One way to think about Britain’s retreat from supply-side tax cuts — announced this morning by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng — is to read Shakespeare. Or, more to the point, the review of Mr. Kwarteng’s book, “War and Gold,” by the famed editor of the Interest Rate Observer, James Grant. The review appeared in the Wall Street Journal and described Mr. Kwarteng, however well read he is, as “a monetary Hamlet.”

That was back in 2014, when, as Mr. Grant put it, the world’s top five central banks had, in the past 12 months alone, “conjured up $1.4 trillion” and done so “as a sorcerer might summon the spirits. No wand, no printing press was required; taps on a keyboard did the heavy lifting.” In other words, they’d just gotten started on the money creation that produced the current crisis.

Mr. Kwarteng’s book is what Mr. Grant calls “a chronicle of fiscal ruination and redemption, with the emphasis on the former.” Mr. Grant sums up Mr. Kwarteng’s narrative as “governments printed currency and levied taxes to fight wars. Now they materialize the money on computer screens to jolt their underachieving and over indebted economies back to life (so far without notable success).”

“Customarily,” Mr. Grant describes Mr. Kwarteng’s book as relating, “sound finance resumed with the peace. What’s new is that, starting about 1919, the taxing and inflating has kept right on going even after the shooting stopped.” Today the taxing and inflating seems determined to continue at least in part because the shooting has restarted yet again in — where else? — Europe.

Mr. Kwarteng might have reprised five centuries of history. Yet Mr. Grant finds his conclusion “not especially gob-smacking.” Gold might appeal to those who doubt paper money, yet, Mr. Kwarteng reckons, “the gold standard will never formally return, but movements in the price of gold may well suggest that investors, in their lack of faith in paper money, have informally adopted one.” 

It’s shocking to read, even in retrospect, of such pessimism about the prospects for honest money, particularly from a future — now current — chancellor of an empire that rose to glory on the price stability provided by gold. It’s the kind of thinking that led a former chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, to sell Britain’s gold hoard at an average of $275 an ounce.

This editorial, in any event, is not about Britain acceding to the gold standard, though the word “pound” denotes a physical weight, specifically, a troy pound of silver. What we see taking place in London is vacillation of whether Britain really wants to be — or not. Our view is that the best course for Britain “to be” is to break free of the multilateral institutions and seize its own future. 

One of the things for us to remember is that the pound/dollar exchange rate over which such consternation has erupted today is not so different than it was when Britain struck for independence in the Brexit referendum of 2016. What was the point of that brave break if not to be able to go its own way in all things, including its financial and monetary and regulatory affairs and fiscal affairs?

It’s not just that the kind of tax cuts against which IMF’s advises were used by President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher to extricate their countries from a trap not unlike that in which Britain is trapped today. It’s that the IMF is not Mr. Kwarteng’s — or Britain’s — friend. The IMF, like the EU and the United Nations, is, in the sense used by public choice economists, a competitor.

Which brings us back to Hamlet. It’s the play that gave English the immortal phrase, “to thine own self be true.” Why should that hold any less apt for Britons than the Danes. To put it in terms that bucked up another troubled Shakespearean royal, Macbeth, our advice to Mr. Kwarteng is “screw your courage to the sticking place.” That is the only way for Britain if it is to be.