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I'm hardly an economics professor myself, but I do know some things. Inflation happens because demand is higher than supply.
For examples of good inflation, if the economy is doing well, people have money to spare. They literally don't value $1 as much because they have so many of them, and businesses are able to get away with higher prices. Another example: when you hire a person, you are hiring a person to make them not do anything else. In other words, if in a given population everyone has the necessary education to go into astrophysics, if you want someone to flip burgers for you, you have to pay them a salary high enough that they don't go into astrophysics instead.
The bad reasons for inflation are obvious: Supply drops to lower than demand.
Deflation happens when supply is high but demand is low. Supply being high is good, but if demand is low for a long period of time that generally means something is wrong. Either you predicted demand poorly or customers turned frugal.
As unintuitive as it may seem, I think you generally always want inflation, but inflation for the good reasons. That should be slow enough that a loaf of bread costing a million dollars would happen, but maybe 10,000 years in the future. You've lived your entire life to where a penny is not really even worth the time it takes to pick up, but it wasn't that way from the beginning. Inflation is bad when your income doesn't keep up with it.
If a loaf of bread ever got to the point where it was a million bucks and you wanted to stop it, the only relatively reasonable way to do that would be a currency exchange. You print some nuBucks, force the economy to use nuBucks after 2 years, but they can trade $1,000 old dollars for 1 nuBuck. That's still a major hassle that most would want to avoid.
You're assuming the money supply is constant, which it isn't. If nothing changes with supply or demand, but the money printer shoots out 10x the number of paper bills, then you're going to have inflation.
We've already had inflation, serious inflation, but due to the way in which is was done, it was mostly confined to asset prices (real estate and stocks). You can argue about supply and demand and building and immigration all you like when it comes to house and land prices, but those things are not applicable when it comes to stocks, and they are also inflated far over the $30 hamburger example.
It's inevitable, but you're right, nobody wants it.
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