“During every great inflation,” he said in 1978, “there is a striking decline in both public and private morality.” What allowed this disastrous state of affairs to continue, a former Federal Reserve economist said in the Wall Street Journal in June 1979, was “the almost universal commitment to the objective of ‘full employment’ ” and the “welfare-state idea which holds that government ought to have a continuing active concern with the poor, the sick, the aged, and the chronically unemployed.” Conservatives
