1. The Federal Reserve System constantly decreases the value of our dollar by printing money out of thin air. (inflation)

2. Graph: The value of a $1 Federal Reserve Note in 1913 dollars (the year the Fed was created).

3. The Fed even recognizes its inflationary activity. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says: “When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover the check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check there is no bank deposit on which that check is drawn. When the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.”

4. American economist Irving Fisher said: “Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.”

5. If you or I did what the Fed does when it prints money, we would be found guilty of counterfeiting and locked up for a very long time!

6. The reason you or I would be arrested for counterfeiting is it’s theft! Every bill you create in bad faith, which doesn’t actually represent the creation of real goods and services, real value that has improved life by directing resources to their most productive uses, is a lie and an appropriation of value from the rest of the world, which gives the counterfeiter goods and services in exchange for nothing, because he or she did not actually create anything of value in return.

7. This is true of what the Federal Reserve does: “Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities, intrinsically, a ‘dollar’ bill is just a piece of paper. Deposits are merely book entries.” – Modern Money Mechanics Workbook, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 1975

8. “The Fed creates absolutely nothing. It does not produce a single grain of wheat to feed people, a single drop of oil to power the engines of an industrial economy, nor a single ingot of metal from the ground to build the products and buildings that improve our lives.” -Wesley Messamore

9. This situation, in which you or I would be arrested for doing something the Federal Reserve does every day, is the hallmark of institutionalized theft and a legal system turned on its head. As French economist Frederic Bastiat said in the 19th century: “But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply… See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”

10. The inflation that results from the Federal Reserve’s massive counterfeiting operation steals from hardworking Americans by diminishing the value of the money they earn.

11. This destroys the purchasing power of the American people by causing the price of everything (like groceries and gasoline) to rise.

12. In this way, inflation works as a hidden tax– one of the steepest and worst taxes Americans have to pay.

13. “Inflation has now been institutionalized at a fairly constant 5% per year. This has been determined to be the optimum level for generating the most revenue without causing public alarm. A 5% devaluation applies, not only to the money earned this year, but to all that is left over from previous years. At the end of the first year, a dollar is worth 95 cents. At the end of the second year, the 95 cents is reduced again by 5%, leaving its worth at 90 cents, and so on. By the time a person has worked 20 years, the government will have confiscated 64% of every dollar he saved over those years. By the time he has worked 45 years, the hidden tax will be 90%. The government will take virtually everything a person saves over a lifetime.” -American filmmaker and lecturer, G. Edward Griffin

14. If government overtly raised the average American worker’s taxes to 90% tomorrow, there would be a revolution in this country. No American worker would tolerate the affront to his life and property.

15. “By this means government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft.” – John Maynard Keynes

16. Alan Greenspan wrote in one of his more sober moments before rising to Chair the Federal Reserve: “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation… This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”

17. Inflation hurts the poor and middle class the most because rising costs of living don’t affect the large budgets and lavish life-style of the wealthy nearly as much as they affect struggling middle class Americans who already struggle to pay for expenses at their present cost; and rising costs can positively break the budget of poor families who are already just barely making ends meet.

18. The Federal Reserve’s racket also hurts the poor and middle class the most because as inflation raises their cost of living, the Fed simply prints more money and lends it out at low interest to wealthy banking establishments, which can lend out and profit from the new money before it circulates, devalues the rest of the money, and raises everybody else’s prices.

19. In this way, central banking is unambiguously a policy of class warfare, a vicious economic war on poor and middle class working Americans, a blank check written out to the already wealthy establishment and signed with every bead of sweat and every aching muscle of every struggling wage earner in this country.

20. “Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money.” -U.S. Senator and politician, Daniel Webster

21. And this class warfare isn’t merely confined to the United States. It is no coincidence, after a decade of monetary expansion unprecedented in history, that dollar-traded global commodities like wheat are becoming so expensive, that food shortages in the Middle East are one of the most important (though least discussed) factors in the “Arab Spring” revolutions that have toppled governments. The banking establishment profits by investing in third world hunger.

22. For these reasons, any Occupy Wall Street supporter, any honest progressive, any purported friend to labor and working class interests, any humanitarian who seeks to relieve the world of poverty and hunger should make ending the Federal Reserve central banking system his or her number one priority.

23. Inflation has other perverse macroeconomic effects that make us all less prosperous. For example, it rewards people who live beyond their means at the expense of people who save because it is easier to pay off today’s debts with weaker future dollars.

24. This is why inflation encourages borrowing and debt while discouraging lending and saving.

25. In this way, inflation fuels rampant consumerism while keeping productive capital out of the market.

26. As a result, inflation slows economic growth and the creation of real value.

27. This is one of the major factors in what caused the economic contraction that Americans are currently still suffering through.

28. Before the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, economic contractions were called “Panics” and were usually very short lived. It was after the creation of the Fed, that the United States would sink into multiple, deep, and long-lasting recessions and depressions.

29. American economist Milton Friedman said: “I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that… the severity of each of the contractions – 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 – is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.”

30. The Federal Reserve System pumps bank reserves full of paper “money” that it prints out of nowhere- as a result, banks over-lend because a bank lends on the basis of its reserves, and with an artificially-growing reserve, a bank will extend an artificially high amount of credit.

31. This is exactly what fueled the over-speculation that would ultimately cause the Great Depression. That’s right- the Fed caused the Great Depression.

32. American financier Bernard Baruch said: “Nothing did more to spur the boom in stocks than the decision made by the New York Federal Reserve bank, in the spring of 1927, to cut the rediscount rate. Benjamin Strong, Governor of the bank, was chief advocate of this unwise measure, which was taken largely at the behest of Montagu Norman of the Bank of England….At the time of the Banks action I warned of its consequences….I felt that sooner or later the market had to break.”

33. The Great Depression sunk the entire world into a global depression, creating the economic circumstances of desperation and dire poverty that allowed autocrats like Hitler and Mussolini to rise to power and assume to themselves “temporary” emergency powers.

34. Among other reasons, this means that the activities of the Federal Reserve may have been a contributing factor to the rise of National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and World War II.

35. The Fed is a major contributor to the start and duration of many other wars, as its unchecked ability to create money and lend it to the United States Treasury helps the regime in Washington to fund its protracted, interventionist wars overseas via borrowing and deficit spending, without overtly raising taxes on the American people so that they feel the immediate costs of war.

36. Knowing they have a seemingly endless reserve of money to borrow from in order to profit from war, the Fed’s very existence encourages rent-seeking behavior from major corporations in the military-industrial complex, who have every incentive to lobby for more war and bigger contracts for the weapons of war, while enlisting the media and an unwary public in the beating of the war drum.

37. The Fed and the currency it creates are likely responsible for many other wars in a more direct way. There is ample evidence to believe that Washington went to war in Iraq and Libya to topple regimes that threatened the hegemony of the dollar as the world’s currency for trading oil. The reason Washington has to go to war to protect the value of the dollar is because its value is a fiction to begin with, the result of its militarily and politically supported role as the world’s reserve currency, not the result of any real measure of productivity and wealth creation.

38. In this way, the Fed and the secondary and tertiary effects of its machinations on global politics and the economy result in the destruction of wealth, not only by theft via inflationary increments, not only by the resulting misallocation of resources to their less productive uses, but by the overt destruction in fiery explosions of capital and labor (labor here, is a euphemism for people’s lives, by the way) that happens in the course of war.

39. Meanwhile, the endless funding spigots of the Federal Reserve Bank serve as the source of the endless stream of “foreign aid” that Washington sends to its client states abroad by the tens of billions, despite having no money itself. This foreign aid mostly ends up in the hands of wealthy and corrupt military dictators like recently-deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

40. For all of these reasons, if you are earnestly antiwar, if you believe that the effects of war are destructive, horrific, unnecessary, and evil, then one of the most important things you can do to end the madness is cut off the funding for it by supporting an end to the Federal Reserve Bank.

41. In addition to the Great Depression and subsequent world-historical events that happened as a result of the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve was responsible for the stagflation of the 1970s, a period of economic contraction that happened concurrently with high inflation, something that was considered impossible according to the entire economic philosophy behind the Federal Reserve.

42. In a 2003 speech, even Ben Bernanke admitted this about the 1970s stagflation: “… the Fed’s credibility as an inflation fighter was lost and inflation expectations began to rise.”

43. The Fed also caused the over-speculation that happened during the 1990s Dot-Com bubble, which crashed and burned when the party was over and very little real value had been created by many of the Dot-Com companies.

44. The Fed also fueled the housing bubble which collapsed in 2008 along with the credit market, pulverizing the U.S. economy and hurting the lives of millions of honest, hardworking Americans.

45. The economic crashes caused by the Federal Reserve are always used as a justification for the government to get bigger, assume more powers, nationalize more industries, spend more money, and control more of our lives.

46. With a record like this, you’d think the failure of central banking would be universally accepted as true. The Fed’s twin mandates are price stabilization and job creation. With the dollar so radically diminished in value since the Fed’s creation and positively abysmal job creation over the last decade, the decade in which the Fed has been most active, the Fed fails to accomplish even its own goals on its own terms.

47. The Fed is quite literally an even bigger Ponzi scheme than the one Bernie Madoff perpetrated.

48. The Fed is not even a part of the U.S. government. It’s a secretive, private, central bank.

49. You heard that correctly: all of this power is concentrated in the hands of wealthy, private bankers, not the American government.

50. In fact, in Lewis vs United States, June 24, 1982, the 9th Circuit Court ruled that “the [Federal] Reserve Banks are not federal … but are independent privately owned and locally controlled corporations… without day to day direction from the federal government.”

51. As such, the Fed’s members and decision-makers are unelected officials who wield immeasurable power over our lives, property, and future.

52. Such power concentrated in the hands of so few is opposed to the republican values of the United States.

53. American economist Milton Friedman argued: “The power to determine the quantity of money… is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power… Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes – excusable or not – can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic – this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.”

54. As Congressman Louis T. McFadden said when speaking in the U.S. Senate: “The Federal Reserve banks are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this nation is run by the International bankers.”

55. American Founding Father, James Madison said: “History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it’s issuance.”

56. “It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” -Industrialist, Henry Ford

57. “Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.” -U.S. President, James A. Garfield

58. The Federal Reserve is secretive and lacking in transparency, a quality nearly universally accepted by Americans as a necessary part of proper governance and as a measure against corruption. There has never been a full, top-to-bottom, public audit of the Federal Reserve Bank.

59. The Fed’s apologists are constantly claiming that there is already plenty of transparency in the Federal Reserve System (even though there really isn’t) and fighting a full Fed audit tooth and nail, scare mongering about the politicization of monetary policy. What are they so afraid of the American people learning?

60. We audit the books of every publicly-traded corporation, but not the biggest and most powerful central bank in the world. Does that make any sense at all?

61. The Federal Reserve has spent even more money than the U.S. Congress in the last year without your vote, without your consent, without your power to stop it, and without any oversight from the American people.

62. “Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.” -English historian, Lord Acton

63. “Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.” -American author, Robert A. Heinlein

64. U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater said: “Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside of the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.”

65. When the American people recently did get a partial, one-time audit of the Federal Reserve in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and consumer protection bill, they learned about all kinds of corruption and suspicious activity at the Federal Reserve, which shows just why Fed apologists are so opposed to a full audit. Any observer cannot help but wonder what the partial audit didn’t uncover.

66. For instance: at the height of the financial crisis, from 2007 – 2010, the Federal Reserve created over $16 trillion out of thin air and loaned them out at functionally zero percent interest to foreign central banks and big Wall Street banks.

67. This might have been the largest single transfer of wealth in human history, the single greatest financial event to have ever happened, and it happened in secret, without your knowledge, without your consent, without your oversight, and when it was uncovered by the partial, one-time audit, even then it was hardly reported or discussed in the mainstream media.

68. This shows that even when the information is available, the Federal Reserve system has been uncannily insulated from public criticism, scrutiny, or even discussion. One is reminded of some cultures where it is considered bad luck to speak out loud of the devil.

69. The one-time Fed audit also revealed shocking conflicts of interest at the Federal Reserve that the public had not been aware of and would not have been without this public review of the Fed’s policies. At the New York Fed, for instance, many employees and contractors were allowed to keep investments in companies that received Fed loans. Think that might be a recipe for corruption?

70. The Federal Reserve System is unconstitutional.

71. American historian, George Bancroft wrote: “Madison, agreeing with the journal of the convention, records that the grant of power to emit bills of credit was refused by a majority of more than four to one. The evidence is perfect; no power to emit paper money was granted to the legislature of the United States.”

72. U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson said of chartering the first Bank of the United States (a precursor to the Fed we have today): “To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution.”

73. The Federal Reserve bank is a coercive monopoly, and coercive monopolies are bad.

74. Think about this: the Federal Reserve does with money what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did with housing.

75. Actually… the Federal Reserve does with housing, what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did with housing.

76. The Fed has perpetrated more abuse on the American people than Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and Enron combined, while hemorrhaging money like oil spilling out of the Gulf of Mexico (with just as much complacency from the federal government about doing anything to stop it).

77. In fact the Fed has played a direct role in creating the climate, circumstances, and means that made so much abuse from these other financial companies possible.

78. Woodrow Wilson, who was President at the time of the Federal Reserve’s creation, came to deeply regret signing the Federal Reserve Act into law.

79. He said: “I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by it’s system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world– no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.”

80. The Federal Reserve allows the government to overspend by lending it money out of thin air.

81. In fact, as Congressman Wright Patman said: “The Federal Reserve bank buys government bonds without one penny.”

82. This fuels and incentivizes the growth of big government to the detriment of small business and civil liberties.

83. “This [Federal Reserve Act] establishes the most gigantic trust on Earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized….the worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill.” – U.S. Congressman, Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr.

84. For these reasons, if you are an honest, limited-government conservative, if you believe government has gotten too big and overstepped its bounds, you should make abolishing the Federal Reserve System your number one priority.

85. The U.S. existed for over a hundred years without the Fed- the world will not end without it now. I promise.

86. The world certainly wouldn’t end as a result of auditing it.

87. “Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.” – Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920′s, the second richest man in Britain

88. “The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.” -Lord Acton

89. American reformer and abolitionist, Horace Greeley wrote of independent central banking: “While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.”

90. “To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.” -Economist, Fredrich von Hayek

91. “If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.” -U.S. Congressman, Robert Hemphill

92. “The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government … are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it.” -U.S. President, Andrew Jackson

93. “If Congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given to be used by themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.” -U.S. President, Andrew Jackson

94. “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” -U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson

95. “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.” -U.S. President, Thomas Jefferson

96. “Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value — zero.” -Enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire

97. “Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.” -U.S. President, George Washington

98. “We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people.” -U.S. Senator and politician, Daniel Webster

99. Auditing the Fed makes practical sense. Why would Democrats or Republicans want so much power in the hands of a small group of wealthy bankers? It is antithetical to both their political platforms and respective ideologies. Auditing and abolishing the Fed is a non-partisan solution to a serious problem.

100. If we don’t end the Fed soon: mark my words- THE DOLLAR WILL COLLAPSE. Period. No- exclamation mark!

—

Wesley Messamore, 24, also blogs at The Humble Libertarian. He has a nearly compulsive obsession with making “lists of 100,” like his list of 100 Ways Barack Obama Is Just Like George W. Bush; 100 Objections to Libertarianism with Libertarian Answers and Rebuttals; and his Top 100 Libertarian Blogs and Websites list, which is always in a process of revision.