Have We Been Misreading Kudlow on Monetary Policy?

Mark Thoma has some fun with the latest from Lawrence Kudlow but left this line alone:

The blowout jobs report for April, with 274,000 new business payrolls and an upward-revision of 93,000 for February and March, virtually assures that economic growth for the first half of 2005 will come in around 4 percent. The tax-cut led economy continues to be stronger than mainstream economists and the media would have us believe. But will the Fed attempt to limit this growth, as it has so often in the past, with its flawed economic models that mistakenly assume that more growth and more jobs are the cause of inflation? After all, how can more people working and producing cause inflation?

Brad DeLong follows suit, while Max Sawicky tries to finds common ground:

we know what we don’t like: the Fed tightening up while the unemployment rate is 5.2 percent.

I think what Max is saying is that he opposes tight monetary policy because he believes the labor market is weak. While I agree, this is not what Kudlow is saying. Kudlow is saying he believes the economy is strong. I suspect Kudlow flips-flops on monetary growth being too strong one week versus being too tight in his next attack on the Federal Reserve because he serves two masters. His primary master are the political types who run this White House, but he also has to prop up NRO goldbug Victor Canto. And if we read enough of Kudlow, you realize that he has never heard of the full employment constraint. Now Max is right that we are not at full employment, but this is not why Kudlow is claiming that monetary growth is too low.