Ron Paul and the pencil

NPR ran two stories this morning that hipneck might like.  The news that Ron Paul will become chairman of the Federal Reserve Oversight Committee ran with Planet Money's story recalling Milton Friedman's famous pencil speech.  Rep. Paul is the author of End the Fed, a polemic on abandoning gold and silver as legal tender to favor a powerful Fed.  The gold standard is often blamed for the collapse of markets in 1929.

In an interview with John Nichols in a joint Nation/NPR collaboration Ron Paul says:

"State secrecy is anathema to a free society. Why exactly should Americans be prevented from knowing what their government is doing in their name? In a free society we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble. The truth is that our foreign spying, meddling and outright military intervention in the post–World War II era has made us less secure, not more, and we have lost countless lives and spent trillions of dollars for our trouble. Too often it's the official government lies that have given us endless and illegal wars resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and casualties."

So, here we are in a place where the Dollar is destined to become cheaper to compete with China Rep. Paul wants to shine sunlight into the bowels of the Fed.  Should be fun.