Peter Schiff and Judge Napolitano: The Truth About Inflation

Peter Schiff appeared on Judging Freedom with Judge Napolitano to talk about inflation.

Why are we suffering from it? Who’s to blame? And where is this leading?

There’s only one reason that anybody suffers from inflation and that’s because of the government.”

As Peter put it, inflation is a creature of government.

It’s simply a stealth way that the government taxes us.”

More Highlights from the Interview

“The government doesn’t want the public to know that inflation is created by government because then they might oppose it, obviously, because it’s a tax. They want to blame inflation on the public — on greedy corporations gouging their customers, on OPEC for raising the price of oil, speculators for trading in commodities, sometimes maybe even greedy unions demanding higher wages. The government wants to point their finger at everybody but itself.”

“Inflation, sometimes, instead of causing prices to go up, it prevents them from falling. And so we don’t see the harmful effects of inflation because you don’t realize how much lower your cost of living otherwise would have been.”

“When the government takes my money, I know who to blame. You raised my taxes. But when they steal my money through inflation, I’m confused. Especially when the government is lying to the public about why prices are going up. Or, they’re pretending they’re not going up by using the CPI which doesn’t even capture the real extent that prices are going up.”

“If they steal their purchasing power through inflation, the voters don’t know they’re getting robbed and they may still continue to reelect the people who are robbing them.”

“How are you going to do anything about 7% inflation when your interest rates are lower than 2%? You’ve got negative real interest rates greater than 5%. You’re not going to make any headway fighting inflation unless you have a positive real interest rate.”

“Powell is still way behind the inflation curve.”

“Unfortunately, the Fed does Congress’s bidding and whatever deficits Congress runs, the Fed is happy to monetize them.”

“The government can only succeed in artificially suppressing interest rates for so long.”

“If interest rates go to 5%, given the current size of the national debt, we would be spending more in interest payments than we would do on any other line-item in the budget, which would include Social Security.”