For more than 20 years, the world’s major capitalist economies have been led to borrow heavily and unabashedly, in large by a new rule, adopted worldwide beginning in the 1970’s and 1980’s, that tied monetary policy to targets for price growth. This dangerous idea – proposed in France by Jacques Rueff in 1958, adopted throughout Europe over the following two decades, and extended to the European Central Bank – was intended to limit the tendency of capitalist economies to aggravate inflation as soon as they hit full employment.