Take this insight from a quasi-insider, for I have read more than my fair share of what I naively thought was classical liberal economic literature, but later found out to be nothing but anarchist, maniacal, conspiratorial filth:

Ron Paul does not seek to abolish the Fed for the reasons Von Mises or Hayek would have been opposed to central banking (i.e., on purely theoretical grounds). He uses their powerful intellectual arguments to further his perverse goal, which at heart, is the dismantling of all institutions of the U.S. government! His reason for being anti-Fed has very little to do with monetary policy (though he will readily use economic arguments as a facade) and very much to do with New World Order paranoia of Joos or Free Masons controlling the commanding heights of our economies and our lives,.. nefariously pulling the invisible strings… or any such dementia.

Likewise, his foreign policy isolationism does not derive out of a respect for other countries’ sovereignty, as he claims, but rather out of a fanatical belief, articulated by Murray Rothbard, that states are immoral constructs to be abolished in favor of an anarchist paradise that only his demented brain could conceive would work. He wants to undermine any foreign policy activity as a means of undermining the functions of the U.S. government, whereby he feels it would make it easier to entirely dismantle that government in the future.

I’m not making this up… I’ve read enough of this lunacy to understand Ron Paul’s agenda from the inside out.

There is a strong tendency for people susceptible to crazy ideas to coalesce toward crazier yet ideas on miscellaneous topics. I have always been a big AGW skeptic, but it’s so unsettling to see Climate Change denial strongly correlated with anti-vax lunacy and creationism, that I am going to dive head-first into the scientific data to reexamine my position on AGW. Yes, insanity by association has quite some clout.

Yet, however Ron Paul and his circle have me sickened to my stomach, monetary policy is a field I have been interested in long before ever hearing his name, and which I have painstakingly studied at university (I’m an Economics major with a specialization in finance, but my academic interests revolve around monetary policy).

re: #229 Charles

The reality is that almost no reputable economists believe the gold standard is a viable basis for a modern economic system. One of the main causes of the Great Depression, in fact, was … the gold standard. If we ever had a government that tried to re-establish the gold standard, our current economic troubles would look like a walk in the park. It’s a recipe for global disaster.

And the idea of abolishing the Federal Reserve is nearly as crazy.

You are correct that the gold standard is shunned by virtually all mainstream economists. But theirs, while being expert opinions, have historically shifted with time on every economic topic, often making 180, and even 360 degree turns. Economics is not like science in that controlled experiments are not possible. What economists do is try to retroactively come up with rationalizations that would fit with the course of economic events, and they hope that their rationalizations provide useful in the future. To cement their theories, or at least give them an air of scientific rigor, they often use a lot of statistical modeling, the suitability of which to economic phenomena has come under attack by one of the most brilliant polymaths of our century. Though approaching the topic from an entirely original angle, Mandelbrot’s findings validate a lot of Mises’s and Hayek’s early thinking.