We Americans are bedeviled night and day by inflation. It’s a curse, an albatross around the necks of homemakers, widows, new entrants to the labor force, old members of the labor force. Rapidly rising prices for goods and services of every kind haunt every person, every family, that wanders in fear and loathing up and down the aisles of grocery stores, shops for airline tickets to see grandparents for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and opens bills for utilities online and in the mail. To be an American in today’s world, whether young or old, retired or toiling, healthy or weak, is to live in fear of bills that terrify day after day. What is to be done? Your humble servant knows this fear well. I have lived through several episodes of panic-inducing fear in my 80-plus years on the globe. There generally is one “approved” way to address this terror: to ratchet up interest rates, curb the growth of money supply, and force our glorious America into a slowdown, usually a recession. The problem is that recessions hurt people. Incomes fall. The value of assets falls. Americans live in fear. “There is nothing to fear but fear itself,” said FDR in his initial inaugural itself in March of 1933. But fear is plenty bad enough. We can see it all around us right now. Through no fault of their own, Americans must live in fear to curb prices. Perhaps there is another way. I know I have seen it before, about 54 years ago. Perhaps there is another way. I know I have seen it before, about 54 years ago. My boss and pal, Richard M. Nixon, was faced with relentless, grinding fear in the early 1970s. His only options seemingly were to throw the nation’s economy into Low Gear and decrease the demand that was jacking up prices cruelly. But Nixon was an experimenter. He had promised that he would not have wage-price controls no matter what. He loved free markets and hated a dictatorial government that would regulate prices and wages via a huge bureaucracy. But he also did not want to throw millions of Americans into unemployment. He wanted stable prices, but he also wanted full employment. And he wanted to win the 1972 election in a big way. Thus, with the enthusiastic support of the Congress and the Federal Reserve Board, he ordered comprehensive wage-price controls in the Fall of 1971. Amazingly, it worked, at least for a while. The nation was stunned, but prices stabilized. Employment stayed strong. I know this well. My father, Herbert Stein, at that time a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, was named by Mr. Nixon to be in charge of the bureaucracy that administered the bitter pill. Mr. Nixon had chosen my father because he knew my father disliked controls and would get rid of them as soon as possible. That worked as well. After about a year, when cracks began to appear in the wage-price ceiling, which was called “Phase One,” my father and the administration started to dismantle the edifice. The public was thrilled. Mr. Nixon won re-election by a huge margin — Mr. Nixon won 49 states, which had never been seen before and has not been seen since Reagan. Of course, a wildly jacked-up media soon started to demolish Mr. Nixon’s legacy. But meanwhile, the back of the inflation had been broken and it never came back until now. Is it time to give it the old college try? Why not? READ MORE from Ben Stein: The Best Thing in Life Liquidity Is Essential to Life The Almighty Power