Paul Krugman is out with his latest column mocking conservatives for a fixation on inflation that he reckons has become an “obsession.” He has been set off by the same dispatch in the Times that we wrote about in “Mystery of Jackson Hole.” It reported on the “increasingly vocal minority” of officials at the Federal reserve who want the bank to “retreat more quickly” from its easy money policies. This owes to fear of inflation. The Nobel laureate thinks the persistence of the inflation obsession is the “more interesting and important story.”

Let’s stipulate for a moment that Mr. Krugman is right about this. Conservatives generally are worried about inflation. We share the worry, despite the consumer price index. But what about Mr. Krugman’s own psychology? Here he is, a Nobel laureate in economics, who won’t address the collapse of the value of the dollar. Its value at the moment is off more than eighty percent from the 250th of an ounce of gold at which it was valued in the middle of the year when Mr. Krugman became a columnist of the Times.

Yet he won’t talk about it. President Obama can go on the radio and talk about how there is no “silver bullet” to the soaring price of gasoline. It turns out that at the time the value of gasoline in terms of silver was plunging. It was not the gasoline going up but the dollar going down. Silence from Mr. Krugman. He’s obsessed with the Consumer Price Index, some versions of which exclude gasoline. He’s worse than indifferent to specie. He’s got a phobia. He’s scared of it. To Mr. Krugman it’s kryptonite.

That’s the rock from Superman ‘s home planet, Krypton. Put a piece of specie next to Mr. Krugman and he shrivels up and like Superman on a slab from Krypton. It wouldn’t surprise us were Mr. Krugman to keep his Nobel “gold medal” in a lead-lined case, lest he get woozy when he walks past it. He calls for analysis? Analyze this. During Bretton Woods, under which the dollar was fixed at a 35th of an ounce of gold, unemployment averaged 4.7%. Since then, it’s averaged above 6%. Is that related to the fiat nature of money?

It’s not just the jobless rate that has spiked in the age of fiat money. The bankruptcy rate also began its climb after the dollar was delinked from gold, which we wrote about in “Elizabeth Warren’s Chance.” So did the so-called inequality rate on on which Thomas Piketty fixates and about which we wrote in “Piketty’s Gold” and “The Anti-Piketty.” Mr. Krugman says that those who have been warning about inflation should be ignored because of the CPI. What will be the fate of Mr. Krugman for failing to acknowledge the collapse of the dollar in specie?