Just What Exactly Do Conservatives Think Inflation Is?

BusinessPolicyJust What Exactly Do Conservatives Think Inflation Is?ByJohn Tamny,Contributor.Follow AuthorMay 17, 2026, 10:00am EDT100 US dollar banknotes symbols of the global economy spread out on a table in Clermont-Ferrand France on June 12 2025. (Photo by Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via AFP) (Photo by ROMAIN COSTASECA/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty ImagesJust as the left captured the formerly laudatory descriptor of “liberal,” economists have stolen “inflation.” Once evidence of currency shrinkage, inflation has now become too much economic growth. Worse, implied in the impossibility of “too much economic growth” is the thoroughly bankrupt Keynesian notion that government spending is a primary accelerator of the economic growth. The latter is precisely what Larry Summers meant back in 2021 when a newly-elected President Biden did as a re-elected President Trump would have done and showered nearly $2 trillion more in “stimulus” spending on the American people. This was theoretical compensation for the tragic lockdowns foisted on Americans in 2020 by President Trump, and then nationally as then-President Trump signed a $3 trillion coronavirus bill into law that among other things, subsidized lockdowns in just about every U.S. state. What rates stress about Summers’s analysis is that he’s a thoroughgoing Keynesian. In his vision of the world, government consumption is some kind of other, seemingly extracted from Pluto, only for the consumption by the state to expand the economy. Conservatives have long viewed the world differently, particularly the conservatives at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. Such was the influence of Robert Bartley, longtime editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, along with his deputy, George Melloan. They embraced the crucial truth within Say’s Law that all consumption is preceded by production. And since governments produce nothing, they can hardly increase demand. Summers, Paul Krugman, and...