The Verbally Challenged John Taylor Strikes Again

John Taylor, tireless self-promoter of “rules-based monetary policy” (whatever that means), inventor of the legendary Taylor Rule, and very likely the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board if a Republican is elected President of the United States in 2016, has a history of verbal faux pas, which I have been documenting not very conscientiously for almost three years now.

Just to review my list (for which I make no claim of exhaustiveness), Professor Taylor was awarded the Hayek Prize of the Manhattan Institute in 2012 for his book First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity. The winner of the prize (a cash award of $50,000) also delivers a public Hayek Lecture in New York City to a distinguished audience consisting of wealthy and powerful and well-connected New Yorkers, drawn from the city’s financial, business, political, journalistic, and academic elites. The day before delivering his public lecture, Professor Taylor published a teaser as an op-ed in that paragon of journalistic excellence the Wall Street Journal editorial page. (This is what I had to say when it was published.)

In his teaser, Professor Taylor invoked Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and his Constitution of Liberty to explain the importance of the rule of law and its relationship to personal freedom. Certainly Hayek had a great deal to say and a lot of wisdom to impart on the subjects of the rule of law and personal freedom, but Professor Taylor, though the winner of the Hayek Prize, was obviously not interested enough to read Hayek’s chapter on monetary policy in The Constitution of Liberty; if he had he could not possibly have made the following assertions.

Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge. . . .

Rules for monetary policy do not mean that the central bank does not change the instruments of policy (interest rates or the money supply) in response to events, or provide loans in the case of a bank run. Rather they mean that they take such actions in a predictable manner.

But guess what. Hayek took a view rather different from Taylor’s in The Constitution of Liberty:

[T]he case against discretion in monetary policy is not quite the same as that against discretion in the use of the coercive powers of government. Even if the control of money is in the hands of a monopoly, its exercise does not necessarily involve coercion of private individuals. The argument against discretion in monetary policy rests on the view that monetary policy and its effects should be as predictable as possible. The validity of the argument depends, therefore, on whether we can devise an automatic mechanism which will make the effective supply of money change in a more predictable and less disturbing manner than will any discretionary measures likely to be adopted. The answer is not certain.

Now that was bad enough – quoting Hayek as an authority for a position that Hayek explicitly declined to take in the very source invoked by Professor Taylor. But that was just Professor Taylor’s teaser. Perhaps it got a bit garbled in the teasing process. So I went to the Manhattan Institute website and watched the video of the entire Hayek Lecture delivered by Professor Taylor. But things got even worse in the lecture – much worse. I mean disastrously worse. (This is what I had to say after watching the video.)

Taylor, while of course praising Hayek at length, simply displayed an appalling ignorance of Hayek’s writings and an inability to comprehend, or a carelessness so egregious that he was unable to properly read, the title — yes, the title! — of a pamphlet written by Hayek in the 1970s, when inflation was reaching the double digits in the US and much of Europe. The pamphlet, entitled Full Employment at any Price?, was an argument that the pursuit of full employment as an absolute goal, with no concern for price stability, would inevitably lead to accelerating inflation. The title was chosen to convey the idea that the pursuit of full employment was not without costs and that a temporary gain in employment at the cost of higher inflation might well not be worth it. Professor Taylor, however, could not even read the title correctly, construing the title as prescriptive, and — astonishingly — presuming that Hayek was advocating the exact policy that the pamphlet was written to confute.

Perhaps Professor Taylor was led to this mind-boggling misinterpretation by a letter from Milton Friedman, cited by Taylor, complaining about Hayek’s criticism in the pamphlet in question of Friedman’s dumb 3-perceent rule, to which criticism Friedman responded in his letter to Hayek. But Professor Taylor, unable to understand what Hayek and Friedman were arguing about, bewilderingly assumed that Friedman was criticizing Hayek’s advocacy of increasing the rate of inflation to whatever level was needed to ensure full employment, culminating in this ridiculous piece of misplaced condescension.

Well, once again, Milton Friedman, his compatriot in his cause — and it’s good to have compatriots by the way, very good to have friends in his cause. He wrote in another letter to Hayek – Hoover Archives – “I hate to see you come out, as you do here, for what I believe to be one of the most fundamental violations of the rule of law that we have, namely, discretionary activities of central bankers.” So, hopefully, that was enough to get everybody back on track. Actually, this episode – I certainly, obviously, don’t mean to suggest, as some people might, that Hayek changed his message, which, of course, he was consistent on everywhere else.

And all of this wisdom was delivered by Professor Taylor in his Hayek Lecture upon being awarded the Hayek Prize. Well done, Professor Taylor, well done.

Then last July, in another Wall Street Journal op-ed, Professor Taylor replied to Alan Blinder’s criticism of a bill introduced by House Republicans to require the Fed to use the Taylor Rule as its method for determining what its target would be for the Federal Funds rate. The title of the op-ed was “John Taylor’s reply to Alan Blinder,” and the subtitle was “The Fed’s ad hoc departures from rule-based monetary policy has [sic!] hurt the economy.” When I pointed out the grammatical error, and wondered whether the mistake was attributable to Professor Taylor or stellar editorial writers employed by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, David Henderson, a frequent contributor to the Journal, wrote a comment to assure me that it was certainly not Professor Taylor’s mistake. I took Henderson’s word for it. (Just for the record, the mistake is still there, you can look it up.)

But now there’s this. In today’s New York Times, there is an article about how, in an earlier era, criticism of the Fed came mainly from Democrats complaining about money being too tight and interests rates too high, while now criticism comes mainly from Republicans complaining that money is too easy and interest rates too low. At the end of the article we find this statement from Professor Taylor:

Practical experience and empirical studies show that checklist-free medical care is wrought with dangers just as rules-free monetary policy is,” Mr. Taylor wrote in a recent defense of his proposal.

There he goes again. Here are five definitions of “wrought” from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary:

1: worked into shape by artistry or effort <carefully wrought essays>

2: elaborately embellished : ornamented

3: processed for use : manufactured <wrought silk>

4: beaten into shape by tools : hammered —used of metals

5: deeply stirred : excited —often used with up <gets easily wrought up over nothing>

Obviously, what Professor Taylor meant to say is that medical care is “fraught” (rhymes with “wrought”) with dangers, but some people just can’t be bothered with pesky little details like that, any more than winners of the Hayek Prize can be bothered with actually reading the works of Hayek to which they refer in their Hayek Lecture. Let’s just hope that if Professor Taylor’s ambition to become Fed Chairman is realized, he’ll be a little bit more attentive to, say, the position of decimal points than he is to the placement of question marks and to the difference in meaning between words that sound almost alike.

PS I see that the Manhattan Institute has chosen James Grant as the winner of the 2015 Hayek Prize for his book America’s Forgotten Depression. I’m sure that 2015 Hayek Lecture will be far more finely wrought grammatically and stylistically than the 2012 Hayek Lecture, but, judging from book for which the prize was awarded, I am not overly optimistic that it will make a great deal more sense than the 2012 Hayek Lecture, but that is not a very high bar to clear.