Josh Barro has a good but incomplete post about the conservative inability to deal in any meaningful way with the reality of recessions. As he says, GOP policy prescriptions — deregulate, cut spending (especially on the poor), and cut taxes (on the rich) — are the same when unemployment is above 9 percent as when it is below 5. “How,” he asks, “can a political ideology have nothing to say about how to address recessions?”

But Barro, I’d argue, misrepresents this as a case of doctrinaire, anti-intellectual politicians rejecting the ideas of conservative wonks. No doubt the politicians are indeed anti-intellectual and doctrinaire; and yes, there are some conservative wonks who are voices in the wilderness.

It’s quite wrong, however, to imagine that it’s only dumb politicians who reject the notion that there’s anything special about recessions, and that periods of high unemployment call for different policies than periods of full employment. When I read Barro’s piece, I immediately thought of a diatribe by a *very* prestigious conservative economist, rejecting and ridiculing the idea that “regular economics” — his term — loses any of its validity during times of high unemployment:

Keynesian economics argues that incentives and other forces in regular economics are overwhelmed, at least in recessions, by effects involving “aggregate demand.”

Those scare quotes are significant. If you consider the notion of “aggregate demand” ludicrous, you aren’t just rejecting Keynesian economics; you’re rejecting monetarism, of any form too; you are in effect declaring that Milton Friedman was a fool. In fact, the author of this diatribe ridicules the whole notion that recessions involve some kind of market failure that needs addressing.

So who are we talking about? Um, Robert Barro.

Why would someone really smart — and the elder Barro certainly is, even if he has some problems with history — reject the very notion of a failure of aggregate demand? The answer has to be political — the sense that acknowledging that markets fail, ever, would be the thin edge of the wedge for liberal policies. Whatever the reason, what we have here is the position Barro the younger lambastes as a failure of conservative politicians being taken by one of the most famous, prestigious conservative economists around.

Whatever has gone wrong here, it’s a problem of the conservative intelligentsia as well as the base.