You can inflate your way to prosperity, just look at Zimbabwe. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:
By the mid-1990s, the economy of Zimbabwe was in serious trouble.
The national government under its dictator Robert Mugabe had spent years confiscating private property– real estate, businesses, factories, bank deposits, etc.
And unsurprisingly, this had a disastrous effect on the economy.
Productive citizens and talented entrepreneurs left Zimbabwe in droves– after all, who would want to keep operating under such awful conditions?
So within a few years, everything from food production to mining output to manufacturing had plummeted.
The banking sector collapsed. Unemployment soared. Tax revenue dried up.
So Mugabe did what most politicians would do in that position: he started printing money.
This is an old trick that governments have relied on for thousands of years.
The ‘denarius’ coin of ancient Rome, for example, contained 93.5% silver in the early 100s AD under Emperor Trajan. By the time Aurelian became emperor the following century, the coin contained only 5% silver.
And as the denarius became less and less valuable, prices across the empire soared. Merchants had to keep increasing their prices in order to receive the same amount of silver that they used to… so inflation was rampant.
This is precisely what happened in Zimbabwe.
The government conjured absurd quantities of money out of thin air in order to make ends meet… but the new money had no value.
