Ron Paul on Glenn Beck

The transcript. (via Lew Rockwell)

GLENN: What happens when Israel strikes Iran or Iran has the Earth rays and we know that they now have a nuclear weapon, what happens to our financial system at that point?

RON PAUL: I think the Chinese take over. If there's a real panic and oil shoots up to a couple of hundred bucks, the Chinese will dump their dollars. Chinese are maneuvering for this. The more we threaten Iran, the stronger the Chinese influence gets because they're using the dollars that they have earned from us and saved, they have a trillion, and they are starting to buy up assets in Iran and build plants and get involved in their energy. So the whole thing is back firing on us. We're getting ready to put tougher sanctions on the Iranians and that will make things that much worse. It won't help the dissidents in Iran. It's going to cost us a lot of money, and there will be a bombing and that will be a big, big event. I think it will crash the dollar is what I think it would do.

GLENN: What does America look like after a crashed dollar?

RON PAUL: Not like it looks today. We think it was bad with the financial crisis. When you have a dollar crisis, the whole thing quits functioning. The checks bounce and literally the federal government's checks bounce if you have -- if inflation goes up --

GLENN: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Does that mean that all of your friends in Washington then just go away?

RON PAUL: Yeah, that might be a good part of it.

GLENN: That might be a good idea! I say we crash the dollar today if that's the effect!

RON PAUL: I think we're going to have a de facto Tenth Amendment, secession. People are just going to ignore the federal government because they won't -- and there's, you know, a total loss of credibility. You know, this idea that Obama says that we're going to have all this new medical care, we're going to take care of everybody and it's not going to cost us anything and we're going to balance the budget and actually cut the deficit by giving people more services, all that does is build, you know, the lack of credibility and people just say that's not believable. But no, it will continue that way. And the checks will keep coming. People will get their Social Security checks. But like this year, even though there's been a lot of inflation that they don't admit to, there's no cost of living increases in the Social Security check. So the people who are dependent on fixed incomes or Social Security, their standard of living is going down right now and it will continue to go down. It will go down rapidly in the midst of a dollar crisis.