In truth, the realities underpinning inflation were deeply political, as Friedman implicitly recognised. The correlate of the monetarist conviction that inflation is always caused by an increase in the supply of money is that it occurs because governments want to ‘provide “goodies” for their supporters and constituents’ without increasing taxes. … The Chicago economists also saw inflation as a ‘moral crisis’ bound up with heightened expectations and a failure of personal and familial responsibility among the working class in a context of victorious political struggles.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 337