Nutty Ron Paul: There is no gold at Fort Knox
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The case of Ron Paul and the missing gold
I was never a member of the Ron Paul fan club as are a shocking number of liberals. Quite frankly I find him to be as loony as Michele Bachmann and Sarah the Palin, and don’t understand why so many people actually give him credence. Now, he has announced that Fort Knox doesn’t really exist, or at the least not the gold that is stored there. Now if that isn’t the kind of statement Michele Bachmann would make I don’t know what is. Here’s the story from Joshua Green of The Atlantic:
Ron Paul has doubts about whether the U.S. reserve exists, and he’s aiming to find out the truth.
I’m quite fond of Ron Paul. I enjoyed spending time with him for this Atlantic profile. I liked learning about Austrian economics. I like the fact that he thinks differently than other Republicans and has the courage of his convictions. Washington is a more interesting place because of him. And he makes good copy. That’s especially true now that he has become, at long last, chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve.
But I have to admit that even I did not foresee, and in fact never could have imagined, Paul’s latest crusade: He’s skeptical that the United States really has the gold it claims to have in Ft. Knox. And he wants some answers!
As most people know, Paul is a huge gold bug. (That’s a big tenet of his Austrian economics.) At various points in his career he has pushed to return the U.S. to the gold standard, and it’s largely thanks to Paul’s efforts that the U.S. Treasury resumed minting gold and silver coins. That’s partly because Paul is suspicious of the dollar, which, he will tell you, is paper money that is being systematically debased by the Federal Reserve. But Paul’s fears seem to extend further than I think most people realize. According to this fascinating Businessweek article he’s now expressed those fears in the form of legislation that would require an independent accounting of the more than 5,000 tons of gold bullion that the U.S. government says it possesses in Ft. Knox and various other locations:
Paul, who has said he thinks it’s possible there is no gold at Fort Knox, told Bloomberg Businessweek the government is asking the American people to trust that all the gold is there, while not allowing site visits and not publishing all the data.
To allay Paul’s suspicions, the Treasury’s inspector general recently visited the Bullion Depository at Ft. Knox to ensure that the gold is actually there (it is). But Paul wasn’t satisfied. He introduced a bill in April that would require tests of the 700,000 gold bars that make up the U.S. gold reserve. That process wouldn’t be cheap:
According to Treasury estimates, testing all that gold would take 400 people working full time for six months to complete and cost at least $15 million. Paul now says he would be satisfied with a representative sampling of the bullion.
Now, like most legislation that Paul champions, this probably isn’t going anywhere. But you still have to marvel at it. And who knows? Democrats are desperate enough for another stimulus that those 400 jobs might look pretty attractive. Maybe they could swallow hard and pitch it as a “jobs program”…
Image credit: Reuters
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Enquiring minds want to know: Is Rand Paul is the illegitimate offspring of Ron Paul and the Coultergeist?
…and everything sanmigmike wrote…
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Hey, lets not knock the guy….
He is the first republican since the 2011 mid terms to actually offer legislation that focused on “jobs, jobs, jobs”
400 jobs for 6 months is about the best that a Republican can do…and at 15 million, well, that proves that government spending does create jobs doesn’t it?
Ron Paul fits in quite well with the Bachmann, Palin gang.
Tis a pity but the right seems to be represented by the tin foil hate brigade. Totally unwilling to look at history, they enjoy their myths…trickle down, Sainted Ronnie, Tricky Dicky not all that bad, free market for everything, America always right…knowing what the founding fathers were thinking (kind of tricky and the idea that they viewed themselves as conservative seems interesting…they had a revolution against established (God granted!) authority, the “Code of the Old West”, celebrating such war heroes as John Wayne (draft dodger) and the Sainted Ronnie and making fun of other men that did indeed go to war and served at the pointed end of the stick. Unwilling to see how due to their ideas and dreams America is indeed sliding out of the few “First Places” that we have left that one would want…got to admit I am not proud of our prisons…populations and cost and some of our other number ones. I mean it is great that we spend more in so many ways on health care but we don’t get what we pay for since we think it is great to drop up 35% on overhead that includes massive profits from companies that don’t add a bit to health care…
Reading a history of Germany and the divisions they were seeing after WW I and the way that a small group of people (considered crazy nuts by many just a few years before) were able to gain power and destroy the country (and a few other countries), kill millions, cost billions. And that group of nuts hated anyone that they didn’t consider a true German. Hated democracy…Worked with big business to take power away from unions and on and on. Nope, they were not “socialists” and part of their growth was getting rid of the old party hands that thought they were “socialists”. Oh well, we get to relive history when we don’t learn from it.
Has any other country in history been so determined to become a third rate country?
Outstanding comment and I agree with every word you say. THanks for dropping by.