It is manifestly the case that many, many secret conspiracies have been hatched and brought to fruition. Think of the spies we caught during the Cold War; or the secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany to carve up Poland; or the assassination of Lincoln, where attempts were also made on the lives of the Vice President and the Secretary of War the same night. If you study history long enough, it becomes clear that at times organized efforts are made in secrecy to accomplish results which appear, but the roots of which remain hidden.
Arguably, the creation of the Federal Reserve could be called a conspiracy. It was done in silence, and a PR campaign was launched in which both sides of the debate were stage managed carefully, such that virtually everyone involved was either a player, or was tricked.
At the same time, in all types of thinking, it is important to stop where you need to stop, to not go too far. One must always remain agnostic with respect to things you simply don’t know, and have no realistic means of knowing.
All living systems are in constant motion. Given this, it is important to remember that, say, the Masons may have played a prominent role in our Revolution (not unreasonably supposition, given that George Washington and Ben Franklin were both Masons), but then faded in importance. A group can be prominent in one century, and fade in another. Or the people in a group may evolve their goals. Or they may be fractured and in internal conflict, with one faction leaning one way, and another a different way. They can change their minds completely. Key leaders may die. They may simply lose interest.
I say this since many people tend to have this–in my view naive–view that there is some sort of “them” out there. What I personally think happens is that interests– for some period of time, to some greater or lesser extent–can become shared. What I have called Inflationists want to make more and more money off of money they create. Socialists want to spend money they don’t have. Industrialists want access to easy money, since if they can grow faster than inflation, they still win.
The way to counter conspiracies, however one may frame them, is simply to remove the incentives to cheat, and where possible the means.
The money facing anyone who would want to bring down the Federal Reserve is astronomical, but I choose to believe, for example, that not all beneficiaries of this process are necessarily interested in our national demise. They are just greedy, and indifferent to the suffering their greed causes others. But need this remain that way forever? Can one not hope that among the ranks of the Inflationists there might still remain genuine patriots, or decent human beings, who have hitherto viewed the priviledges their cartel offers them as the spoils of superior intelligence?
I hope so. No system can endure that is filled with bad human beings, and any system which is filled with good ones can evolve in positive directions. The two are always mixed in different ratios, but one can hope ours has not devolved too far. I may of course be wrong, but there is no need to infer any indomitable or uninfluencable force out there. People are people. Some of them are sons of bitches, but not all of them.