A stunning quote from a financial villain

You sometimes hear Keynesian economics mentioned in tones of disgust and imprecation -- and rightly so. He was as I understand it the father of today's insane tax-and-spend economics.

Politicians love to spend money with wild (indeed crazy) abandon and John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is their presiding spirit in it today. He posited that a country in economic trouble could spend itself to prosperity. How do you think it's working? Like most crazies he did have moments of coherence. At some point in his career he uttered this very sound statement:

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 [also] 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 [once successful upper middle class entrepreneurs], whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat [working people]. 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.

Keynes' antithesis was the "Austrian school" of economists, free-market advocates led in effect by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. It overlapped with the modern Libertarian movement, featuring great minds like the late Murray Rothbard. Rothbard loved the Confederate flag and its meaning in the fight for freedom in the face of statist tyranny, despite having zero personal connections with our region. (He was born in New York the son of a Russian and a Polish Jew.) When he died in 1995 it was said that at his request the flag would always bedeck his grave -- something or other like that.

Scan this article with a skeptical eye

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School

......but check out these organizations in its right margin sometime:

• Foundation for Economic Education
• George Mason University
• The Independent Institute
• Ludwig von Mises Institute

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