End The Fed
- May 3, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: 20 hours ago
Let's finally give the Boogeyman a name: the Federal Reserve.
Original Proposal: The Creature From Jekyll Island
-G. Edward Griffin
Policy Recommendation: End the Fed.* I'm open to keeping the Fed as a lender of last resort should we have another COVID. What I want to eliminate is active management of our economy, proliferation of inflation and the global lending that has become commonplace.
We used to be a country. We rioted over a tax on our tea. Now, most of us don't even know we're being charged the worst tax of all: inflation.
Imagine this: you bought a pair Jordan’s and keep them in mint condition. Unworn and still in the box, holding them for value. Then the Jordan brand decides to make 10 million more pairs. How would you feel? Despite massive gaslighting, the same is true about money itself and since 2018, the amount of money grew 66%¹.
People will tell you not to worry. They'll use big words and say it's a difference of economic thought, your money won't lose it's value. I believed them. I thought it was a well intentioned disagreement. Then I read, G. Edward Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island. It turns out, our third central bank was the brain child of bankers and politicians who conspired at Jekyll Island, GA (can't make this up) before trojan horsing their cartel through Congress.
Thomas Paine — the author of Common Sense — thought that cheapening the value of money was so corrosive to justice that he wanted it treated as a capital crime. Writing about legal tender laws, which forced creditors to accept depreciated paper money in place of the gold or silver a contract actually called for, he didn't mince words: "the punishment of a member who should move for such a law ought to be death."² Yikes. Today, that would include most of D.C.
Paine wasn't writing about central banks — he was writing about compulsion: a government declaring its paper must be accepted, no matter what it's actually worth. That mechanism never left. Every dollar the Fed issues carries legal tender status: you cannot refuse it, and you cannot demand payment indexed to what it was worth last year. The law forces acceptance at face value, however much that value has eroded.
Paine's target was state assemblies printing paper to dodge their debts. Ours is a central bank printing dollars and letting legal tender law do the rest — compelling wage earners, pensioners, and savers alike to accept whatever the dollar's worth by the time it reaches them. The tool changed. The compulsion didn't.
Griffin lays out seven reasons we should do what our founding father's did and EndTheFed.
The Fed is incapable of doing its job
Congress gave the Fed two jobs, and they can't do either. The first is to keep prices stable, but that's like asking a fox to guard the henhouse. The Fed operates by creating new money which destabilizes prices. In economic speak, the phrase is: "Inflation is always a everywhere a monetary phenomenon."³ In english: the person who controls the money controls inflation.
Employment cycles are exacerbated by a debt fueled economy. More on this later.
The Fed is a cartel operating against the public interest
Too Big To Fail is socialism, not capitalism. Banks should be allowed to fail, because capitalism is a profit and loss system. Losses act as natural selection, rewarding good decisions while at the same time penalizing bad ones.
Instead, our Fed bails out banks when they made horrible decisions. There's no incentive to improve when you can be as risky with no repercussions. The bail out dance happens in three steps:
A bank gets itself on the verge of bankruptcy
The bank tells Congress: "If we fail, the entire global economy will crash."
Congress bails them out with our money
Obama presided over the greatest wealth transfer in history by bailing out the banks after the 2008 crisis. Then a populist in Trump came to power. We need to connect these dots.
Below are infamous bail outs of private companies and NYC, totaling almost $12 billion.
We have systemic issues to fix, but the tagline isn't; "Boo, capitalism!". It's: "think harder." Sometimes the problem is socialism, other times unfair competition, and other times it is capitalism.
The Fed is the supreme instrument of usury
When money is just paper, and not a limited resource like gold, whoever controls it has infinite profits. They can simply create more at no cost to them and lend it out with interest. It's called usury.
Loans used to come from real savings—one person saves, another borrows. The Fed broke that logic.
The Fed destabilizes the economy
The Fed was sold to us as a shock absorber — the institution that would smooth out the booms and busts of a wild, unmanaged economy. Instead, it built the rollercoaster it promised to prevent.
Business cycles aren't random. They're manufactured. Ludwig von Mises laid out the mechanism in his Theory of Money and Credit: when a central bank expands credit beyond what real savings can support, it doesn't create wealth, it creates a mirage. Businesses see cheap money and read it as a signal that capital is abundant. They expand, hire, and borrow accordingly. But the signal is false. The savings were never actually there. Eventually reality catches up, and the very boom the easy money financed becomes the bust that unwinds it.
Even Milton Friedman proved this isn't theoretical. His Monetary History of the United States showed the Fed had one job during the Great Depression: manage the money supply and stop the bank runs. It let the money stock collapse by a third instead, turning a bad recession into the worst economic catastrophe in American history. The Fed didn't just fail to prevent the crash. Its own hand was on the lever that made it a depression.
That's the pattern. Since going off the gold standard in 1971, the U.S. has weathered seven recessions — one roughly every seven years. The frequency isn't even the damning part. What's changed is what happens in between: the booms run longer, hotter, and more leveraged, because they're financed by credit expansion instead of real savings. And an economy built on borrowed time doesn't deflate gently. It snaps.
You can watch the mechanism run in real time. The Fed prints $200 billion, credit gets cheap, and the economy booms — right on schedule. Then, to fight the inflation that boom created, the Fed slams the brakes. Small businesses that borrowed on the promise of cheap money can't service the debt. Jobs vanish. Credit freezes.
Here's what gets lost in all of it: money isn't what improves well-being. Productivity is. By letting suits in D.C. actively manage the economy through the credit system, we forgot that. Money is supposed to facilitate growth — a cog, not the main feature. The Fed has spent a century treating the cog like the engine.
The Fed generates the most unfair tax
Our society is divided between people who own things and people who don't. The Fed widens this divide.
If you own stocks or homes, their value rises when prices go up. You did nothing, but own things that are now more valuable. But if you're shopping for your first home, the prices are rising faster than your paycheck. You're poorer.
This is what happened during COVID. A lot of the new money printed by the Fed ended up in the stock market and real estate, which is why the prices went up. Instead of letting prices fall, we kept them artificially high and now normal Americans are priced out of the American dream.
This tax--paying more for the same things--gets by because we can't collectively see the link between the Fed creating more money and why the cost of living keeps going up. It's the Fed. It's inflation. It's the most unjust tax that we've been gaslighted to think doesn't come from whoever controls the money.
The Fed encourages war
Peace and the Fed, in its current version, cannot co-exist. Griffin shows the history of how central banks propagate war. It's named after the people who first discovered it: The Rothschild Formula. This is why the US is talking about going to war in the middle east in 2025 like it's 2001.
The Rothschild Formula:
War is the ultimate discipline of any government.
To ensure governments maintain and expand debt, it must therefore be involved in war or other crisis of similar magnitude.
By financing the enemy, a credible threat of war can be created from another side.
Governments that decline to finance war through debt are eliminated by financing opposition and revolution. (Here Griffin uses the example of Napoleon Bonaparte.)
To sustain this process, both sides are financed to ensure the perpetual threat of war.
The Fed makes war easy to wage by removing the need for democratic approval. Without it, wars must be funded through direct taxation—which we resist. But with a central bank, the government can quietly print as much money as it needs, fueling conflict without consent.
The Fed is an instrument of totalitarianism
Call it bad luck, but the Fed keeps putting our money in the pockets of bad people. Through its collaboration with the World Bank and IMF, the Fed funded human atrocities under the name of “development.”
In Indonesia, Suharto ran a police state while receiving more World Bank funding than nearly any other country. In Ethiopia, during the brutal rule of Mengistu Haile Mariam, their Ministry of Agriculture that was committing the genocide was getting paid by the World Bank the whole time.
The same pattern repeated in Zaire (now the DRC), where Mobutu Sese Seko stole billions while his people lived in poverty—World Bank loans continued to flow.
The map below shows the deaths from state violence and the amount of aid received by the World Bank. The deaths are direct deaths sustained in battle, not including forced famines or deaths not sustained in combat and therefore greatly underestimate the true count.
Though they didn't receive aid at the time, note the scale of conflict in the former Yugoslavia during this period. After the country's breakup conflict led to the ethnic cleansing of Bosniak Muslims by Slobadan Milosevic. A powerful account of these events can be found in Stripping Bare the Body.
These loans weren't just wasted—they kept tyrants in power. The Fed, through its role in international finance and central banking coordination, funded repression.
If inflation is a tax, then international lending is empire-building. And the Fed makes both possible.
End the Fed.*
“M2.” FRED, 28 July 2026, fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS.
Ibid., p. 408.
Friedman (1970), p. 24.
