There is a growing consensus that monetary reform is necessary. Eight years after the 2008 financial crisis and the extraordinary measures taken—most notably near-zero interest rates, frequently changing forward guidance, and hundreds of billions of dollars in asset purchases—the goals of insulating the Federal Reserve from political pressures and creating a more predictable, accountable, rules-based monetary policy are widely held.

Yet in a recent Journal op-ed, Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Fed and the newest member of the Federal Open Market Committee, joined the debate by arguing against rules-based reform. Those in favor of reform, he said, want the Fed to “mechanically follow a simple rule” and “effectively turn monetary policy over to a computer.”

This is a false characterization of the reforms that I and many others support. In those reforms the Fed would choose and report on its strategy, which would neither be mechanical nor run by a computer.

To understand why reform is needed, recall that the Fed moved away from a rules-based policy in 2003-05 when it held the federal-funds rate well below what was indicated by the favorable experience of the previous two decades. The results were not good. The excessively low rates brought on a risk-taking search for yield and excesses in the housing market. Along with a breakdown in the regulatory process, these actions were a key factor in the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

During the panic in the fall of 2008, the Fed did a good job in its lender of last resort capacity by providing liquidity and by cutting the fed-funds rate. But then the Fed moved sharply in an unconventional direction by purchasing large amounts of Treasury and mortgage backed securities, and by holding the fed-funds rates near zero for years after the recession was over.