Mises on inflation

By its very nature, a government decree that "it be" cannot create anything that has not been created before. Only the naive inflationists could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money. Government cannot create anything; its orders cannot even evict anything from the world of reality, but they can evict him from the world of the permissible. Government cannot make him richer, but it can make him poorer.

~ Ludwig von Mises, A Critique of Interventionism, p. 23