What central banks can control is a base and one way they can control the base is via manipulating a particular interest rate, such as a Federal Funds rate, the overnight rate at which banks lend to one another. But they use that control to control what happens to the quantity of money. There is no disagreement.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?

The great virtue of free enterprise is that it forces existing businesses to meet the test of the market continuously, to produce products that meet consumer demands at lowest cost, or else be driven from the market. It is a profit-and-loss system. Naturally, existing businesses generally prefer to keep out competitors in other ways. That is why the business community, despite its rhetoric, has so often been a major enemy of truly free enterprise.

The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.

Americans know very little about social statistics, but I am not sure that it's important that Americans know about social statistics.