Herman Cain Does Not Get the Federal Reserve Issue

Via Conservative Heritage Times

Intellectual Conservative
VERBATIM POST
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By Dan Phillips, on October 3rd, 2011

Is the Ron Paul campaign on an orchestrated campaign to challenge Herman Cain about the Federal Reserve?

Rising Presidential candidate Herman Cain reportedly complains in his new book, This is Herman Cain, that Ron Paul’s campaign is orchestrating an effort to “nail” him on the Federal Reserve. Cain is a former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

According to the Daily Caller Cain writes:

“…Paul’s campaign ‘sends one of its ‘Paulites’ everywhere I show up…’
‘I get the same stupid question at almost every one of these events,’ Cain writes. ‘I know it’s a deliberate strategy. How can a person randomly show up at a hundred events and ask the same stupid question to try to nail me on the Federal Reserve? It’s really becoming annoying more than anything else.’”

First of all, I can pretty much assure Mr. Cain that this is not an orchestrated effort by the official Paul campaign. As someone who was involved in helping pull off the last minute effort that secured Ron Paul a second place finish in the Georgia GOP straw poll, I can testify that the official campaign isn’t that organized. And I say that not as a slight. Just as a nod to reality. The official Paul campaign is busy with their candidate’s own itinerary. I’m sure they don’t have the time or manpower to coordinate that kind of systematic effort to harass rival candidates.

I can confidently assure Mr. Cain that what he is experiencing is actually a spontaneous grassroots effort by Paul supporters, as so much of the Paul campaign is spontaneous and activist driven, to highlight a glaring weakness in a principle primary competitor. I’m surprised this upsets Mr. Cain so. One candidate highlighting a perceived weakness in a rival candidate’s platform is quite common really and is sometimes referred to by some of us as politics.

But what this demonstrates, beyond Mr. Cain’s naiveté and thin skin, is that he really has no idea what the Federal Reserve issue is all about. He says it is not true that he doesn’t support an audit of the Federal Reserve. OK so he does now, although this represents a reversal of his past opinion as documented in the New American article linked above. He just doesn’t think an audit will find anything.

In Dec 2010 when Cain was guest hosting the Neil Boortz Show, he said this about the Fed (my comments in bold):

“Some people say we ought to audit the Federal Reserve. Here's what I do know. The Federal Reserve already has so many internal audits it's ridiculous. I don't know why people think we're going to learn this great amount of information by auditing the Federal Reserve.... Here's the advice I've given to people who are worried about an audit of the Federal Reserve. Call them up and ask them! (Aww! How cute!) You can stop by and have one of their P.R. people or one of their public relations people explain to you how the Federal Reserve operates. (I hope you know a good bail bondsman.)”

Good luck to anyone who chooses to follow-up with Mr. Cain’s just “ask them” advice.
What boggles the mind is how a “conservative” talk radio host who is supposed to have his ear to the ground of grassroots conservatism can be so clueless as to what is really behind the calls to audit the Fed. I’ll let Mr. Cain in on something although I really don’t think it is that much of a secret. The activist Paul supporters who are calling for an audit of the Fed don’t really want to audit the Fed. THEY WANT TO SHUT IT DOWN! The purpose of a Fed audit is not to ensure all the numbers balance moment to moment but to demonstrate the corruption and fantasy accounting that is inherent in the enterprise of central banking.

Personally, I have never quite understood how you would even go about starting to audit the Fed. I’m no accountant, but I do know enough to know that accounting deals with such things as debits, credits, account balances, assets, liabilities, etc., and that there are general accounting rules and principles by which an honest audit would proceed. How then do you audit an entity that is empowered to CREATE MONEY OUT OF THIN AIR? Would the accountant note “and here magic happened” to explain a new infusion of cash (or more likely photons on a computer screen)? Heck, at least Enron and Bernie Madoff had to engage in some “creative accounting” to cover up their chicanery. Not even they claimed the ability to create money out of nothing.

Again, it boggles the mind that Mr. Cain does not realize the fundamental concerns that underlie the rise in anti-Fed activism, a rise that is largely attributable to candidate Paul. Or perhaps he does understand the concerns and is seeking to deflect them, former employee of the Fed that he is. Either way, Herman Cain is not qualified to be President, and he is certainly not qualified to carry the banner of conservatism in this campaign. That an unrepentant former chair of a Federal Reserve branch is actively campaigning with some success to become the consensus “conservative” candidate is a testimony to the sorry state of the “conservative” consensus already.

Dr. Dan Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Georgia. He specializes in the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction. | Dan Phillips | phillips_de@mercer.edu