“It is quite true that when a nation has been supporting its standard of living not by growth but by borrowing, its standard of living will fall when the loans stop. But over any period of time a nation’s economic fortunes, and its creditors’ loans, will be made good not by ‘austerity’ but by growth.”

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The above is but one of many warnings against “austerity” turned up by a machine called the Ironotron, a hand-operated contraption we keep around the offices of the Sun. It turns up ironical mentions in editorials of an earlier time. In this case we fed into the Ironotron Paul Krugman’s latest column denouncing “austerity,” and out spewed a trove of editorials from the leading voice of supply-side economics, the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, the Nobel laureate isn’t the only one who has had a thing or two to say against the idea of austerity. The Journal editorial quoted above was issued at 1985. It sounded a theme the Journal aired throughout the 1980s, when it was the Democrats who were the ones carrying on about the need for austerity. What the Journal was after was not austerity but growth, a point it makes in an editorial in tomorrow’s edition.

The pedigree to this idea is the thing to keep in mind when Mr. Krugman writes that “those of us who have spent years arguing against premature fiscal austerity just had a good two weeks.” The joy he is taking from an error in the work of Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart suggests they have him worried. That Mr. Krugman intends to write about it twice a week for the next eon is signaled by today’s headline “The Story of Our Time.”

There are, though, those who reckon the story of our time is the collapse of the dollar. We comprehend that its value has risen this year, reaching as high as a 1,380th of gold from the 1,693rd of an ounce at which it stood at the start of the year. It’ll take some time yet for the economists to trans-configurate whether the movement of at least some value into the dollar has had anything to do with the salutary nature of the sequester.

It wouldn’t surprise your editor. Even if in recent weeks the value of the dollar has slumped, as it has, to a 1,467th of an ounce of gold. On the dollar’s best day this year it still represents a devastating disappearance of value from our national currency that the Federal Reserve chairman has confessed to Congress he doesn’t fully understand and that Mr. Krugman likes to either sneer at or ignore. For us it’s not a partisan issue; these columns have been warning about the collapse of the dollar since halfway through George W. Bush’s presidency.

All the more reason to mark that the era of the advancing dollar began once the markets figured out where President Reagan and Chairman Volcker were taking the country. It was in a period of a strengthening dollar that the economy grew, unemployment fell, the budget moved toward balance, and people felt better about things. Without getting into the question of cause and effect it can be observed that a strengthening dollar coincided with a period in which taxes were brought down and people were lifted up and the debate rarely heard the word austerity.