> Banking should be a utility, not a for profit business

100% agree. Just consider the overhead of the massive government policy infrastructure required to adequately support all of the banks which exist purely to turn a profit off of people through oftentimes usurious methods. There's no reason the federal government can't simply provide a bank run not-for-profit.

However, the Fed is not the federal government, it is a private corporation; so this is not the correct entity. Instead, the national bank you're suggesting would necessarily have replace the Fed with a fully transparent public institution.

You'll find that most times in history when a Western country tries to do this, the moneyed elites do not enjoy it.

I agree with most of what you're saying, but think the Fed is the ideal route for such a role if we presume that at some point in the future, they will acquire an outsized amount of financial assets similar to what central banks in other developed countries facing stagflation have done (Bank of Japan); it then becomes trivial to issue a citizen's dividend from those assets to citizen accounts. I'd settle for a national government-operated bank if I had to.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22594458 for logistics.

The Fed was never designed to be a retail bank. And so you know, the Fed is a for-profit business.

Replace the Fed with a public entity that provides this service.

There's a reason the Fed is disjointed from the normal branches of government and does not answer to Congress or the President directly. You need that separation to keep the system from corrupting itself. If it were up to Congress, they'd print $100 trillion a year and spend until the system collapsed on itself. Some would argue we've already gotten to that point and we just have yet to see it play out in the economy. That may be true. There's a lot of very real systemic risk in the market right now. Financial mismanagement has destroyed many empires. America's system is vulnerable. Retail banking should be the last of the Fed's concerns at this time. It doesn't cost much, if anything, to open a checking account in the U.S. A lot of the unbanked either have illegal status and are keeping their funds off the books for good reason, or they choose to use cash for privacy reasons, which is totally valid.

If you want a non-profit bank, that's what credit unions are for. They've been around for decades.

> to keep the system from corrupting itself

Yes but the system always finds a way of corrupting itself.

Change is inevitable. How many governments were designed to support providing healthcare to their citizens but do so today? (Over 30)