Ron Paul, who regularly challenged Federal Reserve Board chairmen as a member of the US House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee, continues to describe the problems the Federal Reserve causes. In his Monday column “Don’t Reform the Fed, Fed-Exit!” Paul writes that Federal Reserve-promoted inflation is a tax on average Americans, with “crony capitalists and big-spending politicians” the beneficiaries. But that is only part of the story. Paul contended, in an interview last week on the Turning Hard Times into Good Times radio show, that the central bank encourages war. In answer to a question from host Jay Taylor, Paul declares, “All wars, I believe, are financed, one way or the other, by inflation, the destruction of currency.”

In the interview, Paul argues that war-related special interests profit from the money printing. Paul points to special interests selling “weapons that we don’t need,” mentioning the “$1.3 trillion boondoggle” F-35 fighter plane as an example.

Paul offers that, “if you had a sound monetary system and if people had to either be taxed or loan the money, there would be a lot of restraint” on pursuing war. Indeed, Paul concludes in the interview that, under a sound monetary system, there would not have been trillions of dollars spent on the US government’s military interventions over the last 15 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and other countries.

Listen to Paul’s interview here:

This interview is the second part of a conversation between Taylor and Paul. Read about and listen to the first part of their conversation here.

To explore further Paul’s thoughts on the Federal Reserve and monetary policy, read Paul’s book End the Fed.

Reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.