Auditing the Fed will Audit the State
Posted by on Saturday, July 4, 2009
Under: Columns
Mises Daily by George F. Smith | http://mises.org/story/3533
[An MP3 audio version of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available as a free download.]
If Ron Paul succeeds in getting the Fed audited, the consequences could be far-reaching. Assuming the audit isn't rigged to protect the guilty, as a similar bill was in 1978, the Fed will need every obfuscating Keynesian to testify and write editorials on its behalf, to reassure the public that monetary matters really are best left to the gods who rule us, such as Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner. Monetarists, too, would likely join the "Save the Fed" crusade, perhaps arguing that even a great free market economist like Milton Friedman considered the Fed useful for preventing and curing recessions.
But the really appetizing part of auditing the Fed is knowing what stands behind it. The Fed is a racket at heart, a con game writ large — what else can you call an organization with the exclusive privilege of printing money in the trillions and handing it over to friends? But if this is true, what does that say about the state, the organization that created and sanctions it? Is the Fed an honest mistake in the state's otherwise undying efforts to preserve our liberty, or might it be a key component of a bigger racket?
Without the power of the state, there would be no proposal to audit the Fed because there would be no Fed to audit. Like any cartel, it exists to protect its members from market retribution, and only the police power of the state can make us shoulder that burden. A bill to audit the Fed could by force of logic become a state audit, much like the investigations of the 1972 Watergate burglary exposed the grinning skull behind the government's public persona. During a Fed audit, for example, would it not be reasonable to ask why the people's elected representatives continue to support a banking system that secretly steals wealth from their countrymen and other dollar holders? Or are we to take the naïve position that most elected officials really are clueless about the Fed's policy of currency debasement and ...
Continue reading: http://mises.org/story/3533
[An MP3 audio version of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available as a free download.]
If Ron Paul succeeds in getting the Fed audited, the consequences could be far-reaching. Assuming the audit isn't rigged to protect the guilty, as a similar bill was in 1978, the Fed will need every obfuscating Keynesian to testify and write editorials on its behalf, to reassure the public that monetary matters really are best left to the gods who rule us, such as Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner. Monetarists, too, would likely join the "Save the Fed" crusade, perhaps arguing that even a great free market economist like Milton Friedman considered the Fed useful for preventing and curing recessions.
But the really appetizing part of auditing the Fed is knowing what stands behind it. The Fed is a racket at heart, a con game writ large — what else can you call an organization with the exclusive privilege of printing money in the trillions and handing it over to friends? But if this is true, what does that say about the state, the organization that created and sanctions it? Is the Fed an honest mistake in the state's otherwise undying efforts to preserve our liberty, or might it be a key component of a bigger racket?
Without the power of the state, there would be no proposal to audit the Fed because there would be no Fed to audit. Like any cartel, it exists to protect its members from market retribution, and only the police power of the state can make us shoulder that burden. A bill to audit the Fed could by force of logic become a state audit, much like the investigations of the 1972 Watergate burglary exposed the grinning skull behind the government's public persona. During a Fed audit, for example, would it not be reasonable to ask why the people's elected representatives continue to support a banking system that secretly steals wealth from their countrymen and other dollar holders? Or are we to take the naïve position that most elected officials really are clueless about the Fed's policy of currency debasement and ...
Continue reading: http://mises.org/story/3533
In : Columns
