It has become so endemic in society; the money supply is controlled under the assumption that innovators and managers will somehow be able to keep finding efficiencies and improvements that manage to reduce the costs of production by X% per year in order to obscure the currency's diminishing value and hide the actual level of inflation. It's a really insidious form of taxation used by central planners, and societies have become completely addicted to it in a way that they're never going to be able to outrun it long enough to escape it.