Ron Paul Q&A: Audit the Fed, Then End It

The WSJ has a great interview with Ron Paul regarding the Federal Reserve. Below are some highlights:

What would a world without the Fed look like?

You’d go back to the day that if you wanted to borrow money to build a house, somebody would’ve had to save some money. You wouldn’t have zero savings and all the credit in the world. That’s just a total distortion of capitalism. Capital comes from savings. The part you don’t use for everyday living which you have left over, you reinvest and you save or you loan it out. We were living with something absolutely bizarre that had nothing to do with capitalism. We had no savings whatsoever yet there was all the credit in the world.

So without the Fed, there wouldn’t be as much credit.

Yeah, it would be different. If you were selling me a car and the car was worth $10,000 and I didn’t want to pay cash, you could take credit from me. You’ve got to have something to measure it by. What is a dollar? We don’t even know what a dollar is. There’s no definition for a dollar. There’s never been a time in law that said a Federal Reserve note is a dollar. That’s the basic flaw. There’s no definition for money. We’ve built a worldwide economy on a measuring rod that varies every single day. That’s why it was fragile, and that’s why it collapsed. There was no soundness to it. So that’s why you have to have a stable unit of account.

If you live in a primitive society, you’d trade goods. And if you wanted to advance, then you would trade a universal good, which would be a coin. But we’ve become sophisticated and smart and say, ‘Oh, you don’t have to go through that. We’ll just print the money. And we’ll trust the government not to print too much, and distribute it fairly.’ That’s often just a total farce. People are realizing that it is.

Do you think the Fed will be abolished during your career?

I always thought the day would come… This economy is going to get worse and this dollar is going to get a lot worse. It’ll take care of itself. My real goal is educating people to the nature of money so that when this system fails, that they’ll know what to do and not just say ‘Well, we need a better manager.’

Read the full interview here

Further reading: Two must-read books by Ron Paul: End the Fed and The Revolution: A Manifesto

End the Fed

Mises.org has posted Chapter 2 of Ron Paul’s glorious new book End the Fed. Here’s a small excerpt:

Most Americans haven’t thought much about the strange entity that controls the nation’s money. They simply accept it as though it has always been there, which is far from the case. Visitors to Washington can see the Fed’s palatial headquarters in Washington, D.C., which opened its doors in 1937. Tourists observe its intimidating appearance and forbidding structure, the monetary parallel to the Supreme Court or the Capitol of the United States.

People know that this institution has an important job to do in managing the nation’s money supply, and they hear the head of the Fed testify to Congress, citing complex data, making predictions, and attempting to intimidate anyone who would take issue with them. One would never suspect from their words that there is any mismanagement taking place. The head of the Fed always postures as master of the universe, someone completely knowledgeable and completely in control.

Read the whole chapter here

The Book Bomb To End The Fed

From Lew Rockwell

Help give Ben Bernanke nightmares by pre-ordering Ron Paul’s next bestseller, End the Fed, for just $13.19, in a handsome hardback edition. This important work can strike a moral, economic, libertarian, and constitutional blow at the central government, the central bank, and their cartel of banksters and Wall Street crooks, if we help.

Step One is helping make sure that End the Fed debuts at #1 on Amazon.com on its publication date, September 16, 2009. This will light a firecracker underneath the establishment, and advance the cause of freedom and sound money by leaps and bounds.

Ever since it was schemed by the Rockefeller, Morgan, and Kuhn-Loeb banking families in 1913, and signed into law by the inflationist-warmonger Woodrow Wilson, the Fed has been instrumental in more than 100 wars, the giant welfare state, the American empire, recessions and depressions — including this one — the rip-off of middle-class living standards, and the subversion of American freedom.

If we want the peaceful, commercial republic of the Founders’ dream, prosperity and civilization, sound money and free markets, we must End the Fed.