Danny Vinik notes that “reform conservatives”, who are trying either to rescue the right from its intellectual torpor or to provide cover for its fundamental anti-intellectualism — your choice — have gotten a fair bit of lip service for some of their ideas, but none at all for one key proposal: activist monetary policy to assure full employment.

This was predictable.

The neomonetarist movement starts from an acknowledgement of reality: shortfalls of aggregate demand do happen, and they do matter, and we need an answer. Like the original monetarists, however, they reject any government role in the form of discretionary fiscal policy. Instead, they argue that the Fed and its counterparts can do the job all on their own if they really want to.

I don’t buy this on the economics; to do what’s needed central banks either have to take on a lot of risk, which is in effect a form of fiscal policy, or change inflation expectations, which is far beyond conventional monetary policy. But we don’t need to hash this out here. The more important point is that the neomonetarists are deluded in imagining that there is any constituency for their ideas in the modern conservative movement.

Remember what happened when the Fed began a partial move toward the kind of policy they want: practically the whole Republican establishment began screaming at Ben Bernanke that he was debasing the currency. And surely you don’t think that the failure of inflation to materialize has changed their minds.

And underlying this total opposition to monetary expansion lie two deep forces. First, much of the right is thoroughly committed to the view that bad things only happen because of the government, that the private sector will never have problems if it has low taxes and the security of the gold standard. Paul Ryan is effectively the intellectual leader of the GOP — and he gets his monetary economics from characters in Ayn Rand novels.

Moreover, the Kalecki argument about why business interests oppose activist fiscal policy applies to monetary policy too. If “captains of industry” want the body politic to believe that prosperity depends on their “confidence” — so that any criticism leads to depression — they’re going to hate monetarism as much as they hate Keynesianism, because both imply that full employment depends on policy, not their hurt feelings.

So there’s really no constituency for neomonetarism. Milton Friedman would be an isolated outcast in today’s conservative movement, and his would-be successors have no home.