Every major economic downturn of the last 110 years bears the mark of the Federal Reserve. In fact, as long as the Fed has been around, it has swung the economy between inflation and recession. Yet Americans, surprisingly, have tolerated it.

But we shouldn’t expect that to go on forever. We had three central banks before the Fed, and confined each to the ash heap of history. The problems inherent to central banking are cause to scrap the Fed as well.

[Well, this is true — in part. The lesson of the last few decades, however, is that government action and inaction do more to screw up the economy. Congress and presidents refuse to deal with the consequences of their own policies and leave the Fed holding the bag, having to use monetary policy when the elected branches refuse to deal with those issues through tax and regulatory policies. That’s what led to a decade of monetary expansion (“quantitative easing”) after the 2008 financial sector crisis, which itself was created by bad political policies in pushing mortgage lending and securitizing it, actions taken by Congress and Bill Clinton (mainly), not the Fed. — Ed]