From the Tom Woods Letter:
One of the great villains of American history — who ranks in the “Near Great” category according to our brain-dead historians — is Woodrow Wilson.
So much bad, including much of what ails us today, can be traced to the self-righteous former president of Princeton University.
The Federal Reserve System, whose boom-bust cycles and price inflation have littered more than one hundred years of U.S. history, was signed into existence by Wilson.
A sliver of the liberty movement has been tricked into thinking Wilson eventually came to regret having established the Fed. They point to a spurious quotation that begins, “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.”
Wilson never said this. He was in fact proud of creating the Fed.
The rest of the quotation they use to claim that Wilson regretted creating the Fed is patched together from speeches on other subjects he gave while running for president, before the Fed was even established.
Others think John F. Kennedy was assassinated for trying to abolish the Fed. Oddly enough, most of these people have read, and have great praise for, G. Edward Griffin’s book The Creature from Jekyll Island. But if they’d read closely, they’d see that Griffin debunks the idea that Kennedy made any serious move against the Fed.
I’m not sure why people cling to these myths, although I have a theory: it’s much more comforting to live in a world in which there were some decent presidents who tried their best to advance the people’s interests. It’s nice to think Wilson was duped into creating the Fed, and that JFK heroically gave his life to try to stop it.
It’s much harder to live in a world in which they’re all in on it, and you and I are on our own.
The Fed is the principal regulator of the American banking system. In the years leading up to the 2008 fiasco, chairman Ben Bernanke assured us that the system was sound, that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the housing market, and on and on with downright laughable denials of reality.
Then the crash came, and the alleged experts all pretended no one could have seen it coming.
Ron Paul and his economist colleagues saw it coming, some of them describing to a T precisely what would happen, but since Dr. Paul wasn’t fashionable he wasn’t listened to.
Jerome Powell, the Fed’s current chairman, will forever be remembered for claiming that price inflation, which is currently hitting Americans hard, would be “transitory.”
These people are the wrongiest of the wrong, every time.
It is not true that the Fed gave us fewer and shallower recessions than we saw before, or that we’ve had more stability with the Fed. Whatever the propaganda in the Fed’s favor, you can be sure it’s made up.
Well beyond COVID, I devote every single weekday on the Tom Woods Show to debunking the ridiculous narratives that the establishment expects us to believe.
I’ve spent plenty of time discussing the economics of the Fed, but I recently had the great Saifedean Ammous on the show to discuss other, less obvious consequences of fiat money, among them the industrial sludge we’re urged to eat.
Enjoy, and consider joining the tens of thousands who make the Tom Woods Show part of their daily routine:
https://tomwoods.com/ep-2071-fiat-money-its-damage-goes-beyond-economics/