H.R. 1207

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H.R. 1207 is a piece of legislation that Ron Paul wants to put through congress that would audit the Federal Reserve. What do you all think of this?

More info about H.R 1207 is required. <.< Please?

My initial reaction is that it's a good idea. I'd need more info to be certain though.

I'd say no to it. When the good times roll again, we'd like to repeal it...

I have the same reaction. What does it propose, simply?

It goes in my option into the wrong direction: The political influence of Congress and administration is already to strong on the FED.

I don't think that any politician shall have any say in respect of the currency. Currency is much to important to leave it to people which commonly do think further than the next election.

It's not that complicated of a bill. It would just require the Federal Reserve (our central bank) to show all of its records. How much "money" it has created, and where this "money" has gone. As of right now, they refuse to say where they have distributed the money (which is kind of worrisome). The bill would not give Congress control of monetary policy. It's just a plain, simple audit of the Federal Reserve that would reveal all of their records to the Congress.

Here's the full text of the bill (it's not very long): http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc111/h1207_ih.xml

Last edited by Cyanide on 26 Mar 2009, 5:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

What? The Congress doesn't have any influence on the Fed. They do what they want, when they want. They have never once been audited, and they don't even answer to the president. They operate independently.
And H.R. 1207 doesn't give Congress any control over monetary policy.

Seems reasonable.

ruveyn

Thank god for Ron Paul.

(Put him on the list!)

The only problem I have with auditing the Fed is that then the politicians might find out what's going on there. Now, I'm pretty curious, and I'd love to know, but if the politicians find out, they'll get all fired up and start passing laws.

New laws are almost always redundant, ill-advised, and generally filled with pork.

Right, so we should still follow ol' Hammurabi's wise legal system.

Henriksson, that's a strawman.

The notion that the number of laws passed should be reduced, and that new laws tend to be problematic is not the same as the notion that Hammurabi's laws should be followed. It is just a statement that political systems tend to create new laws in a problematic manner, and thus should have their power curtailed for this reason. This idea is well-known and is favored by political choice economists such as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, who put forward arguments for poor behavior on the part of political actors, and as well the notion that political powers creating change can be problematic seems one that the polymath Friedrich Hayek explored in his 3 volume work Law, Legislation, and Liberty, in which he argues that society is an emergent order rather than a top-down creation to be randomly altered at will by legislative processes. In fact, in Hayek's work, he points out the fact that Hammurabi's wise legal system was not seen as something Hammurabi invented, but rather something the society believed to be true at the time, and the good grounds for not being Hammurabians today is that we have ceased to think that this legal framework fits in with current conceptions of proper social order.

Perhaps I am being too harsh(perhaps I am being too off-topic as well), but zerooftheday's comment was sensible, although not analytically developed, yours was attacking a strawman of it.

In any case, my opinion on this law is that it is mostly harmless in both directions. The major worry is that this will incite the legislator to bother the central bank(a move likely to increase inflation rates without much benefit).

AG:

I never claimed it was analytical, I'm just mocking the general tendency of the gov't to want to control everything it can. They know better because they're smarter than us voters, why else would we have voted for them?. And I favor enforcement of current laws rather than passing new ones as a matter of general principle.

Well, I never said you claimed it was analytical. I was just defending you against Henriksson's strawman.

Well, ok?

Well, actually, they are smarter than you voters. If you didn't recognize that, then you haven't been paying attention to how terrible political ads are despite the reasonable level of education held by politicians. Obama was a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School for a time, yet he just kept on mouthing the word "Hope" and "Change" during the election.

I favor neither.