A view of a gas station during fuel rationing in Portland, Ore., 1973. Drivers were limited to five gallons per vehicle on a first-come, first-served basis.NARA/Reuters Richard N. Langlois is a professor of economics at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise (Princeton University Press, 2023). For those of us old enough to remember it, the recent flare-up of inflation calls to mind the Great Inflation of the late 1970s, which came at the foot of a recession. There are indeed similarities between that historic episode and...