I’ve found this to be a disturbing development. 182 Economists sign a petition for the Federal Reserve’s “independence”.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/petition-for-fed-independence/
http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSTRE56E69R20090715
My guess is this would be to block hr 1207. Do you think the Austrians should start circulating a petition to crush the fed(or maybe for now demand its transparency)? I’m guessing we could match those numbers…
I disagree with LRC and any other folks who believe that anything will come out of the audit of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is an institution that steals money from holders of currency through counterfeiting. It is not legitimate, so what can the audit prove, that the thieves are corrupt?
Even if the audit found outright theft and influence peddling, so what? The prosecutors work for the president who is best buds with the Fed. So there will be a “Blue Ribbon” commission that will subpoena a ton of stuff and have Ron Paul himself and his friends hem and haw just like the congress did at the oil companies, car companies, banks, etc. Maybe some lower level sycophant will fall on their sword for the hope of riches later in some book deal?
Are there even 182 Austrian economists?
I agree. The audit is like having the criminal lead the police investigation into the crime.
The thing is, in the real world, the alternative to Fed “independence” is monetary policy run by Congress, not abolition. So I am somewhat sympathetic. They’re talking about the eventual necessity of tightening money. What do you think the jackasses in Congress would have to say about that?
I wonder myself why there are so many familiar with Austrian economics participating in this democratic circus.
We know what it does, it creates money! I will not be more outraged by the Fed handing out money to its secret friends then what it is already doing out in the open.
The whole secrecy of the Fed is quite irrelevant to anything meaningful. It is an interesting political phenomenon, but it is completely fallacious to associate the secrecy with our current problems.
Personally I think that the goal that Ron Paul and others have here isn’t just to take the secrecy away from these criminals (which I agree does nothing by itself), but to attempt to use it to wake the public up.
I firmly believe that if the public can just be educated about what is going on, what these people are doing to us, there would be riots in the streets and national outrage on both sides of the ‘political fence’. Didn’t the public, before 1913, have at least some idea that central banks even exist (heh) and have some kind of opinion on them (which were negative until the propaganda campaigns started, IIRC)?
Another point is: if you’re an Austrian with a vote in Congress… is there anything else you can do with any effect?