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Friday, December 11, 2009

Ron Paul's Hour

(American Conservative Blog) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan --

The decades-long campaign of Ron Paul to have the Government Accountability Office do a full audit of the Federal Reserve now has 313 sponsors in the House.

Sometimes perseverance does pay off.

If not derailed by the establishment, the audit may happen.

Yet, many columnists and commentators are aghast.

An auditors’ probe, they wail, would imperil the Fed’s independence and expose it to pressure from Congress to keep interest rates low and money flowing when the need of the nation and economy might call for tightening.

They cite Paul Volcker, who to squeeze double-digit inflation out of the economy in the late Carter and early Reagan years, drove the prime rate to 21 percent, causing the worst recession since the Depression. Volcker, they claim, prepared the ground for the Reagan tax cuts and seven fat years of prosperity.

That decade, America created 20 million jobs — and another 22 million in the Clinton era. Without Volcker putting the economy through the wringer, it could not have happened. And had he been forced to explain his decisions, Congress would have broken his policy.

Such is the cast for Fed independence.

But if true, what does this say about our republic?

Is it not an admission that, though Congress was created by the Constitution, and the Fed is a creation of Congress, our elected representatives cannot be trusted with the money supply, cannot be trusted with control of the nation’s central bank? To have decisions made in the national interest, we need folks who do not have to answer to voters.

If this be true, the republic is closer to its end than its beginning, when Thomas Jefferson said, “In questions of power, let us hear no more of trust in men, but rather bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.”

Others contend that were it not for the independence and vision of Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, the economy might have gone over the cliff and into the abyss after the Lehman Brothers collapse in October 2008.

What opponents of Paul’s audit are thus saying is that elected legislators must be kept out of the temple where the great decisions about the economy are made, that these decisions must rest with bankers and economists answerable, as is the Supreme Court, to themselves and no one else.

But has the performance of the Fed been so brilliant any intrusion upon its privacy is sacrilege?...

Moreover, every bubble from the dot-com of the late 1990s to housing this decade is a result of Fed policy. For unless there is an excess of money sloshing around, funds that surge into one market, be it housing, stocks or Third World loans, have to come out of another.

Moreover, if the Fed has not failed dismally in its duty to keep prices stable, how come candy bars and Cokes that cost a nickel in the 1950s cost 50 or 75 cents today, and new Cadillacs that sold for $3,200 in the late 1940s cost $55,000 or $60,000 now? Who is responsible for inflation, if not the Fed?

Moreover, it is now conceded that the Fed, in the early years of this 21st century, kept interest rates near 1 percent for too long, and created the bubble that popped in 2008 and almost brought down our own and the global economies.

Because the Fed can create money out of thin air, we have been able to wage wars on credit, shovel out trillions in foreign aid, World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans, and run humongous budget and trade deficits that have brought our country to the brink of ruin...CONT'D...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

I maintain one of the prime reasons we are fighting those wars and putting the world on the U.S. dole is in order to get away with printing dollars like Monopoly money. In other words, the desire for easy money (greed) is compelling our policy of supposed "benevolence."

Think about: why is the U.S. government able to get away with regularly creating billions out of thin air, and why does the world play along, continuing to buy our debt, bonds, T Bills, etc., even as other countries are unable to do the same to any degree even close? It's because we're the only super power, and the only country with military bases and troops circling the globe. Essentially, we’re are propping up the dollar at the barrel of a gun.

And beyond that, it is the U.S. military and American taxpayer that is bearing the brunt of Europe's defense costs, which essentially frees up European tax money to pay for its socialism.

There really is no free lunch, despite what all these Magical Marxist-think subscribers and Keynesians of both Statist Left and Right who claim we can "create our own reality" profess.

Because of the corrupt nature of our post-Christian "elite," the American dollar floats upon oceans of blood.

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