“Monetarism” Is Confirmation That Economists Never Got The Joke

BusinessPolicy“Monetarism” Is Confirmation That Economists Never Got The JokeByJohn Tamny,Contributor.Follow AuthorMay 24, 2026, 10:00am EDTEconomist Milton Friedman Reading (Photo by Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)Corbis/VCG via Getty ImagesThere’s a George Will column somewhere that says if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Economists seemingly never got the joke. Those on the “free market” side of the economist aisle still cling to the surely comical notion that they can and should plan money. They call themselves “monetarists,” and they claim that non-inflationary growth will be the reward if central banks stick to their pre-set money growth targets. Naaah. No house, street, town, city, state, or country ever needs to worry about how much or how little money is circulating. That’s because production itself is the 100% certain signal that there’s sufficient money. It’s always where production is, and as though an “invisible hand” placed it there. The sole purpose of production is getting, and with the latter in mind, there are always, always, always exchange media facilitating the movement of products for products.No central bank or any central authority could ever hope to plan the “supply” of exchange media necessary to move products for products. To presume to plan so-called “money supply,” central banks would have to grasp the infinite decisions taking place among billions of men, machines and thinking machines ever millisecond of every day on the path to production. Lots of luck there. Monetarism recalls the Five Year Plans of the old Soviet Union. Not so says Jon Hartley, a Stanford economist known to caucus with members of the right. Even though Milton Friedman admitted in 2003 that monetarism was bogus, and even though he was more forthright about how bogus it always was in private, Hartley is one of a growing cohort of PhDs trying to make fetch happen (look it up) as it were, and revive the notion that economists know the money...