Thursday, December 31, 2009

A Critique of Ron Paul's "End the Fed" Book

From the Curious Capitalist blog at Time Magazine.

"I didn't learn anything new about monetary economics or the Federal Reserve, but I did learn a lot about the thinking of Ron Paul. It turns out to be a curious mix of the sensible and the delusional. To put it differently, Paul has wrapped a mostly cogent critique of central banking in general and the Fed in particular inside a decidedly Utopian view of what a world without central banks would look like. At one point in the first chapter he warns that "ending the Fed is not a magic pill to usher in Utopia." Then, throughout the rest of that chapter and the rest of the book he describes how ending the Fed would usher in a state of affairs that sounds an awful lot like, well, Utopia."

...

"There's lots of wisdom in Paul's Fed critique, and his espousal of the virtues of prudence and saving and hard work. But in this book, at least, he succumbs to the temptation of promising an easy way out. Guess he's more of a typical politician than I'd been led to think."

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