You describe with admirable clarity what you mistake for a prediction. It is not a prediction. It is a diagnosis already rendered, decades ago, by anyone who understood that inflationism is not an accident of policy but its very essence under fiat money.

You write that “devaluation is coming.” I must correct you: devaluation arrived the moment the link to gold was severed. What you anticipate is merely the acceleration of a process long underway. There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner, as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later, as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved. Your government, like all governments before it, has chosen “later.”

You are correct that no statesman will propose the necessary retrenchment. But do not flatter the politicians by calling this cowardice. It is something worse: it is the logic of interventionism itself. Each intervention creates the conditions that seem to demand the next. The deficit demands the debt; the debt demands the cheap money; the cheap money demands the next deficit. The interventionist state is not failing to balance its budget — it is constitutionally incapable of doing so, for its entire claim to legitimacy rests upon distributing what it has not earned.

You note that the wealthy and politically connected profit from the inflation. Just so — this is no novelty. Inflation is never neutral. It enriches those who receive the new money first and despoils those who receive it last: the wage earner, the pensioner, the saver — precisely those virtuous citizens whom the demagogue claims to champion. Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism, and it is the most insidious of all taxes, for it is levied without legislation and blamed upon the grocer.

Where I must caution you is in your fatalism. You say the playbook “never changes.” But the playbook is not a law of nature; it is a choice made by men who hold false ideas about money. Sound money is not a technical arrangement. It belongs in the same class with constitutions and bills of rights — it is an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads by government. If the public again comes to understand this, the printing press can be stopped. If it does not, then your forecast requires no economist to confirm it. The masses who applaud each new “stimulus” will learn, as the Germans of 1923 learned, that the government cannot make all people richer by making the money poorer.

The question is not whether the bill comes due. It is only who shall be made to pay it, and whether anything of the market economy — which is to say, of civilization — remains when it does.