[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 6 (Wednesday, January 20, 2010)]
[House]
[Pages H245-H246]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    FREE COMPETITION IN CURRENCY ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I rise at this time to talk about a piece of 
legislation that I have recently introduced. That legislation is H.R. 
4248. It is called the Free Competition in Currency Act. I believe long 
term this is a piece of legislation that will play an important role in 
the monetary reform that will be a necessity if we continue to do what 
we have been doing with our economy and our financial system.
  We are in the middle of a financial crisis today. Some people think 
we have turned a corner, but, quite frankly, I do not believe that has 
occurred. Recently, though, we have just had the opening bells of an 
inquiry into what the cause of the crisis has been. It is the Financial 
Crisis Inquiry Commission. It is a take-off of the Pecora Commission 
that was established in the 1930s to figure out why the crash occurred 
then. Of course, that commission met and talked to people. They tried 
to figure out what was the matter. And from my viewpoint, they came 
down with all of the wrong conclusions. They said that the Federal 
Reserve was

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involved, that the Federal Reserve didn't print enough money fast 
enough and they didn't have a big enough bailout package and they 
needed a lot more regulation.
  So they did all of those things for the first time in our history, 
under the two administrations, the Hoover and the Roosevelt 
administrations, and they prolonged the Depression. They took a 1-year 
depression/recession and turned it into a 15-year depression.
  So I believe what we are going through right now is the same old song 
and dance. We are doing the same thing again. We have this new inquiry, 
and the members of the commission are people who didn't see it coming, 
didn't explain it, and didn't anticipate it. And the people who are 
coming before the commission, as far as I can see so far, had no 
anticipation or are acting surprised that the crisis came and that 
there was a bubble. So I can hardly see any good results coming from 
this.
  My position over the many years has been that the Federal Reserve is 
a dangerous organization because it creates the bubble. Our country 
would be better off with a strong central bank like the Federal 
Reserve. I argue from a moral, economic, and a constitutional viewpoint 
that it has no right to exist and it is very dangerous to us.
  I am very pleased, though, that one of the pieces of legislation I 
introduced, H.R. 1207, to audit the Federal Reserve, has met with a 
large amount of support. We have 316 cosponsors of that bill, and I 
think that is a major step in the right direction, looking to the 
Federal Reserve for the cause of our problem: the easy money system, 
the easy credit, the fixing of interest rates too low.
  Now, the reason I am addressing this is because I believe the 
correction has a long way to run and that eventually we will have to 
have monetary reform. Now, in spite of my position being that we don't 
need the Federal Reserve, I am not in favor of closing the Federal 
Reserve down in one day or two. But I do believe the monetary system 
will close down this government and the monetary system and the Federal 
Reserve and a lot of other things if we continue on our profligate ways 
of spending and borrowing and inflating the currency and regulating the 
currency, and this will get much worse until we have a total collapse 
of the system.
  So my bill, what it does is it introduces competition, competition in 
currencies. The Federal Reserve system and the dollar standard is run 
by a cartel, a monopoly. They don't allow competition because they know 
that they can't compete. Just as we have competition in the post office 
with FedEx and UPS, I think that the Federal Reserve deserves a little 
competition. The public school system has competition with private 
schools and it has competition with home schooling. There is no reason 
in the world that we can't enforce the Constitution, legalize the 
Constitution and say that we can have competitions in currencies, but 
there are three major things that we must do to do that, and the bill 
does this. We repeal legal tender laws and remove the monopoly control 
of the Federal Reserve. We legalize private mints so mints can mint 
coins, and they will be controlled by fraud laws and anticounterfeit 
laws.
  Today, our government commits fraud and counterfeit by printing money 
at will. If a private organization did that, they would be imprisoned 
for the fraud they are causing.
  But the other important reform that would have to occur for money to 
circulate and compete against the monopoly control of the Federal 
Reserve would be to take taxes off money. The Constitution says only 
gold and silver can be money, only that can be legal tender, so you 
can't tax it and allow it to be competitive.
  So these things could occur, and if nobody wanted to use it they 
wouldn't have to and everybody could be happy with the Federal Reserve. 
But if the conditions get so chaotic and the people are looking for an 
alternative, they can go and start operating in another currency.
  So this to me could provide a smooth transition. It would not be 
chaotic. It would be legalized in the Constitution. It would be good, 
sound economics; and, eventually, the most important thing it would do, 
it would restrain the spending of this Congress, because as long as you 
have a Federal Reserve over there willing to print up the money any 
time we spend more money that we don't have and we can't borrow, then 
the Federal Reserve will accommodate us. Therefore, I argue the case 
for competition in currency and strictly limit it in government.

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