"... the critical issue [of] how well the government manages the economy ..."

Economists who fantasize that they can "manage" the economy are insane. The FED governors should be committed for even trying to pretend that their judgement is wiser than 303 million Americans operating in a free market.

Ron Paul's point is not that he could manage it better, but that government has no "business" even trying to run the economy: that's fascism (private ownership under government control).

BTW: Alan Greenspan has admitted that he joined the FED only to mitigate the meddling. He supports Ron Paul's "hard money" position and pointed out that his guide to inflation was the current "dollar price" of gold.

--The T206 Honus Wagner baseball card is God's money, he created it and all can access it freely. And he is not making any more.

What's so special about gold again?

Interestingly, I notice that we went though 4-5 pages of comments without hearing any irrational uninformed blustering by Ron's know nothing groupies. Could they be calming down just a bit and heading back to their parent's basements?

V V

Maybe Andrew Leonard should do his homework, because right now you sound like this:

Ron Paul’s story is just the craziest of the bunch. If he got his way he would abolish public education, social security, police and fire departments and sale the streets to corporations. He'd make Bangladesh look like utopia in comparison. He knows perfectly well that we were all very much worse off under the gold standard-people lost real fortunes in bank runs and lots of kids suffered from serious malnutrition here in the good old USA. But what the heck – maybe the corporation that ended up owning the street corners would still let us sale apples there. (Or maybe not. Commercial Foods may consider it unfair competition.)

Just like Mr. Leonard, you are both making assumptions based on false premises and fearmongering about what Paul would and wouldn't do without doing your homework, but based on your perception of what you think he would do. Do you think you aren't going to get called out for it? Why don't you post what the man himself has said, instead of your hand-me-down secondhand analysis of it?

According to you people Ron Paul, a 72 year old country doctor from texas who has been married over 50 years and has 5 kids and 18 grandkids, is going to turn the Public Schools over to Enron and Blackwater. Get your head out of your ass and get real. Government accounting is ENRON, corrupt government and corrupt corporations are two branches of a corrupt tree. And funny how you claim Paul is going to give everything away to Blackwater when he is the one saying we need to cut off the corporate welfare to the likes of Lockheed and Raytheon. The federal reserve is part of this system. You frame it like Dr. Paul's enemies are blacks, jews, women, and the poor, when his real enemies are the corporate welfare recipients suck up billions for murder and mayhem.

These ridiculous examples are usually always the same, all wrong, but all of this true believer paranoid fearmongering gets funnier and funnier every time I read it.

You can't disuss Paul's monetary ideas without putting them into the proper context. It is so fucking simple I don't understand what there is to get. You think it is a coincidence that we are streched thin expanding our empire while the dollar crashes? It isn't, Expanding empire + collapsing currency is how it is and how it always has been.

But if you want to know what he is going to do, he isn't going to take office and abolish the Federal Reserve that night. His idea involve introducing competing currencies, but of course it is much easier to frame in the context of "gold standard" because it helps marginalize him and get others to perceive him as fringe, "kook", and a relic from the past.

Oh well, I figured it would be hard to whistle past the graveyard once you started digging your own grave, but it seems like you all really do think you are merely digging a whole. Have fun sleeping in it.

When did Ron Paul stop beating his wife?

Just another wannabe true believer smear blag.

For a good explanation of the Fed, watch "Money as Debt." ( free download, 45 minutes. )

It's a bit conspiratorial at times, but the explanation of money creation matches exactly what I learned in macro econ, except that the official phrase for "creates new money" is "intermediation." Macro econ does not harp on the perspective of banks making money out of thin air.

The trouble with a gold standard or any fixed money supply system is that without strict controls on wealth accumulation, there will result a money shortage among the not-rich, leading to a very sluggish economy and more poverty then before.

Creating money in a debt arrangement let's the economy grow quickly, meaning people get active. That's got an upside. The movie uses the word "debt" like a talisman of evil. The problem is not debt, but that the banks and the Fed hold most all of it .

There is no simple fix to the problems of debt-based money. Simply returning to the gold standard is just an expression of frustration and blind faith in the old ways. Actually devising a better system will take brilliant minds and will be a really tough sell. We already know how truly brilliant people are dismissed in America. Getting rich quick is our religion.

And getting rich quick with a gold standard would be much, much harder. How many Americans would get behind that?

"Economists who fantasize that they can "manage" the economy are insane. The FED governors should be committed for even trying to pretend that their judgement is wiser than 303 million Americans operating in a free market.

Ron Paul's point is not that he could manage it better, but that government has no "business" even trying to run the economy: that's fascism (private ownership under government control)."

Are you kidding? That's like saying trained physicians are no wiser about medicine than Johnny Steamshovel. Some of those 303 million Americans wonder why they keep bouncing checks--they still have some left in their checkbook. I'll keep the somewhat flawed perception of the Fed governors over people who can't balance their checkbooks, thank you.

And fascism is not an economic model but a political one. The "fascist" ecomomic model under Hitler most resembled pre-1929 America, except you had Albert Speer coodinating industrial war production with the German industrial cartels. Simply having a central banking structure--something the English have had since 1690 (Bank of England)--does not make something "fascist".