Spreading Shortages Due to Greenspan-Bernanke Federal Reserve Policy--Woodrow Wilson Turns in His Grave

My wife just returned from a Food Emporium supermarket on the upper west side of Manhattan. She tried to buy light bulbs but all the light bulbs had been sold except for two packs in which one light bulb was broken each. Likewise, her best friend just returned from her house in Hawaii and said that there is rice rationing there. As well, my wife has repeatedly been unable to purchase spa and beauty products at our health club in Ulster County, New York and has been told by the sales people that there are backlogs on orders across the board. Suppliers have not been shipping. This is the first time that we have seen a shortage of light bulbs in the supermarket.

These shortages are directly attributable to Fed policy, specifically of the Greenspan-Bernanke Fed. Across the board shortages and price inflation result from malinvestment attributable to excessively low interest rates that fund Wall Street and the commercial banking industry. Thus, the public has subsidized Wall Street to build houses that no one can pay for. The inflationary consequences of the Greenspan-Bernanke policy over the next 30 years will cause many headaches. Although a shortage of spa products or light bulbs are inconvenient, and I can hedge by buying commodities indexes and the like, the Greenspan-Bernanke Fed's three decade-long Christmas for Wall Street, hedge funds and real estate developers has resulted in the death of children in the third world and significantly lower incomes for the average American worker.

It distresses me that double talk--e.g., blaming the results of the Fed's decades-long inflationary stance on third world trade--that characterized discussions about the inflationary recession of the 1970s is again appearing, this time among "conservatives". Social-democratic conservatives seem eager to claim that the interventionist Fed policies of the last three Republican and Clinton administrations have not caused across-the-board inflation in commodity prices, flat wages of workers, wealth transfers to speculators, and child starvation in the third world. They are the friends of big government.

The only solution to flat earnings, reduced wages, inflation and shortages is to get government out of our money supply. That means establishing the kind of gold standard in which Woodrow Wilson believed when he established the Federal Reserve in the first place in 1913. Wilson had voted as a "Gold Democrat" for the New Democratic (Gold) Party in 1896. He did not anticipate that the New Deal coupled with the social democratic (Roosevelt-Rockefeller-Nixon-Bush) wing of the Republican Party would declare against the gold standard. And who would have thought that following Richard ("We are all Keynesians now") Nixon, so-called conservatives have become bigger apologists for government control, regulation and debasement of our money supply than their left-wing social democratic colleagues.