The pervasive lack of awareness of the Fed’s activities, as with so much else the government does, is what economists call “rational ignorance.” When it comes to educating ourselves, we spend most of our time and effort on our own education, jobs, family matters, paying the bills — our private lives. We spend very little time and effort learning about what the hundreds of government agencies of all types are doing. This is why the late Rush Limbaugh referred to most Americans as “low-information voters.”

Politicians have always understood this, which is why so many of them are habitual liars and deceivers. Indeed, when Alexander Hamilton made his case for creating a national bank run by politicians in his 1790 Report on a National Bank, his political nemesis, Thomas Jefferson, responded by saying that it was intentionally confusing, a subterfuge designed to fool the public into acquiescing to a vast, unconstitutional expansion of governmental powers. Jefferson was right on the money, as usual.

President Jackson famously vetoed the renewal charter of the Second BUS in 1832, and it eventually went out of business and into the dustbin of history. In his veto message to Congress, Jackson said that the BUS was an example of how “the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Such institutions “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.... The humble members of society ... who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.” …….

It’s not just bankers, Wall Street speculators, the real estate industry, and other related entities that profit from the Fed’s inflation and boom-and-bust policies. The State and all of its bureaucratic appendages benefit from the Fed’s legalized counterfeiting operation because the people are fooled into thinking they can get something for nothing, whether that “something” is subsidizing foreign wars that have nothing to do with defending America, an ever-expanding welfare state, free hotel rooms, welfare, smartphones, air transportation for illegal aliens, or anything else the government spends money on. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, for example, if governments were constrained to finance their projects with taxes instead of printing money, there would be far fewer wars, and the wars that did exist would be of shorter duration. The same can be said of all other federal government programs. Without the Fed, the federal government would be far closer to focusing on its core constitutional functions instead of the anything-and-everything of today.

To save the American economy from national bankruptcy, the Fed must be abolished by repealing the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, thereby getting the nation’s money supply out of the hands of politicians, bureaucrats, and their academic propagandists and special-interest benefactors. Private property, private enterprise, and competition in currency must be restored so that all of America can become a modern-day version of the Land of Dixie, with competitive currencies backed by more than the promises of lifetime-tenured politicians (as most members of Congress are, essentially) and self-serving federal bureaucrats and their academic court historians.