Audit the Federal Reserve

The most libertarian member of Congress, Ron Paul, has introduced a bill to audit the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve, you may recall, has been spending trillions off budget, and no one knows how much, or for what, who the beneficiaries are, or what commitments the Federal Reserve has made to foreign governments.

The Federal Reserve is now holding securities that represent a gigantic number of mortgages. Some large proportion of these mortgages are on houses for which no payments are being made, yet no foreclosures or evictions are happening. Who, I wonder, is living in these houses. Are the goons of get-out-the-vote organizations such as Acorn getting a disproportionate share of the gravy? It is a huge off the books housing subsidy. Who is getting it?  What voting blocks do the recipients belong to?  What congressional districts are they located in?

Curious minds want to know: Library of Economics and Liberty, “Audit the Federal Reserve”,
Bovard

No member of congress wants to be seen to oppose the audit – but such an audit is extremely unlikely, for no member of congress, with the possible exception of Ron Paul, wants the public to know what the Fed has been up to – still less do they want America’s creditors to know what the Fed has been up to.  If audited, the biggest financial panic the world has ever seen might well ensue.

Many of the people supporting an audit of the fed are the usual commie crazies, who claim that the Federal Reserve banks are actually private. Ron Paul of course, correctly says the exact opposite to the crazies. He says that the Fed is a branch of the federal government and has been from the day it was formed.

The crazies claim the Fed is private, and imply is is controlled by the vast Jewish conspiracy, though in reality the formation of the Fed was example of the usual Jewish tendency to self destructively support their enemies. Before the formation of the Fed, US banking was indeed largely Jewish, and largely private. The mostly Jewish bankers demanded a federal takeover, and of course, with government running things, the government kicked out the Jews and left them sitting bare assed in the snow, as happens whenever the government starts taking a controlling hand in industry. Jewish conspiracy theory is false because Jews are wildly incompetent at collective action. They are always major participants in any such conspiracy, but always get mercilessly screwed by their fellow conspirators, and often enough get an icepick through the head as Trotsky did. The banking conspiracy worked out very badly for the Jewish participants, and the communist conspiracy worked out considerably worse for the Jewish Bolsheviks, and similarly for more conspiracies than you can shake a stick at. As Milton Friedman complained, you would think Jews would be smarter than that by now.  Even Arabs are more successful at conspiring than Jews.