After being urging to do so by several readers, I finally read Ron Paul’s End the Fed. I was about to buy it for the Kindle I got for Christmas, but when I got to work Monday morning there was a package in my mailbox from Gary Howard at Paul’s Campaign for Liberty with two copies of the book. I gave one to my colleague Stephen Gandel, and started reading the other. I had told Hunter Lewis that I was going to read his Where Keynes Went Wrong first, but when I saw how short End the Fed was (and how few words per page it contained) I figured I could finish it in a couple of hours. It took about three, and it was worth the time and effort. I didn’t learn anything new about monetary economics or the Federal Reserve, but I did learn a lot about the thinking of Ron Paul. It turns out to be a curious mix of the sensible and the delusional. To put it differently, Paul has wrapped a mostly cogent critique of central banking in general and the Fed in particular inside a decidedly utopian view of what a world without central banks would look like. At one point in the first chapter he warns that “ending the Fed is not a magic pill to usher in Utopia.” Then, throughout the rest of that chapter and the rest of the book he describes how ending the Fed would usher in a state of affairs that sounds an awful lot like, well, Utopia.

Here’s the list of happy consequences that Paul says ending the Fed would bring, with my annotations in italics: