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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29424 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Lenin didn't say that

https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/04/15/fake-quote-files-v-i-lenin-on-inflation-and-taxation/

Although it is now overshadowed by his later work, Keynes wrote a brilliant and enduring book in 1919, in the aftermath World War I, titled The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In it, he states:

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.

… 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.

Given the unambiguous parallels between this passage and Ronald Reagan’s quote, it seems Reagan read Lord Keynes (or at least, read someone who had read him), and somewhere between 1919 and 1974, what Keynes interprets Lenin as saying became a direct quote from Lenin, which was later embellished and merged with other powerful imagery about inflation and taxes circulating at the same time (grinding millstones crushing the middle class and the bourgeoisie).

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