The invisible tax that needs no congressman to pass it

National Review tells us that the Price Stability Act would remake the Federal Reserve's charter, removing the employment mandate and leaving stable prices as the single, undivided charge. The argument, stripped to its plainest form, is this: a central bank asked to serve two masters will always find a moment when it serves neither well.

I spent years worrying about paper money badly secured. In my day the worry was colonial assemblies printing notes to pay debts they would never otherwise honor, then watching those notes lose a third of their value before the ink dried. The mechanism is different now — I will not pretend otherwise — but the consequence lands in the same place: on the person who earned wages last month, saved them carefully, and finds this month that they buy less bread. That person cast no vote for the inflation. No legislator signed it. It arrived quietly, like a frost.

National Review frames this as protecting "working families," and I think that framing is exactly right, though it is worth saying plainly why. The wealthy can place their savings in assets that rise with prices — land, equities, real property. The working tradesman, the small farmer, the woman who keeps her household on a fixed income, holds her wealth largely in the currency itself or in instruments tied to it. Inflation is, as a matter of arithmetic, a transfer from the latter group to those who borrow and spend first. It is not a tax on riches; it is a tax on thrift.

Now, the honest objection must be heard. A Fed charged with price stability alone may, when unemployment rises sharply, feel itself forbidden to ease conditions that would put people back to work. That is a real cost, and the Act's sponsors owe the public a plain answer about it. I would ask them: what discipline, precisely, replaces the one being removed? A mandate without a mechanism for accountability is a motto, not a law. The early Pennsylvania loan office issued currency backed by land mortgages precisely because something had to stand behind the note. What stands behind this pledge?

My inference — and I mark it as inference, not recollection — is that the Act's value lies less in the specific target than in forcing the question into the open: who is responsible when the dollar loses its weight, and what happens to them when it does? Transparency is itself a form of discipline. A Fed that must answer for a single, measurable promise is harder to excuse than one juggling two.

Counsel for the working person: Whatever Congress decides about the Fed's mandate, you need not wait. Price your own household's real cost of living every six months — not the headline number, but your actual basket of goods. If your savings are losing ground faster than they are growing, that is information worth acting on before the law catches up with the problem.