Many visitors to this site are familiar with G. E. Griffins The Creature From Jekyll Island (608 pages).

I did not discover Griffin's book until about 2002. In 1994, the same year "Creature" appeared, Murray Rothbard published this slender volume. The Case Against The Fed (158 pages).

Quoting from the introduction "By far the most secret and least accountable operation of the federal government is not as one might expect the CIA, DIA or some other super-secret intelligence agency."

And not Surprisingly:

"The Federal Reserve system System is accountable to no one. It has no budget: it is subject to no audit: and no Congressional committee knows of or can truly supervise its operation."

In the succinct early chapters he summarizes the meaning of money, early attempts to create a central bank, the economic and political climate of the time in the US in the 19th century leading up to the Civil War and the important period known as the "Progressive Era."

Rothbard points out that (contrary to what some people today like to espouse),the Republicans Party was never the party of free trade and sound money and in fact was specifically formed to aid in the cartelization of industry and undo the monetary reforms of the Jacksonian Democrats who successfully put an end to central banking in the US by the mid-1800s - effectively setting up a "new National Banking System that centralized the nation's bank and established what amounted to a halfway house toward Central Banking." (Pgs. 74-75)

In the "Progressive Era." we see the beginnings of "The Matrix"

Two paragraphs are worth quoting in their entirety:

"Just as the big as the bankers, in trying to set up a Central Bank had to face a public opinion suspicious of Wall Street and hostile to Central Banking, so the financiers and industrialists faced a public steeped in a tradition and ideology of free competition and hostility to monopoly. How could they get the public and legislators to go along with the fundamental transformation of the American economy towards cartels and monopoly.

The answer was the same in both cases: the big businessmen and financiers had to form an alliance with the opinion molding classes in society, in order to engineer the consent of the public by means of crafty and persuasive propaganda. The opinion molding classes , in previous centuries the Church, but now consisting of media people, journalists, intellectuals, economists, and other academics, professionals, educators, as well as ministers in this cause. For their part the intellectuals and the opinion molders were all too ready for such an alliance. In the first place most of the academics, economists, historians, social scientists, had gone to Germany, in the late nineteenth century to earn their Ph.D.s, which were not yet being granted widely in the U.S. There they had become imbued with the Bismarckian statism. organicism, collectivism., and State molding and governing of society, with bureaucrats and other planners begnigly ruling over a cartelized economy in partnership with organzed big business." (pgs. 86-87)

(About 30 years ago I came up with the phrase "The European Disease." to describe socialism, collectivism, communism or whatever you want to call it after almost getting sucked into the intellectual left by way of the works of Eric Fromm.)

It is common to hear "The Fed" referred to as a private bank. That was ostensibly true prior to the New Deal. Greenlighted by the Federal Reserve act in 1913 the Wall Street banks were more or less free to consolidate their power with most of it ending up in the hands of the Morgan interests.

Leading up to the Great Depression a titanic struggle had been going on between various factions. The two most prominent were the Morgans interests the Rockefeller interests. The reform measures following the crash of 1929 paved the way for the power to be shifted from Wall street to Washington. As Rothbard states "...the New Deal's Banking Acts of 1933 and 1935, ... transformed the face of the Fed and permanently shifted the crucial power in the Fed from Wall Street to the politicos in Washington." (pg. 131)

Having made the case against the Fed, Rothbard turns to what can be done. The minute details are beyond the scope of this small volume, so Rothbard make the traditonl Austrian case for a return to the gold standard and the abolition of the Fed.

You have to give credit to the architects of Central Banking . They were devious, persistent, patient, ambitious and ultimately successful. They came up with one the most ingenious cons in human history. They succeeded in making themselves fabulously wealthy and powerful while at the same time remaining relatively far off the radar of the average citizen.

And it is not just our Fed. They were (are) able to plunder the wealth of the citizens in their respective countries with a power that Alexander the Great. Ghengis Khan, The Roman Emperors, and all the powerful and petty dictators in histiory could have only dreamed about in their wildest dreams.

I can only hope that those of us that wish to drive a stake into the heart of this great evil have the persistent, patience, ambition to kill this beast. - without the deviousness, of course. Maybe a little.

If you don't want to read a 600 page book, read a 180 page book.

The Case Against The Fed is available from the The Ludwig von Mises Instute