Stephen Kirchner ridicules “the fever-swamp Austrians, who argue that every tick in the business cycle must be attributable to a fiat money supply error on the part of the Fed.”

They internally contradict themselves, he argues:

These are the same people who argue that money demand is too complex a phenomenon for the Fed to be able to calibrate an appropriate growth rate in the money supply. That is perfectly true, which is why the Fed doesn’t even try. Yet the fever-swamp Austrians are implicitly claiming enough knowledge about money demand to determine whether monetary policy is too loose or too tight, just by observing simple growth rates in money, credit and even asset prices. This is what Hayek would term a ‘fatal conceit’ and is a travesty of Austrian economics.

Yes, for the same author to hold both positions (A: Fed can’t know enough calibrate money growth appropriately month by month, and B: But I do know, by looking at just a few variables) at the same time would be self-contradictory. I only wish Kirchner had told us who exactly has fallen into that mistake. You know: name the author and cite his works where he says A and B. Maybe even provide some quotes. Give us some evidence that the set of FSA’s isn’t the null set.

My own reading of the literature is that non-fevered Hayekians (like me!) do take position A. (Btw, the same problem applies equally to the Fed calibrating an appropriate interest rate target.) The economists who most conspicuously take something like position B are not the Austrians, but those employing the Taylor Rule or the McCallum Rule. Who is in both camps simultaneously?