“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: