The politics of memory: what's too painful to remember we simply choose to repeat.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top

I AM JUST old enough to remember inflation. As a kid, I didn't really feel the sting and uncertainty of constantly rising prices, except when waiting in a gas line while the guy in the kiosk manually changed prices. But the fear of too many dollars chasing too few goods was in the headlines enough that I distinctly recall poring through the business pages, crunching the numbers, and concluding that it was scientifically "impossible" to get interest rates, unemployment, and inflation each under 10 percent. Of course, I was 10 years old.

In the bizarre climate of contemporary Washington, D.C., my 10-year-old self probably would be employed as an economic policy blogger by The Washington Post. But at the time I was merely sponging up the pessimistic malaise America was marinating in. Richard Nixon had tried his disastrous wage and price controls, Gerald Ford (our cover boy this month) wore his desperation on his jacket lapel in the form of a "WIN" (Whip Inflation Now!) button, and Jimmy Carter alternated between blaming the American people and openly wondering whether low inflation was even possible in the modern world.

It is one of the enduring curiosities of current economic discourse that inflation--which, along with crime, was consistently one of the two biggest American worries throughout the 1970s--has been almost erased from our collective memory banks. The best and brightest Keynesian economists who helped inflict it on the country have done their best to ignore the subject in subsequent decades, preferring to denounce a new series of totemic hate figures, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. And the generation of liberal commentators who have never lived through a period of constantly rising prices are delivering snotty lectures to German central bankers (of all people) about being too "paranoid about inflation," lamenting that Reagan broke the perfectly workable nexus between inflation and expanded government, and trying to marginalize anti-inflation commentators as half-mad cranks. "I think the inflation rate should at least be above zero before we start worrying that it's gotten out of control," blogger Matthew Yglesias of the Obamaphile think tank the Center for American Progress wrote in June.

It turns out Yglesias' precondition was met that very month, when consumer prices jumped 1.1 percent for the 30-day period, putting 12-month inflation at 5 percent, the highest annual level in 17 years. As of press time, the Treasury...