>Inflation serves to reduce wealth (if just stuffed under the mattress), and encourages investment (to beat inflation). Inflation, in the current form, transfe

>Inflation serves to reduce wealth (if just stuffed under the mattress), and encourages investment (to beat inflation). Inflation, in the current form, transfers wealth to the first people to receive/spend the newly printed money (the financial system) from the last people to receive the newly printed money (this is termed the Cantillon effect). Since the end of Bretton Woods in the 1970s there's been a massive increase in USD inflation coinciding with a massive increase in wealth inequality, as would be expected from a system based around systematic transfer of wealth from the real economy to the financial industry. Technically inflation doesn't have to act like this; if it occurred via helicopter money airdropped equally into everybody's bank account, there wouldn't be a wealth transfer. But with the current system it's a systematic source of inequality.