Ron Paul emphasized the need to protect individual liberties to a crowd of 600-plus in the Great Hall on Wednesday night.

“If you haven’t heard me speak before, my speech is a little different,” Paul said. “I think of change being philosophic, not just changing a person here … but changing in the sense there is something seriously wrong with our Constitution.”

Paul said in order to do that, we have to change things a bit because we have drifted far away from our Constitution.

He said there is a serious attack on personal liberty.

He said that passing bills out of panic mode and passing legislation such as the Patriot Act does not help your personal liberty.

“I’d like to get rid of the Patriot Act, to tell you the truth,” Paul said.

He said there was a time when we had a sense of foreign policy and in order to do that again, we need to “give us a strong national defense, to mind our own business and start bringing our troops home.”

He said with the position the United States is in right now, the question of how many enemies the country needs must be asked.

“I think a golden rule is … treat the people like you want to be treated,” Paul said.

He posed a question asking why the United States would want to do anything to another country that it would not want done to itself.

“Wouldn’t that make a different world, if we refrained from bombing people and using drones?” Paul asked. “What if China or some other country ever did that to us? I don’t think America would tolerate it.”

He said the Taliban is not made up of people similar as al-Qaida members, who want to come to America and kill its citizens; they want to get people off their land.

“It’s none of our business,” Paul said. “We should stay out of their affairs and make them make their own decisions.”

He said the war in Iraq began from foreign policy officials “beating the drums of war and getting people to get people to go along with this.”

He said if the United States is careless and lets its guard down, war is going to happen.

He then said war is never an economic stimulus.

“Don’t accept the argument that it’s an economic plus,” Paul said.

He said World War II did not help end the Great Depression, but instead it gave people something to do. He said the Great Depression did not end until after the war was over.

Paul said the middle class is angry right now because the rich got bailed out and the middle class lost their jobs and homes.

“Government has [gotten] big because of the Federal Reserve printing out money,” Paul said. “No matter how well off the welfare system is, it doesn’t work.”

He said in order to protect individual liberty, there needs to be a restriction on federal government.

He said the United States has been under attack through the way of the income tax.

“Income tax is unconstitutional. I don’t even think we’d need income tax if we had the proper size government,” he said.

He said he would like to see a full audit of the Federal Reserve, to which members of the audience yelled, “Down with the Feds.”

Paul said the big problem is political when dealing with a recession.

“When we have a severe slum, the best thing politicians could do is keep their hands out of it,” Paul said.