End the Fed »

Ron Paul, an eleven-term congressman from Texas, is the leading advocate of freedom in our nation's capital. He has devoted his political career to the defense of individual liberty, sound money, and a non-interventionist foreign policy. Judge Andrew Napolitano calls him "the Thomas Jefferson of our day."

After serving as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s, Dr. Paul moved to Texas to begin a civilian medical practice, delivering over four thousand babies in his career as an obstetrician. He served in Congress from 1976 to 1984, and again from 1996 to the present. He and Carol Paul, his wife of fifty-one years, have five children, eighteen grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

Ron Paul, the New York Post once wrote, is a politician who "cannot be bought by special interests."

"There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles," added a congressional colleague. "Ron Paul is one of those few."

Americans have been facing the most significant financial collapse since the 1930s, and instead of a fundamental revaluation of the money machine, all we have gotten is more of the same. In END THE FED, eleven-term congressman Ron Paul gets to the root of our troubles. Simply and clearly, he weaves history, economics, and his own life story, from childhood to Capitol Hill, to tell us how, why, and for whom the Federal Reserve has been pulling the strings of the American financial system for nearly a century-and what we can do about it.

After all, the time for real change is now.

Publishers Weekly

At first glance, abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to the gold standard seems a quaintly eccentric idea, but Texas congressman Paul presents a plan to eliminate our country's central bank, and return to a private banking system, that's both serious and plausible. The questionable aspects involve Paul's predicted results: not only will ending the Fed eliminate inflation (the government cannot print more money than it has gold reserves), but also business booms and busts, wars, income inequality, trade imbalances and the growth of government. Further, and perhaps most important, it would "disempower the secretive cartel of powerful money managers who exercise disproportionate influence over the conduct of public policy." Paul tends to gloss over those periods in history, including the Panic of 1907, in which private banking and the gold standard were law: "the bad reputation of nineteenth century American banking... is largely the result of... propaganda agitating for the creation of the Fed." With respect to "secretive cartels," Paul takes up the interesting question of whether J.P. Morgan is in fact preferable to Ben Bernanke. An engaging response to big-government solutions for the financial crisis, this knowledgeable and opinionated look at U.S. economics, from a firebrand public servant, should provoke much thought.
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1 Why You Should Care 1

2 The Origin and Nature of the Fed 12

3 My Intellectual Influences 32

4 Central Banks and War 63

5 The Gold Commission 71

6 Conversations with Greenspan 80

7 Conversations with Bernanke 95

8 Congress's Interest in Monetary Policy 114

9 The Current Mess 123

10 Why End the Fed? 141

11 The Philosophical Case 149

12 The Constitutional Case 164

13 The Economic Case 179

14 The Libertarian Case 192

15 The Way Out 200

Suggested Reading 211