John Tamny, editor of RealClearMarkets, offers an interesting take in defense of the proposal by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to audit the Federal Reserve.

"Arguably the biggest reason that our central bank needs babysitting is one that is perhaps least often mentioned," Tamny writes.

"To be blunt, recessions, despite the near-term pain they bring, are in fact beautiful. Recessions are a wondrous sign that an economy is fixing itself, that it's starving theglobe.com so that Google can attain more funding."

Without recessions, the economy can't grow, Tamny, who is also political economy editor for Forbes, explains. That's because "recessions ensure that the myriad Webvans in our midst are put out of their misery, so that they're no longer consuming the economy's always limited resources."

So where does the Fed fit in this problem?

"Our Fed thinks its job is to shield us from recession, and it attempted to do just that in 2008," he notes. "We to a high degree can blame the slow recovery on the Fed's hubris, the latter having robbed us of what would have been a staggering rebound," Tamny adds.

"Congress must audit the Fed simply because someone somewhere must be on the hook for the Fed's actions."

New York Times columnist Neil Irwin isn't quite so enthusiastic about the idea of a Fed audit. "When people say they want to audit the Fed, what they really mean is 'The Fed is doing things I disagree with,'" he writes.

"It's easy to say that the Fed is a very secretive, mysterious institution. That has certainly been true historically, and in some respects remains true today. But in most of the ways that matter, the Fed is actually more transparent about what it decides to do, why and how it carries those policies out than almost any other institution in government."

Related Stories:

• Powell: Audit Bill Threatens Fed Independence
• Reason.com's Gillespie: Everyone Agrees the Fed Needs to Be Audited