It's also fun to guess how he will subtly justify his hero this time.
[ Fearing falling prices, professor Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, is pushing for an inflation rate of 5 to 6 percent while conceding that his proposal is rife with peril and “we could end up with 200 percent inflation.” ]
Then don’t print more money you dumb SOB!
Anyways never trust the opinion of anyone who ever worked for the IMF.
This Keynes/Lenin quotation has been posted several times during the past few weeks in FR discussions about the misuse of paper money and the Founders' constitutional money system to protect liberty.
Keynes was cited, along with several of Thomas Jefferson's strong statements on the subject:
The following are a few remarks on the subject from "Our Ageless Constitution". Dr. Edwin Vieira, who is a contributor to that volume, also has published extensively on the Founders' protections for liberty through their provisions for a sound money system. A search of his books and other writings might be interested in pursuing this subject.
Thomas Jefferson: "Paper is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted."
". . . although the other nations of Europe have tried and trodden every path of force or folly in fruitless quest of the same object, yet we still expect to find in juggling tricks and banking dreams, that money can be made out of nothing. . . The misfortune is. . . we shall plunge ourselves in unextinguishable debt, and entail on our posterity an inheritance of external taxes, which will bring our government and people into the condition of those of England, an nation of pikes and gudgeons, the latter bred merely as food for the former."
"Stock dealers and banking companies, by the aid of a paper system [paper money] are enriching themselves to the ruin of our country, and swaying the government by their possession of the printing presses, which their wealth commands, and by other means, not always honorable to the character of our countrymen."
Then there is John Maynard Keynes observation in "The Economic Consequences of the Peace - 1920":
"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. . . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. . . . (It) does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. . . ."
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency”
I hasten to point out that Lenin’s destruction of Russia’s currency was, like most Communist endeavors, as much a matter of incompetence as malice.
The plain truth of the matter is the federal debt can never be repaid from revenues.
The only to repay the debt is to inflate it away. A combination of pure and ancillary inflation are the only way.
My guess has been 7% as the highest tolerable level. This rate compounded and accompanied by increased taxes on inflated wages will reduce the present debt in something less than 10 years.
Love it or hate it, inflation is assured. The only question is can the rate be controlled to a tolerable level.