Quotes about Inflation

It will be asked how will the two masses of Continental and of State money have cost the people of the United States seventy-two millions of dollars, when they are to be redeemed now with about six million? I answer that the difference, being sixty-six millions, has been lost on the paper bills separately by the successive holders of them. Every one, through whose hands a bill passed, lost on that bill what it lost in value during the time it was in his hands. This was a real tax on him; and in this way the people of the United States actually contributed those sixty-six millions of dollars during the war, and by a mode of taxation the most oppressive of all because the most unequal of all.

The illusiveness of this concept of national income is to be seen in its dependence on changes in the purchasing power of the monetary unit. The more inflation progresses, the higher rises the national income.

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services. We conclude that, under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation.

The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.

Big business is not dangerous today because it is big, but because its bigness is an unwholesome inflation created by privileges and exemptions which it ought not to enjoy.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is one of the more insidious statistics developed by our government because it directs the hostility of the inflation-weary public toward business and the marketplace instead of toward the cause: government mismanagement of currency and credit. . . . Real prices are not going up! The value of currency is going down.

Inflation is the one form of taxation which even the weakest government can enforce, when it can enforce nothing else.

Between 1965 (the beginning of LBJ's "Great Society") and 1994, welfare spending has cost the taxpayers $5.4 trillion in constant 1993 dollars. The War on Poverty has cost us 70 % more than the total price tag for defeating both Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation. Many believe that Welfare has destroyed millions of families and cost a huge portion of our national wealth in the process.

Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

Imagine believing in the control of inflation by curbing the money supply! That is like deciding to stop your dog fouling the sidewalk by plugging up its rear end. It is highly unlikely to succeed, but if it does it kills the hound.

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.

In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time that a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.

The first panacea for a misguided nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

There is an island fantasy A "Someday I'll," we'll never see When recession stops, inflation ceases Our mortgage is paid, our pay increases That Someday I'll where problems end Where every piece of mail is from a friend Where the children are sweet and already grown . . . . Most unhappy people . . . put happiness on "law away" And struggle through a blue today . . . . Life's most important revelation Is that the journey means more than the destination . . .

That our popular art forms have become so obsessed with sex has turned the U.S.A into a nation of hobbledehoys; as if grown people don't have more vital concerns, such as taxes, inflation, dirty politics, earning a living, getting an education, or keeping out of jail.