The Federal Reserve’s price fixing committee meets today, in broad daylight and without fear of the law. Though price-fixing may be a crime for most mortals, the Fed is no ordinary manipulator of markets. To set the basic interest rate of the dollar dealing world is its job, or the job it has chosen for itself.

In 2002 and 2003, the central bank went on a campaign against what Wal-Mart shoppers know as everyday low prices. The Fed cried “deflation” and launched a campaign to put a little starch in the Consumer Price Index. It insisted that the greenback be weakened. So Chairman Greenspan and his Fed set about printing lots of dollars and driving down its interest rate to 1%. It was an emergency rate, the Fed acknowledged. But where was the emergency?

It turns out that in the imploding mortgage market of 2007, the Fed has its emergency. Inconveniently, the interest rate it fixes now stands at 5.25%, too high for homeowners who borrowed at teaser rates. What has become ever more obvious is that the most sinuous teaser rate of them all was the one the Fed unnecessarily imposed to forestall the deflationary crisis that it imagined.

Now Wall Street’s noisiest bulls are begging for relief, notwithstanding a weak exchange rate for the dollar, which fetches but a 680th or so of an ounce of gold, and a case of what our forebears called “creeping inflation” (some days, in the supermarkets we patronize, it seems to be galloping). What would these columns have the Fed do? Only cede its rate fixing power to an institution even more qualified than the luminaries on the Federal Open Market Committee. We mean the free market.