Below, as Mark Steyn has noted, I provide a link to a chart demonstrating the utterly unprecedented expansion in the monetary base in which Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has engaged over the last few months. Now economist Bruce Bartlett (who is, I should note, an old friend) has written to take me to task. It’s no good showing what Bernanke has done, Bruce suggests, without showing the problem to which he was responding.

Fair enough. But then Bruce continues, upbraiding me: “You should stop being such a doctrinaire monetarist.” Ah, but I only aspire to being a doctrinaire monetarist. My shortcoming? I can’t quite figure out what, in the current circumstances, monetarist doctrine is.

Three questions, then, for Bruce:

1. What would Milton Friedman have said that the Fed’s monetary policy ought to be?
2. What would Milton Friedman have said that the new administration’s fiscal policy ought to be?
3. Where, precisely, would he have been wrong?

I’ll be very certain to post Bruce’s replies.