Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy – and What We Can Do About It

CHAPTER 5

Money and MoralityHow Debasing Money Debases Society

      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.

—JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

A MONG THE GREAT IRONIES IS THAT LORD KEYNES, THE foremost proponent of monetary stimulus, penned one of the most famous and powerful summations of the societal disarray that occurs when money is destroyed. Keynes wrote these words in 1919, shortly before Germany’s inflation flared up into the Great Disorder, the hyperinflation and social breakdown that preceded ...