I.O.U.S.A - Addison Wiggin [71]
Look at what the Greatest Generation did. They confronted problems at least as serious as these: the most costly war in the history of this country, in every sense of that word, costly. They not only paid down that debt with years of surpluses, but they launched an infrastructure highway program, they launched the GI bill, which was such a wonderful program for the veterans coming back. They did all of those things, but they learned that fairly shared sacrifi ce is sometimes essential. And that ’ s essentially what we need now, too.
Q: Would you characterize yourself as a big, easy target for critics from the left?
Peter Peterson: I don ’ t have any trouble understanding why fat cats are an easy target. Looked at from the standpoint of the lower and middle classes, we ’ ve had a situation where their incomes have been fl at, and perhaps even down a bit, when you consider the costs of energy and health care costs and so forth. So I can understand why they look at the big fortunes of people like myself c10.indd 145
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and say it ’ s unfair. I would be the last to deny — and this doesn ’ t make me terribly popular with some people in my party — that people in our categories are going to have to pay more taxes. But the point I keep making is that isn ’ t going to be nearly enough to solve the problems of this country. We all have to participate in this, except perhaps the truly needy of this country.
At bottom, I would like to suggest that this is really a moral issue.
I remind you of what a German theologian named Bonhoeffer said: The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that we are leaving to our children. Think of the taxes that are implied, which would have to be infl icted on our own kids and grandkids.
Think of the debts that we are piling on them and the costs to them of paying back those debts. The idea that we ’ re slipping this check to those kids for our free lunch is essentially a very immoral proposition, in my view.
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Ron Paul
Rep. Ron Paul (R - TX) has been shaking up the political arena since 1976, when he fi rst ran for Congress as a proponent of free market economics and started railing against the Federal Reserve system. In 2007, Dr. Paul turned heads once again with his grassroots presidential campaign by breaking two fund - raising records: one for the largest single - day donation total among Republican candidates, and twice receiving the most money received via the Internet in a single day by any presidential candidate in history.
Q: How did a very well - liked doctor fi nd his way to Washington?
Ron Paul : In the early ‘ 70s, the breakdown of the monetary system excited me enough to want to speak out because I had been studying Austrian economics for a good many years, and there were a lot of predictions made about the inevitability of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods Agreement. When that happened in 1971, it confi rmed my beliefs in what I had been reading, and in 1974, on a lark, I ran for Congress — and the following year I was elected in a special election. My main motivation in the early 1970s was to talk about economic policy from an Austrian viewpoint, and from the viewpoint of sound money and a Constitution that rejects the whole notion of the paper money system and the Federal Reserve System that we have today.
Q: In a nutshell, what is the Austrian school of thought?
Ron Paul: Well, an easier term to use is the free market score. A lot of people in this country are for free enterprise and they talk about it, but they don ’ t really understand it or believe it. It ’ s called Austrian economics because some of the founders of that school of thought came from Austria; in particular, [Ludwig von] Mises and [Friedrich A.] Hayek. They are the ones who in the twentieth 147
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century kept alive classical liberalism when it came to free market economics and sound money. So