Why are Inflation and Deficits Bad?

My old college friend, writer and philosopher Adam Kotsko, on the misleading common rhetoric about defecits and inflation:

A disproportionate amount of political debate centers around vague abstractions: government spending, deficits, and inflation. The latter two are supposed to be particularly horrible, leading to hyperinflation (and therefore Hitler) or else mountains of debt that are impossible to pay off (and therefore Hitler).

A moment’s reflection will reveal that these three technocratic abstractions are actually code words for “stuff that makes rich assholes powerful.”

|  11 Jul 2014