[anigbrowl]

On the other hand, when you consider what money is an abstraction for - economic resources - inflation doesn't seem so unreasonable. Consider one fairly standardized resource unit - a barrel of oil. Crude oil lasts pretty well, but refined oil products definitely have a shelf life. Food commodities are of course perishable, and real estate can often lose use value if buildings aren't properly maintained. Of course this is not to say that all resources are perishable or perishable to similar degrees, but nature does impose 'use it or lose it' conditions of its own.

The other thing to consider is that any decision to wait has an opportunity cost, and the baseline opportunity cost is captured by the interest rate. Since nobody is going to stop charging interest to borrow money - even in sharia finance you pay a rental cost for money that is very very similar to interest - it would seem as if price inflation was an unavoidable characteristic of any system involving credit or loans.

[gohrt]

Money, or more properly, _currency_, is not a store of value. Oil, timber, or woool is a store of value -- it is actually something you can use. Money is an abstract "IOU", a right to demand someone give you something of value. At the end of the day, a society with oil, timber and wool is better than a society with only money. The only utility money has is that it facilitates production, instead of leaving people unemployed and starving because they have no convenient way to trade their labor or capital for whatever they need.

[anigbrowl]

Yes...that's why I described money as 'an abstraction.' My point is that the underlying resources on which money gives you an easy means of purchasing a claim (instead of having to barter) are sometimes perishable, which means that opting to store rather than use them can have a cost (separate of the opportunity cost of foregone alternatives) and inflation could be thought of as the incorporation of the aggregate perishability of goods into the abstraction of currency. I can't give you a citation for this, it's just my personal conjecture.