“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them down between the millstones of taxation and inflation,” goes a line apparently misattributed to Vladimir Lenin. While the quotation is more likely a paraphrase of Lenin by famed economist John Maynard Keynes, it also “seems like a pretty good description of what the Biden administration is doing to America’s middle class,” wrote the New York Post a year ago already. Of course, “inflation,” as in rising prices, is at least largely caused by a phenomenon expressed via another definition of the term: inflating the money supply.
Now, one thing Lenin absolutely did prescribe, explicitly, was the raising of prices by continual money-supply inflation. He did this, he said, because it was the only way to truly destroy “economic freedom” or, as he put it using the term applied to economic systems by socialists, “capitalism.” This is absolutely relevant for us today, too, for a simple reason:
A path of currency destruction is precisely what our government is pursuing.
And both major parties are guilty — though perhaps for different reasons.
Issuing this warning Thursday was commentator Alexander G. Markovsky. Writing at American Thinker, Markovsky presented Lenin’s dark prescription in the latter’s own words. They come from an April 22, 1919 London Daily Chronicle interview with Lenin, which The New York Times subsequently republished.
As Lenin put it, “Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism [economic freedom] merely by confiscation and expropriation, for however ruthlessly such measures may be applied, astute speculators and obstinate survivors of the capitalist classes will always manage to evade them and continue to corrupt the life of the community.”
“To accomplish this, Lenin declared, ‘Debauch the currency to overturn the basis of society,’” Markovsky related. Lenin later explained the Bolsheviks’ strategy in-depth, saying (as presented by Markovsky):
Hundreds of thousands of ruble notes are being issued daily by our Treasury. This is done, not in order to fill the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment.… The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism [economic freedom] is, therefore, to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort.… The great illusion of the value and power of money on which the capitalist state is based will have been definitely destroyed.
This cycle has been repeated throughout history, though sometimes out of convenience and politicians’ desperation. For instance, many have heard the stories of how in the 1920s Wiemar Republic, buying a loaf of bread could require a wheelbarrow full of banknotes. This was caused by the government’s decision to support workers striking in protest of French occupation by continuing to pay them — with currency ever-newly-printed.
“By mid-1923, the nation’s central banks were using more than 30 paper factories, almost 1,800 printing presses and 133 companies to print banknotes,” writes Alpha History. “Ironically, the production of paper money became one of Germany’s few profitable industries.”
A similar phenomenon was witnessed more recently in Venezuela, where government money-printing contributed to an estimated early 2019 inflation rate of 380,000 percent.
