Gary North

Oct. 14, 2010

Ellen Brown, the Greenbacker, has posted a reply to me. It is addressed to me: an open letter.

I do not intend to reply to her directly. I will address my comments to her victims: her readers.

I will not be posting my responses on the home page in the future. I don't want to bore most of my subscribers out of their skulls. I will post each response as a separate article in the department, Ellen Brown: Greenbacker.

If you are interested in my responses, you can check there daily. I will respond by posting one article per day.

Before I begin, let me say this. I identified 31 major historical errors in her book. I also identified 21 major errors of economic theory. I devoted considerable space to most of them. Some articles are the equivalent of a chapter in a book. She has replied in a series of brief paragraphs.

I am very serious when I go after someone in print. Ellen Brown is not serious about scholarship at all. Let me quote from her response.

The book is 565 pages long and contains 40 pages of endnotes in fine print. I drew from my sources. I could not check the source of every source; in fact they generally didn't give sources. Of your list, I found perhaps four that were valid. Four in 565 pages I think is a remarkably good track record. I have no proof reader, no staff, the book is self-published, and I did much of my own formatting, which was a serious challenge.

First, I listed 31 errors, and I was correct in all 31, as I shall prove over the next 30 working days.

She admits that she drew from "my sources." My point was that her historical sources are totally unreliable. She thinks that she is off the hook because she quoted from some nutty source. She isn't.

She is a lawyer. Can you imagine her in front of a jury? If she loses, her client may go to jail. The prosecuting attorney demonstrates that 31 points in her defense were based on bogus sources and inaccurate statements. In her summation before the jury, she says that she did not have time to verify the sources.

Her client is going to jail.

Second, I typeset my own books, too. I also have no staff. I have written over 50 volumes of books. I strive to verify every fact, every footnote. Any serious author does.

What you're not noticing is what a really good read it is; many people have said so. That took a LOT of work. I was trying to make economics exciting and understandable for the average reader, and I believe I did that. You could put decades into footnotes and fact-checking and you would just be wasting your time if you didn't come up with prose people wanted to read.

I have never seen an admission like this, at any time, by any non-fiction author. This is unprecedented. This is simply beyond belief!

The issue is not whether her book is a "good read." The issue is whether it is accurate.

Back to the courtroom analogy. She informs the jury, "It's not the accuracy of the facts that I presented in my defense of my client that matters. It's whether I entertained you, right?"

Her client is going to jail.

She made Greenbackism exciting and understandable: for ignorant people who think Hitler's National Socialism was based on economics.

Here is my first response.