Actually, our politicians already possess that power . . .
From Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution:
Doesn't mean they should keep it. I consider this one of the big flaws of the Constitution. Any checks and balances in a Constitution will be overridden eventually. Usually slowly over time, or rapidly in a major event (think 9/11 and what the Chimp did.).
The problem is largely attributed to accountability, or lack thereof. Our Congress essentially shirked this power in the early 1900s and handed it off to an organization (the federal reserve) whose chairman can—as witnessed recently—run off to Europe whenever he is called to testify before a House committee. That's not accountability.
There will never be accountability. Or transparency. Once you establish an agency with a monopoly on violence (the State) you create a corrupt organization where it can be bribed for favours. We can never "vote" our way out of this mess. If you grant that your average voter looks like this:
You could pretty much fool them into anything, once you take control of education and media and present them a series of false choices, you own them. Period. End of story. Full stop.
I like Ron Paul's message. Always did. He was putting the message of freedom out there and getting people to think. However, I found his argument rather weak about the Fed. Oh, he nails it when he describes what it does to us, but he kept saying, "The Federal Reserve is unconstitutional!" when he should have been saying, "The Federal Reserve is immoral!" which is a FAR STRONGER argument. However, experience may have taught him that the former statement causes less brainwashed people's head to explode than the latter. Paul was trying to put us onto the "Road to Freedom" to coin Hayek, which has to be done in baby steps as you can't unwind 100 years of socialist brainwashing overnight.
Theoretically, by placing this power in the hands of politicians, the people could turn against them and boot them out of office if they handled the regulation of our currency poorly. I think Dennis Kucinich might be up to the challenge; he puts up a good argument for accountability and transparency in government, as does Ron Paul. This makes putting the regulation of our currency in the hands of politicians only nominally more effective than entrusting it to an unaccountable, private central bank—but more effective, nonetheless.
(Of course, our politicians don't want that power. They don't understand it, and have to maintain the illusion that they know what they're doing. So, it stays in the hands of the "experts" at the federal reserve. However, our politicians seem hell-bent on creating as many new powers outside of Article 1, Section 8 as they can.)
Sorry. If had a monetary printing press I wouldn't be able to resist using it to benefit me at the expense of you. It is just too damn tempting. Whether the Fed does it or government does it is window dressing.
The power to print money allows me to steal the purchasing power of your dollar without physically taking it out of your pocket. As a result, we have prices rise via inflation, which not 1 in 100,000 people or more understand. They blame the greedy capitalists or confuse it with supply shrinking or demand rising or other such silliness - which the government and the banking system is only to happy to stay silent on.
Prior to fiat, government had to go to you directly to extort money from you. In this case your previous observation would be correct. Serfs tended to get uppity about that type of thing and lit torches and carried pitchforks to lynch the leader. I wonder if Authority sometimes didn't have large armies to protect a geographical area from foreign invaders as they did to protect themselves against their own citizens so they could continue to fleece them.
If the money was gold or silver, the next thing Authority did was to monopolize minting of gold and silver coin and stamp illustrious figureheads of themselves on it. The government's reasoning was that they would "help eliminate fraud" etc etc, although Authority proved to be the biggest debaser of all, frequently watering down their coins with other alloys and keeping the leftover gold for themselves, which they would trade or mint into coins they would spend to their own benefit into the market.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, monetary names like dollar, franc, peso, pound was tied to a unit of weight of gold or silver. Over a series of clever moves, too long to document, these terms were disassociated with gold or silver weights and became units of account with arbitrary value. Think about it. What is a dollar defined as today? It used to be approx 1/20th of a gold ounce. Now what is it? Nothing but smoke and mirrors.
The Federal Reserve allowed government to break accountability to the people by printing money and stealing the value of it through inflation. If government does it, or a Fed, same difference.
