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 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.
via Wikiquote
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