I’m stayed out of the fracas over Mike Kinsley’s somewhat bizarre attack on my recent writings; Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, and Dan Drezner have it covered. And I owe a debt to Kinsley, who hired me to write for Slate way back when, letting me establish a reputation as someone who could write short-form pieces about economics for a broad audience, which led down a path to, well, you know.

For some reason, however, none of the things I’ve read goes back directly to Kinsley’s original screed about inflation, which is in a way where all this started. It’s very worth reading, and not just because he was dead wrong (and learned nothing from the experience). For it is pure Schumpeter/Hayek/Mellon liquidationism:

In short, I can’t help feeling that the gold bugs are right. No, I’m not stashing gold bars under my bed. But that’s only because I lack the courage of my convictions. My fear is not the result of economic analysis. It’s more from the realm of psychology. I mean mine. … But this cure has been one ice-cream sundae after another. It can’t be that easy, can it? The puritan in me says that there has to be some pain. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been plenty of economic pain. But that pain has come from the recession itself, not the cure.

Look, folks, when I write about the urge to see economics as a morality play, I am not just inventing this out of thin air. I read a lot; I also talk to a fair number of these people at things like Group of 30 meetings. Yes, there’s class interest; yes, there’s disaster capitalism at work. But the gut feeling that there must be pain (your pain, of course, not theirs) is very, very real too.