Adam Dick

In a new interview with host Deirdre Bolton at Fox Business, Ron Paul explains that most United States Department of Defense spending is on militarism rather than defense. This spending on militarism, Paul continues, is “a negative,” wasting trillions of dollars on counterproductive foreign interventions that produce millions of deaths overseas while reducing Americans’ safety.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Continuing his insightful analysis offered in October RT and November Real News Network interviews, Lawrence Wilkerson, a former United States Army colonel and chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powel, expands this month on his exploration of the US national security state. In an in-depth interview this week with host Abby Martin at teleSUR, Wilkerson explains how “interminable war” is a goal of the national security state.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Ron Paul Institute Senior Fellow Adam Dick was a guest this week of hosts Jason Burack and Eric Dubin on the always interesting Welcome to Dystopia podcast. The conversation begins with a discussion of the killings in San Bernardino, California last week and Dick’s Sunday article “‘No Gun for You!’: Obama’s ‘Soup Nazi’ Gun Control Proposal” that challenges United States President Barack Obama’s proposal that people on the No Fly List be barred from possessing guns. From there, the conversation turns to a variety of related topics.

Matters discussed in the interview include:

• the suggestion that any person who owns a few guns and a few boxes of ammunition should be suspected of planning a terrorist attack;
• the ability of the Obama administration to unilaterally impose new restrictions related to guns, including creating gun taxes or closing the so-called gun show loophole;
• bureaucrats creating No Gun Lists to bar people with supposed mental health problems from owning guns;
• states moving to lessen restrictions related to guns;
• why you should not have blind faith that Republicans and the National Rifle Association (NRA) will oppose restriction of people’s ability to legally keep and bear arms;
• the danger created by gun free zones;
• a comparison of the frequency and death rates of mass shootings in America and Europe;
• out-of-control cops with what Dick calls “kind of an occupying army attitude” killing Americans;
• how foreign intervention by the US government encourages attacks on Americans and feeds the crisis and leviathan cycle whereby government grows and liberty suffers.

Dick’s interview takes place at the beginning and end of the one-hour podcast. But, make sure to listen to the podcast’s regular features in the middle as well. There you will hear Burack and Dubin’s interesting discussion of the oil industry and the Chinese renminbi, as well as reasons for nominating Obama, the US Congress, and Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for “Scumbag of the Week.”

Listen to the complete podcast here:

Read Dick’s Tuesday article “Don’t Believe the Hype About Gun Shootings in the US” for more information regarding some of the matters discussed in the podcast.

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

The Soup Nazi character in the Seinfeld television show sells, at his take-out restaurant, soup that some people consider the best in New York City. But, there is a catch. Customers placing their orders at the restaurant’s counter are in fear that one mistake in phrasing or some other minor misstep will draw the ire of the Soup Nazi along with his decree “No soup for you!”

In a CBS television interview the day of the killings in San Bernardino, California, President Barack Obama effectively proposed giving an unknown number of nameless bureaucrats arbitrary “Soup Nazi” power to decide which individuals in America may or may not possess or obtain guns. If Obama’s proposal becomes law, one bureaucrat, based on the flimsiest of reason or an outright mistake, could summarily decree an individual barred from gun ownership. “No gun for you!”

Here is what Obama, in his own words, recommends in the Wednesday interview:

And for those who are concerned about terrorism, some may be aware of the fact that we have a no-fly list where people can’t get on planes, but those same people who we don’t allow to fly could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm and there’s nothing that we can do to stop them. That’s a law that needs to be changed.

The next day, a vote was held in the US Senate regarding an amendment offered by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) that would, in line with Obama’s recommendation, allow the US government to decree that individuals with some supposed connection to a terrorism threat are barred from accessing guns. By a 54 to 45 vote, senators voted not to move forward with the amendment.

Obama’s proposal may seem reasonable to many people. But, the apparent reasonableness arises from the assumption that the No Fly List is composed of people who have been objectively determined to be terrorists through an exhaustive, fastidious, and transparent process that is consistent with US constitutional principles.

That assumption could hardly be further from the truth. As I examined in my article “The Abominable No Fly List” in October of last year, the operation of the No Fly List is both arbitrary and an absolute menace to liberty.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Today I talked with hosts Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams on the Ron Paul Liberty Report. In the interview, I address how the United States government’s mass surveillance program continues unimpeded despite all the headlines saying that the recent expiration of PATRIOT Act Section 215 has terminated the snooping by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government entities.

With Paul and McAdams, I explored the fraudulent reform that allows the snooping to continue, as well as the public education and legislative action that can end the mass spying program and other anti-liberty government actions.

Watch the complete interview here: