Printing green pieces of paper doesn't make an economy richer. If done without restraint, it leads to runaway price inflation. As an added downside, it also allows governments to slaughter millions of people. (The world wars could not have been waged if the belligerents had stuck to the gold standard.)
Rothbard has in addition a carefully worked out theory, Austrian economics, to guide him.
In the period from 1913 to 2007, the Fed — implementing its mission to "stabilize the price level" — destroyed over 97 percent of the purchasing power of the dollar. (For comparison's sake, note that the value of the dollar had increased slightly during the 100 years before the Fed was created.)
Central bank's and government's loose monetary and fiscal policies are instrumental in the weakening of the process of real savings formation through the diversion of real savings from wealth generators to non-wealth-generating activities.
Wall Street — especially since this financial crisis began — has been anything but a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism.
I will not contend that this scheme is free from all the defects inherent in government interference with economic affairs.
Professor White's lecture showed that, historically, a free-market approach to the banking industry is less prone to crises and operates efficiently through the invisible hand of the market.
