Candidate Joe Biden did not make very many public appearances when he was running for the presidency, but during one of these appearances in July of 2020, he made a strange remark, even by Biden standards. He announced, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” This comment flew over almost everyone’s head, but looking back now, it was a very insightful confession.

Those under 40 years of age do not remember what it was like to live with hyperinflation. My first home mortgage in 1978 had a 15 percent interest rate — and that was with a VA loan! I knew people who had mortgages over 20 percent. Inflation in the 1960s and 70s was the curse of the economy. Wages would be increased, but it would not matter because the cost for everything would go up all the more. Simply going to the grocery store was traumatic. It was no coincidence that General Mills introduced Hamburger Helper in 1971. Check out “Hamburger Helper Commercial 1975” on YouTube, and you will see a TV ad that brags that it is “9 delicious ways to fight inflation.”

The government responded that the public should save more and spend less. Under President Gerald Ford, the government initiated a “Whip Inflation Now” campaign in 1976 that even featured “WIN” buttons. President Jimmy Carter did one better in 1977 by giving a televised talk that became known as “The Sweater Speech” by giving a personal example of wearing a cardigan sweater to illustrate how much energy could be saved if Americans simply reduced the thermostat settings for heating their homes. Obviously, these initiatives failed to curb inflation.

Milton Friedman was one of the most important economists of the 20th century, but he was often disparaged because he was in the conservative camp. It took a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 for folks to finally pay attention to Milton Friedman, and one of them was Ronald Reagan. Friedman described inflation in very simple terms — “too much money going after too few goods.” And implementing these restraints under Reagan’s administration finally brought inflation under control, and more or less has stayed there until 2020.

COVID restrictions essentially halted the economy, which meant that people had fewer dollars, and fewer products were being purchased. To ‘stimulate’ the economy, both the Trump and the Biden Administration approved stimulus money to motivate the populace to get buying again. If Milton Friedman would still be alive, he would have not just warned against the infusion of all these funds to jumpstart the economy but also warned that any expansion of the money supply must be a small and steady expansion as compared to a rapid and unexpected change.

For whatever conservative values Donald Trump held, he was more a businessman than an economist when he signed the $900 billion stimulus bill in December of 2020. In 2021, President Biden’s administration followed up with the CARES Act ($2.2 Trillion) and American Rescue Plan Act ($1.9 Trillion), which with other ‘smaller’ incentive initiatives, dumped some $6 TRILLION into the American economy. This was essentially a “Friedman be damned” philosophy, but it also vindicated Friedman because the result of these actions has been the highest inflation we have seen in this country in four decades.

Both Canada and Germany suffered through the same challenges as the United States but have not seen the inflation rates as our country but also did not pour money into their economies as we did. Even the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s analysts recently admitted, “Fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation.” A federal budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, David Ditch, commented, “Both Democrats and Republicans have dangerously inflated prices by pumping trillions into the economy since the onset of the pandemic. They essentially created a situation where too much money was chasing too few goods.” (Doesn’t that sound familiar?)

So, what can be done? Think of an obese man being told by his doctor that he has to go on a strict diet or else his health would be in severe jeopardy. This is where America is right now. If our federal government officials have any hope of addressing our inflation crisis, their choices are budget cuts, wage controls, credit tightening, and higher taxes. None of these will cause the voting public to dance with delight, and thus they are going to be very, very, very difficult for politicians to embrace. Yet, if they choose to do nothing, the result could be a full-blown recession.

One thing that Joe Biden got exactly right; Milton Friedman is definitely not running this show. However, whether we like it or not, or even if we agree with it or not, Friedman’s is still the best show in town.