The light I want to share to those who are in the dark is very simple and down-to-earth: Count your blessings and thank them … do not grieve for their cost, which one may swear in total desperation worse than the curse of a condemned man in a slammer about to hang.

       Is the Federal Reserve the cause of our troubles yesterday, today and tomorrow? It is time to find out. The time of accounting for the year and the years we lived by has come. We have up to December 31st of 2008 to do it, either with grace or disgrace.

       Let’s face 2009 with hope, not despair. Majority of Americans are happy Barack Obama is going to be president starting this January, yet millions of Americans believed that because he is the nation’s elected president, the sky is about to fall.

      I share some of those concerns.  But the shining light I want others to share is to count our blessings rather than complain how much did it cost us to earn them. Historically there are great blessings indeed, with a hell of a price we paid for.

      Just a sample of a collective judgment of concerned Americans: Whatever hell-bent critics say about the falling sky, we have changed the political dynamics in the Middle East for the betterment of humankind by bringing up the light of liberty and freedom in that dark side of the globe.  It is a priceless American legacy to the world. Only those who are still inside their cocoon of prejudice would deny this historical achievement.

      We planted not necessarily our flag but the seeds of freedom in Iraq to grow and spread like branches of the Great Sherman Tree that provide a protected shield of security and comfort against  political persecutions, religious intolerance and cultural bondage,  against despotisms, fear and ignorance, specifically to millions of our Muslim brethrens in the Arab world we have just awakened.

       Here at home, we put terrorists on the run.  If not for this war on terror the Bush Doctrine had declared to serve notice to those who would like to destroy us, who knows – you might not have been able to read this year-end editorial assessment of this nation’s annual cost and benefit because terrorists would have made America their killing field and you and I would have been consigned to our final resting place six feet below the ground.

       No matter what the disgruntled elements say in our present society that is shifting to the left – especially rabid radicals consumed by hate -- Mankind owed it to the man who did it – George W. Bush, president of the United States.

       And what is the cost we are paying? We have thousands of unmarked graves of unknown soldiers throughout the land; we have what the Arlington Cemetery stands for – to use a metaphor that aptly describes the cost of war in a euphemistic way. 

       Think of the injury of war to the undead or the living dead that is beyond monetary estimation.  The billions of dollar we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot compare when we make an accounting of what our society had suffered and lost.  Our sadness for what we have lost for the joy of freedom we have won has no words to describe what really the heart has captured to make us hide those teardrops that fall.  So let us grant and admit this without any further argument.

       But let me remind you also that diamonds sparkle only when subjected to the most extraordinary grind that is unthinkable.  It speaks of the great American people when they come out of the greatest troubles they have had that throughout the years have been indescribable.  Our thanks to the president of the United States, who walked us out of the minefield of troubles when those in the dark side wanted to destroy us, had melted under the heat of ingratitude as the nation moves from the center to the left.

      Thus if during the last days of the old year we are gazing through our crystal balls to review the past and welcome the New Year, we see a mix of ignominious trivialities and great achievements, a touch of glee and gloom, a picture of discontent and triumphs.

       To switch on the light to share so that others may see through this glass darkly, let us review some of these troubles and see if these are bad enough for the dead to rise from their grave with remorse and stump their feet in protest.  

       Is the Federal Reserve the cause of all our troubles yesterday, today and tomorrow? That’s the trouble … we have less of Federal Reserve that’s why we have this financial troubles now punctuated with heavy bailouts!

      To abolish the Fed is a bad, bad Christmas wish for the holiday season, and a ghastly hope for the New Year and the coming years. Everybody is happy at Yuletide because it is a time of joyful redemption, except the Antichrist that’s said to be cheerless and depressed every time Christendom celebrates the birth of Christ.

       It may be surprising for the rest of us to know that many Americans share this gloom from the dark side. They are not just unhappy in the midst of the season’s merriment and merrymaking but also resentful of life in America. They need somebody to hang by the neck or someone to throw their dirty boots at to vent their anger.

       President Bush is a favorite target of this hellish rage even at Christmastime. Like that Iraqi journalist in Baghdad that caught the attention of the world with his flying shoes, they really believe that Bush is responsible for all and every imaginable corruptions that occurred in the year 2008.

       Instead of exchanging gifts on Christmastime, in anger they kick something else to represent a gift-wrapped present for America.

       For example, demonizing the nation’s central bank with quixotic argumentation the worst of it is purely acrobatic, impractical if not nonsensical economics, is a macabre way of welcoming a Very Unhappy New Year!

       Unhappy because to simplify life in America without the Fed, is simply suggesting that Americans should demonetize and warp back to the economics of the cave. 

       Just imagine what life would be to the 21st century Americans without income taxes, banks, paper money, clearing houses, stock exchange, mortgages, credit and more of its kind, and what have you … doing away all these out of rage or spite in a revolutionary crusade or societal rebellion is nothing less than heedlessly dismantling the sophisticated infrastructures of the world’s richest and most advanced economy that ever graced this planet!

       For thirty years, England’s most celebrated survivor of the wild named Robinson Crusoe lived a life without a Fed to think and worry about.  Anyone who dreams of a guileless financial community yet want luxuries or embellishments to become rich and richer using the banks, mortgage loans, credit institutions and the stock exchange market just to mention a few, must be this millennium’s lost Robinson Crusoe.

      To this day from the time they were born, those who never heard of the existence of banks or never used credit in their life, must be living in the boondocks of America if not in a remote island light years away from civilization.

       But today no single American -- either suffering a terrible privation in the wilderness of Africa or mental illness in the asphalt jungle of Chicago, home of the charmed ones where Bill Ayers and president-elect [allegedly-Kenyan-born] Barack Obama met to forge a lasting professional friendship -- claims to be a castaway like Crusoe, and America is not a tiny island in the Caribbean, an unmarked dot in the map in a screwy comparison. 

        If by some freak accident or miraculous incident seen through a hallucinating mind more than 230 million Americans are cast off to some remote island infested with cutthroat thieves, pirates and ferocious cannibals, then we have no need of Federal Reserve that we now live with in this advance and complicated life in a push-button economy otherwise known as the United States of America, the riches and the most powerful nation on the planet!

       Records show that we tried to control these financial troubles from turning into a nationwide contagion that it is now. But the Democrats raised hell when regulatory control was needed at the time irregularities were discovered in the nation’s leading mortgage banks and lending institutions.  Now we are reaping the harvest of this folly.

        In the height of congressional investigations, recall that the Democrats raised hell calling the legislative inquiry a “political lynching”. Now, we are at the worst of this seemingly unstoppable “financial lynching”.

       Abolitionists were against the Fed because they see “control” of excesses in the private sector as a harmful “intervention” in our free market system.  They hated the Fed so much they feel their hatred gnawing deep down the marrow of their bones. 

      If you want to find out how mad are they, access those video reports in the Internet and understand the shock of their protests against regulatory control the Fed represents.

      In Foxnews, the public had a preview of the garrulous Democrat in Congress named Barney Frank, Chairman of the Financial Services Committee, joined by his political cohorts who reportedly just “sat by as mortgage brokers while Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae made bad loans".  And when this led us to the present financial crisis, look who you think they are scapegoating … the Federal Reserve.

     There is no need to second-guess the outcome when trouble-makers argue for the abolition of the Fed. Like scorned economists full of blasts and blames, they are making the current worsening economic situation even worse. Fed-bashers deserved their iniquitous moniker – the Abolitionists.

     Abolitionists want the standard of gold and silver reintroduced instead of full faith and reliance on government in the use of credit and paper money.  That’s going backward.  It is not appropriate for the advance and sophisticated economy of the United States.  Review the lessons of history in economics.  There are always important teaching moments to learn from.

      The 1970s’ worst inflation was not caused by the Fed as erroneously claimed by radical Abolitionists.  It was triggered by OPEC when they raised the cost of oil sky-high out of greed.  It resulted in worldwide inflation and stagflation.

      We often hear this mantra of protest -- abolish the Fed and let the National Treasury take over its functions. Revolutionary politicians and followers claim the Fed is run by “thieves”. Without proof of the reported thievery, their demonstration of hostility is “trenchy” and gutter-like. It is a boorish craving to reinvent America for the year 2009 onward. 

        What they do not tell the public is that central banking is not, and has never been the function of the Treasury.  A little review of the workings of economics and the role of central banks will shed a shining light of knowledge for the failing eyes of gloom and doom to see.

      The intricate functions of the Fed in the U.S. economy are not synonymous to the deteriorating value of gold and silver held in reserve with other reserve currencies. That’s the short end of the Abolitionists’ prognosis of the role of central banks.

       In international economics, the ups and downs of the values of gold and silver held in reserve and the currency issued are determined by the condition of the economy affected by the balance of payments and the country’s ability to pay or settle debts. It is not deteriorated by manipulation -- as what Abolitionist pointed out the Fed is doing out of greed -- but by the expanding demand to meet the need of the time. The central bank restores and maintains order in an otherwise chaotic financial community.

       The IMF was established in the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 to address the problems of balance of payments and to stabilize the exchange rates of international currencies.  Like the central bank, it issued paper money called S.D.R. [Special Drawing Rights for countries in trouble] badly needed when liquidity is growing less rapidly than the growth of exchanges of goods and services, to prevent the contraction of trade. Thus the ultimate function of the IMF is more or less similar to that of the Fed, in the global economy.

      A bird’s eye-view of the role of the U.S. Federal Reserve is described in the editorial I wrote: Abuse of the Fed.  

      It is incorrect to say that the Fed can regulate the supply of money but cannot control the velocity of money attributed as the cause of our economic debacle.  In the Quantity Theory of Money, the equation of exchange is MV=PQ.  The quantity of money can be determined and the velocity of exchange can be controlled with aggregate demand [AG.D.] as a key determinant. 

      Thus it can be shown in this equation how many times a dollar has been spent in a certain period of time given the total quantity of output, goods and services.

      I wrote a critique of the Fisher Equation. The problem is which unit you will hold constant. If velocity is held constant in determining the quantity of money [Q], you bump with the problem of quasi-money and credit instruments used in the transactions.   

      Inversely, if you hold Q constant in determining velocity [V], expenditures rise when consumers withdraw mutual funds or use credits extended by financial intermediaries. It means AG. D. is determined by liquidity in the economy leading to the Keynesian fiscal policy of controlling expenditures or AG. D. This gives an idea of the technicality of how inflation is controlled through fiscal and monetary policies.

     It should also give a good idea to critics who are obviously unaware when they lampoon the financial need for institutional assistance and reconstruction, that the critical objective of the current massive financial rescues of banks and lending institutions that are going under is to create and maintain LIQUIDITY.  It is so critical that without this emergency financial assistance of the Federal government, banks, lending institutions and corporations will run out of cash [liquid financing] and the economy will ground to a halt.

       One may wonder why Abolitionists and the radical Left are so bitter over the distribution of this programmed rescue package that is critically necessary.  Why they are blatantly impervious to the eventual collapse of the economy portends a lot of questionable intentions.

       At least they should know why foreign economies want to help the United States fund the solution to this financial meltdown. The failure to address this economic trouble promptly would create a larger problem, which would eventually catch up with them and pull the global economy down the drain. International anarchy will reign and nations will declare war in the struggle for survival as what the history of the causes of wars tells us in so many disturbing paces, disquieting phrases and stresses.

      Indeed, there is no other outcome more terrifying if we deconstruct America starting from the abolition of the Federal Reserve, than for Americans reverting to the life of the cave, which after all, if probable is next to the impossible.

     But even as a Yuletide wish, that’s not the kind of hope we want for the coming New Year.  We should be graceful rather than disgraceful and irresponsible in making an accounting of the year 2008 and beyond.

       We shouldn’t wish something we do not want, or welcome the Year 2009 with a retarded hope of a juvenile delinquent to deface and defame our duly established institutional infrastructures and destroy America with such a foolish make-over, and start all over again a life in the cave. #

© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Freedomsphoenix.com access December 29, 2008.

The writer is an award-winning journalist. Know more about the author by reading his published editorials and feature articles or you may e-mail your comment at ed.superx722@yahoo.com.sg