Too many politicians sound like devotees of Lenin

From The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes, 1919.  Pages 235-248.  

Inflation 1) is destructive of a nation's economy, 2) reallocates wealth from the citizenry to the government, 3) undermines both contractual obligations and societal trust upon which so much depends, and 4) encourages government to direct mob anger against the more productive and resilient sectors of society.  

Inflation arises from bad government policy.  

All this was known 103 years ago.  Perhaps without as much confidence as now and certainly without the following century's repeated lessons affirming Keynes' insights.  Claims of a "Putin Price Hike" echo weak and incompetent governments from a century ago.  Claims that inflation is due to greedy corporations echo Leninists of a century ago.  

Biden and Warren and Yellen et al are often referred to as Obama era retreads.  Philosophically and chronologically, it might be more accurate to refer to them as Leninist retreads or Centurion retreads.  Their ideas and behaviors are a century old.

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. 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 [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

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.

In the latter stages of the war all the belligerent governments practiced, from necessity or incompetence, what a Bolshevist might have done from design. Even now, when the war is over, most of them continue out of weakness the same malpractices. But further, the governments of Europe, being many of them at this moment reckless in their methods as well as weak, seek to direct on to a class known as "profiteers" the popular indignation against the more obvious consequences of their vicious methods.

These "profiteers" are, broadly speaking, the entrepreneur class of capitalists, that is to say, the active and constructive element in the whole capitalist society, who in a period of rapidly rising prices cannot but get rich quick whether they wish it or desire it or not. If prices are continually rising, every trader who has purchased for stock or owns property and plant inevitably makes profits. By directing hatred against this class, therefore, the European governments are carrying a step further the fatal process which the subtle mind of Lenin had consciously conceived. The profiteers are a consequence and not a cause of rising prices. By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract and of the established equilibrium of wealth which is the inevitable result of inflation, these governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the 19th century. But they have no plan for replacing it.