Will the Fed be able to survive Ron Paul?

The erstwhile presidential candidate and soon to be head of Congressional oversight of the Federal Reserve talks gold, jobs and the presidency with Fortune.

If there's anything to be said about U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, he sure is persistent. And lately, that inner flame that's helped him gain the reputation for sometimes being the "G.O.P. loner" appears to be paying off.

The soft-spoken obstetrician has represented the 14th District of Texas on and off since 1977, spending much of his political career arguing that the Federal Reserve is evil for America and far too secretive. He doesn't see why there's so much faith in paper money, including the U.S. dollar. If Paul had it his way, there'd be a return to the gold standard. He even laid out his case in his book, End the Fed.

Lately though Paul's views are garnering the attention that he and supporters have long been waiting for. Earlier this month, Paul was picked to head the House subcommittee on domestic monetary policy. That means he will help oversee the body he's opposed to -- the Federal Reserve -- as well as currency and the dollar's value.

If anything, it appears the timing somehow worked out for beliefs that Paul has held for decades. The congressman's backing has grown considerably with the rise of the Tea Party, whose frustrations with government bailouts of big banks and corporations following the financial crisis seem to fall in line with Paul's views.

What are the Federal Reserve's shortcomings?

They're doing a job that's impossible to do. So it's not a single person's fault. It's not just former Chairman Alan Greenspan or just current Chairman Ben Bernanke. It's the assumption that anybody knows what interest rates should be, or the assumption that they know what money supply should be, or the assumption that they can have stable prices or the assumption that they could deal with unemployment.

Do you think we're better off without a Central Bank?

Sure, it's better off that we don't have depressions and inflations and financial chaos and the problems that we face. We of course wouldn't have this backdoor financing of big government fighting wars overseas and getting people to depend on the welfare state. None of that can happen without a Federal Reserve.

So what do you think the economy would look like without the Fed?

We'd probably have a much healthier economy – it wouldn't be so fragile. Nobody would be worrying about currency exchange rates and people wouldn't be in and out of currencies and spending all their energy doing what they're doing. Also, we wouldn't have a situation where the Fed creates money and hands it out for free and let's the banks make billions of dollars. And the poor people who are retired and have CDs get nothing and because of the downturn in the cycle, which the Fed creates, people lose their jobs and lose their houses. You wouldn't have any of that.

This was all very clearly predicted by Austrian economic theory and it's come about and it's very disturbing to the Fed because they're going to have to recognize that their theories are completely wrong and they're not about to do that gracefully.

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