This is what was said, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Chris Matthews; Congressman Paul, I think you have questions and concerns about the bonanza in the hedge fund industry. Do you?
Mr. Paul: Yes. I think this is not a consequence of free markets. What's happening is, there's transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy.
Mr. Paul: This comes about because of the monetary system that we have. When you inflate a currency or destroy a currency, the middle class gets wiped out.
So the people who get to use the money first which is created by the Federal Reserve system benefit. So the money gravitates to the banks and to Wall Street.
That's why you have more billionaires than ever before. Today, this country is in the middle of a recession for a lot of people. Michigan knows about it. Poor people know about it. The middle class knows about it. Wall Street doesn't know about it. Washington, D.C., doesn't know about it.
But it's because of the monetary system and the excessive spending. As long as we live beyond our means we are destined to live beneath our means.
And we have lived beyond our means because we are financing a foreign policy that is so extravagant and beyond what we can control, as well as the spending here at home.
And we're depending on the creation of money out of thin air, which is nothing more than debasement of the currency. It's counterfeit. And it is a natural, predictable consequence that you're going to have people benefit from it and other people suffer.
Mr. Paul: So, if you want a healthy economy, you have to study monetary theory and figure out why it is that we're suffering. And everybody doesn't suffer equally, or this wouldn't be so bad.
It's always the poor people -- those who are on retired incomes -- that suffer the most. But the politicians and those who get to use the money first, like the military industrial complex, they make a lot of money and they benefit from it.
And this is how it was "drunkblogged" at VodkaPundit:
2:09pm Ron Paul takes a simple question about the time, and explains how to build a watch. He's going on about inflation -- at near-record lows -- and how it's the real inflation causing the recession poor people are already in, and how the gold standard will save us, and Masonites are running the Federal Reserve with their zombie pirate enforcers. Or something.
How...witty.
You can be for or against the Ron Paul candidacy, but this strikes me as a cheap, cheap shot. It wasn't so long ago that conservatives were advocating gold coins with the likeness of Ludwig von Mises on them, or celebrating the Nobel Prize in economics being awarded to Friedrich Hayek (a student of von Mises). Now, though, we have right-ish pundits writing "look at the conspiracy nut!" dreck like this.
How...sophisticated.
Note that our drunkblogger has nothing at all to say about this:
Mr. McCain: Everybody is paying taxes and wealth creates wealth. And the fact is that I would commend to your reading, Ron, "Wealth of Nations," because that's what this is all about.
A vibrant economy creates wealth. People pay taxes. Revenues are at an all time high.
Um, right. Tax revenue is a proxy -- or even an indicator -- for wealth? My, Zimbabwe must be in pretty good shape, then, and I guess Hong Kong isn't. Ah, but I do not have the sophisticated economic understanding of Stephen Greene or Senator McCain.
Now, look, I suppose it is possible that Senator McCain read The Wealth of Nations while he was searching for investment ideas for his share of the Keating Five loot, but to suggest that he's more likely than Ron Paul to have actually read the damn thing and digested it is...reaching.
So, here we are, on this October 10 -- the anniversary of Atlas Shrugged's publication in 1957 and the death of Ludwig von Mises in 1973 -- that we not only have a long way to go in creating a free, capitalist America, but that most conservatives and libertarians are not really allies in that struggle. I offer the above as Exhibit A.