“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. . . . I like the America that my parents prospered in. I think we can restore a lot of that.”

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Those words were uttered by Paul Krugman two years ago when Congressman Ron Paul, in a debate on Bloomberg television, had him on the ropes over inflation. Mr. Krugman had a whole list of things he liked about the 1950s and 1960s. But he forgot to mention one — the gold exchange standard that was set up at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the closing days of World War II and undergirt the growth his parents enjoyed.

Oh, does Mr. Krugman have a blind spot about that. He’s out this morning with a column that runs under the headline “Belief, Facts and Money.” It’s about what Krugman calls “conservative delusions about inflation.” It seems to have been ignited by a cable in the Times from a political scientist, Brendan Nyhan, about how more Republicans and religious people doubt Darwin and ignore climate change.

Mr. Krugman suddenly thought about what he called “the similar state of affairs when it comes to economics, monetary economics in particular.” Those who worry about inflation, he seems to suggest, are as dumb as he perceives religious people to be. He denounces the Wall Street Journal for pointing out, in a typically savvy editorial issued in 2009, that the bond vigilantes were on the prowl. Yields on the 10-year Treasury had just climbed above 3.7%, the Journal noted, as “investors are now calculating the risks of renewed dollar inflation.”

The Nobel laureate also went after what he called “a virtual Who’s Who of conservative economists and pundits,”* who published an open letter to the Federal Reserve chairman at the time, Ben Bernanke, warning that his policies risked “currency debasement and inflation.” He neglected to mention that they doubted the Fed asset purchases would achieve the Fed’s goal of promoting employment.

“Reality, however, declined to cooperate,” writes Mr. Krugman. By reality he apparently means “core inflation,” the element of the consumer price index that excludes items on which prices are rising. The actual debasement of the dollar — its collapse in value — did turn out to be breathtaking. Mr. Krugman doesn’t mention it, but the value of the dollar fell at one point to less than an 1,800th of an ounce of gold from the 1,368th of an ounce of gold at which it was when the conservatives wrote their letter.

Unemployment, meantime, has proved way more stubborn than the Democrats expected. Even after millions have dropped from the work force, it has come down to only the level it was at when, in 1978, the Fed first got its mandate to deal with joblessness. The conservative letter-writers gently suggested that rather than more monetary stimulus, “improvements in tax, spending and regulatory policies” be given “precedence in a national growth program.”

Had either the Fed or President Obama listened to the conservatives who wrote the open letter, Mr. Obama might have been spared the humiliation of his poll numbers. The wisest of the Democrats, meanwhile, are starting to ask serious questions. This is what Paul Volcker did in May in his speech to the Bretton Woods Committee in Washington. The former chairman of the Fed reprised the whole post-World War II monetary history under a title with three question marks: “A New Bretton Woods???”

It would be inaccurate to suggest that Mr. Volcker called for a return to a 1950s type gold exchange standard that framed the generation of growth that lifted up Mr. Krugman’s parents and millions of others. Nor did Mr. Volcker put forward any other program. But, he said, “by now I think we can agree that the absence of an official, rules-based, cooperatively managed monetary system has not been a great success.” There was more wisdom of experience in that speech than in the entire run of the Krugman column in the Times.

We don’t yet know what America will do in November in respect of the Senate. But if voters break up the Democratic log-jam in the upper chamber, we could yet get reforms of the type for which Mr. Volcker hinted he, for one, is ready. The chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, Kevin Brady, has been nursing a formal review of the Fed’s performance on its centennial and is starting to win sponsors in the Senate. Congressman Ron Paul may have retired, but his son, Senator Rand Paul, is keeping alive his father’s bill to audit the Fed (it passed the House handily in 2012).

Another signature measure of Ron Paul’s, the Free Competition in Currency Act, is also being nursed on the Hill. It would codify Friedrich Hayek’s ideas of the denationalization of money. Plus an important new generation of economists — John Taylor of Stanford, comes to mind — is pressing for the institution of a rules-based monetary system. It’s hard to predict which of these these ideas will triumph in the years ahead. It’s not hard to predict that it will fall to others than Mr. Krugman to design the new system. We’d like to think they will create something even better than the gold exchange standard in place when Mr. Krugmans parents prospered.

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* The two-dozen signers included two former owners of the Sun, Roger Hertog and Paul Singer, and journalist and historian Amity Shlaes, who is married to the editor of the Sun.