Statement from Thinking About Politics about inflation.

Under these circumstances it is very much in the interest of individual rulers, who love to spend money but hate to impose taxes (in the narrow, overt sense), that people not understand the reasons for inflation. The government finger is often pointed at "greedy" corporations, "money-mad" unions, Arab oil sheiks, bad harvests, and other convenient scapegoats. The most that any of these parties can do, however, is to drive up the price of their own products, and even this can be done only within very strong limits imposed by the market and by the possibility of product substitution. Without government expansion of the money supply, increases in particular prices will always be cancelled out by reductions in other prices and cannot cause an increase in the general or average price level. Still, as in the case of true monopolies, which are always and only created by government action, it is fashionable to speak of inflation as a privately caused problem from which it is government's job to protect us. "Wage and price controls" are thus to inflation as "antitrust laws" are to monopoly, an ineffective remedy based upon a faulty diagnosis of the causes of the problem and serving mainly to confuse the public as to the actual responsibility of government for the problem.