The calamity is not merely higher prices but confused values and distorted choices. Inflation is, in essence, a lie against time and value, and, like all lies, it eventually collapses under its own contradictions. View quoted note →

There is nowadays a very reprehensible, even dangerous, semantic confusion that makes it extremely difficult for the non-expert to grasp the true state of affairs. Inflation, as this term was always used everywhere and especially in this country [the United States], means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check. But people today use the term “inflation” to refer to the phenomenon that is an inevitable consequence of inflation, that is the tendency of all prices and wage rates to rise. The result of this deplorable confusion is that there is no term left to signify the cause of this rise in prices and wages. There is no longer any word available to signify the phenomenon that has been, up to now, called inflation. It follows that nobody cares about inflation in the traditional sense of the term. As you cannot talk about something that has no name, you cannot fight it. Those who pretend to fight inflation are in fact only fighting what is the inevitable consequence of inflation, rising prices. Their ventures are doomed to failure because they do not attack the root of the evil. View quoted note →

The Road to De-Civilization: Inflation and the Moral Erosion of Society My latest with the Mises Institute https://mises.org/mises-wire/road-de-civilization-inflation-and-moral-erosion-society

The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. — Roald Dahl

The great revolution of the market economy is not that it makes some people very rich. It is that it makes ordinary exchange—the millions of small transactions that occur daily—vehicles for peaceful cooperation and mutual improvement. Every time a merchant sells to a customer, a worker accepts employment, a farmer brings goods to market, an artisan creates something for distant buyers; these are acts of peace. They are transactions between people who have found it more profitable to cooperate than to conflict. In an age of rising tensions and declining faith in institutions, this message is urgent. We must recover the understanding that economics is fundamentally about peace, about how billions of strangers can coordinate their actions, satisfy each other’s needs, and improve their conditions together. When we grasp this, we realize that defending markets is not about defending greed or selfishness. It is about defending the greatest engine of peaceful cooperation humanity has ever known. View quoted note →

Markets thus accomplish what diplomacy, treaties, and moral exhortation cannot: they make cooperation more profitable than conflict. They do not require that we love our neighbors or share their values, they simply align incentives. When I profit from your prosperity, I have reason to wish you well. When your poverty impoverishes me, I have reason to help you escape it. These incentives are far more reliable than appeals to universal brotherhood. View quoted note →