The Library of Economics and Liberty,

a website run by Liberty Fund, has placed online a book comparing centralized banking with free banking. The blurb goes as follows:

The Rationale of Central Banking
by Vera C. Smith (1912-1976)
(1990, LibertyPress. First published 1936.)

Vera C. Smith (1912-1976) wrote her extraordinary Ph.D. dissertation in 1935 under F. A. Hayek at the London School of Economics (LSE). The immediately-published result, titled The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative, not only presented the definitive original discussion of free-vs.-centralized banking, but also contained crystal-clear expositions of fractional reserve banking, the mechanics of central banking (including the gold standard, fixed, and flexible exchange rates systems), widely-used expository central bank accounting formats that remain the best for classroom use today, and useful histories of Central Banks in the England, France, Germany, Belgium, and the United States.

No economics teacher, high school, college, or graduate, should be without this informative Vera Smith work.

The introduction:

It is the purpose of this essay to investigate the motives that have in the past led to the establishment of central banks and to discover the theoretical foundations underlying such motives. An examination of the reasons for the eventual decision in favour of a central banking as opposed to a free banking system reveals in most countries a combination of political motives and historical accident which played a much more important part than any well-considered economic principle.
...
While recognising that the maladjustments may be due, not to the specific form of the banking system, but rather to at present unresolved technical difficulties, common to any system, in maintaining equilibrium between savings and investment, or in stabilising the effective quantity of circulating media, it seems not improbable that the tendencies to misdirection are magnified by the form of the system, in particular that part of it which entrusts the determination of the volume of credit to a single authority, between which and the Government there exist reciprocal incentives to paternalism. It is not unlikely that the bolstering up of banking systems by their Governments is a factor which makes for instability.

Unlike socialists of all stripes she takes human society's learning curve into consideration and the possibility that some collective decisions might be heading in the wrong direction. She doesn't criticize us [capitalists - we who adhere to naturally evolved systems, as opposed to those created by reason unaided by experience] for making mistakes.