Just finished End The Fed by Ron Paul. Pretty shit book. It had all the hallmarks of a radical utopian ideology a la Commuist Manifesto or Mein Kampf. He kept harping on about how everything will be better under a gold standard, but didn't explain what needed to be done to get there, nor the problems that would be created by the sudden move. He kept using evocative, incendiary and base language to describe what he sees as a grand conspiracy of the powerful, money-making elite, a rather far-fetched idea. Few of his facts and claims are supported by any cited data, he seemed to be under the impression that the states in America who can't issue their own money were more responsible than the federal government (despite many of them being on the verge of bankruptcy) and that if America did move to the gold standard that all of the selfish, greedy tendencies of the policy-makers would be magically curtailed by the limits imposed by the free-market, rather than the policy-makers continuing on as normal and running the country off a very steep cliff. He constantly wrote about how the End the Fed movement has so many supporters already, despite him openly admitting that most of them are just (naive) uni students. He kept harping on about how inevitable the collapse of the Fed is, but if it's so inevitable, why bother trying to convert people to support it? He spent the whole first two chapters just going on about how things were so much better back in his childhood before the Fed ruined everything, as though his clouded memory wasn't at all biased. He could barely write properly, constantly just paraphrasing the same catchphrases and avoiding discussing anything of importance or extrapolating on his statements.
All in all, shit book, poorly written.
Am now reading Guns Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond. Thus far, a far better writer than Paul.
