From a Position of Military Strength, the Dominating State Will Use Its Superior Power to Enforce a Policy of Internationally Coordinated Inflation, Or Monetary Imperialism

And a similarly straightforward yet once again entirely non-Marxist explanation exists for the observation always pointed out by Marxists, that the banking and business establishment is usually among the most ardent supporters of military strength and imperial expansionism. It is not because the expansion of capitalist markets requires exploitation, but because the expansion of state protected and privileged business requires that such protection be extended also to foreign countries and that foreign competitors be hampered through non-contractual and nonproductive property acquisitions in the same way or more so than internal competition. Specifically, it supports imperialism if this promises to lead to a position of military domination of one’s own allied state over another. For then, from a position of military strength, it becomes possible to establish a system of—as one may call it—monetary imperialism. The dominating state will use its superior power to enforce a policy of internationally coordinated inflation. Its own central bank sets the pace in the process of counterfeiting, and the central banks of the dominated states are ordered to use its currency as their own reserves and inflate on top of them. This way, along with the dominating state and as the earliest receivers of the counterfeit reserve currency its associated banking and business establishment can engage in an almost costless expropriation of foreign property owners and income producers. A double layer of exploitation of a foreign state and a foreign elite on top of a national state and elite is imposed on the exploited class in the dominated territories, causing prolonged economic dependency and relative economic stagnation vis-à-vis the dominant nation. It is this—very uncapitalist—situation that characterizes the status of the United States and the U.S. dollar and that gives rise to the—correct—charge of U.S. economic exploitation and dollar imperialism.

—Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis,” in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006), 135