Inflation is not yet, and let’s hope will not be, running as high as it did in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when we hit double digits three years in a row. But it is at its highest level since that time. Just as it did then, it is generating a potent conservative backlash. When inflation jumps, people don’t just resent paying higher prices. They feel a loss of control, the ground moving beneath them. Inflation becomes the dominant political issue.

And just as in the 1970s, politicians are flailing in response. That decade saw bipartisan experiments in price controls, …