Almost all wars have been paid for through inflation, three-time presidential candidate and former Congressman Ron Paul told RT, adding the practice always ends badly as currency becomes debased leading to upward pressure on prices.

Paul was talking to RT’s Watching the Hawks program about his new book ‘Swords into Plowshares,’ which gives insight into a 20th century full of war, killing, and corruption.

“Almost all wars, in a hundred years or so, have been paid for through inflation, that is debasing the currency,” he said, adding that this has been going on “for hundreds, if not thousands of years.”

According to Paul, the practice always ends badly because “the people realize that the money has been debased, and all that does is push up prices.”

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Answering a question from RT on how US wars would be fought differently if their funding wasn’t based on borrowed money, but dependent only on tax dollars, Paul replied that “it would stop the wars because we couldn’t afford them.”

“I don’t know if we ever had a war paid though tax payers. The only thing where they must have been literally paid for, was when they depended on the looting. They would go in and take over a country, and they would loot and take their gold, and they would pay for the war.”

He added that, “That isn’t done, even though it was proposed, you know, in the Middle East: ‘Well, we’ll take over Iraq, and the oil will pay for it.’ Well, it hasn’t seemed to work.”

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According to Paul, most wars are paid for “with deficit financing.”

“They [the government] go to the people. They ask the people for patriotic reasons to loan money.”

He added that “if we had a requirement of: all wars have to be paid for by direct taxation immediately to pay the bills, there wouldn’t be any wars because the people would rebel immediately.”

“And that’s not likely to happen. They’re going to continue to finance all these warmongering, and letting the military industrial complex to make a lot of money, before it’s admitted that it doesn’t work, and the whole system comes down because of the debt burden, which would be unsustainable.”