baseballlibertarian:

by Gary North

I have posted a video of something I thought I would never see: all five of the Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate verbally demanding an audit of the Federal Reserve System. You can see it here.

Bernanke is facing what no Federal Reserve chairman has ever faced: public awareness of the Federal Reserve System. From late December 1913, when an almost deserted Senate voted for the Federal Reserve Act, until 2008, when the recession confirmed Ron Paul’s warning in late 2007, there was almost no public awareness or even a vague understanding of the Federal Reserve System. The genie is now out of the bottle, where it had been corked since 1913. Ron Paul has uncorked it.

From the November 1910 secret meeting at Georgia’s Jekyll Island until Ron Paul’s 2007 candidacy for the Republican nomination for President, The Federal Reserve had received a free ride from Congress. There had never been much oversight. That’s because FED regulation was an oversight. (The same word is used to convey opposite meanings.)

The Texas Leftist-populist Democrat Wright Patman had been a critic. He had been the chairman of the House Banking Committee until 1975, a year before Paul arrived in Congress. He was a Greenbacker: a believer in a zero-interest economy that achieves this Utopian goal through the use of fiat paper money. Patman was not able to generate much interest in the FED.

Patman did inflict one major wound on the FED. He and California Congressman Jerry Voorhis, another Greenbacker, in the early 1940s persuaded Congress to pass a bill, which Roosevelt signed, that forbids the Federal Reserve from keeping the interest payments from the government bonds it has counterfeited fiat money to purchase. Today, the FED must return to the Treasury all of this money beyond its operating expenses. For 2011, the FED will pay back $77 billion.

A full-scale audit of the FED, if it ever comes, must include an audit of the gold every year. The auditors must see if the gold is in the two vaults. The first vault, at Ft. Knox, is more famous. The more important vault is located at 33 Liberty Street, New York City: the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This is the “Die Hard III” vault.

The auditors must do two things. First, they must determine whether there is the same amount of gold as is listed on the FED’s books at the fake price of $42.22 per ounce. Second, the auditors must follow the paper trail of ownership. They must make sure that the gold in the vaults is still legally in the possession of the FED.

There is a possibility that the FED has transferred ownership of this gold, through swaps, to European central banks, which have in turn leased – sold – their gold to private buyers. It is not enough to determine that the physical gold is in the two vaults. It is also mandatory to determine whether the FED has indirectly sold the government’s gold, which it has held in trust for the government since 1933.

(Source: moralanarchism)

baseballlibertarian:

News Flash…we don’t live in a free market. 

Read the whole article. 

I don’t like getting pushed around by anybody: the government, corporations, or fat people on buses. Probably you feel the same way. It’s understandable then, that when a large corporation does something exquisitely evil or recklessly stupid, you may feel inclined to try and regulate the problem away with the help of the federal government. Assuming, of course, that Congress itself is neither evil nor recklessly stupid, which is a fascinating political position for you to take.

Generally if you invite the government to regulate big industry you also invite big industry to pour lobbyists into Congress. Between the two they concoct a bill which makes things even better for the corporation you hate than it was before Congress started meddling.

To illustrate how federal regulation oftentimes screws over small businesses let us explore a story together. The story of three cupcake bakeries and their owners in the friendly town of Morningwood, Oklahoma:

(Source: moralanarchism)

If you want to know the true result of big government’s insatiable appetite for spending and the effects on our personal finances and lives please read this entire article. Warning: if you’re not already doing so, be sure to sit down first. This is a shocker!

By Daniel R. Amerman, CFA  Posted Thursday, 20 October 2011

There is a common but mistaken belief that the children and grandchildren of older Americans will be the ones who will be paying for today’s massive government deficits.  In this article we will look at six different layers of the deficit and unfunded government promises and put them into personal, per household terms in order to get to the truth of the matter.  This truth is that the deficits are far too large to be repaid by taxpayers decades from now, but will be instead effectively repaid through the destruction of retiree savings and retirement investment portfolios in the coming years.

The value of your checking account, the value of your IRA or Keogh, and the value of all your investments are - and will be - the true source of payment for deficits.  The end result could be a 95% reduction in value for all of our savings, retirement and otherwise, as we will illustrate step by step herein.

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