If you want to see some of the inane “reasoning” behind the whole “Close the Fed” movement, Gary North ( a supposed shining light of this movement) provides many examples.

Here is an excerpt of one posting at Lew Rockwell’s website, which I have linked to before. It is where he tries to argue that the Fed is to blame for a movie no longer costing 25 cents and the candy bar 10 cents.

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These income streams are monetary. But people’s goal in creating streams of income is the creation of consumable income, not digits or pieces of paper with dead politicians’ pictures on them. So, people’s expectations regarding future prices are important in establishing the level of present demand for monetary income streams.

If the process of monetary depreciation is slow enough, people tend to forget what is happening to the value of their locked-in streams of future monetary income. I think of those Nestle candy bars. I also remember going to a movie on Saturday morning in 1951: 15 cents each way for the bus, 25 cents for the movie ticket, and 10 cents for a Butterfinger candy bar. That bought me a day’s entertainment, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.: a western, six cartoons, a serial, a newsreel, and two adult features. Plus, previews of coming attractions.

The Federal Reserve has acted to undermine the value of streams of monetary income. In response, voters have pressured politicians to establish cost-of-living escalators for Social Security payments. So, the government’s statisticians do whatever they can to juggle the data in such a way as to deflate the consumer price index. They prefer to include computers in the official basket of goods rather than candy bars. Moore’s law is their friend.

The man is an idiot disguised as an intellectual.

The idea that computers as a commodity should be excluded from a measurment of the costs of goods and services in the economy is patently insane. Computers have established an entirely new class of goods and services in the economy.

What the hell are you doing now? What was that moron Gary North doing when he authored that post? By what means was the “information” he imparted delivered to thousands around the world and zero cents in terms of variable costs?

And who goes to movies now that you can get them on your computer? Or DVR (a computer)? Or BlueRay (computer)? Or older tech DVD (still a fricking computer)? And if you go to the theater, you may see it digitally projected - through a fricking computer. All at a lower cost of distribution than in the hallowed, sacred, “all was good in the world” 1950s.

This man actually claims that productivity gains from Moore’s law should be excluded from measuring inflation. It is all a “racket”.

This is the quality of thinking behind Ron Paul’s economic fundamentalism.