Rotschild already said: "Give me the power to control a countries money supply and I do not care who makes it's laws." What he forgot of course is that 'he who makes the laws, decides who controls the money supply.' 

As a government you should have a monopoly of money first and foremost. I won't go into detail how you get people to surrender the money of their individual choice for your centrally planned monopoly money. You do not have to fund academia to find an intellectual excuse, since all of this has been done by John Maynard Keynes and his modern disciples. Keynes called gold a barbarous relic, promoted the government regulating the money supply and dressed it up with a whole bunch of formulas. If you can, please ban the book of Henry Hazlit about Keynes or at least keep it out of the curriculum of your public schools.

Once you have a monopoly of money, you can expand and contract the amount of money at will by regulating the interest rate or in more extreme cases by asset swapping, quantative easing, interest rate expectation management, giving guarantees, etc. etc. The main trick to gain assets from the tax slaves is what we at Squeeze Squander and Spin call: the two utter system. You expand the money supply and buy assets with the new money. The debts you incur are not a problem, since inflation eats it away and dumps the bill at those with savings. As tax slaves see prices rise, they wise up and go into debt themselves. At some point the tax slaves are more into debt than the government. At this point the inflation utter is milked to full capacity. More inflation would only benefit the tax slaves as their debt is now greatest.

At this point you hit the breaks on the money supply. Reducing the money supply makes money more valuable and prices in terms of money drop. The tax slaves panic, as they counted on continued inflation to eat away their massive debts. Their debt levels remain high as their assets drop in value. They will now sell their assets to pay of debt. Unfortunately for the tax slaves there are not many people with money, since you made money scarce. There is one exception of a group of people who have plenty of money, since they control the printing press (the government) and can point a gun on the taxpayer. The government now expands the money supply and bails out and buys everything on the cheap. In the deflation phase (2nd utter) the assets also flow in the direction of the government and the freshly printed money towards the tax slaves. The new money will eventually start causing prices to rise and the first utter can take over again.

The deflation phase is usually shorter than the inflation phase. The US dollar lost 95% of its purchasing power since the federal reserve was founded in 1913. The amount of assets grabbed is astronomical.

grafitti ATM by Banksy, when slaves do it, it is bad, when you do it, it is good