Click the link, get your copy and read the whole book.  Clearly, such intellectual charity is not only rare but in the educational spirit of Mises.org. The subject matter is light-heavy but Woods, author of the bestseller Meltdown (reviewed here), navigates it with the smooth skill of a master, making the reader experience satisfying from beginning to end.

The title reflects another insight, paralleling as it does Albert Jay Nock's Our Enemy, the State.  Most of us were raised to believe government and its agencies serve our best interests.  As libertarian scholarship has shown the truth is the exact opposite, particularly with government's sleazy relationship with money and banking.  Admittedly, it's a hard idea to accept since it involves a pernicious breach of trust, but Woods makes it abundantly clear.  To our overlords we are easily-duped chattel.

Until Ron Paul decided to run for president and his End the Fed came along in 2009, the general public was mostly blind to the Fed's existence.  Austrians aside, the few who knew something about it — mostly university-trained economists on the take from the Fed — considered it a vital part of an advanced industrial economy.  Yet the Fed had been around for 96 years when Dr. Paul's book emerged.  Given that it's in charge of the money we use how did it remain in the shadows for tax-burdened citizens for nearly a century?  What's up with that?

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis tells us the Fed's congressional assignment is "to promote maximum employment and price stability." (Bold in original)  For these it talks about interest rates, and its aim is to increase the money supply so that prices rise gently at or around a 2% rate.

How gentle is a 2% rate?  After 10 years of 2% monetary inflation, it would take $121.90 to buy what $100 bought in year one.  But that's over a decade, and you might not notice it unless you're one of the hungry poor not on welfare.  The Fed's inflation of the money supply has been ongoing since it began operations in 1914, draining 96% of the dollar's purchasing power.