Short-term remedies for a faltering economy

The economic news of the week: inflation in the United States is now the highest it has been since 1981. In many sectors of the economy - food, energy, healthcare - it is now running at double-digits, and the dollar's value against the euro has plummeted through the $1.50 barrier.

If your measure of decent policy is "how does this effect the poorest sections of society?" - which is as good a measure as I can think of for ethical decision-making - then the monetarists were wrong, not because inflation was not a huge problem, but because the shock tactics they used to tackle it hurt the poor, the least job-secure, the most.

The only way to rein in inflation as rapidly as the monetarists wanted, during a period in which trade unions had considerable muscles to flex, was to send interest rates soaring at the same time as the government worked to shatter organized labor and use the specter of mass unemployment to drive down real wages. Inflation was tamed - but at the cost of tremendous societal dislocation.