Ron Paul, the pariah of the Republican party, may have just saved the republic. His “Audit the Fed” bill gained the support of three-quarters of the House of Representatives. It’s probably the most important bill to be passed in roughly the last 100 years. Ironic, of course, because the Federal Reserve was instituted in 1913.

Once the Fed is audited, it will hopefully be shut down. Most people would probably be surprised to learn that it is neither federal, nor is it a reserve. It is a private bank, owned by private individuals, that prints money out of thin air, and loans it to the United States at interest. Not a bad gig. For them.

To really understand the importance of this, let’s compare the value of the dollar now, and 65 years ago. We’ll also need to take into account the size of the national debt. The last president not to have a central bank, Andrew Jackson, was also the last president not to have a national debt. I’ll let you connect the dots on that one.

In a closed financial system, it’s impossible to have debt: currency is either available for transactions, or it’s not. It’s only when currency is created out of thin air that debt becomes possible, either via credit or via a printing press. The Federal Reserve monetizes the debt that Congress incurs by printing money to back it. The problem is two-fold: First, it allows debts to be created, masks their effects and makes market corrections take longer. Second, it eventually creates hyper-inflation and with it brings the collapse of the currency.

The Federal Reserve also has another problem, it printed trillions of dollars worth of secret bailouts. My friend Kaleb made a video detailing this, called “One Hundred Million Dollar Penny”, which currently has over 154,000 views on YouTube.

I hear a lot of folks complain that they can’t live off of just $600 or $800 each month. It’s a valid complaint. The problem though, is that at the value of the dollar when they were earning it, that $600 or $800 dollars a month would’ve gone further. To make matters worse, that money was confiscated from them, via the force of government, which is to say, at the point of a gun, and they had no opportunity to use that portion of their life’s work to invest or otherwise use it as they saw fit. That’s theft. Let’s call that $600 or $800 their monthly stipend.

I’ll cut to the chase here. We’re going to take the monthly stipend, multiply it by 12 months to find the yearly value. We’ll then multiply it by the 1947 value of the dollar to find its true value and then subtract the 2012 value from the 1947 value to see the actual amount of yearly theft per individual.

$600 x 12 = $7200 x $10.50 = $75,600 – $7200 = $68,400 (Yearly theft per individual)
$800 x 12 = $9600 x $10.50 = $100,800 – $9600 = $91,200 (Yearly theft per individual)

We’ll then multiply that yearly theft amount by the total number of individuals 65 or older on Social Security, excluding disability and SSI. This will give us our annualized national theft from our retired parents and grandparents via the Federal Reserve. We’ll then approximate that number to the national debt for comparison.

There are 37,743,000 individuals on Social Security as of June of this year according to the Social Security Administration.

$68,400 x 37,743,000 = $2.58T
$91,200 x 37,743,000 = $3.44T

We could pay off the current national debt in roughly 5.5 years just off the money stolen from our senior citizens by the Federal Reserve and its currency printing inflation. The Federal Reserve then pockets the interest from that debt via payments coming from our tax dollars. Angry yet?

The Fed has no incentive to stop and must be audited, then ended. Preferably, the Fed will be forced to internalize the national debt by buying it back and writing it down. This will both remove the debt from our monetary system, while revaluing the dollar and restoring to our retirees what they have rightfully earned. It will also force those who have profited underhandedly from the fruits of our parents and grandparents labors to repay what they have stolen.

John Adams said, “There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”

The Republican Party owes “Crazy Uncle Ron” an apology. He’s been hammering away at it for roughly 30 years. It just took that long for enough people to listen. He may have just saved the republic. We should probably say thank-you.

Image Courtesy of Rdsmith4