“Crazy About Money” is the headline over Paul Krugman’s column attacking Senator Cruz. The Timesman says the senator has staked out positions that are “fundamentally crazy.” Along the way he puts down the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, as a “con man.” But first Mr. Krugman attempts to sideswipe Mr. Cruz for having as an adviser a “a noted anti-Muslim bigot and conspiracy theorist.” The offending adviser isn’t named by the Nobel laureate in libel.

Which, let us just say, is rich. However unsavory a figure may have fetched up in Mr. Cruz’s outer circle, who could compare with, say, Mahathir Mohamad? He’s the erstwhile premier of Malaysia to whom Mr. Krugman used to give advice. Dr. Mahathir is notorious for claiming that, among other things, the Jews “invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights, and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong.”

After the Malaysian leader made that remark, Mr. Krugman issued a column called “Listening to Mahathir,” which put the gloss on bigotry under the sub-headline “anti-Semitism with a purpose.” In the column Mr. Krugman sought to blame Dr. Mahathir’s anti-Jewish rhetoric on — wait for it — President George W. Bush’s support for Israel. Yet the World Jewish Congress had documented that Dr. Mahathir’s “recorded anti-Jewish antipathy” extended back nearly 30 years.

We note this just to mark Mr. Krugman’s modus operandi. The former adviser to Enron just lacks the standing to vet Mr. Cruz’s camarilla — or, for that matter, his monetary policy. It’s bizarre that he’s attempting to do so. In a season in which high-minded columnists are begging for a candidate to offer ideas rather than insults, as Mr. Ryan put it so niftily, Senator Cruz has advanced the most idealistic and principled set of ideas, starting with monetary reform.

Which is really what set off Mr. Krugman’s tirade. Mr. Cruz is the only candidate who seems to understand that the regime of fiat money — in which the dollar lacks a legal definition in terms of specie (i.e., gold “ideally,” as Mr. Cruz put it) — is at the root of what has come to be called the Great Recession. It’s not the only source of our problems. But it’s key to understanding why the Obama years have been swallowed by a recovery (if that’s what it is) that is disappointing on jobs.

The Left is in a panic over the fact that the Congress is waking up to the need for monetary reform. Mr. Krugman may mock Mr. Ryan, as he did this morning, for appreciating Ayn Rand’s paean to the gold standard in her novel “Atlas Shrugged.” What Mr. Ryan knows, though, is that George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founders understood the truths of honest money long before Ayn Rand wrote about them so compellingly.

Messrs. Cruz and Ryan also understand — mark it well — that it is to only the Congress that the Constitution grants the monetary powers. They’re given neither to the courts, the president, nor the states. They’re not even granted to academic economists (could that be because so many academic economists make it their business to justify the debasement of the dollar?). Within days of Mr. Ryan acceding to Speaker, the House passed the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act.

The FORM Act, which is now before the Senate, could yet prove to be a historic piece of legislation. It would begin restoring oversight of monetary policy to the Congress that holds the grant of monetary powers. That would disenfranchise Mr. Krugman and the rest of the economists (the Fed employs something like 300 economists in Washington D.C. alone). It would set in motion the long overdue work of reform just as the Fed begins its second century.

It’s not just Messrs. Cruz and Ryan who understand what’s needed. No less a specimen of sanity than Paul Volcker warned two years ago that “the absence of an official, rules-based, cooperatively managed monetary system has not been a great success.” Mr. Krugman may even secretly understand this himself. “I’m a defender of the economic policies that we followed after World War II, that produced the best generation of economic growth that this country has ever experienced,” he once wrote.

Professor Krugman called it “the America that my parents prospered in.” He neglected to mention it was also an era when the dollar was fixed by law to a specified weight of gold. It was — between 1947 and 1971 — a span in which unemployment averaged only 4.7%. Why Mr. Krugman’s silence? Could it be that he has stopped being an economist and become a political agitator? Or that he is the one, as he so often claims in respect of others, whose ideas are crazy?