Ron Paul argues that the Federal Reserve is unnecessary and harmful, but Mitt Romney’s economics adviser Glenn Hubbard says it’s “crazy” to talk about doing away with it. In the letter below, Don Boudreaux takes issue with Hubbard.

Big government economists want people to think there is a consensus in favor of central banking, but in truth there is no such thing.

Editor, The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY  10018

Dear Editor:

Bill Keller reports that Glenn Hubbard - Columbia University economist and 
advisor to the Romney campaign - proclaims that "Nobody who is taken seriously 
as an economist is going to say 'cancel the Fed'"; such a notion, says Prof. 
Hubbard, is "just crazy" ("The Politics of Economics in the Age of Shouting," 
Nov. 28).

To propose the abolition of central banking is indeed crazy today - just as, 
say, proposing the abolition of slavery was crazy in 1812, or proposing the 
abolition of military conscription was crazy in 1952.  The dominance of the 
unexamined premises of too many Right-thinking Serious people in the past 
suffocated practical efforts to fundamentally reform the way labor was supplied 
to plantation owners and, later, to the military.  Similar unexamined premises 
suffocate practical efforts today to fundamentally reform the way money is 
supplied to the economy.

As Prof. Hubbard surely knows, though, the economic case for central banking is 
hardly settled; it continues to be debated by serious scholars.  Prof. Hubbard 
also surely knows that the case for replacing central banking with a more 
decentralized, privatized, and competitive arrangement is real and rests on 
significant theoretical and historical research published in premier outlets and 
conducted by economists with impeccable scientific credentials - economists such 
as Kevin Dowd, Steve Horwitz, Benjamin Klein, Kurt Schuler, George Selgin, 
Richard Timberlake, Gordon Tullock, Lawrence H. White, Leland Yeager, as well as 
by the late F.A. Hayek and Vera Smith.

Sincerely, 
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University