Category: Book Reviews

End The Fed book review

What I got from Paul’s End the Fed


 

 

 

 

 

Do it already

End The Fed is the first book of Ron Paul’s which I have read. I’ve been listening to podcasts and reading blogs about the need to end the fed and all manner of reasons why they are evil. With nearly 100 years of history, there is much to learn to come up to speed. Turns out, there is less to really grasp than expected and Paul does a very good job of laying out the exact reasons why: they rule in secret behind closed doors and flatly refuse to cooperate when asked. That an entity of our government can have the chutzpah to ignore Congressional inquiry seems wholly beyond the pale, yet, here we are.

Not all economics are created the same

Libertarianism has exposed me to economics at all, and Austrian economics particularly, and that ain’t all bad. I accept the premise that liberty cannot be achieved without money. I will put aside the discussion of what money is, touched on in the book, and use it in the colloquial sense to make a point: no slave or indentured servant or paycheck to paycheck person found liberty in that condition. Each person found a way to change that condition to a more favorable one, and that was the path to liberty. We, the current residents of the USA, are tied to the Fed in ways we may not see and that’s mostly by design.  That is out tether and that is not a way to national liberty.

The end of the book is really the beginning, the rest is information. Paul writes, “Among all the arguments that can be used to reject the Federal Reserve, the moral argument alone should suffice. It’s cheating. It’s a lie. It’s counterfeiting. It benefits the few at the expense of the many. . . . That should be enough for all Americans to all for an end to this ninety-five-year-old failed scheme.”

The work yet to do

Along the way to ending the fed, Paul gets in the proper jabs at the unnecessary big government as well. It is End The Fed, but he reminds us that more than just that is unconstitutional. He offers a call to action, albeit, a slow one. Information is the first salvo, and he feels this book is one lobby in that cause. As a newbie economist, I appreciate the relative ease with which Paul masters his topic. I enjoyed some inside baseball from Congressional hearings. He does try to explain money as a commodity, inflation and deflation, and, does so rather well. The confusion I found between and among those is on me, not on him.

This is a primer, and reads as such. There is far too much to write or know for this to be the be-all end-all book of money and Federal Reserve. To Paul’s credit, he offers a reading list and I appreciate that he broke the books into categories of Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Bonus Reading. All familiar with Austrian economics will find the expected names of Mises, Rothbard, Murphy and Hayek. I recommend Paul’s book and the reading list, which I’m tackling, out of order by the way.

 

 

The Great Gatsby

 

The Great Gatsby

I will confess that it wasn’t until I was enrolled as an English major that I finally read The Great Gatsby.

I was a non-traditional student which means I was old. 30. Ancient as college kids go.

I dove into my readings. All of them. I enjoyed being a student. In-class discussions revealed an obvious difference between how I and the other students would read a book: our ages dictated how we saw the story.

I’ll admit it has been some while since I’ve read it, but I did read it several times with a few years span in between. As I aged, the story changed a bit. I suspect younger readers would be attracted to Daisy or Tom, attractive and young and dashing. Almost immortal.

Fitzgerald’s writing in really quite impressive here. He had more than a few distractions including Hemingway, the war, Zelda, drinking and yet, somehow, over 5 years of labor, and not, he produced a book which rewrites itself for each read from the same reader.  I read more of Fitzgerald and went to Hemingway and some Gertrude Stein.  I’m a limited fan of the Lost Generation.  Limited in exposure by my choice.

As with most things craft, he has his fans and dissenters. I like him. I like the book. The craft to pick the right word to say the right thing is craft. That a sentence can be so clearly one thing but still carry multiple meanings in context and for the reader is what every writer dreams to do. I don’t think that was his real goal, but I do think he did pursue some idea of immortality in his work. For my money he got it in The Great Gatsby.