Steve Moore, Trump’s Great Fed Pick

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At The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell makes the case for conservative support of Stephen Moore, President Trump’s latest choice to fill a vacancy on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. There is opposition to Moore’s confirmation, but Tyrrell says it’s time to “get on with” stirring up the Fed, and Moore is the man to do it. He writes (abridged):

Steve Moore, one of the oracles of free market economics, is President Donald Trump’s choice for the Federal Reserve Board, and the long knives are out for him. Yet I am told by conservatives everywhere not to worry. He is a shoo-in.

The simple fact is that the conservatives are often slow on the draw against the American left. Only the Wall Street Journal and the intrepid New York Sun have come out swinging for Moore. It is time for the conservatives to rally around him.

Defending Moore on economic grounds ought not to be that difficult. The Trump Administration is presiding over an economic boom that Moore has been calling for for years. With the President’s tax cuts and deregulation — two of Moore’s favorite panaceas for an anemic economy — we have historically low unemployment, certainly for blacks and for Latinos. Growth is now robust. It has actually outpaced predictions. Most economists predicted 2.5% growth for the first quarter. Friday we learned that the economy grew at 3.2%.

That is the first time since 2015 that the first quarter GDP topped 3%. Most economists were wrong. Moore and those like him were right on track. As Jeremy J. Siegel said in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “… somehow, though unemployment is at a 50-year low, inflation is still below the Fed’s 2% target.” He is the rare economist for Moore.

Ahh, but his critics say Moore is no economist. He lacks a Ph.D. He is a writer, at times a clever writer, at other times a strenuously serious writer, on economics and politics. Well, I have a long memory. He writes with authority on economics and politics much as Henry Hazlitt wrote on economics and politics for some 60 years, from the early 1920s until the late 1980s. Hazlitt had no Ph.D. either. In fact he had no college degree at all. Hazlitt would have been an excellent choice throughout his long life to stir up the Fed. Now we have a President in place to stir up the Fed. So let us get on with it.