CPAC 2011 - Ron Paul Speech

Congressman Ron Paul (TX-14) has always been a popular speaker at CPAC. Below are some excerpts from his speech:

I understand we had a few new members sent to Congress and we have you to thank for that, but I do want to take a moment to take a little special privilege and say we also have a new senator from Kentucky, and we like that too!

There's a lot of exciting things going on. There is truly a new revolution going on in this country, and we've been dealing with this and encouraging it because I do believe that we live in a time where we do need a change in attitude, a change in ideas. We don't need just a change of political parties, we need to change philosophy of what this country is all about.

This past week we had a pretty good victory for the freedom movement. We had a vote come up all of a sudden under suspension, and it had to do with the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act, as we know, has nothing to do with patriotism - they always name it opposite of what it is. The Patriot Act is the destruction of the Fourth Amendment. That's what it's all about!

The one thing in Washington that they don't quite understand is what's happening in grassroots America because they assume that everyone loved the Patriot Act.

A lot of people ate saying what should our position be about finding the next dictator of Egypt? I would say we need to do a lot less, a lot sooner, not only in Egypt, but around the world! Some people want to argue with us about that and day we have a moral responsibility to spread our goodness around the world, and it's our obligation to do this, but let me tell you, fiscal conservatives should look at this carefully. How much did we invest in that dictator of the past thirty years? $70 billion dollars we invested in Egypt, and guess what, the government is crumbling, the people are upset, not only with their government, but they're upset with us for propping up that public dictator for all those years. Now to add insult to injury, where do you think the money went? To his bank account.

It used to be that the conservatives were against foreign aid. I'm still against foreign aid for everybody. Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country. There can't be a better example than that than what we did with Egypt.

I'm sure half the people in this room won't cut one penny out of the military, and the military is not equated to defense. Defense spending is one thing, military spending is what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, and we have to go after that!

When government takes over the role of making us virtuous and making us excellent and redistributing the wealth, they only do it at the expense of liberty, and that's why we're in such terrible shape today because we allowed the government to be so much involved. The government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to your neighbor to steal for you. There is to be no redistribution of wealth!

We should all assume personal for promoting the ideas of liberty.

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