I Want to Live Like Common People—the Bernanke Version, That Is, Not the Shatner Version or the Pulp Version

If you enjoyed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's uncomfortable appearance before the House last week, you should be ashamed of yourself.

That seems to be the view of one Bernanke defender, who posits that an indisputably great man, because he is indisputably great, should not be subject to scorn or ridicule while explaining his role in the Merrill Lynch purchase to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Says James Hamilton of EconBrowser:

It is one thing to have different views from those of the Fed Chair on particular decisions that have been made– I certainly have plenty of areas of disagreement of my own. But it is another matter to question Bernanke's intellect or personal integrity. As someone who's known him for 25 years, I would place him above 99.9% of those recently in power in Washington on the integrity dimension, not to mention IQ. His actions over the past two years have been guided by one and only one motive, that being to minimize the harm caused to ordinary people by the financial turmoil. Whether you agree or disagree with all the steps he's taken, let's start with an understanding that that's been his overriding goal.

Arguments like the one set up in those last two sentences cheat the point: Sure we can admit the possibility he may be wrong as long as we all agree beforehand that he's right. The rest of this passage is just greatness-stroking that is irrelevant to whether the elected representatives of the American people should be holding the Fed Chairman accountable. And as it happens, we may have an understanding that Bernanke's overriding goal is to help "ordinary people," but still disagree with the goal. It's not the business of any official to decide which people are ordinary enough to merit help from government entities (and I don't think it's clear that a single ordinary folk has in fact been spared any harm by the Fed's actions).

Calculated Risk makes the more modest claim that Bernanke has tried to get liquidity into the market, and that it's not exactly his fault the Fed is now running AIG (and prefaces that with a much-longer recitation of Ben's Boners). Last week's testimony was bracing stuff, with some wonderful surprise evidence, and if you think the attacks on Bernanke have been "very personal" I have to point out that politics ain't bean bag. Being in the top percentile of integrity-filled intellectuals is no bar to tough public questioning. Nor should it be.