Some conservatives are attacking current U.S. monetary policy as being too expansionary, as likely to lead to excessive inflation and debauchment of the currency.   The Weekly Standard is promoting a letter to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke that urges a reversal of its policy of QE2, its new round of monetary easing. The letter is signed by a list of conservatives, most of whom are well-known Republican economists, some associated with political candidates.  Apparently the driving force is David Malpass, who was an official in the Reagan Treasury, and he is taking out newspaper ads later this week.  This follows similar attacks on the Fed by politicians Sarah Palin, Mike Pence, and Paul Ryan. 

     If the National Journal, Wall Street Journal and Politico are right that the Republicans are trying to stake out a position that Democrats are pursuing inflationary monetary policy, they are on shaky ground.   I will leave it to others to make the important point of substance:  the risk of excessive inflation is low now compared to the risk of an alarming Japan-style deflation, with the economy having only begun to recover from its nadir of early 2009.   Or to acknowledge that Quantitative Easing is only a second best policy response to high unemployment.    (Fiscal policy would be much more likely to succeed at this task, if it were not for the constraints in Congress.)

     I will, rather, respond to the political component of the National Journal’s question by pointing out some insufficiently understood history:

1. Republican President Nixon successfully pushed Fed Chairman Arthur Burns into an excessively easy monetary policy in the early 1970s — leading to high inflation which the White House tried to address with wage-price controls.  Nixon, of course, also devalued the dollar, and took it off gold, thereby ending the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates.
2. Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush tried aggressively to push Fed Chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan into easier monetary policy, especially in election years.  This is documented in Bob Woodward’s 2000 book Maestro.   The White House succeeded in making life unpleasant enough for inflation-slayer Volcker that he eventually declined to be reappointed, prompting Treasury Secretary James Baker to exult “We got the son of a bitch!” (p.24).  Baker is also the man usually credited with the Plaza Accord and the associated 50 % depreciation of the dollar from 1985 to 1987.
3. Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are the two presidents in the last four decades who scrupulously refrained from pushing their Fed Chairmen (Volcker and Greenspan, respectively) into inflationary monetary policy.  
4. Under Republican President G.W.Bush, monetary policy once again became excessively easy, during 2003-06, contributing substantially to dollar depreciation, the housing bubble and the subsequent financial crash.

     Thus if the other party were to accuse Democrats of pursuing excessively inflationary monetary policy, it would be akin to them accusing Democrats of pursuing excessively expansionary fiscal policy.    Perhaps such accusations will strike some who don’t pay close attention as superficially plausible, even after all these years.  But they nonetheless fly in the face of history.   Another case of the pot calling the kettle “red.”   Yes, I know, the usual saying is about the color black.  But red is the color of deficits, overheating, … and Republicans.

    I document the history in “Responding to Crises,” Cato Journal 27, 2007. 

The Yale Book of Quotations provides a useful service: It tabulates well-known sound-bites, but tries to get the exact quote and citation right, which is rare.    (P.T. Barnum in fact never said “There is a sucker born every minute.”    Richard Nixon never said “But it would be wrong.” Etc.)  The editor also compiles an annual list of Top Ten Quotes of the Year.   In the second week of December he released the list for 2008.  Number 1, for example, is “I can see Russia from my house” (carefully attributed to the Tina Fey parody rather than precisely what Sarah Palin originally said).

The good news is that the title line in my blogpost of July 17 was chosen as one of the top ten quotes of 2008 (tied for tenth place, it is true).    The sentence is: “If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in financial crises.”     The bad news is that the quote was attributed to Paul Krugman, who had used it subsequently on the Bill Maher Show.   I had originally written it in 2007 as the first line of an article in a Cato Journal issue devoted to financial crises.  Among the others who picked up on the line after my blogpost were Ben Bernanke,  Mark Shields, Bloomberg,  WSJ.com, Brad deLong, and Tom Keene – generally with attribution, when the format permitted.

The list of Top Ten Quotations of 2008 went out over AP on December 15 as it was, and appeared in lots of newspaper stories and TV broadcasts.  Krugman immediately set the record straight on his blog, as I knew he would.   AP sent out a correction on December 22.    It should be obvious that this is not a scandal of any sort and that Krugman is just as quotable as he ever was.
  

But there are some other, more interesting, aspects.

One is an illustration of how tough is the world in which highly visible columnists like Krugman live.   There are lots of Krugman-haters out there.  Of course the phenomenon originates in the fact that he consistently has been liberal and anti-Bush (not precisely the same thing).  But the antipathy goes very deep.    The Yale/AP list was originally called to my attention by one Joel West.   I told him I was indebted to him for pointing out the misattribution.   But I also told him that I was sure that there had been no desire on Paul’s part to steal my line:  TV shows like Bill Maher don’t customarily allow their guests to display footnotes.     But Mr.West must be one of the Krugman-haters, because his subsequent blogpost accused Krugman of dishonesty.   As had another Krugman-hating blogpost before that.   These people are eager for ammunition against someone of a different ideological persuasion and are not sufficiently discriminating about what they use.

Ironically, of the other two soundbites that share tenth place on the Yale/AP list with the atheists-libertarians quote, one is something else attributed to Krugman (“Cash for trash”), and the third is from the all-time champion Krugman-hater, Donald Luskin.   Luskin earned the Top Ten honor when quoted as saying “Anyone who says we’re in a recession, or heading into one — especially the worst one since the Great Depression — is making up his own private definition of “`recession’”  in the Washington Post, September 14.    This was of course after a huge fraction of economic commentators and the public had already decided that the country was probably in recession, as now turns out indeed to have been the case.   (I myself took a bit of grief on various blogs both for saying the “R word” too early and also for saying it too late.  But I have also gotten credit.)

The atheists-and-libertarians line itself has also drawn some grief from some atheists and libertarians, on various blogsites.   I don’t mean to put these two philosophies together (although that would be an interesting essay question on some exam).  Nor is it the case that either group is objecting to being associated with the other.   But both have pointed out that the statement is not literally true.   They are entirely correct:  There are plenty of atheists in the military;  and there are plenty of libertarians in a financial crisis.  But of course the statement did not literally mean there are no atheists in foxholes or libertarians in financial crises.  The claims are, rather, that on average:  (i) soldiers under fire tend suddenly to grow more religious in outlook, and (ii) policy-makers facing a financial crisis tend suddenly to grow more interventionist in outlook.    But, yes, there really are conscientious atheists in foxholes.   They are a minority, but a substantial one.   And yes there really are thoughtful libertarians in financial crises.  Again a minority, but not to be dismissed.   If anything, I admire the intellectual consistency of those who have thought through their views well enough ahead of time that they do not change them under pressure from events that, even if calamitous, were predictable.