The Midwesterner on Anti-Fed Rhetoric

Richard Longworth, the Midwesterner, takes Ron Paul and Rick Perry to task for their anti-Fed rhetoric. In particular, Mr. Longworth recalls his experience with a mid-size farmer in the 80s. Boom had gone to bust – small farmers without a lot of debt who had second jobs survived as did big farmers growing fat off of subsidies. It was the mid-sized farmer that got crushed. The farmer he recalls in particular was desperate; and therefore susceptible to snake-oil salesmen who preyed on the desperate:

As night fell outside on the leveraged fields, we sat at his kitchen table and he brought out document after document, article after article, learned paper after learned paper, proving that he didn’t owe the money after all, that it was all a Washington scam perpetrated by the Federal Reserve Bank. He would take it to court, he said, and he would win.

Of course, he never had a chance. But he, like many other farmers, had been convinced by far-right “consultants” that the act of Congress which created the Federal Reserve system in 1913 was unconstitutional. According to this reasoning, all the Fed’s actions, including its creation of the U.S. currency, also are unconstitutional. Hence, the dollar is an illegal currency. This farmer’s debts, of course, were denominated in dollars. Therefore, the debts were illegal and didn’t have to be paid. He was in the clear. Or so he thought.

I never heard what happened to him. I assume he lost the farm. Other farmers like him took the constitutional argument to court, and invariably lost. Some of the so-called consultants peddling this snake oil went to prison.

His discussion of these far right “consultants,” such as the Posse Comitatus, and their challenges to government legitimacy reminds me of the folks I ran across pushing the Redemption theory to claim they were not responsible for their debts and that the courts had no jurisdiction over them:

The basic idea, so far as there is coherence to it, relies on the dissolution of the Union following Southern secession; creation of a sort of government corporation which, via the 14th Amendment, created ‘citizens’ as a sort of involuntary asset. The Federal Government secretly went bankrupt in 1933 and then pledged the labor of all citizens by depositing their birth certificates with the Department of Commerce.

Agree or disagree with policy, but to a greater or lesser extent, this business about the legitimacy of the Fed or (or the IRS or whatever) is ridiculous. Maybe it’s all just good fun for Rick Perry to accuse the Fed of a capital crime for exercising a power specifically granted to it by Congress and to threaten to treat Ben Bernanke roughly down in Texas. But, with people in such dire financial straights, perhaps they won’t recognize that Perry is just a trash talking blowhard. (And, for the sake of “balance,” if any politicians on the Left are questioning the legitimacy of government institutions and trash talking, they should knock it off as well.)

From where I sit, it feels like there is not a huge distance between Ron Paul on the one hand and Posse Comitatus, Sovereign Citizens, and the Redemption Movement on the other side.