Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Inflation or the managerial class?
Inflationism is as much a tool as it is an ideology and a phenomenon. Inflation, of course, promotes consumption at the moment as prices change faster than incomes. It benefits borrowers at the expense of lenders. It benefits first and earlier receivers—those closest to the money spigot—at the expense of later receivers. It also provides the perfect tool for the managerial class that James Burnham and Sam Francis describe for the further expansion and centralization of power.
Their theory rests upon the idea that business and the state have become fused through a class of bureaucrats and managers working hand-in-hand. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were obvious examples, but Burnham also saw the New Deal as another. A flaw can be found in Burnham’s identification of the New Deal as part of the managerial revolution he observed, though. It began in the United States much earlier, in the Progressive Era, as big business joined progressive technocratic expertise to cartelize industries at the expense of the consumer-taxpayer. The New Deal was foreshadowed in the war socialism of Woodrow Wilson, which was only halted by the end of the war. A crucial aspect of this business cartelization was central banking.
Politics becomes a totalizing force under bureaucracy. Inflation is the managerial class’s greatest tool. Through it they can finance every policy they wish. They can reward their friends and punish their enemies. They create a consumerist man—the economic man that is used as a strawman against free marketeers. The “free market” is chided for its “rampant consumerism.” All of this is possible only with the help of central banking and its chronic inflationism. It is no coincidence that the century of bureaucracy coincided with the century of central banking.
Yes, inflation coming at the hands of the bureaucrats is the very poison we are required to eat to try to live (or, perhaps, to die). The managers and bureaucrats centralize all of our decisions into their sphere of influence, thereby making us the thralls to their wishes. We let it happen, we asked for ”safety” and we got it good and hard. Perhaps uncertantity and danger are better when you hold the responsibility for your own live in your own hands. It is just like self-custodying your own BTC, self-custodying your own life!