Steve Forbes has little good to say about the Federal Reserve in his most recent Forbes column, labeling chairman Ben Bernanke “supreme soclaiist.”

By owning so many long-term government bonds, Bernanke has created an artificial shortage of these financial instruments. Like a good central planner, Bernanke is using his policies to subsidize the still rapidly growing, gargantuan debt of the U.S. government. He also holds a huge stash of mortgages so that mortgage rates can be kept low in order to revive the battered housing industry. Big companies also find credit abnormally easy to get.

All of this means the government is picking winners and losers. And in this case the losers are savers. Bernanke & Co. want to effectively force Americans to put their cash in riskier assets, such as stocks.

Another category that’s hurting is small business. Bernanke pays a nominal interest rate on reserves that banks leave at the Fed—a totally risk-free return. On paper an institution would do well lending to a local restaurant or dry cleaner, where rates are significantly higher. But if it does, it had best be prepared to undergo a regulatory third degree.

Ben and his apologists say that one of the Fed’s mandates is to bring about full employment; therefore, it must engage in these ­statist actions. History, however, shows us that the best thing a central bank can do to create prosperity is to keep the currency stable in value. Whenever the dollar veers in value, as it’s done chronically since the link to gold was severed 40 years ago, market distortions result and capital is misallocated.

The Fed’s socialist tendencies, as one would expect, ride roughshod over property rights. If you sold a bottle of wine for five loaves of bread and Washington came along and confiscated two of those loaves, that would be “takings.” The Constitution guarantees that the government would have to pay you for that seized property. Yet the Federal Reserve routinely confiscates people’s property when it undermines the value of the dollar.

About 2:20 into this video clip from a July 2010 interview with Carolina Journal Radio/CarolinaJournal.tv, Forbes offers his thoughts about the Fed and its treatment of the dollar.