"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. 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."
"A government can live for a long time...by print[ing] paper money. that is to say, it can by this means secure the command over real resources - just as real as those obtained by taxation...A government can live by this means when it can live by no other. It is the form of taxation which the public finds hardest to evade and even the weakest government can enforce, when it can enforce nothing else."
The author is John Maynard Keynes.
Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution: "No state shall...make anything but gold and siver coin a tender in payment of debts."
Hmmm!
2 comments:
Interesting. I never heard of Keynes until the last year. Now his name comes up often. I think I heard about him from Ron Paul first when he was discussing economics, Keynesian vs. Austrian.
Common sense isn't so common sometimes...
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