I think it’s very interesting that the cattle at Faux News—who engineered Dr. Ron Paul’s exclusion from key primary debates and general marginalization in presidential primary reporting, conspiring with other MSM to virtually hand Obama victory by handing McCain victory first—now can’t get enough Paul. Since the bailout of AIG and the collapse of Lehman last fall, and certainly since the November election, Faux news in particular and the MSM in general have been giving Paul more uninterrupted on-screen time in a given week than he got during his entire presidential campaign (which lasted nearly a year and a half, if you’re not keeping score). Now that the good Doctor has been vindicated by unfolding events, his wisdom is seen for its merit, rather than being dismissed, Cassandra-like, as lunatic raving.
Nor is he still a lone voice, crying in the wilderness. His cohort of congresscritters have begun collectively pulling their heads out of their (presumably) proverbial asses. They begin, in this age of blatant fascism, to see the wisdom—or at least the political expediency—of auditing the Fed.
From FAUXNews.com:
All of a sudden, Congress is paying close attention to Ron Paul.
The feisty congressman from Texas, whose insurgent “Ron Paul Revolution” presidential campaign rankled Republican leaders last year, now has the GOP House leadership on his side — backing a measure that generated paltry support when he first introduced it 26 years ago.
Paul, as of Tuesday, has won 245 co-sponsors to a bill that would require a full-fledged audit of the Federal Reserve by the end of 2010.
Paul attracted just 18 co-sponsors when he authored a similar bill, which died, in 1983. While the impact Fed policies have on inflation is once again a concern, fears about loose monetary policy and excessive federal spending appear even more widespread in 2009.
“In the past, I never got much support, but I think it’s the financial crisis obviously that’s drawing so much attention to it, and people want to know more about the Federal Reserve,” Paul told FOXNews.com.
With the Federal Reserve holding interest rates at rock-bottom levels, pumping trillions into the economy and now poised to have new powers to oversee the financial system under President Obama’s proposed regulatory overhaul, Paul said lawmakers want transparency.
“If they give them a lot more power and there’s no more transparency, that’ll be a disaster,” he said.
The bill would call for the comptroller general in the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed and report those findings to Congress. The GAO’s ability to conduct such audits now is severely restricted.
A slew of top Republicans are backing the bill, as are many Democrats.
It seems much more like they’re giving him credit because they can’t find a way not to. I’m sure that if they could pin this on their own neocon Sean Hannity or pseudo-libertarian Glenn (“I’m a libertarian, but…”) Beck, they certainly would. Despite the final line in the above excerpt, the article leaves one with the impression that this is actually a spontaneous and solely GOP-backed initiative [it's actually (as of this writing) about 30% bipartisan; 72 of the current 245 cosponsors are Demoblican], instead of the most recent battle in a nearly three-decade-long struggle on Paul’s part.
I guess the “perfect storm” of a Democratic Congress, a Democratic President, and an unmitigated economic disaster finally goaded the Republicans into actually acting republican for a change.
Like the Tea Parties. But who am I to criticize?
Years ago, Murray Rothbard laid rest to the idea that the perfect is the enemy of the good. In “Why Be A Libertarian?,” Rothbard opined
Antilibertarians, and antiradicals generally, characteristically make the point that such “abolitionism” is “unrealistic;” by making such a charge they are hopelessly confusing the desired goal with a strategic estimate of the probable outcome.
In framing principle, it is of the utmost importance not to mix in strategic estimates with the forging of desired goals. First, goals must be formulated, which, in this case, would be the instant abolition of slavery or whatever other statist oppression we are considering. And we must first frame these goals without considering the probability of attaining them. The libertarian goals are “realistic” in the sense that they could be achieved if enough people agreed on their desirability, and that, if achieved, they would bring about a far better world. The “realism” of the goal can only be challenged by a critique of the goal itself, not in the problem of how to attain it. Then, after we have decided on the goal, we face the entirely separate strategic question of how to attain that goal as rapidly as possible, how to build a movement to attain it, etc.
Obviously, Paul’s ultimate goal remains unchanged: End the Fed. But an open audit is a logical first step, and ultimately serves the purpose of liberty — if the purse strings are first cut, it follows that all publicly funded abrogations of liberty will eventually have to end. The Fed is the enabler of all of the graft the infects Capitol Hill. It drives Americas foreign adventurism. It makes the domestic welfare/police state possible. Auditing the Fed will bring down the American Empire and return us to a manageably-sized, more constitutional republic.
Of course, no Empire means no killing the “little brown people” in other countries. It also means no more handouts, whether personal, corporate, or international.
Far too many modern Americans are bound to their pet projects, their imperialism, their fascism, or their socialism. I include these tea-partying, politically “born again” conservatives. They trust their government far too much.
