Protectors of Wealth, not Work, Pressing Hard on Fear-Inflation Button

Another Krugman column on the long term against-the-data cries of fear-the- inflation! crowd

…inflation obsession has persisted, year after year, even as events have refuted its supposed justifications. And this tells us that something more than bad analysis is at work. At a fundamental level, it’s political.

This is fairly obvious if you look at who the inflation obsessives are. While a few conservatives believe that the Fed should be doing more, not less, they have little if any real influence. The overall picture is that most conservatives are inflation obsessives, and nearly all inflation obsessives are conservative.

Why is this the case? In part it reflects the belief that the government should never seek to mitigate economic pain, because the private sector always knows best. Back in the 1930s, Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter inveighed against any effort to fight the depression with easy money; to do so, warned Schumpeter, would be to leave “the work of depressions undone.” Modern conservatives are generally less open about the harshness of their view, but it’s pretty much the same.

The flip side of this antigovernment attitude is the conviction that any attempt to boost the economy, whether fiscal or monetary, must produce disastrous results — Zimbabwe, here we come! And this conviction is so strong that it persists no matter how wrong it has been, year after year.

Finally, all this ties in with a predilection for acting tough and inflicting punishment whatever the economic conditions. The British journalist William Keegan once described this as “sado-monetarism,” and it’s very much alive today.

Does any of this matter? It’s true that the Fed hasn’t surrendered to the sado-monetarists. Notably, it didn’t panic in 2011, when another blip in gasoline prices briefly raised the headline rate of inflation, and Republicans began inveighing against the “debasement” of the dollar.

NY Times: Krugman and see the comments too, by and large useful contributions…