But it is a shock to see so many conservative voices — including, incredibly, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal — echoing Trump’s demands.

It’s hard to overstate just how consistent and intense The Journal and others of like mind used to be in their attacks on easy money. Many commentators have noted that three years ago The Journal declared that low interest rates are bad for the economy. But that was minor compared with the newspaper’s pronouncements during the financial crisis. For example, it attacked and ridiculed Ben Bernanke for cutting interest rates in December 2008 — that is, at a time when the economy was in free fall, and desperately needed all the support it could get.

Now, you might say that the explanation for the right’s about-face on monetary policy is the same as the explanation of its about-face on deficits. That is, Republicans want pain and suffering when there’s a Democratic president, but a nonstop party when one of their own sits in the White House. And that is indeed how it looks now. But I used to think there was something more to the story.

You see, as a pundit who, well, gets a lot of hate mail, I’ve learned that the issue of whether it sometimes makes sense to print money stirs more visceral emotions on the right than anything else. Declare that Trump is a corrupt Russian puppet, and you get a fair bit of blowback, but nothing like what you get if you say that returning to the gold standard would be a bad idea, or that monetary easing isn’t necessarily inflationary. A lot of people on the right just go crazy at any suggestion that money is something to be managed, not treated as a sacred trust with which mortals must not meddle.

The only thing I know that brings comparable blowback is criticism of Bitcoin, a topic that combines some of the same libertarian derp with a hefty infusion of technobabble.