A nation’s productive—and moral, and intellectual—top is the middle class. It
is a broad reservoir of energy, it is a country’s motor and lifeblood, which
feeds the rest. The common denominator of its members, on their various levels
of ability, is: independence. The upper classes are merely a nation’s past; the
middle class is its future.
The middle class is the heart, the lifeblood, the energy source of a free,
industrial economy, i.e., of capitalism; it did not and cannot exist under any
other system; it is the product of upward mobility, incompatible with frozen
social castes. Do not ask, therefore, for whom the bell of inflation is
tolling; it tolls for you. It is not at the destruction of a handful of the
rich that inflation is aimed (the rich are mostly in the vanguard of the
destroyers), but at the middle class.