“Don’t just do something, stand there,” President Ronald Reagan once advised his staff. Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke has decided that remains pretty good advice: In his Friday speech to the world’s central bankers assembled in Jackson Hole, he said that he will not use “the range of tools that could be used to provide additional monetary stimulus,” at least until after an extended meeting of the monetary policy committee next month. He passes the chalice to politicians—he calls them “policymakers”—“to promote stronger economic performance” by adopting growth inducing tax, trade, and regulatory policies. If they do their job, he is confident that nothing that has happened in recent years will prevent the economy from resuming the growth consistent with its strong economic fundamentals.

That is a big “if.” Most Americans doubt that the political class is up to the job of sensible policymaking, since it seems to prefer mutually assured destruction to solving the nation’s problems. Republican politicians have focused of late on the overwhelmingly important issue of whether President Obama is entitled to a brief vacation, and Rick Perry, Texas governor and now the leading candidate for his party’s presidential nomination, says Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, would be “almost treasonous” if he loosens monetary policy. Fortunately for the chairman, even in Texas they don’t execute people for “almost” treason.