Last night and this morning, I watched a two part documentary posted to Google Video titled The Money Masters.

Here’s Part One:

and here’s Part Two:

Due to somewhat choppy editing, there is about five minutes of repetition at the beginning of Part Two.

In the documentary the narrator chronicles a history of money and banking, focusing in great depth on the “fractional reserve system” that is at the root of the Federal Reserve System.

The video gives a great deal of background history to the system and how it was organized and orchestrated through various political machinations to pass through the United States legal system. Towards the end, it also offers a handful of “solutions”, most of which revolve around abolishing the Federal Reserve System and creating a new debt-free American Note in the place of the Federal Reserve Notes currently circulated.

After viewing the video I sent the following email to the email address listed on the documentary makers’ website:

i have known about “the federal reserve scam” for about fifteen years, but the money masters video laid out a very clear and comprehensive history of money and the monetary systems employed around the world.

only one thing raised my eyebrows and caused me to question if there might be an ulterior motive behind the video. towards the end, the video made frequent references to solutions proposed by milton friedman. my understanding of friedman’s version of laissez-faire capitalism often resulted in statist authoritarianism, corporatism and even fascism. while this could be evidence of a broken watch being right twice a day, it did cause me to question some of the other conclusions that the video reached. i do not believe that the implementation of chicago school economics by the “new democrats” and the “neo-conservatives” have offered anything other than more debt, more war, more poverty and fewer constitutional protections.

i do realize that this runs much, much, much deeper than democrat vs republican or liberal vs conservative, but i remain skeptical that the solution lies in the free-market (corporate) libertarianism forwarded by milton friedman. again, i am willing to admit i do not know everything about friedman, but i have certainly not been a fan of reagan and even less a fan of the eight year reign of error that is called the second bush admistration.

Even with that caveat, I still recommend the video as an interesting history of money and banking in the United States. The current “banking crisis” is not some strange aberration from an otherwise stable system. It is another crank of a wheel.