Ron Paul Vs Paul Krugman: Exciting Debate on Video with Transcript

Sparks flew when Paul Krugman and Congressman Ron Paul faced off today on Bloomberg TV’s “Street Smart” with Trish Regan and Adam Johnson….

Republican race…whether he would support Romney as nominee…how U.S. monetary policy is like the Roman Empire and why there should be legal competition to the U.S. dollar (yes, gold and silver).

Hear NYT columnist Krugman fire back on the role U.S. government should play in regulating the market economy…what economist Milton Friedman really thought about government stimulus…and what is the right level for debt for U.S. taxpayers (that’s you).

Krugman: If you think you can avoid the government from setting monetary policy, you’re living in the world that was 150 years ago.

Paul: ... But he wants to go back 1,000 years or 2,000 years just as the Romans and the Greeks and all other countries debased their currency.

This is a lot more interesting than the usual bumper sticker sound bite debates featuring people interrupting, yelling and talking over each other to keep either party from making a coherent statement. RP probably lost most people with his allusion to the East Roman or Byzantine Empire. It is certainly not true that the Byzantines were not embroiled in almost constant warfare. What his little compression of a lot of history alluded to was that absent two big exceptions; Justinian’s attempt to recreate the Roman Empire through his great commanders Belisarius and Narses in the 6th century and the Emperor Heraclitus duel to the death with the Sassanian Persian kingdom in the 7th century the East Roman Empire generally stood on a strategic defensive fending off invaders from without (and there were plenty of them). The two attempts at a strategic offensive were disastrous as in the case of Justinian it sapped the wealth of the empire and along with a massive plague helped impoverish virtually all parts of the realm, in the second case the empire exhausted itself in the sterile pursuit of destruction of the Neo-Persian Empire. The beneficiaries of the resultant weakness within the East Roman and Sassanian empires were the Arabs inspired by their wonderful new religion Islam.

But he wants to go back 1,000 years or 2,000 years just as the Romans and the Greeks and all other countries debased their currency.

I'm not particularly a fan of Ron Paul, but this is one of the best comebacks I've ever heard to the libs' perennial "You want to live in the past" BS arguments.

Market based interest rates certainly make sense and I like the idea of currency competition. He makes a great point when he says that a private company committing fraud is caught quickly, but governments can commit fraud and not pay a penalty.

and yet Krugman (who doesn't understand any of this) is the one with the Nobel Prize in Economics.

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