When I hear Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke heralded as the savior of our economy, I am reminded of Robert Higgs's description of a metaphorical street fair, "one of those happy community gatherings at which sellers of handcrafted ceramics, funky clothing, herbal remedies, and fresh vegetables congregate to display their wares for the strolling customers, who chat amiably with the stall-keepers and with one another. Suddenly, amid horrified shrieks and the roar of a giant engine, a truck plows through this placid setting, scattering twisted debris and broken bodies in its wake. Finally, after wreaking a hundred-yard swath of death and devastation, the truck stops, and the driver, Ben Bernanke, climbs down from the cab.

"'Do not panic. I am here to assess the damage,' Bernanke explains, 'and make recommendations for reforms that will prevent a recurrence of this unfortunate and wholly unforeseen act of God.'

"Undismayed by the swelling chorus of curses and groans, the truck driver addresses the gathering crowd of stunned onlookers. 'We must have a strategy that regulates the street fair system as a whole not just its individual components.' He then methodically lays out a series of recommendations for strengthening the construction material of stalls and regulating their placement along the street, for ensuring that each transient merchant has an adequate capital cushion against such crises, for monitoring fruitmongers and hippy artists deemed 'too big to fail,' to keep them from taking excessive risk . . .

"'Moreover,' he continues, 'street fairs are too important to be left to each town to regulate.' He proposes that the rules be harmonized among the mayors of all the world's great cities and that a global street-fair authority be created to monitor street-fair risks and protect the people from accidents like the one that just occurred . . ."

Of course Bernanke only drives the Federal Reserve truck, which is owned by international bankers who would also like to own the surviving free marketeers in the aforementioned scenario. The payoff to the bankers, whose interests Bernanke protects and promotes under the guise of stabilizing our economy, is that the street fair merchants would have to take out loans in order to meet the new, improved street fair standards.

Since a bank-controlled Congress abdicated its Constitutional responsibility to regulate the nation's money supply and gave the job to the Federal Reserve in 1913, the dollar has lost 90 percent of its purchasing power through the Federal Reserve's printing of unbacked paper money and debt creation. The growth of the banking community's control over our economy and government has been steady and quiet for most of the past 100 years, but early in this century the bankmeisters got greedy even by barnyard swine standards, made some wild gambles, lost their hides, and came to their man in the Treasury Dept. to bail them out with taxpayer money in concert with Congress and the Federal Reserve. This has worked out pretty good for the bankers and their shareholders -- for example, current U.S. Treasurer Tim Geithner's 98,000 shares of Goldman-Sachs have tripled in value since the bank bailouts began last fall.

But the taxpayer rescue of big banks has not had a soothing effect on those straining to pay the interest on their mortgages and pay off their student loans and credit cards. Their anger has helped them coax over 250 of their representatives in Congress to co-sponsor with Congressman Ron Paul a bill which would take some power from the bankers and return it to Congress.

In 1950, the law which created the Federal Reserve was amended to exempt the Federal Reserve from any auditing procedures. It is entrusted with our money supply, including hundreds or billions of dollars of bailout money and all it can print, and has zero accountability. The Federal Reserve Transparency Act, H.R. 1207, would subject the Federal Reserve to congressional auditing.

"If we get the audit and get the books open, make them answer the questions," Paul said, "I am convinced that the American people will be so outraged that then we will have reform of the monetary system . . . we will be forced to live within our means."

In 1942 in a short war propaganda film called Inflation, the devil consults with Hitler about how to defeat America. The devil's idea was to help Hitler by giving Americans easy credit and drowning us with debt so we'd be too poor to support the war effort. The devil's plan didn't work soon enough to help Hitler, but, though the film was fiction, the post-war proliferation of credit cards, debt, and inflation have grown into an ugly reality that has spread to the point that now we can barely support ourselves without government assistance -- and the government really has nothing to offer us but more debt.

Free enterprise is not to blame for our economic crisis. It is the subversion of our marketplace by an elite ruling class of control freaks aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve that has turned our once peaceful and prosperous street fair into a tattered remnant of its former self. If we can discipline ourselves to live within our means, and compel the keepers of the public trust to do the same, we can repair the damage and restore America to its status as a haven for those who value freedom, fairness, and opportunity.