Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, has been attacked for failing to foresee the financial crisis, for bailing out Wall Street, and, most recently, for injecting an additional $600 billion into the banking system to give the slow recovery a boost.

But Mr. Bernanke will face even more scrutiny in the months to come. On Thursday, House Republican leaders announced that Representative Ron Paul of Texas, the outspoken Republican libertarian who ran for president in 2008, will become the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Fed. His position on the central bank is captured in the title of his 2009 book, “End the Fed” (Grand Central Publishing).

Here’s some of what he wrote:

The Beginning of the End

“The day the Fed came into being in 1913 may have been the beginning of the end, but the powers it obtained and the mischief it caused took a long time to become a serious issue and a concern for average Americans.”