You would think someone would have seen through this, and realised they could produce their own money and owe no interest, but instead the Bank of England has been used as a model and now nearly every nation has a Central Bank with fractional reserve banking at its core.
These central banks have the power to take over a nations economy and become that nations real governing force. What we have here is a scam of mammoth proportions covering what is actually a hidden tax, being collected by private concerns.
Unfortunately, the idea that the government (ie without the central bank) can produce its own money and owe no interest is not really viable. The state knows, in its heart of hearts, through the course of history, that with such a direct license to print money, it would quickly succumb to the temptation to print, and lose the confidence of the public in the currency, in which case the power would be gone.
Instead, it enlists innovative bankers, in it for their private profit, to come up with novel ways to convince people that the money is a safe place for their savings. The huge pool of money in the world doesn't look so big when there are so many highly-valued financial assets (stocks, real estate, bonds, interest yielding bank deposits, what have you) out there that you can buy with the money. If money could only buy real goods and services, it would be clear that there's too much money compared to what it could buy. Never mind that the value of these assets are also propped up by all sorts of public policy. The idea is to make things complicated enough that most people don't see through the scheme.
Monetary creation, quite simply, is an addictive drug. The best money creators (Britain and the US) are able to find ways to slow the addiction down with central-bank-maintained discipline, at least initially. But it makes no difference in the end, as all they can/could do is to enable the money bubble to blow bigger before its collapse.