"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 actually enriches
some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at
security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of
wealth
Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their
deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who
are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has
impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and
the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all
permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate
foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost
meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a
lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer
means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch 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."
John Maynard Keynes
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