I'm intrigued, and not in a happy way, that the newspapers are running article after article on rising living costs without mentioning that this is how employers routinely and systematically reduce employees' real pay: it's an intentional feature of capitalism.

Yet the reporters and the economists quoted all seem to pick words to avoid causality and choice: today I read that "food prices would tend to track up over time, so the fact they were at record prices was not entirely unexpected."

One could well think that the economists' inflation is as natural as, say, the expansion of an unconstrained ideal gas.