[SmileyPSU]

It seems like most of the anti-Fed crew would either like to give control of monetary policy directly to the government, abide by some sort of ****llic standard, or allow for competing currencies. All of these ideas sound great until you look at the nuts and bolts of them, and realize that they don't fix anything at all.

"Go to the gold standard, it will prevent the devaluing of our dollar" chant the hippies and the paranoid banking CTers. Awesome, until you realize that the amount mined gold is not constant, and those fluctuations in output will invariably affect the value of the dollar. So, instead of the world's brightest economists deciding what a dollar's worth, we now have miners making that call. Brilliant! Hopefully those miners have a sweet plan for when the time comes when there's not enough gold to represent an entire year's GDP!

"Give the ability to print money to the government, not to some private enterprise that answers to no one," scream the liberals. Nevermind that the Fed, for all intents and purposes, is a government entity...considering how the government fixes everything it touches, it is entirely logical to want our Congressmen, with their vast knowledge of economics, decide this country's monetary policy. Lets put our heads together and think about what else can we do to make government bigger.

"We want competing currencies," yell people whose thoughts have not gone beyond how cool the idea of printing your own money sounds. A system where everyone tries to pay for everything with different "currencies" sounds swell. What problems could arise from this? But I have a better idea, lets just eliminate the idea of currency altogether and go back to bartering! I'm hungry, I've got a pair of Nikes, some paperclips, and a copy of Gears of War. What kind of groceries could I get for that?