End The Fed
- Jack Connors
- May 3
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 24
Let's finally name the boogeyman: the Federal Reserve.
Original Proposal: The Creature From Jekyll Island
-G. Edward Griffin
Policy Recommendation: End the Federal Reserve
The worst economic lie I had to unlearn is that the cause of inflation is due to theoretical differences. Inflation — the most unfair tax, the origin of totalitarianism and inequality — is something we’ve handed over to the Fed, who uses it to achieve its true function. The Fed was created for, and acts as a cartel, using inflation to bail-out its member banks.
With so much talk of “structural [insert bad quality here]” yet so little tangible policy, Edward Griffin gives us one: end the Federal Reserve. He traces the origins of the Fed — from its secret inception on Jekyll Island, GA (you can’t make this up) to its third iteration as today’s Fed — and lays out seven reasons why we should follow our Founding Fathers and end the Fed.
The Fed is incapable of doing its job
The Fed was passed by Congress to keep prices stable, but that's like asking a fox to guard the henhouse. The Fed regularly does the very thing that causes inflation, creating new money. It does this to achieve it's true purpose of acting as a cartel for banks.
Hearing the true origin of our country's third central banks clarified the biggest hang up I had. I come from the school of: "inflation is always and everyone a monetary phenomenon." But the guy in charge of the Fed literally said, "monetary aggregates play no role in the formulation of monetary policy." I assumed it was a well intentioned difference of opinion.
Inflation isn't the Fed foe, it's its most trusted tool.
The Fed is a cartel operating against the public interest
Too Big To Fail is a lie. Banks should be allowed to fail, but the cartel that is the Fed won't allow it. This is how we end up bailing out companies:
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 the money they get from selling the Fed their debt
Below are infamous bail outs of private companies and NYC, totaling almost $12 billion.
This isn’t capitalism. Capitalism is a profit and loss system—where bad decisions carry consequences. But guaranteed bailouts let banks take reckless risks, knowing we'll eat the losses.
Bernie Sanders was right when he said we have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich. But the solution isn’t extending social to the poor—it’s ending it for the rich.
The Fed is the supreme instrument of usury
Usury is charging interest so exploitative it traps borrowers in debt—enriching the lender without offering real value in return. Think payday loans. The Fed is the most usurious institution of all.
In healthy economics, loans come from real savings—one person saves, another borrows. The Fed broke that logic. It allows banks to create money out of thin air, then charge interest on it. No real work, no real risk, no real contribution to society. Just profit off of conjured credit.
The Fed destabilizes the economy
The Fed was approved by Congress under the promise of smoothing out economic cycles and preventing crises. It’s done the opposite.
Credit cycles were credited for causing business cycles back in 1912 when Ludwig von Mises' Theory of Money and Credit. Since going off the gold standard in 1971, the U.S. has endured eight recessions—roughly one every 6 years. Prior to the Fed’s founding in 1913, and especially before 1971, recessions were less frequent and often less systemic.
Now our economy is dependent on debt expansion. When the Fed prints 200 billion dollars, the economy booms. But when it tightens (to fight the inflation it caused), everything crashes: small businesses fail, jobs vanish, and credit freezes.
If we were to pay off this debt, the money supply would shrink, guaranteeing recession. Good behavior is penalized.
The Fed generates the most unfair tax
We once rioted over a hidden tax on tea—now most don’t even realize being charged the most unjust tax of all: inflation.
It sounds anticlimactic, but it’s true—inflation destroys a society. It widens inequality by helping the rich and hurting the poor. If you own assets like homes or stocks, inflation helps you because people need to put their money somewhere. During COVID, much of the relief didn't trickle down and saw equities and homes surge in price.
But if you don’t, you're just left paying more for groceries that already take up a larger share of your paycheck.
The Fed encourages war
World peace and the Fed cannot co-exist. Griffin shows how the Fed is central to warmongers in what he calls the The Rothschild Formula. Here 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
The Fed props up authoritarian regimes abroad. Through its close relationship with the World Bank and IMF, the Fed funded human atrocities under the name of “development.”
In Ethiopia, during the brutal rule of Mengistu Haile Mariam (1977–1991), the exact Ministry of Agriculture that was committing the genocide was getting paid by the World Bank the whole time. The World Bank does some good work, but around 40% of those SMB loans are regime change missions.
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. In Indonesia, Suharto ran a police state while receiving more World Bank funding than nearly any other country.
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 under estimate 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.
