He labelled the cause as government policy, which clearly includes pandemic measures.

Sweden didn't lock down but they did print a ton of money. Compare money supply growth for UK vs Sweden. It's the same and occurred at the same time. Lockdowns weren't the only pandemic spending measures unfortunately. All governments everywhere massively pumped the money supply to pay for "whatever it takes" and now the bill has come due:

https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/sweden-money-su...

> Do you really think none of this matters, or do your political leanings tell you it's always the government's fault?

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, however, this basic insight is easy to get confused about because there's a large gap between theory and practice when it comes to this metric.

In theory inflation cannot occur without money printing, because a rise in prices of something like oil or food must be compensated by a fall in prices elsewhere as demand for that less essential thing disappears. People re-allocate their financial decisions towards the thing increasing in prices, businesses compensate by lowering prices to try and increase demand, it balances out.

Several things complicate this simple picture in practice.

One is that government inflation metrics don't include all prices. Indeed they cannot because it's too difficult to collect that data and prices constantly change. Also, governments like to play games with inflation statistics because if you can confuse people about inflation you get to pay for election pledges with money printing and then blame inflation on external factors, and because people tend to vote for whoever promises to spend more without raising taxes it's a quick way to hack democracy. So they usually define inflation only in terms of a small subset of all prices. If you do that then you can obviously have inflation even in the absence of money printing because you're ignoring the prices that fall.

Another problem is that in a sufficiently damaging period of price instability, some goods and services may simply cease being available. Everyone is spending all their money on heating their homes and other businesses go bankrupt as a consequence. At this point the price of the thing effectively goes to infinity, it just can't be obtained at any price, but that ruins the calculations and so governments do substitutions within the basket of prices, asserting that X is a substitute for Y even if in reality X is quite different (e.g. different kinds of meat). There are lots of hacks like these in how the stats are calculated.

Yet another problem is that money printing is somewhat circular in a fractional reserve system with very low reserve ratios and there are lots of feedback loops. If the government prints lots of money, then gives it to people whilst simultaneously banning the spending of it then it will appear they printed lots of money without causing inflation. When they stop banning the spending of it, that will show up as inflation even if the money printing has stopped. This is what's happening now, as governments shovelled money into people's pockets during lockdowns but there was nothing open to spend it on.

Nonetheless, we usually think of inflation has being caused by money printing because most of the time prices aren't being affected by wars or oil cartels and when that does occur, the prices which rise are being compensated by other prices that are falling or disappearing (which is a loss of wealth). It may just not be obvious.