be left to their own devices. Cross-border outbreaks of illnesses are particularly well suited to the preexisting bureaucratic desire for power over populations: they make the public much more willing to accept forced quarantines and arrests for noncompliance; forced immunizations; involuntary commitments to state facilities; curfews; restrictions on business operations and travel; and import controls. They also allow public health officials to commandeer and manage efforts to find "the cure," who then take credit when the virus eventually relents. These are the sorts of things that authoritarian politicians want all the time. Crises simply provide an opportunity to ratchet up their power and also to accustom the public to being ordered around and taking cues from centralized government sources. Antistate libertarians are not immune to this phenomenon of attempting to place square events into round holes. We tend to explain crises as the result of state (or central bank) interference, either created or made worse by the lack of market discipline, incentives, and property rights lacking due to state action or state regulation. Libertarians think the Food and Drug Administration, for example, kills more people than it saves by approving bad drugs and delaying regulatory approvals for promising treatments. Moreover, an individualist libertarian perspective on bodily sovereignty poses an obvious challenge to public health. No individual should be forced to accept quarantine or immunization against his will, and in fact no individual should be forced to consider herd immunity or other collectivist notions when making medical decisions. Just as most libertarians don't think Doritos and Mountain Dew should be banned because their consumption imposes "public" healthcare costs in a statist/fascist system of mandatory insurance and tax-funded Medicaid, most don't think that individual health decisions should be overridden by politicians—even in an "emergency" outbreak situation. So how do we reconcile public health with individual rights? Should the latter be sacrificed to protect the former? Three observations present themselves. First, even the highly authoritarian Chinese national state has been unable to contain the virus, though it can cordon off whole cities by dictatorial fiat and impose wholesale house arrest over cities in a manner unthinkable in Western countries. Chinese state police literally drag people suspected of carrying the virus out of their cars, forcibly put them handcuffed in hazmat vehicles, and haul them off to what amount to prison hospitals. Chinese citizens who speak out publicly against the Xi government's handling of the crisis are arrested. So, if the Chinese government can't contain it, even with martial law and control over media, how in the world do Western countries expect to do so? Imagine trying to quarantine, say, Dallas and Fort Worth! Second, poor countries (and China is quite poor per capita compared to the West, ranking around sixty-fifth internationally) almost invariably suffer from worse public health conditions. Sanitation, nutrition, and access to drugs, facilities, and competent doctors matter a great deal when it comes to incubating infectious diseases. Richer countries are healthier countries, and the West benefits when conditions improve and modernize in the Third World. Third, we already have de facto supranational bodies such as World Health Organization tasked with preventing and lessening the spread of diseases like the coronavirus. The WHO has been around since 1948 and hasn't prevented a host of modern epidemics like SARS and Zika; exactly what new international agency or organization will do better? If anything, pandemics call for decentralization of treatment. After all, the best approach is to isolate infected people rather than bringing them into large hospital populations in crowded city centers. What doctor or nurse wants to work in a hospital full of coronavirus cases? We might wish for a utopian libertarian answer to public health crises like the coronovirus, along the lines of a Rothbardian externality argument for airborne pollution. But sometimes bad things simply happen. The best hope is market incentives, the rapid application of individual human ingenuity and self-interest to the situation. Liberty is better, not perfect. And governments, including the Chinese government, are clueless as always. This article was originally published at The Mises Institute.  
By Chris Rossini
Politicians appeal to emotions. They figured out long ago that facts, thinking and logic are not their friends. It's so much easier to stir up emotions and hope that no one (or only a few people at most) actually think things through. The primary emotional vein that politicians always tap into is fear. This is the king of them all, and the surest road to political riches. Scare people enough and they'll hand over their money, and even worse, sacrifice their liberty. You can shake trillions of dollars out of the population if you scare them efficiently enough. Americans succumbed to the emotion of fear long before any of us were born. The bad thinking habits have been passed down from generation to generation. Here we have a land surrounded by massive oceans. Nature provides the greatest defense. No one is coming to get us. And yet, trillions and trillions of dollars are ripped out of the pockets of the American people without a bat of the eye. American airports have become places that would make Washington and Jefferson roll over in their graves. They would roll over again if they knew that everything is under surveillance in America. How can this be? How can the "land of the free" and "home of the brave" spiral this far downward? FEAR. Power, being the epicenter of greed, is of course never satisfied. So new fears are systematically piled on top of the old ones. 'The Earth is going to turn into a fireball.....or an ice cube!' 'It's going to happen in 12 years....Hurry up!...Give us the remaining liberty that you have left!' 'We're going to fundamentally change this country.' 'And above all -- Do NOT question any of this!!!' It's just fear with a different wrapper. It's also as ridiculous as the U.S. having 1,000 military bases scattered all over the planet. Oh, and by the way, the U.S. government (military) is amongst the biggest polluters on the face of the Earth. But the "fundamental change" that has to occur in the country is all about micromanaging the American people. Liberty is not an option in this Matrix of Fears. The propaganda is on a 24/7 cycle and it comes at you from every direction. Wherever a lot of eyeballs happen to be focused at any given moment, propaganda is always there to meet them. Here's the silver lining: We're all individually born free, and meant to stay that way. But we have to choose it. We have to choose to not be afraid, and embrace our Liberty. It's not a given. If it was a given, we wouldn't be free, but automations that have no ability to choose. Choosing Liberty comes with social costs. You have to go against the tide. You may have to go against long-held family beliefs. You have to accept your uniqueness and responsibility for seeking out that which is true, no matter how uncomfortable you may feel to realize you've been wrong. Things that are true don't fall from the heavens into your lap. They have to be sought. There are no shortcuts. It is only propaganda that falls into your lap. You don't have to exert any labor to get a big dose of propaganda. It's always there. Ron Paul has said a thousand times that you never have to sacrifice your freedom in order to be safe. Taking away freedom should never be an option in America. Today, it's presented as the only option. Individually, we need to make the commitment to remove ourselves from the Matrix of Fear.
The Trump Administration continues to spend billions developing and "upgrading" the nuclear weapons arsenal, claiming at the same time that it's in response to Russian moves and that it's "not an arms race." Is there solid evidence to back US claims...or is this just another high-paid jobs program for the military-industrial complex?
By Ron Paul
One thing we’ve learned from the Trump Presidency is that the “deep state” is not just some crazy conspiracy theory. For the past three years we’ve seen that deep state launch plot after plot to overturn the election. It all started with former CIA director John Brennan’s phony “Intelligence Assessment” of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. It was claimed that all 17 US intelligence agencies agreed that Putin put Trump in office, but we found out later that the report was cooked up by a handful of Brennan’s hand-picked agents. Donald Trump upset the Washington apple cart as presidential candidate and in so doing he set elements of the deep state in motion against him. One of the things candidate Donald Trump did to paint a deep state target on his back was his repeated praise of Wikileaks, the pro-transparency media organization headed up by Australian journalist Julian Assange. More than 100 times candidate Trump said “I love Wikileaks” on the campaign trail. Trump loved it when Wikileaks exposed the criminality of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, as it cheated to deprive Bernie Sanders of the Democratic Party nomination. Wikileaks’ release of the DNC emails exposed the deep corruption at the heart of US politics, and as a candidate Trump loved the transparency. Then Trump got elected. The real tragedy of the Trump presidency is nowhere better demonstrated than in Trump’s 180 degree turn away from Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. “I know nothing about Wikileaks,” he said as president. “It’s really not my thing.” US pressure and bribes to the Ecuadorian government ended Assange’s asylum and his seven years in a room at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After his dramatic arrest by London's Metropolitan Police last April, he has been effectively tortured in British jails at the behest of the US deep state. Today, Monday the 24th of February, Assange faces an extradition hearing in a UK courthouse. The Trump Administration – led by a man who praised Assange’s work – seeks a show trial of Assange worthy of the worst of the Soviet era. The US is seeking a 175 year prison sentence. The Trump Administration argues that the Australian Assange should be tried and convicted of espionage against a country of which he is not a citizen. At the same time the Trump Administration argues that the First Amendment does not apply to Assange because he is not an American citizen! So Assange is subject to US law when it comes to publishing information embarrassing to the US deep state but he is not subject to the law of the land – the US Constitution – which protects all journalists and is the backbone of our system of government. It is ironic that a President Trump who has been victim of so much deep state meddling has done the deep state’s bidding when it comes to Assange and Wikileaks. President Trump should preempt the inevitable US show trial of Assange by granting the journalist blanket pardon under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The deep state Trump is serving by persecuting Assange is the same deep state that continues to plot Trump’s own ouster. Free Assange!
As the second day of the extradition hearing for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continues in London, the lines of argumentation of both sides are taking shape. While the US tries to argue that Wikileaks publishing harmed individuals who aided the US government, there is little evidence to back the claim. Will the UK courts roll over for a Washington that would like to see, as former FBI Director Comey suggested, "Assange's head on a pike"?
By Liberty Report Staff
James Corbett sits down with Ron Paul to discuss the coming end of the Federal Reserve. Dr. Paul reflects on the End The Fed movement, explains the inevitability of the Fed's demise, and talks about what system may come along to take its place.
Will the "bipartisan consensus" in Washington blame the coronavirus for the coming economic downturn? Why does the US media seem so uninterested in Julian Assange's extradition hearing today? Today's Liberty Report is all about the chaos exploding all around us...
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