In the well-known words of Keynes in the period of hyperinflation in Europe after World War I: “A government can live for a long time, even the German Government or the Russian Government, by printing paper money… A government can live by this means when it can live by no other.
It is the form of taxation which the public finds it hardest to evade and even the weakest government can enforce.” This situation was a familiar one in Israel in the early 1980s, until an end was put to it in 1985, when as part of the Economic Stabilization Program the law known as the “No Printing Law” was passed.