by Dr. Mercola

In the recent Iowa Straw Poll Michelle Bachman came in first. That fact was reported by most of the national media. However, in an incredible display of conformity bias, virtually all of the major media blacked out the fact that Rep. Ron Paul came in a virtual tie with her. There was less than 1 percent difference between them, yet he was completely ignored by all the major media.

For the most part I am a political atheist.  I was equally critical of President Clinton, Bush and Obama, yet it is hard to avoid the enormous influence that politics has on our life. My belief is that the US has unfortunately been gradually merging corporate influence into government regulations which is terrific for the corporations but an unmitigated disaster for most people.  In my view this is one of the foundational issues that is contributing to the pervasive influence of the conventional medical model.

The last thing I want to spend my time on is sharing my political views (and some people will always criticize me when I do), and I want to make it clear that I really do not care about the political parties. That said, it’s clear that our health is being severely harmed by the federal government and the corporate favoritism they display, and this concerns me a great deal. We are now at the point where you can’t make a statement about the health benefit of a food without it being considered a drug; and genetically modified foods are unique enough to hold patents, yet this is kept hidden from you and not declared on the food label because they know you probably wouldn’t buy it if you knew what it was. Other areas that now require you to take control of your own health and not let the federal government strip you of your health freedom include:

• Water fluoridation
• Right to buy, sell, and consume raw milk
• Mercury amalgams in dentistry
• Mandatory vaccinations

One of the factors that endear Dr. Ron Paul to me is the fact that he’s a medical doctor, and he has a record of defending health freedom and promoting health in general. It’s a quality that few other politicians have. He serves as an excellent role model for healthy living and preventive medicine, and leads by example.

For example, Dr. Paul is now running for President of the United States again, but he still makes time for exercise every day.

“Usually in the afternoon I ride the bike and I’ll go 10, 12 or 15 miles depending on the time of day… [T]his morning I did… a 3.5 miles walk. When I get up, I like to get outside and do that, get the walking in, which helps me both psychologically as well as physically.”

Defining Freedom and Liberty

This interview, however, will focus primarily on freedom and liberty, which is essential if you want to have any real control over your own health.

His most recent book is called Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom. It’s a phenomenal book and I highly encourage you to read it. In it, Dr. Paul reminds us that the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and every coin we carry have the word ‘liberty’ emblazoned on it. It’s an essential element to our country’s origins. Yet Americans have allowed a massive erosion of liberties to occur since the enactment of the US Constitution.

How did that happen?

“It’s a good question,” Dr. Paul says. “I think it’s an important question because if you desire liberty, and our liberties have been eroded, we ought to know what happened or we can’t correct the problem… When it comes to liberty, for some people it’s an abstract and they don’t think about it, and they have been misled for so long that they have been taught that the government is there to protect us and take care of us. Not to protect our liberties as much as to guarantee the entitlement that you have, and they distort the meaning of rights and freedoms.

They say you have a right to education, you have a right to medical care, you are entitled by the government to be taken care of. The entitlement system becomes a right.

But all these things they’re talking about depend on the use of government force. Force—that is, if the government can give you or me something… some goods or some service, they have to extract it from somebody else. So they become thieves… That’s what they’re doing. They steal from one and give to another, and the politicians get rewarded. So we became soft on this. The people desired security over freedom, which we were warned against.”

Do You Really Want to Live in a Free Society?

I agree with Dr. Paul when he says that what we need is a re-education on the meaning of freedom and liberty, and what self-reliance means. If you want to live in a free society, you must first understand what a free society is!

While Dr. Paul may be talking about liberty as it relates to the economy and various political issues, I’ve been publicly urging people through this newsletter to “take control of your health” for well over 12 years, and it’s the same basic principle. It’s a call to end blind reliance on authorities that aren’t necessarily working in your best interest—even though they may not realize it themselves.

In terms of health, the health advice you get from doctors today is deeply colored by their education, which is largely controlled and manipulated by the drug industry. And drug companies only dispense advice that promotes profits for them and their shareholders—without much regard for the outcome for patients and the well-being of society as a whole.

“The biggest problem we have is that so many think that if you give them their liberty, you’re going to take away something,” Dr. Paul says. “But the truth is the governments can’t provide [everything]. They eventually bankrupt the country and give us the conditions that we have today.

But the whole goal of defending liberty is first to define it, and then convince people that it’s in their best interest to live in a free society.

If they think it’s better to give up a little freedom and the government will take care of them from the cradle to the grave, which so many believe, we really can’t win. We have an opportunity now because I think those who made all those promises look pretty bad because they can’t fulfill their promises.”

Your Health Freedom and Civil Liberties are at Great Risk

Unless you’ve been living beneath a rock, you’re probably painfully aware that our economy is rolling downhill like a rock, picking up momentum with each passing day. As a result, we can expect that many will be challenged with health problems. It’s questionable whether the traditional medical model of drugs and surgery will survive a complete financial collapse, which is all the more reason to take control of your own health and implement effective, low-cost strategies that can help you avoid illness in the first place.

Part of preventive medicine is diet, and raw milk plays an important part here. In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has begun clamping down on raw milk producers ever more forcefully—resorting to the use of armed SWAT teams to raid milk farmers and organic co-ops… This is the price of so-called “security.” The FDA claims they’re just doing their job and protecting your health. But are they really? And, even if that was their only incentive, is it worth surrendering one of your most basic rights for this protection—the right to buy and consume a food that’s been sustaining human health long before the advent of pasteurization?

“When we talk about these medical issues, as a physician and as a person in politics, I have sharp lines because I have medical opinions. What I’m doing in politics is not exactly the medical opinion, whether it’s the use of medicinal marijuana or whether it’s raw milk or not. What I deal with in politics is your right of freedom of choice.

As long as you don’t force other people, and as long as you don’t defraud people, you ought to have a choice on alternative treatments and not have the FDA and the drug companies controlling things. That’s where we get into so much trouble.

It doesn’t mean anybody has perfect knowledge on these things, but one thing I know is the government doesn’t have perfect knowledge. So if we defer to the government and say, “The FDA will take care of us. We’ll just listen to them and they’ll never delay drug usage or promote the wrong drugs, or prohibit or force us to do certain things,” then we’re foolish if we accept that notion.”

Dr. Paul Addresses the Patriot Act

Your liberty is also under assault under the guise of the Patriot Act and Homeland Security.

“I’ve been commenting on what we’ve seen at the airport, and using that as an example,” Dr. Paul says. “If we can tolerate the groping and the undressing of a 94-year-old woman in order for her to get on an airplane, I figure if the American people put up with this, we’re in big trouble.”

The Patriot Act is probably one of the most inappropriately named bills we’ve ever had. A patriot is defined by the dictionary as a person who regards himself as a defender of individual rights against presumed interference by the federal government. Recently in Chicago and Minneapolis, prominent peace activists had their door broken down and property confiscated without any charges being filed. Patriots are now considered terrorists, and are being terrorized…

I’m wondering what’s going to take for American to wake up and see what the federal government has become. It’s spending is out of control, and each year more new unconstitutional laws are enacted.

“[A]t the time of the founding of our country, the patriots were the ones who said they had too much government and they were going to challenge the government. Today, if you’re “a patriot” you support all the wars and all the welfare and the Patriot Act, which undermines or destroys the Fourth Amendment. So they have turned the definition of the patriot on its head!

The Patriot Act… was passed right after 9/11… I said, if this bill had been named, not the Patriot Act, but “a bill to repeal the Fourth Amendment.” How many people would have voted for it? That’s essential what it does. It allows the government to do what they’re doing and some of these authorities continuing to grow.

Certainly at the airport they don’t have the right to do what they do. The potential customers, the passengers, aren’t suspects. There is no probable cause there, and yet they are being humiliated and groped and x-rayed continuously. … [I]f we see a transition back toward a free society, the Patriot Act will be repealed. But right now, we couldn’t even slow it up. In Washington, they have just renewed it, essentially the whole thing, for four more years.”

Can a Smaller Government Save the United States?

Another primary concept Dr. Paul promotes is a movement towards smaller government. In light of the ongoing financial depression and the upcoming Presidential elections, this is going to be a massively important issue. We’re now looking at a $1.6 trillion deficit for this year. That, plus the total deficit of $14 trillion, and probably unfunded liabilities that are well above $60-70 trillion!

Dr. Paul admits it’s a complicated issue.

“It’s so difficult because the majority of people, obviously, for quite a few decades have depended on the government and the wealth was there. But now we’ve consumed the wealth. We’ve destroyed the jobs, and all we have is debt.”

He suggests we could “wean” ourselves off Big Government by implementing a transition program to progressively cut out unnecessary agencies and programs, without any major calamity.

“But I think the odds of that happening are about slim to none, because the politicians won’t cut anything,” he says. “There is a strong lobby for the military industrial complex and foreign adventurism; there is a strong lobby that says the entire system is perfect.

Still… I think what’s happening is that more and more people are realizing they [politicians] can’t fulfill their promises. The system doesn’t work.

You could introduce the notion of nullification and say, if the states have determined that the federal government can’t take care of us, whether it’s through Obama care and they want to opt out of the system, or anything that the government does; if the monetary crisis moves to the point where the money is not doing the job and you get a check that doesn’t buy anything, it means that people will opt out of the system.

It won’t be actually opting out by law, but it will be a de facto nullification. People will just ignore it, ignore what the government says… Maybe it will get to the point where the system will break down, and maybe we won’t have these armed bureaucrats coming in and raiding raw milk producers.

That’s a little scary, because then there is the big decision on what is civil disobedience and what isn’t? Are they going to ignore this or are they going to continue to make examples of us?

I think that’s what they do with the raw milk issue. They want to show you they’re still in charge, but eventually, they’re not going to be in charge because they’re not going to have any money. Hopefully, we can turn that around and make that a positive.”

Will Dr. Paul’s Plan Solve the US Debt Issue?

A recent Time Magazine article discussed Ron Paul’s ideas for solving the debt ceiling problem. The US annual debt is over $1 trillion dollars, and cumulatively it is $14 trillion, but with the unfunded liabilities like Social Security and Medicare it probably rises to $70 trillion. Most everyone reading this, including me, really have an enormously difficult time comprehending how much a trillion dollars really is. So I am sharing a nice video that I embedded in the Dr. Paul video and I would strongly encourage you to watch it.

Time Magazine explains:

“Paul’s plan starts with the Federal Reserve. In the last year or two the Fed has been buying up U.S. Treasury bonds in an effort to lower interest rates and boost the economy. The most recent round of that buying has been dubbed QE2… The result is that the Fed now holds nearly $1.7 trillion in U.S. debt. But that is really phony debt… Nonetheless… [it] is still counted in the debt ceiling number, which caps that amount of total Federal debt at $14.3 trillion.

Paul’s plan: Get the Fed and the Treasury to rip up that debt. It’s fake debt anyway. And the Fed is legally allowed to return the debt to the Treasury to be destroyed. A trillion and a half dollars is currently about what spending is expected to exceed tax revenue in 2011. And the deficit is expected to dramatically shrink in 2013 and beyond. So cut the debt by $1.7 trillion and you could run the government as is for at least the next year, and perhaps into 2013.”

Another plan proposed by Dr. Paul in the past months calls for the U.S. government to sell its gold reserves. As many of you know, Dr. Paul is a strong supporter of gold as a counter to the devaluation of the dollar. But what made Dr. Paul suggest this plan in the first place?

“It was a mixture of things,” Dr. Paul says. “… I would say when people are in trouble—if you or I got into trouble and we had a stash of gold, and we wanted to be honorable, don’t you think we would sell our gold and pay our bills, and maybe go to work to buy the gold coins back again? That was the idea. I’m not necessarily against the gold being put back into the hands of the people.

It was also part of this idea of the [Federal Reserve] audit. If we’re going to sell the gold, we would have to find out if we really have the gold… I’ve had this recent hearing to look into how much gold there really is, so it’s all part of that. I don’t think it would be the end of the world if the gold was all put in the hands of the people, because it was confiscated [from them].

But you know if you were going to deliver it to the people, you could make it all into coins and let people use it as legal tender. That’s what the government is supposed to do. They weren’t supposed to hold all the gold. They were just supposed to guarantee that when they minted the gold coins they would have an honest way to measure.”

Folks, there are no easy and pain-free answers to any of the problems that currently face us. But one thing is for sure: if we do not rise to defend our most basic freedoms, we may lose them all.

Interview:

Full Article Here: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/08/28/ron-paul-on-defending-health-freedom.aspx