Monetarist Orphans

In his Conscience of a Liberal blog, Paul Krugman makes a very good point (again). The modern monetarists, the ones who inherited the legacy of Friedman and, by extension, David Stockman, are now political orphans.

[W]hat our modern monetarists are facing is a different problem: it turns out that they have no political home. The modern American conservative movement has no room for nuance, for the idea that some forms of government activism are a good idea. Ayn Rand, not Milton Friedman, is their patron saint; in fact, if Friedman were alive today, he’d be shunned as a dangerous radical with inflationary ideas.

And no amount of data will change their minds. If you look at what these people say, they’ve taken to putting scare quotes around the word “data”. Numbers, you see, have a clear liberal bias. 

It's shocking that one of our two major political parties has been taken over by the spirit of a psychologically disturbed Russian immigrant.  Their faith lies in the hope that she might be right, despite all data to the contrary.

Are the Republicans living in the shadow of Rasputin's ghost?  It seems so...