Spotted at the Cato Institute: A Take on Rand Paul's View on Audit the Fed

There is a great object lesson provided by a recent Cato Institute panel discussion. It provided great insight into why it usually makes sense to go for the jugular and call for dismantlement of government agencies, rather than measures that are unclear in objectives and which can be co-opted by the established order.

The panel discussion took place on April 17 at the Washington D.C. headquarters and was titled. Should GAO Audit the Federal Reserve?.  Remarkably, the discussion hardly touches on the evils of the Federal Reserve and how it is the creator of the business cycle and a generally unstable economy. Instead, it is a discussion of the minutiae of what an establishment conducted audit would do and what it would look like. That's co-opting Ron Paul's call for auditing the Fed, which I am sure was aimed more at exposing the evils of Fed money manipulation.

The topic of gold doesn't even come up until the question and answer period at the end of the secession, where an audience participant brings it up. Panelist David Wessel of the Brookings Institute answered the question with utter contempt and said, "We tried the gold standard. It didn't work very well and we shouldn't go back."

Another panelist for this inside the Beltway Cato event was David Walker, a former United States Comptroller General who oversaw the General Accounting Office. His reply to the question was, "I don't see how practically you could go back to a gold standard."

And that's the kind of "broad policy discussion" you get at Beltway institutions these days.

There was one on point observation, however, and it came from Wessel, when he discussed Rand's view on Audit the Fed:

 -RW