“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.”
John Maynard Keynes observation in “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” (1920)
That excellent essay was written just after Keynes abandoned the Versailles conference in disgust. This was some years before Keynes went over to the dark side. The John Maynard Keynes of the 1930’s would never have said or written anything like that.