Philly rally for Ron Paul to "End the Fed"

Four days before Ben Bernanke gave the first-ever Federal Reserve Chairman press conference to defend his cheap-money policy, more than 100 demonstrators descended on the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia to cheerfully demand the nation's central banking system shut down.

Supporters of US Rep. and Presidential hopeful Ron Paul, R-Texas, libertarian- and tea party-backed author of the book End the Fed and current head of the House banking subcommittee for monetary policy, the Fed-killers held their third yearly Philadelphia "Fedstock" festival, complete with live music.

Fedstock organizers are small-business operators who see government, not as a safety net against life's threatened hardships, or the expression of our national aspirations, but an expensive obstacle to getting things done. James Babb runs an employers' help-wanted direct-mail and magazine advertising service. Rob Pepe owns an industrial-filter manufacturing business out in Montgomery County. Mike Salvi sells homes. Darren Wolfe is a business-website salesman who moonlights as a chess instructor.

The crowd was filled out with Drexel and Temple students, and old people, reached through Facebook and other social-networking sites preaching, as Babb puts it, that "there's not going to be any Social Security there for them" and "they'll be working their butts off to pay for today's government blunders."

They listened to Ernest Hancock, a Phoenix radio host whose libertarian principles cause him to praise mass Mexican immigration and other unpopular positions. They applauded as Wolfe tossed a copy of the Communist Manifesto, blamed it for free public schools, government roads, central banking and other projects that pre-date Karl Marx; and blamed the Fed and the national income tax for the murderous and costly wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan; and "socialized medicine" like Medicare and Medicaid.

"You can advocate for peace activism without having to endorse the left's entire agenda," Wolfe told the group. "Giving the state resources, by giving it control over our money, only feeds the war machine... The left's antiwar movement has failed completely. We need libertarians to pick up this ball."

That's the Ron Paul message as filtered through his supporters: You can't trust the government to have an army and not use it; you can't trust the Fed to limit interest rates without, eventually, ruinous inflation and dollar devaluation and unpayable debt and a self-destroying out-of-control government. So, end the income tax, and end the Fed. "Ron Paul has a lot to do with delivering this information to the younger people, the college campuses," Babb told me.

Never mind that debt, boom and years-long busts were endemic before there was a Federal Reserve, or that the biggest difference between today's weak economy and those of 100 years ago is unemployment insurance and other government social programs (which libertarian godfather Frederich Hayek supported, so long as they are evenly administered, as I read in his book, The Road to Serfdom).

"The Fed is the cause of the boom and bust cycle," Babb assured me. "The price of credit becomes distorted...We now have massive booms, devastating busts. The tech boom and bust. The real estate boom and bust. The final bust is going to be the government bust. What's going to happen to all the people dependent on the government when the money runs out?"

Babb is realistic about Paul's Presidential chances. "The people who put Presidents into power are from the Goldman Sachs of this world. They don't want Ron in there. But his message is extremely powerful."

So what's the solution, really? "Ron Paul has the idea we need competing currencies." Babb decried the March federal counterfeiting criminal conviction of Bernard von NotHaus, who stamped silver coins with Ron Paul's image. Babb says he has certificates backed by NotHaus silver the government seized: "I'd love to redeem them!" With precious metal prices soaring, "they're worth four times what I paid."