"Can we control inflation?" asked Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan last week. "It is the problem of our time."
At the street-corner markets of Paris, the price of tomatoes, lettuce and strawberries was up 40% over last month. In West Germany, bread cost 1¢ more. In Spain, where many people have to hold two jobs to live, bus fares were up 33%. In Britain, householders were told that they must pay 8% more for their coal, 10% more for their cooking gas. In an announcement that Britons took as symbolic of the whole trend, the government itself last week announced...