Keynes (and Lenin!) Not Always Wrong

In his Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes wrote: "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency.  By a continuing process of inflation governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.  By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily and, while the process impoverishes many, it enriches some.  The sight of this arbitrary arrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of distribution of wealth.

"Lenin was certainly right.  There is no subtler, no surer means of overthrowing the existing order of society than debauching the currency.  The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

[Please, dear friends, let's be exceptions to that statistic - and help others do the same.]