End the Fed: Just because Ron Paul is crazy doesn’t mean he’s wrong

I recently completed Ron Paul’s book, End the Fed, and I have to tell you, the man has a unique ability to take an issue that everyone should be able to understand, and yet somehow make it incomprehensible.

Let me make it clear that I’m a huge Ron Paul fan. His commitment to liberty and his personal integrity are unassailable. His career as a public servant has been estimable, and his intellectual honesty and rigor are first class. But somehow, he just can’t put a few paragraphs together that will keep the readers attention without injecting some useless tangential issue  that makes sense if you are a Libertarian, but scares the crap out of you if you are just the average guy/gal.

Still, I liked the book – I’m just not so sure the message is going to play to many people outside of his existing audience. He starts out with a history of the Fed, making very clear who its political and economic patrons were, and still are. He turns some very nice phrases.

“A point we learn from this event and every other banking panic in U.S. history is that crises have always led to greater centralization. A system that is mixed between freedom and the state is a shaky system, and its internal contradictions have been resolved not by tending toward a free market but rather through a trend toward statism. It is not surprising, then, that academic opinion swung in favor of central banking, too, with most important economists—having long forgotten their classical roots—seeing new magic powers associated with elastic money.”, [Ron Paul, End The Fed]

He goes on then to tell his own story which, while interesting, I don’t think succeeds in personalizing the story in the way he wishes, and to me is ultimately a distraction that should have ended up under an editor’s eraser. He then takes an excursion into a rather abstruse point about the connection between war-making and political control of money – a point that I ultimately agree with; but that is due to my study of Libertarianism at length. I think it will ultimately sound like more paranoid conspiracy theory to the average reader. which is the last thing Libertarians need.

He does a nice job of explaining why the gold standard makes sense, which I think would have been a huge enough accomplishment without his trying to impugn the entire political class, as he goes on to do (again, he’s right – but is being right worth alienating new converts?). He does then return to teaching mode and does a great job of explaining the philosophical and constitutional case against ‘the Fed’, beginning with a dissection of the current mess.

“Moral hazard breeds dependency, neglect, and sacrifice of liberty, tolerance of false monetary doctrines, and promises of wealth without work. Utopian wishes are dreams destined to turn into nightmares. Paper money advocates make promises to the masses in order to appease them, while they are convinced by their own superiority that they can acquire wealth themselves, control the government for the good of the people, and bring paradise to the world.”, [Ron Paul, End The Fed]

Ron Paul is truly brilliant in this and many other moments, and I believe that this kind of polemic adds a just the right ideological edge to the book without descending into mudslinging. However, by this point in the book, he’s hopelessly muddled the narrative with his excursions into a variety of irrelevant and/or scary stories, neither of which in my opinion are going to make the non-Libertarian more comfortable with him, and thus our movement.

With all of this said, I do recommend reading this book. It’s an indispensable precis on what doesn’t work about the Fed for those of us living in the netherworld between academia and ignorance. Just don’t expect to give it to a non-Libertarian friend and have them come back agreeing with you.