Daily Inspiration Quote by Milton Friedman

Friedman’s line is a neat piece of ideological jujitsu: it recasts a messy macroeconomic phenomenon as a democratic outrage. Call inflation “taxation” and you’ve smuggled it out of the realm of technical management and into the moral language of consent. Taxes are supposed to be argued over, voted on, and owned. Inflation, he implies, is the opposite: a silent levy administered through the back door of the currency.

The intent is political as much as economic. Friedman is warning that when governments finance spending by expanding the money supply (or pressure central banks to do so), they can transfer resources without ever raising a tax rate. Prices rise, purchasing power falls, and the public pays in smaller, less legible increments. The subtext is a suspicion of state discretion: even if inflation starts as “policy,” it lands as a distributional event, punishing savers and wage earners whose incomes lag behind prices while rewarding debtors and those closest to new money and credit.

Context matters: Friedman’s career arcs through postwar Keynesian dominance, the Great Inflation of the 1970s, and the rise of monetarism and central bank independence. This is a slogan built for that fight. It’s not a neutral description of all inflation; it’s an argument about governance. By framing inflation as taxation “without legislation,” he’s also implying “without accountability” - a critique of technocracy and a defense of rules over discretion. The line works because it makes an abstract policy failure feel like a breach of civic contract: if money is a public trust, debasing it is a way of billing citizens who never agreed to the charge.