Ben Carson Illustrates Political Class Devotion to Central Planning

After the last Republican presidential debate, candidate Ben Carson told Fox Business host Neil Cavuto he wouldn’t necessarily remove Janet Yellen as head of the Federal Reserve. His reasoning was astonishingly shallow.

Did he articulate some in-depth policy insights to bolster his comments? Did he cite some kind of Yellen policy success? Did he appeal to her breadth of economic wisdom?

Nope.

He had a much deeper reason for keeping Yellen on:

Janet Yellen is a wonderful person. I’ve known her for many years.”

Well, there you have it. Yellen is a good person. That certainly qualifies her to micromanage the US economy.

Carson isn’t alone in his economic cluelessness. The number of these candidates willing to fundamentally challenge the status quo hovers somewhere near zero. Donald Trump illustrated the vast gulf between the presidential candidates shortly after Carson sounded off. Trump told Cavuto it was “very unlikely” that he would keep Yellen on. Then he hedged, saying it was too early to tell.

Notice what neither one of these candidates said – scrap the Fed and stop allowing politically connected central planners to tinker with the economy. In fact, Carson said we just need to have a “more responsible monetary policy.”

And these are the “free market” guys.

Carson wasn’t finished. Along with his general support of Yellen, he also asserted the Federal Reserve plays an indispensable role in the US economy, saying the country needs a central bank to tie our currency to something.

You mean like gold, Ben?

Herein lies the real problem: it is almost universally accepted within popular and political circles that economies need central bankers to make them work. The idea that money should be backed by gold is viewed as archaic.

Tom Woods recently addressed this very issue, tearing apart an article from the liberal website Think Progress on his podcast after an amateur economist/journalist attacked the gold standard. The truth is tying money to something tangible like gold stabilizes an economy. Jeffrey Herbener explained this on Woods’ podcast:

Under the classical gold standard there was the advantage of stability in maintaining the purchasing power of money, even though it may have had empirical drawbacks compared to say Bretton Woods.”

Is it a coincidence that China continues to stockpile gold as it seeks to elevate the status of the yuan on the world stage?

Herbener hints at the real issue members of the political class like Ben Carson have with the gold standard – it actually does tie money to something and makes it more difficult for central planners to tinker.

Perhaps it’s time we put a little less faith in the whims of the likes of Janet Yellen, Ben Carson and Donald Trump, and place a little more faith in gold.

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