"Reagan had the opportunity to perform this quick surgery when he came into office. Instead, he turned his economic policies over to the Friedmanite monetarists. Reaganomics is largely monetarism. The monetarist view is that the Fed must only very, very slowly reduce the rate of counterfeiting, and thereby insure a gradual, painless recession with no unemployment or sharp readjustments. The hoax of Reaganomics was that the phony "budget cuts" and "tax cuts" were supposed to provide the razzle-dazzle to give gradualist Friedmanism the time, or the "breathing space," to work its magic. … There were two fundamental reforms the Reagan Administration could have proposed to end our Age of Inflation. First, either the abolition or the brutal checking of the Fed. Nothing was done, since monetarism wishes to give all power to the Fed and then navely urges the Fed to use that power wisely and with self-restraint. Second, the Administration could have followed Reagan's campaign pledge and reinstituted the gold standard. But the Friedmanite monetarists hate gold with a purple passion and wish all power to government fiat money."