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End the Fed by Ron Paul.  212 pages. Grand Central. $21.99.

Ron Paul has always been something of a political misfit.  An eleven term Republican congressman from Texas, he’s labored most of his career in obscurity, only recently achieving national prominence on the strength of his 2008 bid for the Republican presidential nomination.  The reaction to Paul’s campaign by both voters and media alike was a curious mixture of perplexity, enthusiasm and scorn.  His pro-life, pro-gun positions certainly resonated with many values conservatives.  Fiscal conservatives  no doubt appreciated his small government rhetoric, accompanied as it was by a congressional voting record so hostile to new taxes and regulations that Paul, a physician by trade, earned himself the nickname Dr. No.   And yet during the campaign, Paul often found himself at odds with many of these same conservatives.  His denunciation of the Bush administration’s undeclared war in Iraq got him booed at the 2007 Values Voter Presidential Debate, and for the same reason he was openly rejected by major figures in the Republican party and conservative media.  How, people wondered, can Paul be so conservative and so liberal at the same time?  He appeared full of contradictions.  In reality, there was no contradiction among Paul’s positions, but instead a remarkable underlying consistency.  For Paul, as he says of himself on his congressional website, “never votes for proposed legislation unless the measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution.” Paul’s stand on abortion, guns and war is governed by what the Constitution says on these issues, not by the changing winds of popular opinion.  But public opion, even among self-described conservatives, has drifted so far from constitutional moorings that consistent arguments based on the Constitution sound strange to contemporary listeners.    

While his opposition to Bush’s War on Terror garnered Paul a great deal of attention and no little animosity during the campaign, it was not his sole, or even main focus.  Paul was and is one of the best informed members of Congress on a wide range of issues, but his area of speciality is monetary policy.  Considered a rather wonkish and eccentric subject by many, the Federal Reserve Bank’s (the Fed) monetary policy had long been an object of Paul’s criticism.  Paul, as his Constitutionalist philosophy demanded, was an advocate of hard, commodity money, a position often identified with the gold standard.  As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, Paul grilled Fed chairmen such as Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke for many years, asking pointed, informed questions of them while others were lobbing softballs.  And while Paul would question and criticize the Fed chairmen on this or that point, ultimately it was not individual Fed policies to which he objected, but the very existence of the Fed.  For long time Paul admirers such as myself, this always made his C-SPAN head to heads with Greenspan and Bernanke must see TV.  But aside from the entertainment value of watching Fed chairmen squirm under Paul’s questioning, these House Committee meetings were serious affairs.  For the power of those chairmen was awesome, and their decisions affected the lives of every single person in the country in ways few people understood.  But while they were no small matter, the Fed’s activities remained out of sight and out of mind for most Americans.  

All that changed in the fall of 2008. (more…)

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