Fed Audit and Ron Paul

Here is an editorial from the New York Sun about Ron Paul and his proposal to fully audit the New York Fed.  Here is an example of an issue where the liberal-left and the 'Paulites' can unite to oppose the shenanigans of the financial Establishment:

It is tempting to express disappointment at the watering down the Senate did to Congressman Ron Paul’s vision of how to audit the Federal Reserve. Dr. Paul himself is, in an interview with the Sun this morning, characterizing the Senate’s bill as only “slightly better than nothing.” He is even warning, “It does political harm,” in that it gives the Fed “cover — and people can hide from it.” The bill that cleared the Senate is aimed at finding out merely what the Fed did during the recent bailouts but not what it is doing, say, at the discount window or in the way of loans to other central banks and governments and international financial institutions. It may lead to an auditing merely of procedures and not of numbers. The right move in the House-Senate conference is a pursuit of a wide audit that would open the Fed to daylight.

In the longer scheme of things, however, it’s possible to see the a more encouraging side to this story, at least for those of us who came in to the campaign for monetary reform in the 1970s, after President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971 and brought Bretton Woods to its bang-less, whimpering end. A decade later Congress established the United States Gold Commission. The commission backed the current system. But it produced Dr. Paul’s famous minority report, in which the congressman from Texas was joined by another member of the commission, Lewis Lehrman, a New York businessman and intellectual. Now here we are, albeit 30 years later, and a version of what Dr. Paul has been asking for, even if a watered down version, has passed the Senate 96 to zero, and Dr. Paul ranks nearly even in the polls with the sitting president.