The problem of restraint was all the more difficult because, as Friedman later recognised, some benefited from inflation while others suffered, so ‘society is divided into winners and losers’; the prime winners, he argued, were debtors, as the real value of debt was diminished by increases in prices, and the prime losers were creditors and the entire ‘savings and loan industry’, whose returns on their lending were simultaneously diminished. … If inflation had distributional consequences, including transferring money from creditors to debtors, then the decision to treat combatting inflation as the primary economic goal could not be value-free. … This was clear in Chile, where Allende’s government broke with a long tradition of responding to inflation by cutting social services, especially for the poor. When the opposition blocked new taxes that would have financed social programmes, the UP government accepted inflation as a ‘lesser evil’ than failing to fulfil its election commitments to Chile’s poorest citizens.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 339