One of the great farces of our day is the supposed “war on inflation” being waged by civil governments everywhere. In every continent, politicians pledge themselves to an all-out war on inflation, conveniently neglecting to state that the immediate cause of all inflation in the modern era is the increase of the supply of money and credit by the central civil or statist agencies. Inflation is an act of state, a very highly desirable act of state from the standpoint of politicians and the bureaucracy, because it increases vastly the powers of the state. The rise of the modern totalitarian state has its economic origin in the abandonment of gold coinage for paper money. As the creator of fiat money, of instant money by means of legalized counterfeiting of wealth, the state is always the wealthiest and most powerful force in society. As inflation increases, so too does the power of the state. Every civil government thus has a vested interest in inflation. For a state to halt inflation is to diminish its power. The cry, “Stop inflation,” is another way of saying “Castrate the state,” and no state or bureaucracy has yet favored its own castration.
Inflation is thus a way of life to the modern, humanistic power state, because power is its goal. The fundamental premise of modern political science is that the state is god walking on earth. This same Hegelian (and in origin pagan) doctrine is basic to Marxism, fascism, Naziism, democracy, Fabianism, and other modern political theories. It means that the state claims sovereignty, an attribute of God alone, and therefore claims the power to create. The result of this assertion of sovereignty and the power to create is fiat laws (laws with no basis in God’s law and purely arbitrary assertions of the state), fiat money (money created by state decree and having behind it the value of statist coercion), and fiat everything. Above all, it means fiat justice; justice ceases to be grounded in God’s being and righteousness, and is grounded instead in the arbitrary judgments and decisions of the state, its bureaucracy, and its agencies.
The more humanistic the power state becomes, the more it removes its law-making policies from the elective process. The goal of the humanistic state is to replace God as the ultimate power and authority over man, and hence it works, in the name of man, to separate itself from man. Most lawmaking in the United States is not an act of Congress, or of a state legislature, but of a bureaucracy which enacts vast powers unto itself through the Federal Register or in like ways. A sovereign power is always transcendental; it transcends those whom it governs. God is beyond man and nature and separate from them; hence we speak of the supernatural. Similarly, the would-be sovereign state seeks to be transcendental, beyond man in the name of man, and its rule becomes more and more a fiat and arbitrary rule.
The goal is total power; the key or the means is money, the creation of fiat money; in brief, inflation….
Inflation thus has a religious root. It is a consequence of the attempt by the state to play god and to resolve all human problems, not by religious and moral answers derived from the Bible, but from humanism. The state believes that, by playing god, it can abolish the problems of man and society. Instead, it aggravates those problems.
-- Rousas John Rushdoony, The Roots of Inflation
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