The former congressman says that liberty doesn’t posit a particular social and economic outcome; it trusts in the decisions of free people. Excerpted from the program from April 10, 2014.

RON PAUL, Former U.S. Congressman; Author, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues that Affect Our Freedom

In conversation with JOSH RICHMAN, Political Reporter, Bay Area News Group

JOSH RICHMAN: An audience member asks, What is the effect of unlimited money in political campaigns? Do you favor public financing of campaigns?

RON PAUL: Well, the second half is real easy. I’m absolutely opposed to public financing. Public means government. Government means they have to steal the money. They steal it from one group and give it to another. Do you think the libertarians are going to get a fair shake on that? No. Libertarians can’t even get on ballots because the others are in charge. You can’t get your signatures, and you don’t get on the debates and all that. So public financing means that you’re using stolen money to get involved in the process and I’m positively opposed to it.

But I’m also opposed to these strict rules that say that if you’re a wealthy person and you have a lot of money and you want to help me in the campaign because you believe in liberty, [these rules say you can’t]. It’s your money. It’s a free society. You ought to be able to. And you say, “This is terrible.” I’ve already complained about big money in Washington: the big corporations, the military-industrial complex, the drug companies, insurance companies. That’s an evil and it’s wrong, but that’s the symptom. The symptom is there’s so much to be auctioned off and the government can auction off everything. They control all wealth and they control the special interest.

RICHMAN: In Congress, you championed the cause of those who want to legalize the sale and distribution of raw milk. You called the applicable food safety laws “pasteurization without representation.” Yet the Center for Disease Control has reported some outbreaks of disease associated with this. A member of the audience asks another food safety question: Should GMO foods be banned? Are they a health risk? Does government have a role to play in ensuring public health through things like food safety?

PAUL: Yeah, they have an obligation [which is] for the government not to be involved in deciding good drugs versus bad drugs – because they’ve done so much more harm by putting bad drugs on the market, and [those drugs] had the FDA seal of approval. Thank goodness I was reluctant to use new drugs, and it did me well in my medical practice. Every night you hear an ad on TV, “Well, if you’ve ever used this drug, call me. I’m going to sue somebody and I’m going to make you a billionaire.” Guess what? It was an FDA-approved drug. They [also] keep good drugs off the market. There’s good evidence for that. 

But if I make up my mind and say, “You know, I think I’ll drink raw milk,” and I’m not careful and don’t realize I need refrigeration and a few other things and I get sick, I took a risk and I suffered the consequence. But when government does [that kind of thing], they make all of us sick. They come and tell us, “you will take these immunizations and you will do this.” Today there’s an article out that says the flu pill isn’t worth much after all. But it’s better to make up your own mind. You don’t want a law to get rid of the GMOs.

But the market is so far ahead of the government. My wife and I looked at the labels [during] the last year or two. It’s miraculous what has happened. Whole Foods has come out and they provide food and knowledge and you can read labels – “gluten-free.” The market is telling these producers what to do. That is a healthy way of doing it. The best thing to do when we are concerned is [not] accept the Good Housekeeping stamp of approval when it comes from the U.S. government, because they’re a bunch of bureaucrats. They usually work for drug companies and they promote things, [for instance] some of this mental health testing – I used to fight that all the time, being the only one to vote against this – mental health testing of every kid in grade school so that they could put them on drugs. And a lot of them are on drugs [now]. Then you hear about the shootings. Even our veterans, when they come home, they’re on drugs. They’re on these psychotropic drugs; and [people] make billions of dollars off this. So I would say that they don’t have a very good record, and private choices will not be perfect.

Let me just tell a very brief story. I was raised in a dairy, and the farmers would send their milk to us and we would pasteurize it. It probably would have my dad turning over in his grave if he thought that I was championing raw milk. I don’t drink raw milk, but I [do] champion the cause of freedom of choice.

I’ve never even seen anybody smoke a marijuana cigarette and yet, along with Barney Frank, I led the charge on freedom of choice. True freedom of choice: you make up your own mind about doing risky behavior. It is freedom that we want. We don’t want dictates; we don’t want authoritarians who are the do-gooders who think they know what’s best. Yes, you know what’s best for your personal life; you know how best to spend your money. And you may mess up. Just don’t try to blame somebody else for it if you mess up. Your family might help you. But if you turn it all over to the government, you end up where we are today: a totally bankrupt government, undermining our liberties, at perpetual war and a pretense that when things get messed up, we can always go to the government; the government will take care of us. It doesn’t work; the most enlightening thing today is more and more people are announcing, “You know what? We have to question what the government is doing.” I think that’s very, very good.

RICHMAN: Given the situations in Colorado and Washington and the debate that is almost constant here in California, are you for or against the mass commercialization or recreational use of drugs, such as marijuana or crack or heroin?

PAUL: I’d legalize everything. People should make their own choices. The only thing that’s illegal is using aggression against somebody else. And if that is the case, all substances should be legal. They asked me the same question in a very liberal South Carolina audience, and they asked me, “What do you mean you’d legalize heroin?” I asked the crowd, “All right. If I legalize heroin tomorrow, how many of you are going to use heroin?” Didn’t see that many hands go up. It’s the whole idea of who’s responsible and what people would do.

The do-gooders get in there and say, “We’re going to regulate alcohol.” That didn’t work out so well. “Now we’re going to regulate marijuana. But if we regulate marijuana, you know, hemp looks a little bit like marijuana, so we have to regulate hemp too.” Hemp has nothing to do with psychotropic drugs or anything. So what do we do? We destroy an industry. It’s just not this fantasy of government protection against ourselves. When we assume government can protect us against ourselves, whether it’s fanatical thoughts – political or religious – or against what we eat or put in our mouths and our body, I tell you what, it won’t work except for one thing: it will destroy your liberty.

Freedom of choice is a great idea, just [as long as] you understand that it’s not perfection. But like I said before, if you believe that the government has to do that because you might do something wrong, why is it that you want to take a few people and put them up in Washington and have them make the decisions for us? What if they do something wrong? That’s constantly what is happening. Look at all the decisions they make for us, sending our kids off to fight these stupid wars – undeclared, unwinnable wars. It has been a great burden to us, and they’re endless. Even if we quit the wars right now, it [will take] decades to take care of the problems that we have created for this generation.

That is just so avoidable. Some things in life, you can’t avoid. But much of what we have – economically and as far as the slaughter of a generation of young people – that’s avoidable, just with some common sense. And common sense also would lead us to some guidance with our Constitution; if we had followed the Constitution, we would be fighting a lot less wars.