Former Texas Rep. Ron Paul called for "a revolutionary change in our economic thinking" to get the nation back on track during an interview with
Newsmax TV.
"The government is supposed to provide an environment where the people are energized, but right now, the end stages are sort of what you see in Detroit and Greece," said Paul, who ran for president three times, told "The Hard Line" host Ed Berliner.
"We have to have a revolutionary change in our economic thinking and then the people are the ones that produce the jobs, not the government."
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Paul was asked about his recent prediction that the stock market's "day of reckoning" is near, and whether Donald Trump — a successful businessman — is the guy to fix it.
"I don't think anybody should be running the economy and that's the whole fallacy of our last hundred years," Paul said.
"[Trump] can't run the economy, he can't create jobs, and he should know that. He can create jobs if he stays in the building industry, but even his industry is going to be in trouble because he might build too many buildings because interest rates are zero," he said.
"It's really down to the essence of getting people to understand good economics, which isn't the most popular thing to do in politics," he said.
"We do not have a free market. Every day the market gets less free, individual liberty gets further eroded, and we expand ourselves further around the world and the only reason this exists is that we have been endowed with the ability to print the reserve currency of the world," he said.
“We have to change a lot of policies. Regulations cannot solve the problems that government creates,” he said.
‘Every time you create one regulation, you create two new problems and it keeps pyramiding. That all has to end and it will end. The question is, what are we going to put in its place?”