Similarly, when John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936 about “the euthanasia of the rentier,” he was also deeply impressed by what he observed around him: the pre–World War I world of the rentier was collapsing, and there was in fact no other politically acceptable way out of the economic and budgetary crisis of the day. In particular, Keynes clearly felt that inflation, which the British were still reluctant to accept because of strong conservative attachment to the pre-1914 gold standard, would be the simplest though not necessarily the most just way to reduce the burden of public debt and the
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