Central Banking and The Wizard of Oz

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched the Wizard of Oz; it is too numerous to calculate. I thought it was just some fanciful story for children; that was until I read Hamilton’s Curse by Thomas J. Dilorenzo. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, but I was dumbstruck by the hypotheses that the Wizard of Oz was actually about the dangers of centralized banking.

Mr. Dilorenzo is not the only one who has made this analogy, as he states in his book:

Your author is not the first to note the similarity between central bankers and the Wizard of Oz. L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, on which the famous movie was based, was a commentary on the growing monetary problems of the late nineteenth century that were created by centralized banking. As the economists Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund explain:


The Emerald (green) City is Washington and the Wizard of Oz (ounce of gold) is the president, who manipulates the population on behalf of the big-city banks. The Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Munchkins represent different groups of people while the Cowardly Lion represents William Jennings Bryan [an opponent of the gold standard] and Dorothy stands for “everyman,” the average, good natured citizen, who does not have a clue about the underlying causes of the problems of society. The Yellow Brick Road is the gold standard…Baum’s story parallels the American banking system where the government and big banks controlled the economy in support of the industrial and financial interests in the East to the detriment of farmers, labor, and rural America, especially in the South and West.


Baum’s book was written after only three decades of nationalized banking; the creation of the Fed in 1913 produced a system even more centralized than the one the Lincoln administration had recreated.

Well, what do you know? I will never be able to watch that movie again without thinking of Ben Bernanke pulling the levers behind the curtain.