From Henry VIII to Lenin or Nero to Hitler, authoritarians always want to control money: who prints it, how much of it and at what price. They just can’t help themselves because money is the ultimate weapon, more powerful than ideology, religion or even military muscle. As Nathan Rothschild quipped, he who controls the money, controls the country.

Lenin and Hitler wanted to use money to destroy their enemies both internal and external, while Nero was more into self-enrichment. Henry VIII sought control over the mint so he could fund wars but when he realised he couldn’t pull the wool over people’s financial eyes indefinitely, he concluded that backing the new religion – Protestantism – would allow him to confiscate the wealth of the monasteries, in effect stealing the assets of the old religion. This was an easier way to get rich than mass debasement.

Lenin being Lenin went all in on money. In an interview with London’s Daily Chronicle published on April 23rd, 1919, Lenin is reported to have said that he had a plan to annihilate the power of money in order to destroy what remained of the old Russian state following the October Revolution of 1917.

“Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury ... with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money ... The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is therefore to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort. Already the hundred-rouble note is almost valueless in Russia. Soon even the simplest peasant will realise that it is only a scrap of paper ... and the great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based, will have been destroyed,” he........

© The Irish Times