The 62 percent wage increase the Longshoremen just won moves us to tell— yet again — about our brunch at the home of the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, Simon Weber. It was July 1984. Among those the table, piled with bagels, smoked fish, and cream cheese, was the Nobel laureate in literature Isaac Bashevis Singer. We remarked that the Wall Street Journal, where we were pulling an oar, had just come out for, if only in theory, open borders.

“Oy,” Singer exclaimed. “All those Mexicans.”

We almost fell out of our socks, as we put it in an earlier editorial, to hear such a thing from the greatest immigrant writer in the home of the editor of the greatest immigrants’ newspaper. As words flew, Weber motioned for us to come out on his balcony, which overlooked Coney Island and its immigrant neighborhoods. There he shook his finger in our face and said, “I know you guys from the Wall Street Journal — all you want is cheap labor.”

That’s the moment we realized that editing the Jewish Forward — bringing it out in English after a century in Yiddish — could be as much fun as anything we’d yet tried in the newspaper line. The Wall Street Journal, in fact, wasn’t for open borders in the literal sense. It was, though, one of the few newspapers whose editorials opposed the idea that high wages were a cause of inflation. It, like Milton Friedman, thought of inflation as a monetary phenomenon.

The Journal had no fear of high wages any more than it did of immigrants. It wanted supply-side incentives, deregulation, low marginal taxes, and honest and stable money. That is the program that rewards labor and the gains they make in productivity. That is why a free-market columnist like our Lawrence Kudlow is suggesting that “Bidenflation, not the longshoremen,” is at fault in the port strike that — for now — ended last week. 

Mr. Kudlow points to the wave of price increases under the Biden-Harris administration — their “legacy of inflation,” as these columns have described it. This is a towering issue in this campaign. Over the past three-and-a-half years, Mr. Kudlow notes, “20 percent inflation” has “brought down real wages for working folks all around the country.” That, Mr. Kudlow explains, includes the longshoremen who appear to have just won their strike.

“Real wages have dropped sharply as the cost of living has sky-rocketed,” Mr. Kudlow adds. So while he notes that “it’s fashionable for all the business lobbies” to “beat up on the International Longshoremen’s Association,” President Trump’s former top economic advisor recommends that “they should be aiming their fire at the Biden-Harris inflation policies, not the employees.” 

Again in this presidential race, the two major-party candidates have different approaches to the inflation battle, though Trump, in his term, was a poor exemplar on spending. He presided over a $7.8 trillion boost in the gross public debt and called for zero percent — nay, negative percent — interest rates. The dollar, measured in gold, shed 35.7 percent of its value on his watch. Yet he is better on taxes and regulation.

Vice President Harris calls for another round of President Biden’s menu of more spending, higher taxes, and more regulatory burdens on the economy. It’s no wonder, then, that the longshoremen, in calling off their strike, were looking to lock in wage gains in the event of a Harris win. Mr. Kudlow calls it “insurance against future inflation.” As he puts it, “the moral of this story” is that “the American workforce deserves a solid hike in wages.”

Although these columns expressed some concerns with the tactics being used by an increasingly aggressive labor movement, the threat to the prosperity of working Americans posed by inflation makes understandable at least some of the unions’ frustration. All the more reason for labor to press the issue of honest money which would ensure that the salary increases they are achieving — fiat wages, one might say — don’t get erased by a new wave of inflation.