[Ed. Note: We’ll find out soon enough… It seems unlikely that history will remember the name ‘John Tamny’ before it remembers ‘Milton Friedman.’]
by John Tamny
Forbes
In a video that’s gone viral, the late Milton Friedman correctly asserts about inflation that “consumers don’t produce it,” and “producers don’t produce it.” Only for Friedman to go off track with the observation that “too much government spending” does produce inflation.
Ignored by Friedman was that governments aren’t some kind of other capable of extracting spending power from Pluto, rather governments only have the power to spend insofar as they can extract the spending power from the private sector first. All spending, whether by individuals, businesses, or governments, follows production.