What You Should Know About Inflation
Summary
Hazlitt's most directly Bitcoin-relevant book — a focused monograph on monetary inflation written at the tail-end of the Bretton Woods era. The book makes three arguments. First: that the popular usage of “inflation” to mean “rising prices” is a category error — inflation is the increase in the money supply that causes rising prices, and treating the symptom obscures the disease. Second: that political incentive structures guarantee any discretionary monetary authority will eventually inflate, because the immediate beneficiaries of easy money are visible and concentrated while the costs are invisible and dispersed. Third: that no “moderate” or “managed” inflation is sustainable — once accepted as policy, it accelerates by its own internal logic. The book includes a remarkable section on what Hazlitt calls “the lesson of Brazil” — an early case study of high-inflation regime dynamics that would later play out in Argentina, Turkey, Venezuela, Lebanon, and elsewhere.
Why It Matters for Bitcoin
If Hazlitt were alive in 2026, this would be a Bitcoin book. Every argument applies directly: the definitional confusion between money-supply expansion and consumer-price symptoms, the political ratchet that ensures any central bank will eventually inflate, the impossibility of stopping at “a little” inflation. Bitcoin's fixed supply schedule is the technological answer to Hazlitt's framing: the political incentive to inflate cannot be wished away by oath, mandate, or institutional design — it must be removed by making inflation structurally impossible. The book also previews modern high-inflation case studies (Brazil, Argentina) that Bitcoin advocates now point to as live demonstrations of the protocol's necessity in the developing world. The shortest path to seeing why Bitcoin is the answer is to first see clearly what the question was — Hazlitt makes the question unmistakable.