The Fed’s goal is stable prices. They choose to err on the side of slight inflation because deflation is much more harmful. Managing the supply of money to meet demand, and not create inflation or deflation in the process, ain’t easy. They’ve done a pretty good job of it over the past 50 years or so. Stable prices were pretty hard to come by when we were on the gold standard. We’d experience a year of massive deflation followed by a year of massive inflation. These wild swings wiped out a lot of businesses, especially farmers.
Who’s this we, in we experienced price swings? There were millions of ‘we’s’, many did not experience price swings.( who knows? No one, so, how can anyone make a true statement as to the conditions back then? Do you trust the then poor, biased, agenda history? I don’t. I’m not saying they are lying, just that economic, political, fincial stats in history are not clear enough to repeat often heard mantras. For example, FDR ‘saved us’ from the Depression. He did not. He, and Hoover and the Fed, made it worse.)
And further in a free market, what’s wrong with price swings? What, are you a price welfare socialist that thinks that the same people that brought you, for example, lovely public housing, stable housing, that many ‘we’s’ enjoy, that we all know is a crowning success( /sarcasm ) that the same central planning in state finance will also produce a smooth, mono-culture welfare finance state. Are you for the welfarization, the socialization of finance.