End the Fed now.
The decades-long campaign of Ron Paul to have the GovernmentAccountability Office do a full audit of the Federal Reserve now has313 sponsors in the House.
Sometimes perseverance does pay off.
If not derailed by the establishment, the audit may happen.
Yet, many columnists and commentators are aghast.
An auditors’ probe, they wail, would imperil the Fed’s independenceand expose it to pressure from Congress to keep interest rates low andmoney flowing when the need of the nation and economy might call fortightening.
They cite Paul Volcker, who to squeeze double-digit inflation outof the economy in the late Carter and early Reagan years, drove theprime rate to 21 percent, causing the worst recession since theDepression. Volcker, they claim, prepared the ground for the Reagan taxcuts and seven fat years of prosperity.
That decade, America created 20 million jobs — and another 22million in the Clinton era. Without Volcker putting the economy throughthe wringer, it could not have happened. And had he been forced toexplain his decisions, Congress would have broken his policy.
Such is the cast for Fed independence.
But if true, what does this say about our republic?