Thomas Donlan of Barron’s uses his latest editorial commentary to examine the Federal Reserve’s ability to control inflation and maximize employment.

The two commonly worshipped mandates amount to at least one too many. There are plenty of data points on the Phillips Curve indicating that monetary policies encouraging rapid growth of jobs also produce inflation, and that monetary policies designed to wring inflation out of the economy also will squeeze out jobs.

This prospective trade-off inconveniences central bankers and other politicians who believe they have been given earthly power in order to use it for the common good. Unfortunately, common people — which is to say all of us — abhor trade-offs, preferring to demand more guns and more butter, more goods and more leisure, more jobs and stable prices.

Maybe the two mandates are two too many, since the Federal Reserve gets too much credit for its ability to manipulate the economy. As we ought to see in recent economic history, just because stuff happens does not mean the Fed did it.

For the past eight years, the Fed has been trying to raise inflation, without success. Its easy-money policies also were supposed to goose a recovery that most people considered depressingly slow. …

… This should be the time that interest rates rise. In normal times with these indicators of an even better future, short-term rates should be around 3% or 4%, with long-term rates and mortgages still higher.

Of course, the Fed knows these are not normal times. No matter how comfortably normal the times may seem, the Fed has injected trillions of dollars into the economy by purchasing — and rolling over — bills, notes, and bonds from every corner of the capital market. The Fed’s economists do not know how to stop, because if they stopped the economy might tank.

So the new Fed policy is quite simple: another dose of flimflam. By removing the word “patient” from its monetary plan, it threatens to raise rates, but not right away. It promised not to do it in April, and it hinted it won’t do it in June, either. The only thing that changed was the word in the policy, not the hesitant policy itself.