The Federal Reserve should be abolished.

This debate was over whether or not the FED should be abolished let me point out that allegations that a secret conspiracy illegally directed formation of the FED and continues to control it. But there are facts that we cant disregard (1) Years before the FED was formed, Supreme Court decisions had given Congress virtually total power over the U.S. monetary system and that power was used to advance easy-credit, fiat-money interests. (2) The FED bill was openly debated in Congress and before the American public, and it was passed with broad bipartisan support in a political and social climate that strongly favored the creation of a central bank. (3) The power of the member banks as stockholders of the FED banks is narrowly circumscribed by the terms of the FED Act thus, the influence of bankers on U.S. monetary policy is via some avenue other than the little known fact of their stock ownership in the FED. Although there is a reasonable basis for doubting the Constitutionality of fiat money, by the time the FED plan was conceived the Supreme Court had long ruled that Congress did indeed have Constitutional power to control the monetary system of the United States. Congress had passed Legal Tender Acts in 1862, 1863, 1864, and 1865 as wartime measures, and additional acts in 1878 and 1890 as peacetime legislation. According to these acts, non-interest-bearing legal-tender notes issued by the United States were declared "lawful money and a legal tender in payment of all debts, public and private, within the United States." Initially such notes were not legal tender in payment of duties on imports or on Government interest-bearing obligations, but by 1890 these exceptions had been eliminated. The Supreme Court ruled on the Constitutionality of these Acts in three landmark cases: Hepburn v. Griswold (1870); Knox v. Lee (1871); and Juilliard v. Greenman (1884). Although in Hepburn v. Griswold the Court first ruled against Congress's authority to issue fiat money, as soon as the Court's membership changed, it reversed the ruling. As a result of rulings in Knox v. Lee and Juilliard v. Greenman the power exercised by Congress in authorizing issues of legal-tender notes was a legitimate power in both wartime and peacetime. The nearly unanimous (8 to 1) 1884 decision granted Congress sweeping powers to regulate virtually all monetary issues. Thus Congress had already taken many easy-money steps before it passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. The Constitutionality of the Act was upheld in Raichie v. Federal Reserve Bank of New York on July 15, 1929. One can today continue to maintain, we grant, that the Supreme Court's decision was innocently or malevolently contrary to the Constitution, but that decision settled the issue according to the legal procedures of the Nation. The definition of conspiracy theory is : A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.The Myth of the Federal Reserve is an amazing attempt at historical revision, and rather than being just one conspiracy theory weaves many of them together in a "conspiracy tapestry". The myth is all over the internet and independent documentaries, and the accounts of the conspiracy differ a bit in their scope, so I can’t possibly address all of the issues in my limited space. I will show conspiratorial myths surrounding the creation of the Fed and that the Fed is a for-profit banking cartel that controls the US money supply in order to enrich itself one more time. Neither of these suppositions is grounded in fact.Myth: The Federal Reserve System is a for profit private banking cartel and is being used by private bankers to devalue the American currency for their own gain.Panic of 1907 was a financial crisis that arose near the beginning of the twentieth century as result of a plan to limit the popularity of trust companies. The banking industry was unsettled with the emerging successes of trusts companies, so they attempted to bring financial ruin to F. Augustus Heinze's Knickerbocker Trust in order to falter the public's favor in trust companies. Since the Knickerbocker Trust was unable to receive any financial support from other financial institutions to save itself from failure, the public started to fear that the banking and trust industries were experiencing liquidity issues and thus starting to perform bank runs.(bank run is a situation in which numerous bank customers try to withdraw their bank deposits simultaneously and the bank's reserves are not sufficient to cover the withdrawals.) The 1913 U.S. legislation that created the current Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Act intended to establish a form of economic stability through the introduction of the Central Bank, which would be in charge of monetary policy, into the United States. The Federal Reserve Act is perhaps one of the most influential laws concerning the U.S. financial system.Some people believe that expansion of the money supply generates many problems, such as inflation expectations, which become self fulfilling as higher wages and prices are demanded. Supply does not keep up with demand and the effects of growth versus inflation are a net negative for the economy. Economists, such as Milton Friedman, have advocated a fixed rate of increase in M1(which is used as a measurement for economists trying to quantify the amount of money in circulation. The M1 is a very liquid measure of the money supply, as it contains cash and assets that can quickly be converted to currency), rather than discretionary policies that expand and contract the money supply based on macroeconomic factors. Other schools of economic thought, such as the Austrian school, believe that central banking is itself the source of the business cycle, and should be replaced with the gold standard, or a free market determined currency system. I did not focus on these theories and policy choices here, since my purpose is to argue against certain scenes in the FED conspiracy and its revisionist history, but it is helpful to know that there are legitimate economic arguments against the Fed, at least in its current form. But I am also opposed to the “End the Fed” agenda on real economic theory, not just conspiracy theory, and the correct historical account of the Panic of 1907 is only a small part of this justification, in that it demonstrates the value of a lender of last resort. I hope I have shown, at the very least, that the FED was not created under a veil of conspiracy for specifically nefarious or greedy purposes. By explaining the historical events that provided the impetus and forged the will to create a central bank, along with the unique structure and function of the FED as an American style central bank, I hope that any worries one might have had, that the FED is a shadowy cartel controlling the money supply, can now be recognized as overly simplistic and paranoid. So the argument that The Federal Reserve should be abolished is ignorant and unfounded Like I said last round vote whichever way you want........