I'm impressed that Brad DeLong can get through an entire Lawrence Kudlow article. He does, and finds Kudlow's reasoning abilities lacking:
For example, I was reading a piece by Lawrence Kudlow in National Review Online. It rang the changes on Kudlow's standard notes: (1) That those who worry about demand being insufficient are fools. (2) Praise of the early nineteenth-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say. (3) What nonsense it is to say that aggregate demand can be lower than aggregate supply because ""business creates production, production creates jobs, and wages for jobs create income. And when producers take time off to become consumers, they use their incomes to spend on goods and services." (4) Praise of Ronald Reagan for worrying not about demand but supply (with, somehow, not a mention of how the Reagan deficits reduced investment and proved, over a decade and a half, a much bigger drag on the growth of America's productive potential than high tax rates had been). (5) How Jean-Baptiste Say would "laugh at demand-side economists" who fear that uncertain consumer confidence may lead to stagnant consumer spending and slow growth this year. (6) The assertion that "gains in the supply of production will soon lead to increases in the volume of consumption."
But then, in the next paragraph, comes the whammy: "In addition, the Fed is feeding more cash into the economic pipeline, removing the deflationary constraint on production."
What is this "deflationary constraint on production" that the Federal Reserve is removing? It is the possibility that low liquidity--too small a money supply--may keep firms from buying capital equipment and consumers from buying goods and services, and so push aggregate demand below aggregate supply. We do not need to worry that aggregate demand is too low because the Federal Reserve is watching over us. Thus, when push comes to shove, Kudlow believes--at some level--that aggregate demand is not automatically kept in balance with aggregate supply by the dazzling theoretical clarity of Say's Law, but by something else.
