To be entirely honest with you, I think that entire philosophy should apply to a lot of areas of government, but people don't necessarily like to hear that. There's a lot of areas that are deeply complex, like economics for example. And I know EVERYONE has an opinion and thinks they're right and that their way the best, but really it's the Dunning-Kruger effect. People seriously over-estimate their own intelligence and they tend to underestimate the intelligence of those who "know what they're doing". No one likes to be told that they're not bright enough to know any better, but in some areas that's precisely the case. Why don't we line up outside the surgeon's door when he's doing an operation and say "well, I think you should cut that vessel instead?" We don't say to the surgeon "well, my opinion is just as good as yours" because it's not. Yet we are collectively asked as a society to make decisions on things that we can't possibly have an adequate understanding of. The State of the Union address in the United States is always written on the tenth grade reading level, because on average it has been determined that the 10th grade reading level is as high as the average American understands. Yet, he's to make decisions on Economics, Health Care, Complex Environmental Law, Ethical Questions regarding stem cell research. I know everyone likes to pretend that they know, because it takes a very humble person to say "that's a little over my head". Yet I constantly hear people, politicians even, say things like "we need to do away with the Federal Reserve". And I just think to myself "oh dear God!"

All of this is eventually going to come down to public opinion and the crowd almost always makes the wrong choice.

But who truly and honestly has the skills to audit the Federal Reserve? I remember when Goldman Sachs testified before Congress and they pretty much laughed in Congress's face with what the equivalent of: "It's not that the Congress doesn't have the power to oversee us. It's that they don't have the knowledge to oversee us." When you look at what happened to subprime, what happened to banks, what happened to derivatives, there's a very small group of people (Most of them work for industry firms) that truly understand what happened. Sure, there's a lot of OPINIONS, but that gets us nowhere.

To your point, ending the system would be easier than auditing, but you also kind of illustrate my point. I've worked in finance the majority of my career. And I occasionally here the "end the FRB diatribe" that based on some sort of political ideology. And I mean you no disrespect, but, clearly, you don't know what the hell you're talking about it. The free market does not have the skills to mitigate this.