Thanks for the thoughtful reply even if my original comment may have been a bit snarky. Let me start by saying that I kind of admire the logical coherence and

Thanks for the thoughtful reply even if my original comment may have been a bit snarky. Let me start by saying that I kind of admire the logical coherence and beauty of the framework built from the basic building blocks of utility maximizing (rational) agents, free trade and market equilibrium. It is actually very hard to argue against the framework within the framework itself, the logical purity of the model is quite beautiful indeed. And absolutely yes, free trade has been one of the huge welfare drivers of the last centuries. Another one, in my opinion, is democracy and worker's unions, but that is a side note to this particular discussion. But (of course there is a but...), what comes to monetary policy, I'd like to ask you to consider one of the basic premises I mentioned above, namely market equilibrium. I would argue that even if in the long term the macroeconomy may be somewhat equilibrium seeking, in the short term it is quite obvious that the unconstrained macroeconomy is a complex system with different feedback loops and time constants causing a pretty much chaotic behaviour[1]. And without any exogenous controls in place, even these short term fluctuations can become large enough to cause havoc in the society. These fluctuations can be observed in macro level in the business cycles (even if the central banks and governments do their best to smooth them!), and even in micro level in repeatable experiments[2] So, if you allow economy in your model to be complex and not just perfectly equilibrium seeking, you pretty much must have some exogenous control to keep the economy even remotely stable. Unfortunately that exogenous control by definition means that somehow actions of some agents in the economy must be artificially either restricted or fostered, even if that flies on the face of the moral principle of individual freedom. And central banks are important tools in this exogenous control via money supply. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game