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The Cato Institute has some bones to pick with the Federal Reserve.

The Washington libertarian think tank this week will launch a new Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. Its goal: challenge the central banks policies and explore alternative ways to manage the U.S. money supply, including but not limited to a return to the gold standard.

I think we can do better than the Federal Reserve, said George Selgin, the centers director and a former economics professor at the University of Georgia. We should be exploring how to do better. We should be exploring alternatives that could do better, instead of dismissing that entire inquiry as something that should be only of interest to people on the fringe.

The new center is the latest manifestation of growing public and academic attention on the Fed and central banking after the 2008 financial crisis. Another Washington think tank, the Brookings Institution, last December launched the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, where former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is a distinguished fellow in residence.

(Journal contributor David Wessel is the director of the Hutchins Center, and former Journal editor George Melloan is on the new Cato centers executive advisory council.)

The Feds extraordinary actions in recent years helping rescue large financial firms, pinning interest rates at zero for nearly six years and counting, three rounds of bond-buying aimed at stimulating economic recovery remain controversial.

Critics have variously accused the Fed of bailing out fat-cat Wall Street bankers, harming Americans who rely on interest from their savings, distorting the flows of the free market, failing to generate sustainable economic growth and flirting with out-of-control inflation and a debased currency. Defenders say the Feds policies prevented the crisis from escalating into a financial catastrophe, helped stabilize the financial system and helped nurture a fitful recovery, and they note inflation remains low and the dollar strong.

Criticism of the Fed, Mr. Selgin acknowledged, has come not just from serious economists but also conspiracy theorists with outlandish and often-distasteful ideas.

One of my goals, as the director of the center, is to be in charge of damage control. That consists of making sure our work isnt tainted by this kind of amateur stuff, Mr. Selgin said. We need to keep ourselves pure in terms of our writing being as scholarly as it can be. If we do that, we can make a strong case against holding the Federal Reserve to be the best of all possible monetary systems.

The center boasts some heavy hitters in the economics world. Its academic advisers include two Nobel laureates, New York Universitys Thomas J. Sargentand Chapman Universitys Vernon L. Smith, as well as Stanford University economist John B. Taylorand others.

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Libertarian Think Tank is Spoiling for a Fight with the Fed