(gentle guitar music) - [Narrator] Support for this program is provided by the Open Discourse Coalition, providing a variety of intellectual viewpoints at Bucknell University and beyond.

(gentle guitar music fades) (lively upbeat music) - [Narrator 2] From foreign policy to public health mandates to tariffs, what does the Constitution have to say about government intervention in our lives and abroad?

The Bucknell Program for American Leadership and the Open Discourse Coalition are proud to present United States Senator, Rand Paul, "Culture and the Constitution."

(audience applauding) - It's a privilege to introduce our speaker today.

First, a brief word on this series, "Culture and the Constitution."

It's included a number of programs in the past three years, recognizing that many issues in this highly turbulent time of US history relate to the Constitution, often in a cultural, not just in a political or legal way.

Today's program with Senator Paul is envisioned as a coda to the series dealing with macro issues of how the Constitution informs the grappling of American culture with issues of global military responsibilities and public health, among other issues and how it shapes us as a people.

When the series began in 2022, much world attention focused on King Charles III's accession to the English throne.

At that time, the cultural role of the Constitution in American life was sometimes compared to the English monarchy.

In America, the Constitution provides a cultural, as well as a legal frame for our contested unity as a nation.

Its usefulness called into question by some, but still fiercely defended as a living national tradition by many.

Issues examined in the series have included the Second Amendment, abortion, parental rights, and public education, free speech and religious expression in relation to sexual rights.

We hope to turn edited transcripts of the many programs into a book volume.

Senator Paul is well situated to address these questions thoughtfully, from a career of reflecting on such issues, as a senior Senator who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee and chairs the Homeland Security Committee in the Senate, his reputation for independence may run partly in the family as son of former US congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas.

But he has formed a distinguished reputation in his own right as Senator from Kentucky since his election in 2010 and before that as an ophthalmologist, a healing profession that he still practices in service work for the underprivileged.

He has a reputation as an independently minded Republican with an interest in libertarian ideas and in potential bipartisan work, such as criminal justice reform, and in the Constitution, leading him sometimes to oppose initiatives of President Trump's administration, which however, he also has supported in a number of areas.

The format for today's program is that Senator Paul will offer remarks, which I may prompt with a few questions along the way.

And then around 12:50 we'll switch into questions and answer mode with the audience, which will begun by Mayor Kendy Alvarez of Lewisburg, a Bucknell alum and Democrat to show bipartisan spirit here today.

Senator Paul, we're very glad to have you here at Bucknell, as was said, the first sitting senator to speaker in 20 years.

I wonder if you could begin by sharing some thoughts on during this period of world conflicts, how the US with its global military power should or could interact with those conflicts in a way that is in accord with our constitution, and how the tension there may inform our sense of where we are going as a constitutional republic.

- I'm wondering if I should first ask what happened to the guy 20 years ago?

(audience laughing) - [Host] It was- - Nobody came for 20 years.

Did you run him out?

(audience laughing) You know, the intersection of foreign policy, like a lot of other politics sometimes is informed by platitude, sometimes informed by denigrating terms to call you a name or to call you a name instead of really getting to the meat of things.

I think it's also sometimes important that some of the things you think on the surface are the best thing to do.

You may actually get the opposite result, and I'll give you a couple of examples.

With regard to foreign policy, when you think about, you know, what's the biggest issue or the worst thing that can happen would be war.

Some in this crowd lived through the Vietnam War.

Some may remember, not many, but some may remember the, you know, Korean War and World War II.

But the thing is, is that probably is the most important issue of our time ever.

If it comes up, whether to send the young men and women in this room to go fight in war, and so I think it should be careful, should be thoughtful.

And our founding fathers were incredibly wary of giving too much power to one person.

Now, we think of it as just us.

While they, we were so much better than the English because we wanted to limit the power, the executive, the President wasn't going to have this power.

But actually it's in the English tradition.

The English had been trying since Magna Carta on to limit the power of the executive.

Almost every war, every civil war, everything that went on, 100 years before our Civil War, they were fighting and talking about a Bill of Rights, having less power given to the President.

So when we write our constitution, our founding fathers were explicit.

They wrote that war only will happen at the will of Congress.

You know, that the authority to declare war only comes from Congress.

And that worked up until about 1950, I mean, until the Korean War.

And since the Korean War hasn't really worked.

Now, occasionally we still have votes and they're important votes.

They aren't actually declarations of war.

But when Bush went to war in Afghanistan and Bush went to war in Iraq, there were votes at least.

I mean, for goodness sakes, I had some complaints.

I wasn't for the Iraq war at all.

But with going into Afghanistan, had I been there, I'd have probably voted yes, but thank goodness there was at least a vote.

But we've gotten away from that.

Things happen all the time.

We're bombing in Yemen.

Nobody's voted whether we should be at war with Yemen.

They say, "Well, you can't be at war with a non-state actor."

Well, why not?

I mean, just declare who you're at war with and vote on if you're gonna go to war.

But anyway, the importance of the separation of power is to make war less likely.

People say, "Well, Congress is feckless, they'll never go to war."

Well, that might be a good thing, but it's also, if you look at times when we have been attacked, we actually were fairly unified, in World War II we were attacked, the vote was 434 to one in the House to go to war with Japan.

I think similar vote with Germany.

When we were attacked on 9/11, the vote to go into the war with Afghanistan, nearly unanimous.

But the most important thing is, and it doesn't sound that exciting, it's the process.

We have to have a vote.

You get a vote through your representatives.

It's the dispersion of power.

It's trying to keep power from being centralized in one authority.

and warmaking is probably the most important of that.

And Madison, when he was writing about this in the "Federalist Paper" said that the executive branch is the branch most prone to war.

Therefore, with studied care, we have vested that power in the legislature.

And it's important.

The separation of powers is probably one of the most important things we got from the Constitution, from our founding fathers.

Now we have other debates about it now.

I mean, I think it was Montesquieu who wrote that when the executive and the legislative power are united in one person, there can be no liberty.

Where they were not only fearful of war, they were fearful of taxation.

And so they said, you know, they fought the war essentially, they felt like they were being taxed by England without representation.

So they said, "No taxation without representation, taxes must originate not only just in Congress, but in the House of Representatives."

Well, we're currently allowing the president, whom I agree with on many issues, but we're allowing the President to institute taxes, to levy taxes, to levy tariffs without any congressional permission.

And you say, "Well, how dare him?"

But before you get too mad at just him realize the Congress over the last 70 years just kept giving it to him, no, we don't want it, we don't want it.

So there's probably 7, maybe 10 statutes saying, "Hey, Mr. President, take our authority."

So there's a little bit on both sides.

You say, "Well, I don't like Trump taking all this authority."

Well, you ought to ask the Democrats why they gave it to him.

Because the Democrats, many of 'em have been there 20 and 30 years, voted every time to give the trade authority to the President.

Now, if they were here, they would argue, well, trade authority is, it's hard to negotiate trade deals with 435 or 535 in Congress with another country, so we gave it to the President to negotiate deals and most of the deals had to come back and be voted on.

That's somewhat reasonable.

And most of the deals since World War II to lower barriers, they haven't been to raised barriers.

We haven't been in a trade war since 1931, which actually didn't work out very well.

There was a Smoot-Hawley Tariff that was destructive and increased or exacerbated the depression.

But going back to the issue of the foreign policy, the most important thing is the division of power.

Let it go to Congress.

And it will only be in times of when we've either been directly attacked or of great unity that we would go to war.

- In this area, in Northern Appalachia, there's a high percentage of families that have people who have gone into the military and so are pretty directly and personally affected when we're involved in other countries and in conflicts.

And so this is, this handing, allowing power to gather in the executive and it has real consequences for people in the society at large.

And I wonder if, I don't know if you can draw any parallels to just people's attitudes towards today in terms of apathy towards some of these constitutional issues.

I don't know if it's fair to- - I guess the first thing that comes to mind is, you know, the Vietnam era was when I was a very small child.

I don't remember it directly, but reading of it, there was a great deal of dissension and turmoil and society wasn't necessarily behind the war.

And, but some of that is made worse by the fact that one person took us to war.

Now, it wasn't just Republicans, it was a Democrat before it was a Republican that instituted the war, but it wasn't Congress and there really was no vote to begin that war.

But if you contrast that with World War II, where World War II Congress voted overwhelmingly and we lost many more people, I think we may have lost 450,000 Americans in a smaller America, than we lost 60,000 in Vietnam in a bigger America.

So we lost a lot of people in World War II, but you never really found people bitterly complaining about their government.

Now there are people who don't like war in any era.

So I'm, there were opponents to the war, but for the most part it was made better.

And decisions are made better when they're not made by one person.

When there's a full debate and you can say, you know, if it's 51% to 49, you may still be mad, if it's 75 to 25, but we're all a little less angry and a little more open to the fact that people voted on something.

I think it would be the same with tariffs.

It wouldn't be as dramatic, but it also might not be as chaotic.

I think the marketplace saw chaos when it lost $6.6 trillion in two days, two weeks ago.

So I think we should be wary of that and but really gets back to the general principle of, you know, trying to disperse power among many.

So it's not just, we don't want all the power in the presidency, we also don't want all the power in Washington or in Congress, period.

So you have the 10th Amendment saying that power's not given to the Federal Congress or left to the states and people.

So another check and balance is supposed to be state government, but then even beyond state government, it's local government.

And what I always tell people is the best government you have is your local government.

So I don't know what the budget of Lewisburg is, Kendi, but my, oh, right over here, my guess is you spend what comes in, right?

That doesn't happen in Washington.

Think how much better your city is 'cause you have rules and there's only so much money can be spent.

And if you have roads that need built and they can't be built that year, you have to save and you build 'em the next time.

In Washington, they just say whatever.

I've had people come up to me and said, "We shouldn't have to decide, it's a good thing."

We should, all things are good and it's for the good of the people and it's for poor people and it's for everybody's health.

It's like, well, but who's gonna pay for it?

Somebody should say that and ask the question.

But local government does a better job.

State government largely has to balance their budget.

So almost everything we do in Washington, we should be pushing back to the states because the more the states have restrictions, they have some restraint based on their budget and how their ability to borrow, the more likely they are to make a wise decision.

Friedman put it this way, Friedman said that.

"Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as their own."

And the truism that really gets to you, if I ask each of you for $1,000 because I've got this great idea for a business, you're gonna think, how long did I have to work for that $1,000?

Do I trust what he's saying?

I'm gonna have to make a judgment on him.

But if I'm a city council member, let's don't go to the city.

Let's say I'm a state representative and I tell you, "I'll bring you $10 billion, you don't ask where it came from" and he or she doesn't either because they just think, "Well, it grows on trees, it's not mine."

And so the more we push things back to the state level, the better.

But the more we push 'em back to the people.

So really we should do nothing in government that you can't do for yourselves.

And so that means government should be kept at a minimum.

And our founding fathers recognize this.

They said government is a necessary evil.

That was Thomas Paine.

Thomas Paine was so famous he sold two and a half million.

Boy, if I just had him helping me write books, I could have sold more book.

(audience laughing) He sold two and a half million pamphlets in a country.

No, no, I think it was 700,000 in a country of two and a half million.

Almost everybody had read his pamphlet.

Washington was so impressed with his pamphlet that he read it out loud in the camps to the soldiers.

But he said, "Government is a necessary evil."

And it's, you know, we have to get through that.

Why is it a necessary evil?

'Cause you gotta give up some of your liberty.

How do you give up your liberty, through rules, but also by giving me part of your wages, you give part of your wages.

So my argument is always, how much do you have to give?

The least amount possible.

If non-government entity can do it, let's let the non-government entity to do it.

Plus they'll do it wiser because it's their money and they'll always make better decisions than people in the government who don't tend to make good decisions, not 'cause they're bad people, but because they don't get the right incentives.

They're not punished in any way by making the wrong decisions.

- Senator, today among many in our educated elite, I think this is fair to say, the Constitution is viewed a bit as an archaic or even an oppressive document.

I'm not sure that it's always taught that directly to young people or that many people are actually reading it today.

I was wondering if you just have some thoughts about the role of the constitution and the Federalist system that's part of it and the seemingly low level of understanding or appreciation that exists in some quarters for, and I think... - You know, I think there's been maybe sort of 100 year long or 120 year long assault on the constitution.

Woodrow Wilson was very dismissive of it.

He basically forwarded and so did other intellectual society, that it's a living constitution.

It's a adaptable and it is adaptable.

We have, it's difficult, we have to adopt amendments and we do periodically, but I think that's the way it should be instead of just sort of ignoring it.

Most of the prohibitions in like on declaring war are just simply ignored on the idea that a tariff is being done by the President without the approval of Congress, the prior approval, and without it starting in the House, is absolutely without question against the Constitution.

If you take it to the Supreme Court, it's probably the least likely argument to actually win the day arguing that it's unconstitutional.

But there are other arguments, they're using emergency powers and they say, "Well, it's some power from 1972," what never mentions tariffs.

This will be the first time that emergency powers ever been used for something like tariffs.

And the emergency with Canada, which I voted against and joined people from the other party and voting against the emergency.

They said, "Well, it's fentanyl.

It's fentanyl.

Don't you care about their kids?"

Well, I do care.

I know two kids who died from fentanyl.

I know a couple other people who have overdosed.

It's a terrible drug.

And yet the thing is more fentanyl's coming from the US into Canada than from Canada into the US.

We just have to be honest, it's a fake emergency.

Is there a real threat, no problem, yes.

Is there a real emergency at the Southern border?

You can argue that and we should do something about it, but it's not with Canada.

It's going both ways to Canada and maybe more from here to there.

And it's a false argument.

But it gets back to, do you wanna be under the rule of one person, even if you like what they're doing?

You know, I like Donald Trump.

I voted for him, still support him.

But the thing is, is I'm not for emergency rule.

You know, I'm for a democratic republic, restrained by a constitution or as Jefferson said, "Restrained by the chains of the Constitution."

This was supposed to restrain men and women from their base or instincts.

I think it was Madison who said, "If men were angels, we wouldn't need any rules."

That's sort of true, yeah, but men and women are, you have to put women in too.

Men and women are not angels and they tend to be self-interested.

They tend to want more power.

And so the laws of the constitution have restrained people from their natural propensity to wanna get it.

You wanna see the terrible things come out of people.

Anybody know what a Karen is?

(audience laughing) Anybody remember the pandemic and ever meet a Karen, ever meet one on a plane?

Oh my goodness.

The worst image I ever saw was this woman come out spewing profanity, everything's on the internet, you can find anything on the internet.

These two boys are grappling and wrestling.

They're 10 years old, outside, grappling and wrestling.

And she's yelling and spewing profanity at them that they're going to kill the world and they need to get inside.

When there's no science behind that, but it's none of your damn business, these people.

But it brought the worst of people out because they became to the belief that public health was about telling other people what to do.

Public health should be about persuasion.

Public health's telling you what I think is the truth, but I'm not in charge of you.

You can accept or you can deny my advice or anybody else's.

And that's why we would've been a lot better off if Anthony Fauci had been a family practitioner in Peoria instead of the head of the entire food chain.

(audience applauding) - Well, speaking of that, we have about 10 minutes left before we open things up for questions, especially from students.

You wrote a book in 2023, "Deception."

We have copies of that for people here.

Speaking of the constitution, how does that relate, you know, just extending your remarks a minute ago, how does that relate to issues of public health and specifically the kinds of issues you examined in your book?

- The court has been, I would say mostly good, not entirely good, but mostly good on this.

So one of the decisions that came out from this is that the constitution does not allow for exceptions such as a pandemic.

There is no pandemic exception to the Bill of Rights, that these rights continue and that the constitutional analysis continues with this.

There were some worse, I mean, in my state, my government, my governor said you had to present papers to leave or enter the state.

He forbid people going to church in their car.

We had drive through services and I told people who follow me on Twitter, that was four years ago on Easter, he outlawed drive through where you sit in your car and drive through church or you sit outside in a parking lot with your family.

He banned that and had police take down their license plates.

That's the ultimate Karen and the ultimate, but there ended up being no science in this, it was different and the thing is about medicine, it isn't one size fits all.

You know, people say, well, you're anti-vaccine.

No, I'm not.

If you were 75 years old and 50 pounds overweight, I'd have take the vaccine and plus or minus on that, on either the weight or the age.

If you're 15, I wouldn't.

Or if you'd already had COVID, I wouldn't.

I mean, those are just sort of common sense things.

In my book we talk about George Washington.

I love the idea, vaccines just like the most incredible medical miracle ever.

The first one that was of really popularized was a live inoculation of smallpox.

You talk about brave, this began in 1720, Thomas Boylston was a doctor in, no, Zabdiel Boylston was a doctor and the first one he inoculated was a kid, but smallpox, a third of people died a grizzly hemorrhagic death.

A third of the people.

So a third of Boston when smallpox would come, would die.

But the treatment which he learned from somebody from the Middle East is, you find somebody who did pretty well.

It's like the chickenpox.

Some people would get five chickenpox and some people got 1,000, some people would survive smallpox pretty well.

You waited a few days till they had an immune response, you took a scab off and you took some pus and you stuck it in somebody else's arm, live vaccine.

You think, "Well, who would do that?"

Well, the death rate for smallpox was one in three.

The death rate from the live vaccine was about 1 in 50.

And everybody took it, including George Washington sending Martha to take it.

But the other moral of this story is he didn't take it.

Why?

'Cause he had scars on his face from smallpox when he was 15 in the Barbados.

So he believed in natural immunity.

I mean, everybody believed in natural immunity.

My my favorite quote is Martin Kulldorff, he's an epidemiologist fired for not being vaccinated from Harvard after he'd already had the disease.

He said, "Well, we knew about natural immunity from the plague in Athens in 436 BC all the way up until 2020.

And then mysteriously the knowledge was lost, (audience laughing) but it's now 2023, 2024, we're gaining some of that knowledge back."

(audience laughing) But if you ask Anthony Fauci this question, his response would be, "Oh, well, you just don't know."

And this is the same with these, I call 'em snot nose reporters.

These 20-year-old reporters who have never had a science class coming up to me saying, "Why aren't you wearing a mask?"

And I was like, "I already had it."

But you ask these people you know about, you know, what are the chances of getting, they say, "We just don't know."

Well, we did know.

There was a woman who had the Spanish flu in 1918 as a baby.

She was still alive in 2020.

So she was going in for testing for COVID.

And they said, "Hmm, why don't we test her for antibodies for the Spanish flu?"

She had antibodies, she was 100 years old, she still had antibodies to the Spanish flu, coronavirus is what COVID was.

But there was a coronavirus in 2003.

We tested those people.

They still had antibodies and they still had T-cell reaction.

Immunity is a real thing, is it perfect?

No, somebody here will say, "Well, I had COVID twice and wouldn't vaccinated."

Possibility, I had COVID once wasn't vaccinated and didn't have it again, not that I know of, but I could barely knew I had it the first time too.

But the thing is, is natural immunity provides protection.

So what I've been asking the government, be honest with people, I wanna know the truth.

Let's say I'm 70 years old and I've had two vaccines and I've had COVID twice, which is most of the country, had two vaccines, I've been vaccinated twice and I've had it twice.

Do I need another one?

Tell me how many people die who've already been vaccinated and had it naturally from getting it yet again.

I think it's zero.

But then you could have useful information.

Do you need to keep getting a vaccine every six months?

Maybe?

I think probably not.

And now your kids, absolutely not.

'Cause there is some risk factors with it, doesn't mean I'm anti-vaccine, but under age 20, particularly boys but girls as well, it's about 6 out of 10,000 can get a heart inflammation called myocarditis, severe enough that they present with chest pain and elevated cardiac isoenzymes like a heart attack.

What's the death rate for a 15-year-old?

Zero, kids didn't die from this.

In fact, in many countries, no healthy kids died.

You say, "oh no, I saw it on CNN."

Well, don't believe everything you see on CNN.

But almost every one of the kids were very sad cases and they were dying from something else.

You know, I know that the guy that was decapitated in the motorcycle last 16th that was positive for COVID.

I don't think that was his cause of death.

(audience laughing) But you know, I think that a lot of this is about thinking it out, but it's ultimately about your freedom.

Even everything I'm saying, I have strong opinions and I have evidence and facts, but if you disagree with it, go get vaccinated again.

I mean, wear a mask if you wanna wear a mask, it's completely up to you.

But people shouldn't just tell others that they have to do something for which there's at least some disputation as to what's right.

Because it turns out most of the things they told you during the pandemic were wrong.

Cloth masks don't work at all.

Zero.

And they told you to wear one and you were going in to feed your spouse and you're at risk for getting COVID.

They're putting you at risk by telling you the wrong thing to do.

Six feet of separation.

So I'm sitting 20 feet from this gentleman.

If I sit here long enough and we were in the middle of COVID, I get COVID from 20 feet.

It spread throughout rooms.

If you were in a smaller room and you're all singing, you had a better chance.

You don't need to be in that room.

You don't need to wear a mask and be in that room, when it was deadly in the very beginning and people were at risk until it started mutating and getting less dangerous.

You just have to stay away from people.

So six feet of separation was wrong.

They were wrong on natural immunity.

The people had to keep working, almost all of 'em got COVID.

So the people do meat processing, it's a messy, difficult job.

A lot of 'em are immigrant workers.

If you look at the statistics, like there was one plant in Missouri, 236 workers, 229 got COVID in the first three weeks.

Almost all survived.

There were some deaths, but when they survived, why weren't we honest with 'em and say, "You can thank God you are done.

You don't have to wear a mask again.

You don't have to have this plastic all over.

You don't have to wear 10 suits of plastic armor because you now have had the disease."

Instead we told 'em, "We don't know.

You better wear another mask.

Maybe another three.

If it has the Washington Nationals on it, it's much more protective."

(audience laughing) - Senator, before we go to the audience Q&A, just in the last few minutes here, do you have any thoughts on how people should educate themselves more about the Constitution and just our whole culture as a constitutional republic?

- Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff out there.

The Constitution Center down in Philadelphia is good and does anybody know they have a new website on the constitution?

Can't remember the exact website, but if you Google the Constitution Center out of Philadelphia, you can probably get their website.

The guy's name is Jeff Rosen and I'm gonna have him come speak to my interns, but he does a good job.

But there's lots of, you know, there's, the internet is full of a lot of garbage, but it's also full of a lot of amazing things.

I mean you could probably in 30 minutes just by doing YouTubes of Milton Friedman learn more than most people taking economics, and not at Bucknell, but in lesser schools, of course, (audience laughing) because in some of the other schools, they're learning the wrong thing.

They're learning Marx and Krugman, I mean, as if there's a difference.

But anyway, I think that there's a lot out there and actually people should look at the internet that way and not think the Internet's just terrible.

It has terrible stuff on it, but it has a lot of good stuff and it's right at your fingertips.

And I love all the old interviews.

You know, there's old interviews of Ayn Rand on "The Morton Downey" show or some show.

You know, "The Phil Donahue Show" and things like that.

The old interviews are great.

Milton Friedman was very, very pithy.

I mean he really, he could get to the point, I have to tell another Milton Friedman story.

So he went to India and they wanted to show him, they had all this big earth moving equipment and everything and how they were modernizing.

This was back in the 60s.

And he got there and he looked around and there's 100 workers with shovels, digging an earth and dam.

And he says, "Well, I thought you were modernized."

And they said, "Well, you know, we've decided that to create jobs we shouldn't use the big earth movers.

We should use men with shovels."

And he said, "Well, wow, you know, you could create a lot more jobs if you give 'em toothpicks."

(audience laughing) But in that statement he's hit the head on everybody who has thought, let's make somebody do something through labor, not through machine, 'cause the machine's gonna steal jobs.

Everyone who's ever said that has been wrong.

And that's why I work with AI and stuff, I can't predict the future, just my prediction of the future looking at the past is, don't overly fear things.

You know, people fear robots, they fear the loom.

They feared electricity and every time we moved beyond it, and one thing before we get to the questions, there's a great website called humanprogress.org.

It's part of Cato, but it just talks about how much amazing progress we have made.

Life expectancy nearly doubled.

Infant mortality gone from one in three to maybe 1 in 500 or 1 in 1,000.

I mean, so many good things have happened.

And even wealth, if you look at wealth around the world, in 1820, 98% of people lived in abject poverty, $2 a day or less.

When I was married, 1990, it had gone from 98% to 33%, from 1990 to today, less than 10% of the world lives on $2 a day.

Poverty's being eradicated.

And you have to understand what it comes from and from my opinion, it comes from capitalism, free markets and trade.

Trade is boom since World War II and so is prosperity, they boomed hand in hand.

As the trade deficits went up, prosperity went up, we really aren't getting poor.

We are getting overall richer.

If you look at a 70 year trend line on all things, household income, et cetera, we have so much more free time.

A television, you gotta work 10% of the time to buy television you used to have to, food, about 15% of the time you did 100 years ago to get your food, clothes, incredibly cheap compared to where they once were.

There are a few things we have problems with, where the prices are rising, higher education and healthcare, but the government's heavily involved with funding both of those and the prices have been driven up.

But overall I think it's a good outcome for the country.

I think we have, you know, nothing but to be optimistic about the future of the country.

- [Host] Alright, well, thank you so much, Senator.

- [Rand] Thank you.

(audience applauding) Then mayor Alvarez, who's also a fellow with the Open Discourse Coalition will lead off the questioning here.

- Well, thank you.

I do hope that now after this engagement, it shouldn't be another 20 years before we get another sitting senator to come.

(audience laughing) So we are in the heart of Appalachia and we know that the Appalachian people have a healthy distrust of government.

Now that applies on the local, the state and the federal level.

I already know where you stand on, you know, being a support of local government knowing that that's where things happen.

But in this space where we have so much media that focuses on what's happening nationally or internationally and the focus isn't on the local level, how do we engage people better to get them to understand that this is what really matters.

- You know, we face the same problems 'cause we've got the lower part of the Appalachians in Kentucky and you know, if there were easy answers, they would've been done.

LBJ came down and visited, famously visited the guy and it's on his front porch.

He's got his washing machine, they've gone back to that person.

He hates the media.

Now he does not wanna talk to the media.

His life never got any better.

If you examine poverty, dollars aren't the cure for it necessarily.

I mean, poverty is related to a lot of things.

There are things that are very much integrally associated with it.

I think it was Charles Murray did a book showing people who were married before they had their kids and got college and people who weren't married before their kids didn't make it to college.

And it's two completely different lives.

Now the hard part about saying that is somebody that say, "Well, my daughter had a baby, you talking about my daughter and she wasn't married."

I'm not, nobody wants to cast dispersions.

We live in a real world.

My family's not perfect either.

But if you don't tell kids this that there's a huge difference between poverty and not poverty, it's being married but I can't make a law.

I'm not for a law saying you have to be married.

I'm for giving you advice, I'm for ministers giving advice, I'm for people setting examples.

But I can tell you factually, you'll do better if you haven't already had your child.

You have a choice.

You will do better if you'll wait till you're married.

Now people say, "That's old fashioned.

Who's that old guy talking about marriage?

Whatever."

But I'm just talking about you wanna be less poor.

You wanna engage in prosperity.

Number one is probably marriage and education is there too.

The only thing I would say about education is, I think we got off on the wrong track 20 or 30 years ago thinking it was for everybody.

And I think there is education pretty much for everybody, but may not always be a college.

Technical schools have a place and there's so many jobs out there and I tell people all the time who aren't yet in college, but they're clever, they're smart people but they're not book people.

If you're an electrician, you'll be able to own a truck, you'll be able to own a bass boat, you'll be able to go to Disney World with your kids as an electrician.

But if you are the electrical contractor that hires the other electricians, you'll be richer than every doctor in town.

I know this.

(audience laughing) Or air conditioning.

Gotta again, if you wanna go someplace in life, air conditioning.

So I visited technical school recently and there's 60 kids, some of 'em no longer kids, 25, 30 years old in there.

Every one of them's tuition was paid for completely and it wasn't a four year degree, it was gonna be like a six week degree.

And they had a job.

Whoever paid their tuition was gonna hire them if they finish a course.

So we should, at the same time we extol higher education.

I'm part of it.

I did a lot of education.

I'm not against education.

We need to also say, we need to train our workers and get good welders and plumbers and carpenters and all of that.

But what we also need to tell our kids, and this gets back to the whole idea of optimism versus pessimism.

Man, be optimistic.

Everything is out there.

It is not the end of the world.

It is the best time.

It's the best time ever to be alive.

Seriously.

We have antibiotics, we have epidurals when you have a baby, we have twice the longevity.

Kids don't die like they did.

Women died, 1 in 10 women would die after birth.

We don't have that anymore.

We live in the best of all times.

And as far as relations, people say everybody's angry at each other.

No they're not.

People are less angry than they've ever been in the history of the world.

Is everybody perfect?

No.

But there's a lot less anger, bigotry, racism, all those things that we had, I think there's a lot less than there's ever been.

Not perfect but better than it's ever been.

Go out and conquer the world if you're a young person, there's so much out there waiting for you and nothing stopping you other than people beating you down saying, "You can't do it, you're a victim."

Don't be a victim, go out there and conquer the world is my attitude.

- [Guest] Thank you.

(audience applauding) - My questionnaire for you Senator is, you've advocated for reducing government spending, talked about the federal reserve and the national debt.

And today I want to ask, what specific steps would you take to reduce national debt without cutting programs that benefit the working class?

- You have to cut everything.

Even things that may say that they are for the working class, you have to cut everything.

And what I say by that doesn't mean you have to cut out necessarily what you're giving to people, what the program does.

But they have to cut the dollars, there has to be less dollars and people will find deficiencies.

Some things could be eliminated completely and you might not know the difference.

The National Science Foundation, people say, "Oh, we need science."

Well, you have the NIH.

The NIH has got $40 billion, the National Science Foundation has about $8 billion.

And you say, "Well, what do they do?"

Well, since the 1970s we've been pointing out what they do.

If you wanna hear the most ridiculous, crazy stuff, that's where it comes from.

One of the first studies they did is they wanted to know what makes people more aggressive, gin or tequila.

(audience laughing) Now we all know the answer (audience laughing) but being good government scientists, they wanna know.

So they got codfish and I don't know how you get 'em to drink gin, but they guzzled the gin in one set of codfish and tequila in the other.

And of course, the tequila fish were bonkers.

But no, I mean, just stupid study like that.

What makes people happy?

Do lonely rats wanna use more cocaine than well socialized rats.

My favorite is Japanese quail.

It's about a million bucks.

Are Japanese quail more sexually promiscuous on cocaine or not on cocaine.

So that just to me is such an insult to the taxpayer.

I just wipe out 100% of that and we'd never know it was going, some behavioral researchers would hate me and they do already anyway and we get rid of it.

But everything else, even Medicare, the President takes Medicare and social security off there, you can't take 'em off the limit.

Social security's going to have to be reformed.

So whenever I get the notice and ARP always sends us around Kentucky, "Tell Rand Paul to keep his hands off my social security."

If you do, there'll be no social security within 10 years it's going to be 20% short.

I tell people, "Look, I'm not yet old but I aspire to be an old person.

(audience laughing) I want my social security, I want my family to get it.

I want everybody to get social security.

I'm not against it.

It's a government program, it's been supposed to be a pension program but within 10 years it falls short and it'll be 25% short."

So anybody who says they're not wanting to reform social security should be run out on a rail from office 'cause they're not a serious person.

It's the opposite of what we do.

We should reward people brave enough to say we should do something about it.

What should we do?

Raise the age.

You hate old people.

No, I aspire to be an old person but you have to raise the age 'cause there's not enough money.

We already did it once.

Some people in this room know it, but many people forgot about it.

We raised it from 65 to 67 'cause we hated old people?

No, 'cause old people were living longer.

In 1937 the average life expectancy was 65.

What worked, program, what a great program.

Half your people die, the other half lived and they live off the money of the other half that died.

But now it's more like 80 and it's gonna go higher.

Those are all good things, but you have to raise the age.

So I finally got an amendment, I had a bill and I had three co-sponsors.

I finally got the amendment to vote on it to raise the age over the next 10 years, couple months, a year, each year for 10 years.

And you know how many votes I got?

- [Audience Member] Three.

- Me and two other Republicans.

People are fearful of it.

They think it's the end of their career if they vote to do something like that.

But I think it's the end of the country if we don't do it.

So, and that would be the hottest of the third rails to touch, would be social security.

Medicare's the same way.

It's a trillion dollars.

I know people who've run hospital chains and I ask 'em, "If I gave you Medicare to run, could you cut 10% and still get everybody their benefit?"

He said, "You can give it to me, I'll cut it 20% and get everybody their benefit," because just so inefficient, this is government.

And so everything has to be looked at.

And some things you might decide we're not going to look at after you look at everything.

But the way you balance the budget.

And I do a plan every year, a five year budget plan, balances in the fifth year.

The way you get there is through looking at what across the board number it would take.

It used to be when I started doing this, freezing spending for five years would balance, a couple years later it was called the penny plan.

1% cut balances the budget, then it was the nickel plan, then we had COVID.

Now it's the sixth penny plan.

It's the numbers are so far outta whack.

Interest on the national debts of trillion.

So for all the people who say, "I can't cut this, it's too precious to people."

We're taking a trillion dollars from those same people to pay interest on the debt, which buys nothing.

And there is a danger and there is a danger of a calamity, a precipitous action.

I'm not saying it's going to happen, but what if interest rates went to 10%?

They were 11% when I bought my first house, plus I was an idiot and I paid premium mortgage insurance for another two points.

I made 13% when I bought my first house.

But the thing is if they went to 10%, we can't pay the debt.

The debt will be unpayable at 10% and they will pay it.

But they'll just have to print up so much money that they will be suffering from 10, 20, 30% inflation and you destroy the country.

These are all possible outcomes.

The most likely outcome is still the country's going to do great, you're going to do great.

But we still have to address these problems in the debt.

So I would say look everywhere for cutting.

- [Audience Member] Thank you.

- Thank you so much for your insights about provisioning of goods, whether by the state or the central government and private entities.

But I want to draw upon private entities, is that they have profit incentive, which usually takes prices higher and mostly for industries like healthcare, how can we handle that?

Another question is- - Say that again for me.

Who has an incentive to make prices up?

- [Audience Member] Private entities.

- Right.

- Yeah and my other question is, America has gotten better society, wealth has gone up and it's a lot better to live in America right now, but at the same time things like inequality have gone up.

And so how do we handle things like that as well?

- Let's do the price thing first.

So you say businesses have an incentive to raise prices.

I would say technically they have incentive to make more profit.

So sometimes that means lowering prices to get more of the market share.

So Walmart makes money not by raising prices, they make it by lowering it to their competitors.

They have about a 4% profit margin.

So if you wanna make a ton of money, go into software, they have like 100% profit margin.

You go to Walmart, you only get 4%, but they sell a trillion dollars worth of stuff.

So 4% of a trillion ends up being decent money.

But they do it by maximizing profit, but they maximize profit lowering prices.

But let's say I'm just greedy and I'm gonna open grocery stores.

It's hard to imagine 'cause it's hard to imagine without competition.

But let's say I'm in a business and I wanna double and triple all my prices because I just like running my hands through the gold and I want more gold, more gold and I'm just a miser and I just wanna be rich.

It can only happen until someone else sees an opportunity and they come in and undercut me.

So there always is a price at which, and if the barrier to entry is a million dollars, it takes a while.

So some industries can raise prices for a while, but if you allow international competition, it's less so because there's people everywhere around the world that can compete.

But the bottom line is there is no monopoly price.

There are no monopolies in a free market.

The only monopolies that we've ever had are monopolies that are promoted and protected by government.

So as prices rise, somebody gets an opportunity and undercuts me.

But what you actually find is that most industries are complaining 'cause the competition's too fierce.

In fact, one of the famous antitrust cases was the ready to eat antitrust case.

And they were all complaining, "There's too much competition.

We can't get our new cereal in 'cause there's too much competition among six people already."

So I think that the, what you perceive as a problem is that you don't think that the capitalist system will correct.

And I think the historical example is that the capital system does correct, when people try to raise prices, competition brings prices down.

When the airlines were heavily regulated, it cost like 800 bucks to go round trip somewhere 30 years ago, when prices came down is when they deregulated and you got more competition.

Competition always works, always brings down prices.

And then what was the second part of the question?

- It was about inequality, how you- - [Rand] Oh, inequality.

- Yeah.

- Inequality.

I write some about inequality not in this book, in a book called "Case Against Socialism."

And one of the questions that you have to start with if you are worried about income inequality is, if the average income in Lewisburg was 10,000 for everybody and the richest person in the town made 100,000, it's sort of a tenfold difference.

But what if we got a change and the marketplace changed things and now the average is 30,000 for the poor person, but it's 13 million.

So now the rich people have gotten a lot richer and income inequality's gotten worse.

Which society would you wanna live in if you're the average person.

I'd wanna live in the one that makes 30,000, not 10,000.

Income inequality is always about looking at the other guy.

And it's a natural tendency for us to wanna look at other people and envy 'em.

It's a terrible, I think tendency among us, but we have it to look at other people, what do they make?

What do they make?

But it really should be about your wealth.

Every transaction you make, if you go on Amazon today and you buy shoes for $75, are you happy with that trade?

Yeah, it had to be because you wouldn't have made it.

So all trade is mutually beneficial.

But if I take a million of you that all bought shoes for $75 and I say, "I'm gonna add it all up," and now we're talking about millions of dollars, now I'm gonna say, "China ripped us off."

Well, how'd they rip us off if all million of you that went, bought shoes on Amazon, all thought you got a good deal?

How did a million individual good deals become a bad deal for a country?

It's a fallacy.

The trade deficit is a fallacy.

It's not a little bit wrong, it's completely meaningless.

I'll give you another example.

If you go to buy a Corvette, if you work at the Corvette factory, the person who owns a Corvette factory has a trade deficit.

They buy your labor and you rarely buy a Corvette.

Some people never buy a Corvette, but they're buying your labor so they have a trade deficit with you.

It means nothing.

The only thing that makes any difference to the people making Corvette is how many people, no matter who they are or where they are, buy their car versus the cost of the car.

It's profit and loss.

Trade deficit is, you've drawn a circle around the US and China, but we don't trade with China.

The US doesn't trade with China.

Individuals make trades and they wouldn't make the trade unless they were beneficial.

So what we've done is we've screwed something up.

Not to mention it's just not real accounting.

Not to mention the fact that if you, the real thing I don't want is people your age to go fight in Taiwan, doesn't mean I don't care about Taiwan.

I want Taiwan to remain free and non-communist.

But I think the day we quit trading with China is the day they march in and take Taiwan when they have nothing to lose.

And that's the opposite of what they say in Washington, Washington, they all tell you, "Oh, we just need to send more nuclear weapons and more weapons to Taiwan and we need more soldiers there.

We need to patrol the seas."

And I'd say, "Well, no, you need to quit kicking Chinese companies out of the US and you need to quit ending trade with China."

I think it's important to think through all these different questions, particularly the income inequality question 'cause I think there's a lot of great writers on it, and I've got some in my book, but a lot of mine refers to original research.

There's probably a dozen people looking at it from the free market point of view on income inequality.

Piketty, Thomas Piketty was the most famous writer on this in recent years.

He's a socialist though, so he wants a tax of like 60% on everybody, over 100,000.

Or he just wants to take the money from the rich and give it to the not so rich.

But in his book he says that economic wealth goes down when you income and inequality goes up.

There are researchers who have looked at the numbers and say completely the opposite.

So you have to wade through all of this and decide who you believe.

And then you also have to decide is even if income inequality is getting worse, if the poor are getting richer, would you rather have the poor at a lower level if everybody were more equal?

And I think ultimately most people would just rather be richer in their life rather than how rich somebody else is.

- Thanks for being here by the way.

- [Rand] Sure.

- Something you just said is that, I remember when I, about 1,000 years ago when I was younger from New York City, originally, standing, waiting for an express bus and the IBM building was right up the block.

And on the top of the building it said, "World peace through world trade."

And I don't know when they lost that logo, but I've always remembered that.

But to get to the point, I worked for 20 years for Congressman Glenn Thompson, who's our congressman here.

I worked in the district and over those years I changed my mind about term limits.

I always thought elections are term limits, but it seems now with public money, with corporate money involved, something is being screwed up in the way Congress turns, Congress and the Senate turn.

The fear of being primary, the money that's out there, how can we, do you feel that this is a problem?

- It was part of my original platform and still is.

I'm a co-sponsor.

I'd take a constitutional amendment and so I'm a co-sponsor of, I think it's 6 in the house and 12 in the Senate is what ours is.

But it has to be everybody.

And people say, "Well, now you've been there longer than 12.

Why don't you just leave?"

Those are mean people saying that actually, they... (audience laughing) But the thing is, it only works for me if everybody does it.

It wouldn't be great for Kentucky to say, "Well, we're only gonna send," and some states did that, but then you put yourself at a disadvantage versus the other states having more seniority.

But I'm still for 'em.

And I think term limits would be a good idea.

They tried doing it state by state and the court ruled that you can't have different rules for federal office from one state to the other.

And it kinda makes sense.

I mean, you know, what if they in Washington state had some other bizarre rule about running for office that was different than the rest, it kinda needs to be somewhat uniform.

- Thank you, Senator, so much for being here.

Especially when I think a lot of Republicans are so hesitant to talk to the public right now.

I'm just curious what you think at this moment, President Trump's role is in the Republican party, does he have a capture over the kind of lower wealth populist base and that's controlling their representatives?

Or does he have a direct play with the representatives and the populist base or neither of the above?

- He did win a nationwide election.

He is the only one that can say that.

So if Republicans resist, he'll point his finger and he'll say, "Well, I won the election, you didn't," but we all won elections, you know, where we're from, we actually represent our state or our district, not the entire country.

I think there is some level of intimidation, you know, that people are worried that he might get involved in the primary.

He's gotten involved and challenged people that he didn't like and went after them.

I don't see it that way.

I guess I see it that my job is to try to persuade the public that there's an economic fallacy to things like trade deficit and the trade is good.

So I do it all the time, maybe to a fault.

And if you look at my Twitter feed, they almost all hate me right now.

So my wife has explained to me what it means to be ratioed.

Every time I talk about free trade, I got ratioed.

For those of who don't do Twitter, it means you get more comments than likes and when they see it, then they, you know, go after you.

But I don't know.

See, I was a, I'm someone who believes in small government, mostly because I want to be left alone.

I don't want you tell me what to do and I don't wanna tell you what to do.

I wanna people to just kinda, I'm part of the Leave Me Alone Coalition that can be people on the right or the left, just leave me alone.

And I was that before there was a Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump sometimes agrees with me on policies on war.

He actually is much closer to my liking than the Bushes, particularly the second Bush.

The Iraq war, I think was a terrible mistake, and most progressives would agree with me on that.

It was mostly Democrats who opposed the Iraq War and a few Republicans, my dad included, but George W. Bush was very much, we're gonna make the world safe for democracy.

We're gonna spread freedom everywhere.

And I think you spread freedom through trade, not at the point of a gun.

It doesn't mean we don't defend ourselves, but I don't think we go into other countries, take 'em over and make 'em love us.

In fact, most, I think we've gotten the opposite result when we've gone into countries and tried to impose our way.

But I think that, you know, if you look at that and the directionality of it and how much Trump controls, certainly there's a significant degree.

I think there's a breaking point.

I think when the market went down $6 trillion, even members of his administration lit up to that.

And it's not just rich people who lose money.

There's a lot of ordinary people in here who put money away, who have worked for 20 years just doing a regular job, but have put away a decent amount of money and lost money, and the markets are still real skittish.

They were a little bit down yesterday.

They've come up, they mostly went up when he put the tariffs, you know, into a pause.

But within 90 days, something's gonna happen.

If he comes out and makes some deals to lower trade barriers, I think you'll see a huge positive response by the marketplace.

But the marketplace has millions of pretty smart self-interested people.

They're a pretty good poll of people watching the economy every day.

And they don't like the idea of tariffs.

So where it goes from here, I think there is a point at which people will have to make a decision whether it's following just one person.

And look, I'm a partisan.

When he was impeached both times, the Democrats did it purely for partisans and I stood up and defended him.

I'll do it again, but on issues it doesn't always have to be, you know, that he's right and everybody else is wrong.

I mean, for decades Republicans and many Democrats and in many universities, they taught that trade was a good thing.

Most economic departments in most universities, I think still do teach that trade is a good thing.

So we're either all wrong or he's right or the reverse.

But I think it's worth speaking up, even though it isn't making me currently that popular.

- So do you believe he has sort of policy control over the party more than Presidents before him?

- In some ways, yes.

I think he's been, he's less afraid.

A lot of presidents wouldn't get involved in primaries.

He is involved in 100s of primaries.

He threatens people every day, you know, that he'll go after him in a primary.

So he has much more of a hold on it and he's gotten a lot of people elected that are, you know, wanting to support his.

And like I say, I'm still for the majority of his platform, I got most of his cabinet through.

I'm a chairman of a committee to give you a cue, don't get the wrong opinion that I'm anti-Trump.

But I do think it's important in any day and age for people to stand up and be honest about what they think is happening and not submit to, you know, one person, even if they're the leader of your party.

And we'll see what happens.

It may not be good for me, but I am what I am.

(bright lively music) - All good things must come to an end, and I think we're going to need to segue along here, but let's- - Thank you.

- Thank Senator... (audience applauding) (bright lively music continues) (bright lively music fades) (bright upbeat music) - [Narrator] Support for this program was provided by the Open Discourse Coalition, providing a variety of intellectual viewpoints at Bucknell University and beyond.

(bright upbeat music fades)