http://www.lewrockwell.com/buchanan/buchanan108.html ^ great column detailing the road to hell paved with the good intentions of the Fed.
this is by me lester:
Do you know what it means when "the fed lowers interest rates"? It means they are printing more money. Do you think you yourself would know when the country needs more or less money? What if you thought you did and you got it wrong? Shouldn't there be another way, something more connected to something less isolated than a bunch of guys who aren't elected and of whom we have little to no oversight?
I am not trying to be condescending here. probably many of you know more about this than I do. It's just not a particularly colorful or talked about issue in society today. But that boringness creates an escape hatch for jerks like Alan Greenspan, who MASSIVELY overinflated the money supply in the Bush years which led to the housing bubble. No we are paying the price.
bottom line: this system was created in time when big government was going to be the new good way and collectivism was the future. Eventually , wether in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's russia, we saw that that was not a step forward, but a step back into the sort of paganism and submission to authority that most of western civilization had been about overcoming.
There's another way. It's very easy to simply let the market itself set the interest rates and they would go up or down naturally isntead of being held down for bubbles and then eventually jacked up. The whole thing of waiting around for this alleged genius to tell us what he is going to do, wether he is going to let the sun shine, is undignified.