… is from Reason magazine’s February 1974 interview of Milton Friedman:
A high rate of monetary expansion would not be desirable but a free society can live with any rate of monetary expansion, provided there isn’t an attempt to eliminate its effects by price and wage controls. What a free society cannot live with is an attempt to repress inflation.
DBx: I suspect that even Friedman would agree that he here overstated the case that “a free society can live with any rate of monetary expansion”; at some point, such expansion becomes destructive in and of itself. But Friedman’s larger point is correct and important: As undesirable as inflation is, matters are made much worse if governments attempt to suppress increases in nominal prices, wages, and interest rates.
