The Red and Black

Issue date: 7/17/08 Section: Opinions

MATT BRANDENBURGH

Every time Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is called to testify in a hearing before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress, he hears essentially the same line of questioning from Rep. Ron Paul.
Paul asks him such things as, if the economic problem the Fed is trying to fix is high inflation, and the Fed's proposed solution is adding to the money supply (read: more inflation), how that could ever fix the problem. Or whether inflation, the main result of which is a decrease in the value of a dollar, could be construed as a "tax" on individuals, though a deceptively well-hidden one.
Paul's questions all get at the idea that perhaps the Fed's control of money supply is the root of the problem.
Bernanke can usually provide no more answer to Paul's questions than to repeat economic generalities or sometimes simply affirm that Paul's suspicions have some truth, without recommending any solutions.
But an economic measure called the Producer Price Index (PPI) seems to somewhat bear out Paul's hypothesis. A chart of the PPI over the past 90 years, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows prices in this measure holding relatively stable until about the mid-70s and then taking a sharp upturn. Could this be related to the fact that the American dollar was fully taken off of the gold standard in 1971, and full control of the money supply was given to the Fed? Paul's answer is yes, and his solution is a return to the gold standard.
But because this proposed course of action falls so far from what is usually discussed, it is never seriously considered by any in power, nor discussed by the mainstream national media to any significant degree.
This is an individual case of a much broader problem within our political culture: the range of acceptable opinion in our country has shrunken to an almost impossibly narrow range.
Thus, many opinions and criticisms from all sides of the political debate are automatically dismissed because they fall outside this range.
This restriction of sensible debate - known as "political correctness" - is extremely harmful, because what may be the right solution gets dismissed without consideration.
Barack Obama fell victim to this when he was accused of "appeasement" for suggesting that the U.S. hold diplomatic talks with Iran because this goes against the conventional foreign policy wisdom of the past seven years - which has not exactly been fruitful in improving global political stability.
Any serious reform to our ailing public school system is shouted down for being too risky, but by not changing schools, we run the risk of keeping them as they are - failures.
While there is no harm in considering different opinions, there is great harm to be found in dismissing most of the range of possible options without even thinking about them.

- Matt Brandenburgh is opinions editor for The Red & Black.

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