Good post by a guy who worked for Ronnie Raygun, Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. Krugman worked in the Reagan administration. Doug Henwood was a young Republican in college. Often the left's smartest members are turncoats and class traitors.*

Can the Fed Stimulate Growth or Only Inflation? by Bruce Bartlett

But conservatives want nothing to do with N.G.D.P. targeting. Amity Shlaes, a columnist with Bloomberg News and a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer, denounced the idea in a Nov. 2 column, calling it “a license to inflate.”

Her view is that if a recession causes growth to fall, unemployment to rise and home prices to crash, people should just suck it up and learn to live with it. Allowing prices to rise from wherever they are, even if there has been a deflation that caused them to fall, opens the door to stagflation and even hyperinflation. It’s a risk too great to take. The risk of continuing the status quo is, apparently, nothing to be concerned about.

It’s tiresome to read such rationalizations for doing nothing about the second-greatest economic crisis in our history, especially from someone like Ms. Shlaes, who is well versed in the history of the Great Depression.

Then, too, there were those just like her, like Henry Hazlitt, an editorial writer for The New York Times, and Benjamin M. Anderson, an economist with Chase National Bank, who also said people should just suck it up, that unemployment was only caused by excessive wages and greedy workers and that inflation was a cure worse than the disease, even as the price level fell 25 percent from 1929 to 1933.

Amity Shlaes, welcome to my rogues gallery!
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*like Hugo Stiglitz --- video montage of Stiglitz scenes