Re: Keynes quote

["Esteban Perez" <eperez@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alan,

Check. Ephraim Keliman. "Early Inflation tax theory and estimates"
HOPE. Summer 2000. The following paragraphs are from that article:


 "In fact, Preobrazhensky arrived at his view of inflation as a tax even earlier, as evident from a passage in
the ABC of Communism ([1919] 1966), vastly popular at the time, which he cowrote with Nikolai
Bukharin. Having pointed out that money creation was the main source of financing the Soviet budget,
the authors stated, "This . . . is in reality a special form of taxation. Inasmuch as the issue of paper
money accelerates the depreciation of the currency, it leads directly to the expropriation of the money
capital of the bourgeoisie for it reduces the purchasing capacity of this money capital" (340-41). They
add that "this sort of tax can be collected without the taxpayer being aware that he is paying anything of
the sort."

It is of some historic interest that Paper Money is also the book that became "known for the much
quoted panegyric on the printing press as `that machine gun which attacked the bourgeois regime in the
rear"' (Erlich, 1950, 73). This statement came to be sometimes spuriously attributed to Lenin and, as
such, was supposed to have given rise to Keynes's much-cited dictum about Lenin declaring that "the
best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch its currency" (Keynes [1919] 1920, 235). As
Keynes's statement predates both his encounter with Preobrazhensky and the publication of Paper
Money, this is no evidence that Keynes borrowed in any respect from the latter. 19 But it does attest to
his interest in ideas coming from the new political experiment in the East. "