Mark Gongloff of the Huffington Post responded to a surpassingly silly post of Christopher T. Mahoney’s, former vice chairman of Moody’s. Unfortunately, Gongloff’s post is almost as silly as Mahoney’s.
According to Mahoney, Protestants stink at monetary policy, you know, because of the whole Protestant work ethic thing that if you get something for nothing then it must be sinful. Thus Protestants believe that expansionary monetary policy and “reflation” are sinful precisely because they can costlessly cure depression and unemployment. Mahoney concludes therefore, “The only people who understand monetary policy are Jews and Catholics.” But instead of challenging Mahoney’s ludicrous premise that inflation is the miracle cure for what ails the U.S. economy, Gongloff offers as counterexamples Friedrich A. Hayek, who was born a Roman Catholic, and his Jewish mentor, Ludwig von Mises, whose valiant fight for complete separation of money from the control of politicians was also presumably driven by a theological aversion to inflation. But the narrow-minded dogmatists are not, of course, Mises and Hayek, but those like Gongloff and Mahoney who insist against all reason and experience that the creation of money miraculously begets real goods and services and ushers in an earthly paradise of plenty.
