To: tejek who wrote (124799 ) 10/23/2012 8:00:28 PM From: RetiredNow Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 149317 Understanding macroeconomic theory and learning from both Keynes (Bernanke is a fan) and from Hayek & Mises will make you a better long term investor. Keynes himself probably couldn't have guessed at what lengths his theories would have been stretched to justify what Bernanke and Congress are doing today. I wonder if he would have supported it. Either way, knowing what both Keynes and Hayek think about what Bernanke and Congress are doing, helps clarify what you should be doing to preserve what wealth you've managed to accumulate. That's why you should make sure to educate yourself rather than be so enamored of the highly degreed folks in the modern day, who claim they know what they are doing even as they destroy American citizens' wealth with abandon. Keynes said:"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, government 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. – 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."