Thursday, June 9, 2011

Review of Ron Paul's "End the Fed"


 I just submitted this piece to Mike Marnell's Lincoln Eagle. It may appear in the June or July issue.

Review: Ron Paul's End the Fed
Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.*

Ron Paul, End The Fed.  New York: Grand Central Publishing. 2009. 212 pages.

"There was no food, however, in the whole region because the famine was severe; both Egypt and Canaan wasted away…They came to (Joseph)…and said, 'We cannot hide from our lord the fact that since our money is gone and our livestock belongs to you, there is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and or land. Why should we perish before your eyes…Buy us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will be in bondage to Pharaoh…and Joseph reduced the people to servitude, from one end of Egypt to the other." --Genesis 47: 13-22

            I have just finished Representative Ron Paul's End the Fed.  I consider it must reading for all Americans, but especially for Congressman Maurice Hinchey and most other local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike. For a century American citizens have chosen, ostrich-like, to avoid discussion about the Federal Reserve Bank. Their head-in-the-sand attitude is encouraged by the legacy media, all of which is owned by interests beholden to Wall Street, which, along with commercial banks, government employees and big businesses benefit from the Federal Reserve Bank's redistribution of wealth from you to them.  The Fed does this by printing dollars, making yours worth less and soon, according to Representative Paul, worthless. 

            The fact is that the richer you are the more you benefit from the current Federal Reserve Bank system, and the media is indebted to the super-rich. George Soros, for instance, just gave funding to National Public Radio. Warren Buffett owns stakes in The Washington Post and Capital Cities ABC.  General Electric and Bill Gates own MS-NBC.  Sumner Redstone owns CBS. As far back as 1912, The New York Times silenced presidential candidate Robert M. La Follette when he publicly stated that the magazine industry, like the newspaper industry of the day, had fallen under Wall Street's editorial domination.  To this day the Ochs Sulzbergers, the inheritors of The Times who oppose inheritance for everyone else but have never opposed family trusts for the super-rich, are key apologists for the Federal Reserve Bank.

            In his book, Representative Paul makes clear why you should pay no attention whatsoever to the legacy media-- NPR, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, or Newsmax.  The Federal Reserve Bank is the single most important story of today, yet none of the legacy media chooses to explain what it is doing to you financially.

            In a nutshell, the Federal Reserve prints money, uses it to buy bonds from commercial banks, which then expand the amount of money up to ten-fold and lend much of it to Wall Street, hedge funds, sub-prime real estate interests, big companies, and government. The last, in turn, subsidizes special interest lobbies like government employees, the Association of Trial Lawyers (now called the American Association for Justice), and the National Lawyers' Guild.   The economics profession gains considerable prestige and power from this arrangement, and has become a vested interest just like any other. Any economist who defends the Fed, and virtually all do, is part of the economic chicanery that is bringing America down.   

            The Fed has been badly managed, and in his book Representative Paul shows why.  Big, money center banks in New York City lend the Fed's counterfeit printed money to incompetently run Wall Street firms which invest it in bubble investments that make money in the short run but crash in the longer run. Then, rather than allow the badly run Wall Street firms to collapse, economists and the legacy media clamor for even bigger investments to the badly run firms in part at taxpayers' expense and in part through more counterfeit.  Although manipulative politicians like Representative Hinchey postured about the first bailout, they know that their interests coincide with Wall Street's, hedge fund managers' the super rich's and the National Lawyers' Guild's. The success of Representative Hinchey's favorite programs depends on Federal Reserve Bank credit expansion. Representative Hinchey would likely be poorer without the Fed.

            Where does the wealth come from which is allocated to Wall Street and Hinchey-style government mismanagement? It comes from you. The Congressman whom you have been electing has benefited from the Federal Reserve Bank's fraud for his entire career, most recently by voting against an audit Representative Paul proposed that would have required the Fed to show how much wealth it is diverting from your pocket via rising prices to firms like Mitsubishi Bank, Deutsche Bank, Citibank and other trans-national banks.  Americans' real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wage hasn't risen since 1970, but lots of money has been diverted to foreign banks and corporations.   You can see why Hinchey voted against an audit of the Fed. People who have nothing to hide hide nothing.

            So, Representative Paul concludes, the dollar is going to collapse, and that will make you worse off. It might throw you out of work, or it might cause a gradual or perhaps a rapid hyper-inflation that will reduce your standard of living.  The fault clearly rests with Congress, including your representative, Maurice Hinchey.  But how do you prepare for the coming economic decline for which Americans have voted?

            For me, there are three kinds of investments that make sense. I hope to eventually retire, not to make big money through speculation.  I don't recommend this for you; rather, you need to think for yourself.  In my case I am first gradually putting a large share of my savings in gold (GLD) and silver (SLV), 20 or 30 percent.  Second, I am taking a stake in other commodities, especially agriculture (DBA) and oil (DBO).  Third, for cash income I am buying high dividend yielding stocks such as Verizon (VZ) and Philip Morris (MO and PM).  If the dollar collapses, Philip Morris will still sell cigarettes.

            Congressman Ron Paul is pessimistic about the end result of the Federal Reserve Bank's policies. If you want to pretend that what we face today is business as usual, I will buy you a ticket to an ostrich farm I know of in Big Indian, and you can plan to retire there. Meanwhile, read Ron Paul's End the Fed and face the facts-- both parties have been complicit in wrecking the American way of life. Monetary debasement has accelerated and will eventually harm you. Currency collapses end freedom, what you know as the American way of life.  We are in the endgame now. There is nothing left for Soros, Buffett, Goldman Sachs, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan and the American Association for Justice (what a laugh) to steal.  If you believe the legacy media you will get hurt.
 
*Mitchell Langbert is associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. He blogs at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The reason why you cannot explain is that the ideas cannot withstand the test of rigorous logic.

Mitchell Langbert said...

I don't follow what you're saying. Please explain. Please tell me what you mean by "I cannot explain." You lack rigorous logic in your argument. Maybe that's because your argument is moronic. Please explain

Mitchell Langbert said...

If you're serious about learning, read Ron Paul's "End the Fed." A more rigorous statement is Murray Rothbard's "What Has Government Done to Our Money." Your questions displayed a lack of intellectual ability. I appreciate good questions, not ones where you start saying that the fertility rate has something to do with what I was talking about when I said you should substitute money supply for it. That's called being "disingenuous."

If you really want to learn, read "End the Fed" and "What Has Government Done to Our Money." Until then you have nothing to say.

Anonymous said...

Rothbard:

SO: WHY TALK ABOUT RACE AT ALL?

If, then, the Race Question is really a problem for statists and not for paleos, why should we talk about the race matter at all? Why should it be a political concern for us; why not leave the issue entirely to the scientists?

Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and "discriminatory" and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.

In any case, there is cause for jubilation these days, for it looks as if the left-egalitarian blackout-and-smear gang has been dealt a truly lethal blow.



Rothbard on David Duke:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch5.html


Rothbard on Buchanan:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch6.html

Mitchell Langbert said...

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that all racial groups benefit from free market capitalism, and especially those at the bottom of the economic ladder. The people worst hurt by Progressivism and big government are their supposed beneficiaries. The terrible wrongs done to inner cities during the 1950s and '60s, the exodus of manufacturing jobs because of the dollar's serving as a reserve currency, forcing it far higher than it ought to be, the transfer of wealth to stock and bond holders and real estate interests at the expense of the poor and the use of tests rather than market performance all work against the poor. The piddling welfare benefits given to the poor in today's society are a joke compared to the massive welfare benefits given to Wall Street and government, and to real estate interests.

Doug Plumb said...

The problem fundamentally, isn't the money, its the priest class that supports corrupt money. Without them, the money could be clearly seen as worthless.

Average people know as much about the law as they do shearing sheep. But they assume bucket loads of crap that doesn't even withstand the smallest application of common sense.

It seems to me there was another priest class many years ago...

If Pauls book explains that the money system and the law makers must be married (corrupt or not, LAW=MONEY), then its a must read, otherwise its just a clear re-iteration of what has been said elsewhere. This concept is not explained by anyone I have heard of in mainline alternative news.

If it explains this, then I need this book. Excellent post, thanks Mitchell.