Lessons from the Nixon era about the potential impact of inflation panics on progressive politics
Richard Nixon announces a wage-price freeze on August 15, 1971, shocking the world. Photo: Richard Nixon Foundation When I was a freshman college debater at Emory University in the fall of 1970, the national debate topic was not Vietnam, but the desirability of wage and price control. Little did we know that just months ahead a Republican president would impose a wage-price freeze, long the anti-inflationary prescription of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Like Tim Noah, I suspect there may be a generational lapse in understanding the politics of inflation: But sometimes lost in an examination of the right’s exploitation of inflation fears is the abiding fact that the left has no clear prescription for dealing with it, either, other than by denying its existence or significance . Ironically, that was made most evident by the supposedly illiberal Richard Nixon’s surprising use of the great liberal instrument for taming inflation.
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