A friend is all up in arms about auditing the fed, ron paul...etc What the heck does that even mean, and what if anything would that accomplish?
Well,....
Basically, Ron Paul is a lunatic conspiracy theorist. There seems to be some conspiracy theories floating around about how the Fed is run by the usual s3krit cabal of Communist Jewish Reptoid bankers from the planet Zog to enrich themselves at the expense of real humans so that they can fill their swimming pools with twenty dollar bills and dive into them Scrooge McDuck fashion.
And the idea is that by auditing the Fed, we'll see the money leak and will be able to get the money back from the Reptoids. While no sensible person believes this, there are any number of 'tards on the forum that will passionately defend this conspiracy theory. You'll see them when they show up.
At a marginally more rational level, Paul has made it his mission to destroy the Fed. Quite literally -- he even has a book published entitled "End the Fed," which is required 'tard reading despite the fact that few of them have actually made it to chapter 2. (Not enough pictures, I guess.)
Since sensible people recognize that the Fed is actually quite a good thing, he doesn't have the political support to do that, so he's going for the next best thing, which is to destroy its ability to operate independently of whatever political/populist whims are going through Congress and the Fox News echo chamber. When the Fed was set up, it was deliberately set up to be outside of Congress' direct supervision (and of the President's, for that matter) so that we wouldn't see things like a deliberate easing of monetary policy to produce a temporary stock market boost just before the election,.... which of course would cause inflation after the election. This is the type of stupid currency trick usually carried out by banana republics, and it's one reason that banana republics tend to have economies as messed up as they have. (Look at Argentina under Peron for an example of what happens when you let the elected dictator run the money supply.)
But this means that the Fed has to be able to take unpopular decisions, such as tightening currency supplies to prevent inflation when the economy is starting to get out of line. One of the former Fed chairs (Martin) famously said that the job of the Fed was "to take the punch bowl away just as the party was starting to heat up" or something like that (I forget the exact quote). Paul Volcker deliberately caused a recession in the early 1980s by tightening the money market, but he also managed as a result to get inflation under control and laid the groundwork for the boom economy of the 1980s and 1990s by doing so. Low inflation, high growth rate, low unemployment,.... can all be tied to his deeply unpopular actions at the time.
The rather silly call for "transparency" is really just a call to put Congress back in control of the money supply with an overall goal of destroying the Fed. Paul is even fairly explicit about this, but for some reason, there are an awful lot of populists out there that
want the United States to be a banana republic.....
