To Go Along With the Earlier Post On Inflation

One of my favorite quotes on the subject:

"No government is willing to accept responsibility for producing inflation, even in less virulent degree. Government officials always find some excuse - greedy businessmen, grasping trade unions, spendthrift consumers, Arab sheikhs, bad weather, or anything else that seems even remotely plausible. No doubt, businessmen are greedy, trade unions are grasping, consumers are spendthrifts, Arab sheikhs have raised the price of oil, and weather is often bad. All these can produce high prices for individual items; they cannot produce rising prices for goods in general. They can cause temporary ups or downs in the rise of inflation. But they cannot produce continuing inflation for one very simple reason: none of the alleged culprits possesses a printing press on which it can turn out those pieces of paper we carry in our pockets; none can legally authorize a bookkeeper to make entries on ledgers that are the equivalent of those pieces of paper."

~ from Milton & Rose Friedman's Free to Choose: A Personal Statement