No it isn't. It is theft if you are making wages at X price with the understanding that X bought you Y goods in return. If inflation drives up the costs for Y goods so you get Y-Z goods in return then suddenly you got less than you intended for your labor. In a free market prices generally fall.

In the current market they rise at random rates across sectors. Currently we have people spending a lot of time figuring out how to pay for medical care and higher education because that's where the inflation has hit the hardest.

> Currently we have people spending a lot of time figuring out how to pay for medical care and higher education because that's where the inflation has hit the hardest.

That's also because of the American Government's idiotic policies on those two "items", in my opinion.

> In a free market prices generally fall.

[citation needed]

If you have X amount of money and Y goods/service, the ratio of money per unit of good/service is X/Y. Economic growth increases the amount of goods/services provided; tractors dig more holes than shovels, and so on. This means Y increases, and thus X/Y must decrease: the cost per unit of good/service decreases.

>In a free market prices generally fall.

If we take the far-right Austrian definition of "free market" (meaning: a market in which the only functions of government are property and contract enforcement) then we have zero empirical evidence for much anything about free markets.

They've never existed.

Further, we don't even have solid evidence that hypothetical markets of that kind would be Pareto-optimal. They serve literally no function except that of ideology.

19th century America is close enough and the results astounded the entire world.

19th century America was a rabid, rampant employer of slavery, indentured servitude, and debt peonage. And when it comes to it, 20th century America was far more impressive.

I agree that people should get into real assets but this sounds a lot like it's okay to beat your kids in order to train them to run faster.

Beating a kid is obviously wrong, but parenting (and coaching and managing) does involve creating incentives to encourage desired behaviors, and discourage undesirable behaviors.

Where do you think cash goes if not into someone else's hand? It's like a game of hot potato constantly tossing it around to someone else so they hurt from it losing value, and not you. But in the end everyone handles it for some amount of time and gets burned the same amount.

In the U.S., the Fed creates and destroys dollars to manage the inflation rate.

Sure, if you have some money to start with. If you're at the lower rungs of the ladder, inflation hurts you even worse.

Right now, at least in the United States, if you belong to, IIRC, the bottom 75% of the population by net worth, then you are in fact a net debtor, and inflation helps you more than it hurts.

Look where that got us...