A Novel Takes Flight

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:23:15 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Jim Davies at Strike the Root - a review of George F. Smith's novel, The Flight of the Barbarous Relic. A fictional account of a gold-standard believer, who puts on fiat currency robes to attain the office of Federal Reserve Chairman, then goes about destroying the Fed. If only. The Amazon comments pushed me over the edge, and I ordered a copy.

The story concerns a fictional Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, portrayed as a believer in gold, whom the back cover tells us is a "renegade", out to "destroy the Fed." The way in which he sets out to do so, in full public view, is highly imaginative and just credible; and part of that credibility comes from the historical fact that one in his position (Alan Greenspan) did and possibly still does actually believe in gold as money, or at least in a gold standard. Where Flight departs from history is that its character in that spot stops pretending and acts dramatically to expose the total, destructive fraud of fiat money, perpetrated these many decades by the deliberate policy of the Federal Government; it's what Greenspan might have done, but never did.

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