NACBA
Member
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2010
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- 784
Clueless in Kentucky: Rand Paul’s ideas about the Fed make absolutely no sense
Sometimes it's hard to tell the charlatans from the cranks.
Take Rand Paul. Does he really believe all the stuff he says? It's hard to tell. Back when he thought it would help him, he was happy to indulge in Bilderberg Group and NAFTA superhighway conspiracy theories. But then he got elected to the U.S. Senate, and had enough self-awareness to realize that talking about them had become a liability. So he stopped. Instead, he's moved on to peddling barely-more-coherent scare stories about Ebola, vaccines, and, above all, the Federal Reserve. In fact, during a swing to Iowa last weekend, he began his trip with an all out assault on the Fed. “Anybody feel that the Fed is out to get us?" Paul said to applause.
What's behind this odd fixation? Like his father before him, Rand Paul is a devotee of so-called Austrian economics. I say devotee, because Austrianism is a cult more than anything else. It preaches that the Fed is to blame for the economy's boom-and-bust cycle ... despite the fact that the busts have gotten smaller and less frequent since the Fed -- the nation's central bank -- was created. But that's no matter to Austrians who think the only important thing is whether their theories work in, well, theory, and not in, well, practice. That's not hyperbole. Austrians really say it's irrelevant whether their hyperinflation predictions come true—which makes sense, I guess, since they haven't—as long as those predictions logically follow from first principles. That makes their beliefs "true" whether or not they actually are. If that sounds loony, that's because it is. But it's the basis of Paul's attempt to control—I forgot, he's calling it an "audit" of—the Fed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...ideas-about-the-fed-make-absolutely-no-sense/
Sometimes it's hard to tell the charlatans from the cranks.
Take Rand Paul. Does he really believe all the stuff he says? It's hard to tell. Back when he thought it would help him, he was happy to indulge in Bilderberg Group and NAFTA superhighway conspiracy theories. But then he got elected to the U.S. Senate, and had enough self-awareness to realize that talking about them had become a liability. So he stopped. Instead, he's moved on to peddling barely-more-coherent scare stories about Ebola, vaccines, and, above all, the Federal Reserve. In fact, during a swing to Iowa last weekend, he began his trip with an all out assault on the Fed. “Anybody feel that the Fed is out to get us?" Paul said to applause.
What's behind this odd fixation? Like his father before him, Rand Paul is a devotee of so-called Austrian economics. I say devotee, because Austrianism is a cult more than anything else. It preaches that the Fed is to blame for the economy's boom-and-bust cycle ... despite the fact that the busts have gotten smaller and less frequent since the Fed -- the nation's central bank -- was created. But that's no matter to Austrians who think the only important thing is whether their theories work in, well, theory, and not in, well, practice. That's not hyperbole. Austrians really say it's irrelevant whether their hyperinflation predictions come true—which makes sense, I guess, since they haven't—as long as those predictions logically follow from first principles. That makes their beliefs "true" whether or not they actually are. If that sounds loony, that's because it is. But it's the basis of Paul's attempt to control—I forgot, he's calling it an "audit" of—the Fed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...ideas-about-the-fed-make-absolutely-no-sense/
