Well, there's just as much of a trend of claiming your position is "science" when it isn't, simply for political reasons.

For example, by any reasonable standards, economics is not a science; yet people who question the current orthodoxy in economics, for example by questioning whether having the Federal Reserve print money is really a good idea, are routinely castigated. Ron Paul became a nonstarter as a Presidential candidate for precisely this reason.

You don't get it in Congress/Senate/Parliament. You don't get it on the news channels. You sometimes - very rarely - still get it on the radio.

I want to see two people with opposing views debate a single issue for 2-3 hours, without being allowed to evade answering a question. Would happily pay a subscription fee to get that.

However, in many cases, better debate won't fix the problem, because the problem in many cases is not that the "right" views aren't getting air time. The problem in many cases is that we can't even do controlled experiments in the domain, so our understanding is very limited and we simply don't know enough about the domain to give useful input to public policy decisions. For example, I think that's true of economics; nobody knows enough about economics to give useful input about most public policies.

We already know that hyperinflation relative to growth is a way to ruin an economy quickly for instance. Similarly the issue with federal reserve denialism is that they have rhetoric but not much understanding about economic history.

Precious metal backed currency has lead to countless expensive wars and travesties because it effectively started to be a brake/cap on growing economies. Essentially saying you are against the federal reserve period is like admitting you are a homeopath - it goes beyond a difference of supportable opinion and into a sign of incompetence.

I can understand some unease about the role of the federal reserve but it should have some role even if it is stuck on "try to map to economic growth instead of attempting stimulus or bubble deflation".

The federal reserve is a terrible choice because unaccountable bureaucrats with their own agenda are given the power to juice or crash the economy, and they appear to threaten/reward presidents with this power.

Just printing money is a terrible choice because the executive can just run the presses instead of taxing, and thereby cause hyperinflation.

The USA has tried all 3 methods.

That last one has the most potential I think. It could be restricted to reduce misbehavior, perhaps with a time delay before changes take effect.

The primary function of central banks when they were established was to prevent bank runs, acting as a lender to banks. But what if, for example, we had full reserve banking instead of fractional reserve? Would that not eliminate bank runs, make the economy more stable, ensure interest rate serve as a valid signal of consumer time preferences and of the demand for capital, and eliminate the need for a central bank?

I'm not sure either part of this is true. The evidence of the 20th century doesn't give much support to the thesis that fiat money helps prevent wars. Nor is it clear that a fixed, or at any rate slowly growing, quantity of money acts as a brake on economic growth. Current economic orthodoxy says it does, but current economic orthodoxy doesn't make good predictions.

> I can understand some unease about the role of the federal reserve but it should have some role even if it is stuck on "try to map to economic growth instead of attempting stimulus or bubble deflation".

You wouldn't need a central bank to implement a policy of "keep the total quantity of money in some defined relationship to the total size of the economy". In fact you wouldn't want a central bank to implement that policy, because a central bank wouldn't give newly printed money to everyone in the economy in proportion to the amount of money they currently hold, which is the only fair way to print money.

Go further into the past and you'll see plenty. The Opium War was from the terrible twos of mercantilism and metallic standards - the British Empire feared the effects of trading silver for tea and had found a substitute agricultural good - opium. Many empires before then engaged in conquest for precious metals only to either hyperinflate themselves or lose the war. There were accounts of terrible attempts to tame inflation with price controls after the Roman empire seized too much treasure.

The 'fairness' in distribution of money based upon holding is also missing the point on several levels. Not only would that be de-facto regressive it would encourage /not/ investing resources but speculative hoarding which isn't a good thing for the economy. It brings to mind a fundamental misunderstanding that is very common. Money isn't wealth. Money is a medium of exchange for the goods and services which are actual wealth.

It is part of why Bitcoin did so terrible as an actual workable currency - everyone just grabbed onto their Beanie Baby 3.0's and didn't use it for actual exchange and it was very unstable.

Fiat currency is essentially 'superficially crazy/stupid but it works' (it isn't so crazy if one understands the role of money is to be a medium of exchange and is thus arbitrary but can serve the systems for good or ill) and a lot of people get hung-up on it.

"Fewer except for the infamous big ones". If that's what you call progress, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.