Gertrude Coogan’s Bluff, by Dr. Gary North
Over the past couple of years, millions of grass roots activists in the tea parties, 9/12 organizations, Ron Paul Meet Up groups, etc. have learned about the detrimental and pernicious role in the economy played by the Federal Reserve banking system.
They have gotten the essential message — End The Fed.
But there is much more to the basic story than calling for the abolition of the central bank that has depreciated the value of the dollar and created the “boom/bust” inflation/depression business cycle since its inception in 1913.
Motivated to learn the truth, these persons are seeking answers to the roots of the present economic crisis in a variety of places.
Unfortunately many of these legions of sincere activists are becoming miseducated in the causal background economics and the accurate history relating to central banking, the Fed, inflationism, and populism. They have naively bought into many long-discredited ideas and wrong-headed notions once labeled “Greenbackism” or “money crankism.” They have been sold a bogus bill of goods and been led down the perilous Populist path.
Dr. Gary North has nobly stepped forward to set the record straight. Taking on one of the major “money cranks,” Gertrude Coogan, he is calling her bluff, and putting forth an accurate economic and historical analysis of the role of money, central banking, and the partnership of banks and the state in fostering inflation and depressions.
Firmly grounded in the Austrian school of free market analysis of Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, and Murray Rothbard, Dr. North provides the necessary corrective for the attentive lay person or grass roots activist to learn the truth behind these important questions which affect the monetary future of our nation and our families.
The major “establishment” treatment of this story is found in “court historian” Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style of American Politics and Other Essays. The Powers-That-Be and their sycophantic scribblers such as the late Hofstadter and his descendants in the bought-and-paid-for academic professoriat love nothing better than painting critics of our Fed-centered monetary regime as “conspiracy theorists” and “paranoids.” They eagerly seek to blur the line between populist “money crankism” and the orthodox Keynesianism of the establishment, totally disregarding the dispassionate and accurate analysis of the Austrians. They know that the truth would set us free.
5:36 pm on October 3, 2010
