The Creature from Jekyll Island

[01503]

This is a book on the Federal Reserve, and I would like to know if anyone has read it, and what their opinion of it is.

It has gotten positive reviews by Ron Paul and the Von Mises Institute.

Is this just a conspiracy theory, or is there reason to believe that these men caused wars, depressions, etc?

http://www.orwelltoday.com/jekyllislandbook.shtml

http://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-Isla...e/dp/0912986212

[softwareNerd]

I haven't read it, but my son's class read excerpts from it, and their teacher summarized it. From that second-hand source, it seems like it's a typical libertarian anti-Fed tale about how bankers who owned an unfair share of the world's wealth, plotted to form the Fed, as a means of keeping banking in north Eastern hands, against threats from growing Western and Southern banks.

Edited October 19, 2008 by softwareNerd

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

This is a book on the Federal Reserve, and I would like to know if anyone has read it, and what their opinion of it is.

I haven't read that particular book, but the power to print money should never have been granted to the Federal government (or any other government) -- and certainly they should not have been granted the power to print money not backed by any commodities that are redeemable at face value (fiat money).

Properly speaking, money -- the bills and coins and other means of exchange -- ought to represent real wealth that you actually own -- i.e. you own 1 ton of gold, but instead of carrying it around to do your shopping, you print bills stating that the owner of this bill is entitled to a certain amount of the gold stored at the gold warehouse. When the grocery or whoever you purchase goods and services from decides to cash out his holdings of those bills, he can go to the gold warehouse and get his gold. When the gold warehouse is trusted to give out the gold to whoever owns the bills, this becomes a generally accepted means of exchange. That is, people will gladly take the bills for goods and services, because it is easier to carry than carrying around a sack of gold. This is what money ought to be.

By granting governments the power to print money, there is no longer the guarantee that it is backed by anything -- i.e. there is no warehouse that one can go to, say Fort Nox, to collect the commodities backing the bills, because that connection has been broken. In other words, one cannot go to the Federal Reserve and demand your gold for your bills, if you decide that gold is better than bills.

The government should never have claimed gold for its printed money the way it did near the turn of the last century (late 1800's to early 1900's). People were legally forbidden to trade in gold and had to use the Federal Reserve notes, and their gold was taken from them by force for these bills. This is the way the Federal Reserve notes became the money of the land. And now that they got all the gold, and it cannot be claimed via the Federal Reserve note, they can do whatever they want with the printing press to make more notes not backed by anything.

Whether this was a conspiracy of politicians or of bankers is immaterial. The power to print money should never have been disconnected from real commodities.

Unfortunately, the only real way out of this is to overturn that Amendment that grants the printing of money to the government; but it is going to take a real educational effort to convince enough people in and out of government to do this. Once the government is granted that authority, and it being an institution of force, it will of its own nature use force to get rid of all of the real money that was issued by sound banks and gold vaults.

[01503]

It's not so much about the Fed Reserve as it is the great conspiracy of these kinds of men being able to run the world. I have a hard time a banker could cause WWII like this book describes.

[Devils_Advocate]

Is this just a conspiracy theory, or is there reason to believe that these men caused wars, depressions, etc?

Did they cause depressions?

Yes, but not intentionally. This is a side effect.

Did they cause wars?

Inadvertently, i.e., they caused the depression, which caused WWII.

So they did (sort of), but it wasn't a conspiracy. A group of men in suits didn't sit down at a table deep underground in a dimly lit room in 1913 and plot the next 200 years. Sorry.

[01503]

Sorry.

I'm not disappointed. I was a skeptic in the first place. I wanted to see what the people on OO.net thought.