The billionaire George Soros is warning Britons against pulling out of the European Union. He contrasts, as we did in “The American Option,” the fact that Ukraine is agitating to get into the E.U. just as Britain is agitating to get out. But it’s another matter when a warning of this kind is made by the man who famously shorted the British pound and, as the Guardian reminded its readers this morning, helped to force Britain’s currency out of the European exchange rate mechanism. That was in 1992 on what is known as Black Wednesday. Nice little economy you have there, Mr. Soros seems to be saying today. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.

What gets us about this is Mr. Soros’s harping on jobs. Here’s what he is quoted by the Guardian as saying in respect of the political consequences of any British withdrawal from the E.U.: “I will leave it to the British business community, particularly the multinationals that set up factories here as an entry point into the common market, to explain to the public what they stand to lose. But in one word — jobs.” He did this, the Guardian reports, after the Labor Party leader, Edward Miliband, “won plaudits from business groups” for suggesting that if Labor wins the next election, there won’t be a referendum on Europe.

It’s an incredible demarche by Mr. Soros, actually — irresponsible, demagogic, and detached from any reference to history. We don’t mind saying that we are not Soros haters; we have a mixed view of the billionaire. He’s done many great things, including in Eastern Europe. But if he wants to talk about the employment consequences of Britain pulling out of Europe, he also needs to talk about sound money. After all, British employment was perking along just fine after World War II. Unemployment never got above 3% even once between 1946 and 1970. That’s a full, long generation of full employment.

Then, bang. All of a sudden, unemployment started rising. It went above 3%. It dipped a bit to 2.6% in 1973 and 1974, and then started soaring, hitting 14.8% in 1986. It hasn’t been down to what it was prior to 1971 since then. It hasn’t been close. So wouldn’t it make sense for Mr. Soros to make at least some reference to what happened in 1971? Particularly since something big happened that year. It was that President Nixon closed the gold window. America defaulted on the dollar. The gold exchange standard that had been operated since Bretton Woods was abandoned.

Now a lot of people, including Mr. Soros, made a lot of money in the chaos that followed. We don’t begrudge them a cent of it. We do not blame them in the least for the chaos. But we do blame them for suggesting that the way to get the jobs back, or to protect what jobs they do have, is to entangle one’s economy with a European Union that issues a fiat currency like the Euro. What Mr. Soros and his fellow sages should be saying is that long-term full employment is not going to return to Britain until it restores itself to a system of sound and honest money.

By the way, we’d say the same thing to Ukraine and its striving millions. Their hunger for freedom and democracy is inspiring. But to scramble to get onto the European Union is to seek to clamber aboard a raft that is caught in a whirlpool. For Mr. Soros to argue that Britain should cling to the same raft, well, he should — he no doubt does — know better. It is a tragedy. He could play such a constructive role on this head. It looks, however, like this issue will have to wait until the Republicans turn, as they did in 1896, to a candidate who understands the centrality of sound money and makes it the center of a presidential campaign.