President Trump's relentless attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve help remind us why the Constitution established a totally different monetary system than the one under which we have all been born and raised.

The reason that the Federal Reserve — or central bank — was established as an independent federal agency was because it's a very bad idea to have a president deciding monetary policy. That's because presidents inevitably want to use the monetary system to benefit themselves politically, which ordinarily means expanding the money supply to create an artificial sense of economic prosperity, which then enables a president to exclaim, "Do you see how beneficial my tariffs and other economic policies are?" Then, when prices of things start rising in response to the expanded quantity of devalued money in the system, a president can easily blame the rising prices on such things as greed, profiteering, Big Oil, and so forth, with hardly anyone realizing that the president's monetary policies are the reason for the price rises.

By making the Fed independent of presidential control, the idea is that the people at the Fed would manage the money supply in a responsible, non-political way. Of course, this is pure nonsense. Throughout the long history of the Federal Reserve, there have been instances where Federal Reserve officials have responded and reacted to political events, oftentimes with the intent to benefit one political party over another.

But the most important thing to understand about America's central bank is that it is based on the socialist principle of central planning, which, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out, produces "planned chaos." That's what we have had during the entire existence of the Federal Reserve — planned monetary chaos. That's because no one, no matter how smart, can centrally manage something as complex as money, especially in a very complex market economy like that of the United States.

Thus, the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 was a bad idea from the very start. While the ostensible purpose was to have a governmental entity that would stabilize money and the banking system, the result has been the exact opposite.