Another RP hit piece : Paul vs. Bernanke on Value of the Dollar
Posted on November 9th, 2007 by bile Categories and Tags: Uncategorized, Bryon Wolf, central bank, Constitution, debate, Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve System, Google, Mises Institute, news search, politics, reserve banks, Ron Paul, United States, USA, your money 13 Comments »When you are Ron Paul, your public enemy No. 1 is the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Because when you are Ron Paul, although you are technically a Republican, you are really a libertarian, and your strict adherence to the gospel of the Constitution leads you to question why the Federal Reserve — the consortium of 12 reserve banks that acts as the U.S. central bank — even exists.
It doesn’t say anything about any central bank in the Constitution. Not only that, the primary responsibility of the Federal Reserve — to control the money flow and availability of currency on the open market — is something that you, Ron Paul, find incorrigible. The government, you believe, creates inflation when it prints money and moves it willy-nilly into the market to control the very inflation you think it’s causing by moving that money around in the first place. Counterpoint: The gold standard was too inflexible, and the average citizen suffers when the government can’t give the markets more fuel in the form of money.
I read a lot of Ron Paul news. I’ve got a RSS feed of a Google news search of ‘Ron Paul.’ As Dr. Paul has become more popular the number of hit pieces have also risen. What I notice is that a huge portion of them, like the one linked above, are full of ignorance and sarcasm. This guy, Z. Bryon Wolf, doesn’t actually try to intelligently argue his point. In fact I have a hard time figuring out exactly what his point is. He speaks as if it were an inside joke, anyone reading this would already agree that Paul’s economic ideas are crazy so the mere mentioning of them is enough. Unfortunately for Mr. Wolf that’s not the case. While I can’t be certain, pieces like this I’d think would be transparent to the average reader. There just isn’t any substance. No counter argument and worse is the problem, and this is a common one, that they claim Paul wants a gold standard. That’s categorically incorrect. He’s a supporter of hard asset backed currencies and ultimately an open market for competing currencies. He uses gold as one example for historical and practical reasons. You can find out more here and here or read any number of Austrian economics book on the topic, like any of the dozens at the Mises Institute website including Ron Paul’s own Gold, Peace, and Prosperity and The Case for Gold. If you are going to write a hit piece on someone you can at least do so research first. Either throw mud and call him names or attempt to intelligently debate the issues. I’m not interested in these halfassed attacks.
