This is

This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 19th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown at the International Students for Liberty Conference

this weekend. I sat down with former presidential candidate

Texas congressman and physician Ron Paul about his opinions on the student

movement for liberty the president's request for a new war from Congress and the

growing effort to audit the policies of the Federal Reserve.

We're recording here at the International Students for Liberty Conference in 2015, and I think it's fair to say you deserve some amount of credit for the

giving the I guess momentum for a great deal of the student liberty movement. So how do you evaluate the state of Libertarian ideas

and the liberty movement now decades

since you began talking about this in Congress.

Well, I come down pretty optimistic about what's happening, because I think back when I first started in 1974, and even when I first was elected and voted, nobody there had the biggest idea of what I was doing.

They just thought it was strange and different and how come you're voting with those bad liberals sometime and

these conservatives another time and what's your position on war? So mostly just a big

question like it took a long time. Yeah I think it was today I heard some political discussion, fluffy stuff and I said,

well I wonder what the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party will do now.

So you know it's gained some recognition. So the ideas are out

there and I see a tremendous opportunity. I think there's great strides we've already made, but I see all around me the collapse of a system that they've worked with for over 100 years.

Of course, authoritarianism isn't around a lot longer than 100 years. Of course authoritarianism isn't around a lot longer than 100 years, but the

more recent authoritarianism of the 20th century when it came to the type of foreign policy of intervention

and Keynesian economics and central banking and they're all on the

verge of disintegration. So I'm pretty optimistic but the job of course is how you're going to fill

...