... for the New New Deal stimulus package to kick in, let's acknowledge that the incoming administration intends to take a Keynesian approach to the Great Meltdown: using deficit spending to stimulate the economy. One of the side effects, of course, of printing all that money will be inflation. What's really interesting is to read what John Maynard Keynes himself had to say about that in 1919: By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their people. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily ; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls ... become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism h...