By Mencken’s Ghost

Oct. 4, 2012

Well, as expected, neither Obama nor Romney talked about the fourth branch of government in their programmed first “debate.”  Also as expected, the great intellect of a media moderator didn’t ask about the fourth branch.

That’s not surprising, given that public schools don’t teach students about the fourth branch, although the schools have 12 years and about 20,000 hours of classroom time to do so.  To the extent that K-12 schools teach the facts of government at all anymore, they continue to teach that there are three branches of government, not four.

What is the fourth branch?  It is the Federal Reserve. 

This unelected branch has as much power as the legislative, executive and judicial branches in affecting the economy, our lives, and the nation’s future.

Hirsute Ben Bernanke was the 800 lb. central banker at the debate that no one acknowledged.

That’s because it was not in the interest of either candidate or either party to acknowledge him.  Without the constitutionally required backing of silver, he is the silverback that allows the legislative and executive branches to keep kicking the time bomb of deficit spending down the road so that it blows up on someone’s else’s watch.

Operating in cahoots with the other branches, the central bank is responsible for asset bubbles, pronounced and protracted boom and bust cycles, an erosion of middle-class earnings and standard of living, the burgeoning welfare/entitlement state, the crony banking system, the nation’s imperial overreach, and the expansion of government into every nook and cranny of our lives and anatomy.  Without the Fed’s ability to create Monopoly money and easy credit and to beggar other countries, the rest of the government would have to live within its means.

Don’t you think that a branch with this much power would warrant at least one serious question at a debate?  Or how about public schools spending a couple of hours out of 20,000 hours to teach students the truth about it?

Teaching this would not be injecting politics or ideology or opinions into the classroom.  It would be injecting facts about how the government actually works.  When a government institution like a public school omits facts critical of the government, it is being just as propagandist as when it tells untruths to put the government in a favorable light.

Imagine a courageous teacher heroically conducting a class on how the Federal Reserve allows the U.S. Department of Education to spend money that really doesn’t exist.  For younger students, she could use Monopoly money to make the instruction interesting.  Or imagine her conducting a class about the facts of how special interests like teacher unions are bankrupting the nation out of self-interest.

It wouldn’t take more than a day for her to be reprimanded by her principal and union representative.  Since they wouldn’t be able to dispute what she said, they’d hide their real agenda of suppressing the truth behind the smokescreen that she didn’t stick to the proscribed state curriculum and district lesson plan.    

Those who speak the truth about the Federal Reserve and government schools are labeled as extremists, when the real extremists are those who intentionally keep the truth from the public.

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