A recent editorial (“Our View: This is not your father’s inflation,” July 23) assures us that circumstances today are different than in the 1970s, when inflation became a major problem, and that we shouldn’t worry about recent price increases. Actually, there are important similarities between then and now.

Then, as now, the focus of both fiscal and monetary policy was on economic growth and employment, and concerns about inflation were dismissed as it gathered momentum. Then, as now, price increases were attributed to factors outside of government control and were considered to be temporary. Then it was union wage demands and a run-up in oil prices. Today it is the effects of COVID on the supply chain. The most important similarity, however, is the clear evidence of excessive money creation in both periods.

Inflation rarely rises or falls in a straight line, and perhaps monthly consumer prices will decline as supply bottlenecks ease. But if inflation is at root a monetary phenomenon, as economist Milton Friedman argued – and history suggests that he was correct – then the Federal Reserve’s easy money policy designed to stimulate the economy and finance gargantuan federal spending will continue to provide fuel for inflation’s next upsurge irrespective of other factors.

Until the early 1980s there was little willingness to check inflation for fear of adverse economic effects. We should have learned then, but apparently didn’t, that the longer the Fed waits to curb rapid money supply growth, the more painful the correction will be.

Martin Jones
Freeport