Tuesday 12 April 2022

"Wage raises as such are not inflationary"


"There is a lot of nonsense said about these things. Some people assert that wage raises are 'inflationary.' But they are not in themselves inflationary. Nothing is inflationary except inflation, i.e., an increase in the quantity of money [and credit] in circulation... And under present conditions nobody but the government [and its agencies] can bring an inflation into being. What the unions can generate by forcing the employers to accept wage rates higher than the potential market rates is not inflation and not higher commodity prices, but unemployment of a part of the people anxious to get a job. Inflation is a policy to which the government resorts in order to prevent the large scale unemployment the unions' wage raising would otherwise bring about."
~ Ludwig Von Mises, from his 1958 article 'Wages, Unemployment & Inflation,' collected in Planning for Freedom

No comments: