For Barney Frank, No Fed Dissent Will Do
5th October 2011
George Will puts his gun in the barrel and pulls the trigger.
Fond of diversity in everything but thought, a certain kind of liberal favors mandatory harmony (e.g., campus speech codes). Such liberals, being realists at least about the strength of their arguments, discourage “too much” debate about them (e.g., restrictions on campaign spending to disseminate political advocacy). Now Frank wants to strip the presidents of the Fed’s 12 regional banks of their right to vote as members of the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee.
Frank is a Democrat, you see, so he loves freedom — freedom of speech, especially.
Frank says he has “long been troubled” from a “theoretical democratic standpoint” by the “anomaly” of important decisions affecting national economic policy being made by persons “selected with absolutely no public scrutiny or confirmation.” It was not, however, until August that this affront to Frank’s democratic sensibilities became so intolerable that he proposed a legislative remedy.
Hey, nothing is more democratic than suppressing incorrect opinions.
Nevertheless, it is notable that the left now has its Ron Paul. Notable and, in a sense, appropriate because one of liberalism’s steady aims is to break more and more institutions to the saddle of centralized power.