This is CBS I In The World. I'm John Bats. With John Tamney, the author of the new book

The Money Confusion, how it will be a literacy about currencies and inflation.

Sets the stage for the crypto revolution. We're headed to crypto, but we're going to stop

at the way station called inflation. John right now inflation is a headline story around

the world. All economies, the European, Asian, African, everybody's pointing to inflation

as a threat to their prosperity, to their sovereignty, to stability. Easy money is the blame.

Easy money of the central bankers for these years. You disagree, John. You say the source

of inflation is what, John? What is the source of inflation?

The source of inflation is the lockdowns. And how we know that is we can go back to

first principles. We can go back to Adam Smith's pin factory. What happened when one man

producing one pin per day divided up work with several on the way to tens of thousands

of pins per day. Work divided is the path toward explosions of production. The iPhone

is a consequence of global cooperation among workers. In 2020, workers around the world

who had built up sophisticated working relationships with one another over decades were suddenly

barred from going to work, suddenly barred from operating their business. That prices

are higher today is to me a statement of the obvious when you eviscerate the cooperation,

production of everything is going to be more expensive after the fact. But command and

control is not inflation. Inflation is a devaluation of the currency. We are suffering the

bitter fruits of command and control. And it staggers me that so many would mistake this

for something entirely different, which is inflation. You write that devaluation is a policy

choice. Translate that John. It is a policy choice. It's what governments do. They can

delink their currency from gold as we did in 1971. People can have deferring views about

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