Milton Friedman dixit

Why do governments create inflation? le preguntaron a Milton Friedman. Y contestó:

“They create inflation in order to get the revenue from it, and the reason it has come down is not because the governments have become more noble but because you can’t get much revenue out of it (…) How do governments get money from inflation? Number one, there is the direct value of the high-powered money base. That’s a very small source, it’s trivial. Much more important are two other sources. One is that if your tax system is expressed in nominal terms, inflation raises taxes without anyone having to vote for higher taxes. The second is that if you have been able to issue securities at an interest rate that is lower than the rate of inflation, you can expropiate those securities. The expropiation of past debt plus the automatic increases in taxes were undoubtedly the major source of revenue for the USA from the inflations of the 1970s. (…) The adjustment of tax rates for inflation, indexing the tax rates, hs elminated one source of revenue. The fact that bond markets have become so much more sensitive to inflation has elminated the second. So how much revenue can you get out of inflation? It isn’t worth inflation.” En Modern Macroeconomics de Snowdown y Vane.

Cuanto sabía el viejo. Y cuanto explica esta cita (por la negativa) la Argentina de hoy.