Politics & Power Quote by John Maynard Keynes

Inflation is doing the state’s dirty work with clean hands. Keynes’s line is often dragged out as a right-wing cudgel, but its bite comes from something more interesting: a technocrat warning that macroeconomic tools are also political weapons, whether or not politicians admit it.

“Continuing process” matters. He’s not talking about a one-off price spike caused by war or supply shocks; he’s describing a policy environment where currency loses value steadily enough that people normalize it. That’s where the confiscation becomes “secretly and unobserved.” Tax bills arrive with a signature and a due date. Inflation arrives as smaller portions, higher rents, wages that look bigger but buy less. The state doesn’t have to pass an unpopular levy; it can let the unit of account deteriorate and watch the public argue with their employers, their landlords, and each other.

Keynes is also pointing at distribution. Inflation rarely hits evenly. Debtors win, creditors lose. Asset owners often outrun the erosion; wage earners and savers eat it first. “An important part of the wealth” isn’t melodrama: in a world of fixed incomes and cash savings, modest annual inflation compounds into a quiet transfer from the cautious to the leveraged.

The context is early 20th-century Europe, where wartime finance and postwar instability made currency credibility a live issue. Keynes understood mass politics well enough to know that governments prefer policies that diffuse blame. He’s not romanticizing austerity; he’s diagnosing how modern states can fund themselves without asking permission - and how easily citizens can miss the bill until it’s already been paid.