House passes Audit the Fed bill.

[Oakvale]

Uhuh, well good for Ron Paul.

At least this populist silliness won't get anywhere in the Senate (is that a good feature of the Senate's stodginess?), but it's annoying to see so many people actually voting for it. I mean, I get it makes rather good politics to trash the evil Fed and, like, banks and stuff, but Jesus, guys, stop and think for a second. If this bill is such a no-brainer, why on earth would some members of Congress bother opposing it? You can't argue that it's bad political optics, certainly - blathering a little about "transparency" is always going to be a winner in that regard.

We've seen how awfully boneheaded Congress has been throughout the Depression we're suffering through - do you really want the central bank, too, to be subject to short-term political pressures by opportunistic morons concerned solely about getting re-elected next time around?

Jeopardizing the independence of a country's central bank because of bullsh!t notions of "transparency" and "the people!!!!!1" to score political points would be such an awful idea that I'm actually kind of surprised more of Congress didn't vote for it.

The Fed obviously hasn't performed perfectly, ever, but I'm far more comfortable keeping it independent and run by economists who actually know what they're doing instead of being subject to the political whims of impatient voters every two to six years.

Think about this logically - this is Ron Paul's bill. The man's spent a large portion of his political career vowing to abolish the Federal Reserve - the point of this idiotic bill is to destroy the Fed's credibility by irrevocably politicising it and, thus, making it much easier to abolish. If you think that's a noble goal, fine - though I disagree - but please, please don't pretend this about high moral concepts of open government. It's a little much.

[Oakvale]

If the Fed really is secretly monetizing debt, why would we be better off knowing? Wouldn't that just cause inflation?

So you would rather remain ignorant and have everything blow up in our faces much, much harder?

I would rather remain ignorant in the hope that it doesn't blow up at all. And why should it blow up? It's not like we have an inflation problem at the moment--and in this case the long run doesn't matter because the Fed can just change its policy if this changes--so why mess with it? If the Fed is, we're just getting a free stimulus. I know this sounds backwards and wrong to a lot of people, but neither money nor gold have an objective value; both are worth whatever people think they're worth. If the Fed's printing too much money and pumping it into the economy, as long as no one knows, who cares? But if we all find out, then the everyone will start devaluing our currency much more. And maybe the Fed really is just adding 2% each year like they're supposed it. But if they're not I for one don't want us to know it.

This isn't an ideological view. I'm just worried we're going to create an inflationary economic mess for no reason.

Some libertarians believe there's, uh, magical secret hyperinflation going on, we just haven't noticed yet.

[Oakvale]

If you're going to subscribe to the Austrian cult, MBD, you could at least recognize that it's a minority position rather than stating all your dogma as if it's indisputable fact.

I don't want to get too deeply engaged, but one thing in particular bugged me - ""money is a placeholder for value". That's a meaningless sentence, as I'm sure you're well aware. Value's a subjective thing, why is gold (lol) or whatever any more valuable than, say, a lump of plastic? You don't understand what money is.

[Oakvale]

You're misunderstanding. My point is that "value" is whatever society decides it is. A piece of paper used as legal tender is just as valuable as the gold you want to "back [it] up" with because people decide that it should be so. That's all.

"In and of itself, worth nothing" doesn't mean anything. "Worth" is not an objective quality.