Inflation may be ever so slowly cooling in the U.S., but it’s still sparking heated debates online.
As Americans watched their buying power erode through 2021 and 2022, peaking at a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022, pundits offered a long list of factors they blamed for causing inflation: increased consumer spending, rising labor costs, supply chain disruptions and monetary and fiscal policies.
However, if the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, renowned for his work on monetary policy and free-market principles, was still alive, he’d certainly have a more straightforward explanation for the phenomenon: “Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington can create money, and any other attribution to other groups of inflation is wrong,” Friedman famously stated.
“Consumers don’t produce it. Producers don’t produce it. The trade unions don't produce it. Foreign sheiks don't produce it. Oil imports don't produce it. What produces it is too much government spending and too much government creation of money and nothing else.”
Although Friedman (who died in 2006) made these remarks decades ago, they seem to be striking a chord once again today. Sen. Rand Paul recently posted a clip of this speech on X, which has garnered more than 51 million views since being shared in early October.
The post also caught the eye of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reposted it, along with a “100%” emoji to signal his full agreement with Friedman’s message.
