Most people talk about inflation as if it’s just rising prices, but that’s a modern distortion of the term, not its original or most accurate definition.
Inflation, properly understood, refers to an increase in the money supply. Rising prices are a symptom of inflation, not the thing itself. Milton Friedman famously put it: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” When more money chases the same amount of goods and services, prices naturally rise. The important distinction is this:
- If inflation is rising prices, anyone can blame their preferred scapegoat (corporations, immigrants, political parties, etc.)
- But if inflation is an increase in the money supply, then the cause becomes clearer: governments and central banks. They’re the ones expanding the money supply through deficit spending and monetary policy.
This definition shift isn’t just academic. It changes who we hold accountable and how we think about solutions.
Once we start thinking of inflation as price increases (rather than money supply increases), we start trying to measure it that way with flawed tools like the CPI. But CPI is based on a “representative” basket of goods and services and arbitrary weightings that rarely reflect any real household. In a country of 340 million people and over 100 million households, the idea that one basket can capture everyone’s cost-of-living reality is unrealistic.
Alternative metrics like asset prices (real estate, bitcoin, stocks, etc.) aren’t much better. They reflect inflation in different parts of the economy, but they impact people unequally. A rise in the S&P 500 or real estate prices doesn’t help someone who doesn’t own stocks or property, like a renter struggling to afford groceries.
Instead, a better metric for inflation is simply tracking the growth in the money supply because that
is inflation. Prices respond to that increase over time, unevenly across sectors.
The CPI and similar indexes tend to understate inflation, especially when money supply growth is high. There have been years when the money supply increased 10–20%, yet the official inflation rate was reported at just 0–2%. Many families intuitively knew something was off. Their costs were rising much faster than the headlines claimed.
When we ignore the expansion of the money supply and rely solely on selective price indexes, we get a distorted view of the economy. Worse, we allow the institutions responsible for inflation (central banks and governments) to avoid accountability.