Audit the Fed
Better yet, do away with it
Well Groundhog Day has come and gone, and that means—time loops being what they are—it’s time for a libertarian to once again introduce a bill to audit the Federal Reserve.
As he usually does, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) has stepped up to the plate and reintroduced, for the umpteenth time, a measure to do just that:
The American public deserves more insight into the practices of the Federal Reserve. Behind closed doors, the Fed crafts monetary policies that devalue our currency, slow economic growth, and make life harder for the poor and middle class. The American people benefit when we work to increase government transparency.
Well, he won’t get any argument from me. I’m libertarian-ish myself, though not with a capital ‘L’: I happen to believe theory needs to work in the real world with real people, that is to say, theory is as theory does. Large ‘L’ libertarians live in a shrink-wrapped political lab.
Massie doesn’t, though. Unfortunately, the slogan “Audit the Fed” has been a rallying cry for so long—I think since the Roman Empire—that it has almost become a caricature of libertarianism.
First it was Ron Paul introducing the bill, then it was his son Rand, then Massie, then Rand again, now Massie again—you get the idea, it’s not a large pool. Audit the Fed is akin to The End is Near as far as doomsday poster slogans go.
Here’s the thing. It’s not only not fringe and not frivolous, it’s an absolutely crucial bill that has to be enacted if the deep state is to be truly corralled, and, with Donald Trump on a torrid march against the federal bureaucracy, now is the perfect time to do it. The fact that the bill always gets a lot of cosponsors says a lot about its substantive content. For some odd reason, that never translates into enactment, not that the majority of Congress is bought-and-paid-for by bankers or anything. The withering opposition—and, yes, mockery—is a sure signal it’s worth taking seriously, if someone will just rename it and recalibrate the slogan.
It’s an especially good time given Trump’s early crusade to dismantle the federal government and given that the GOP holds both houses of Congress for the next two years.
To be sure, Trump’s efforts to dismantle the deep state are truly breathtaking so far, surprising even his most ardent supporters with his pace of politically “creative destruction” as he drives the bureaucracy into the political and economic wilderness. Just this week the president gained control of the USAID office, a well-known CIA front group whose expertise is interference in the affairs of foreign nations (remember USAID’s Cuban Twitter, which was designed to foment revolution in that country?), and, as I write this, the administration is finalizing plans to dismantle the Department of Education, regulatory brick by regulatory brick.
Many of these noble efforts will ultimately need congressional support and will have to survive court challenges, but no matter. The president’s aim is true, and it is serious.
But there are deep state fundamentals still to contend with. The nerve center and brain of the bureaucratic collectivist state must be captured and eradicated for Trump to complete his mission. He has made a good start, as I wrote about last week, with the Senior Executive Service, but another one of those pillars is the central bank, otherwise known as the Federal Reserve.
To this end, Massie’s bill is a necessary first step in returning control of monetary policy to the people, as the constitution specified. It’s not just monetary policy, either: Reining in the Federal Reserve is necessary to fully unravel smothering climate change regulations it has woven throughout the financial sector, to end the Fed’s massive push toward equity in employment distribution, not to mention its efforts to increasingly concentrate wealth in the hands of the globalist rich through permanent inflation.
And all without any accountability. …
Read the rest at The MacIver Institute