Budget surpluses are extremely harmful -- they shrink the money supply, forcing industry into deficit.
Are you OK with you and your descendants being made more poor by government dilution?
How much of your earnings are you comfortable forking over to government under threat of force?
To say that Federal Reserve (a private entity) actions are politically uncontested is dishonest. There have been plenty of voices against the Fed in the minority. Kennedy tried to end the Fed and there have been numerous congressional proposals to audit the Fed. None have ever achieved a majority.
The Federal Reserve (whether you mean the Board of Governors, the system, or any of the individual federal reserve banks) isn't a private entity.
(The Board of Governors is a federal agency; the rest are weird hybrids.)
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve):
It is governed by the presidentially appointed board of governors or Federal Reserve Board (FRB). Twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, located in cities throughout the nation, regulate and oversee privately owned commercial banks.
The federal government sets the salaries of the board's seven governors, and it receives all the system's annual profits, after dividends on member banks' capital investments are paid, and an account surplus is maintained. In 2015, the Federal Reserve earned a net income of $100.2 billion and transferred $97.7 billion to the U.S. Treasury.[24] Although an instrument of the US Government, the Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by Congress, and the terms of the members of the board of governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."
The USPS is an independent agency of the federal government receiving no taxpayer funding (except for services like postage purchased by other government agencies) that is funded by its own operational revenues.
The parts of the Fed that aren't the Board of Governors aren't really like that, either, though.
> an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by Congress, and the terms of the members of the board of governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.
The first and third are the typical things that define “independent” federal agencies, the second is true of some of them (e.g., USPS).
The structure and composition of the Fed is special though, even in that context, but “private” seems to be misleading behind a false dichotomy.
It is kind of (though this term is charged because of the role corporatism played in the fascist public ideology, though the term is much older and not generally associated with authoritarianism), something of a corporatist institution in and by which state and private power are aligned.
What is dishonest is framing congressional spending in terms like "within its means" while also ignoring the Federal Reserve's ongoing dilution. Rather, monetary creation by the Fed and the Federal Government needs to be judged by the same standard. The pro-spending crowd calls this MMT, and the anti-dilution crowd calls this Austrian economics.
I personally would prefer the libertarian philosophy of more sound money, less (centralized) spending, and growing distributed wealth. But since that seems to be off the table, MMT is the remaining consistent approach. It makes more sense than profligate welfare to banks while turning the screws on everyone else. And with the way the Fed's feedback cycle is set up, it will actually cause less inflation than what we're currently getting.
A relevant example is that the last big tax cuts package in 2017 created lots of 'opportunity zones' which exempted people from paying capital gains on many real estate transactions. This was ostensibly to encourage investment in poor neighborhoods, but I live on the edge of one such opportunity zone and I can assure you it was already a red hot real estate market before that tax cut.
Everyone in this area gets junk mail from real estate agents on an almost daily basis because property prices have risen stratospherically and those agents get a 3% cut of any transaction they handle.