Yes, rising prices reduce demand. But rising volumes also create economies of scale and allow low prices. There's a delicate balance and sometimes an equilibrium of large volume, low price can transition to a new equilibrium of low volume, high price, or vise-versa. For example, if you are a software company and you sell software to a small group of professionals, like a CAD program, your price is probably around $1000 ~ $5000 per seat, per year. And competition will not lower it, because your competitors face the same economic situation you do: it's a niche product, you have to amortize a high development cost over a small number of customers, and those customers have money and are willing to pay.

However, there is also a stable equilibrium for a company to turn a similar profit shipping software of equal quality to a very large number of people for a very low price. Something like a spreadsheet or word-processing software. Now your software is cheap, or supported by ad revenue, and yet you can still remain highly profitable. If, however, your userbase started to shrink for whatever reason, you might have to charge the remaining users a large amount. Most will leave, but a few of those users may derive a lot of value from your software and are willing to pay, and you end up with the same economics as the CAD developer.

Software is of course an extreme example, where the marginal cost of production is approximately zero, but most industries outside of resource extraction have declining marginal costs with scale. That's why you can end up with high-quality cheap components (like cameras, etc) that are used in smartphones, where they have high-volume production, and very expensive specialty cameras for eg. microscopes, even though the specialty camera required much less investment of R&D to produce. It can only be sold at a high price because there is not enough demand to reach economies of scale that would allow a lower price.

So if for whatever reason, money was sucked out of the economy and the average person suddenly became very poor and could not afford a smartphone, it's possible that smartphone companies would compete hard to keep those customers and drop their prices. But if that doesn't make for a sustainable business, the smartphone makers have to drop production to sell only to a few wealthy buyers, the remaining phones will get much more expensive, because their components will be made in expensive fabs at smaller volumes. The total revenue will be lower, the GDP would be lower, but the average price of goods can still be higher. Especially when there's a large wealth disparity to make that high-price low-volume equilibrium stable.

I see you've moved past trying to argue what the definition of inflation is so I can only assume you've agreed me with.

So to move on to your new topic, there is a framing problem here. There does not need to be extra money during a period with inflation.

If I had $100 dollars and potatoes are $2 and a car is $50 I can get 25 potatoes and 1 car. If the costs of a car increases to $80 I can get 10 potatoes and 1 car. Inflation has occurred and I haven't done any changes to the money supply here.

And then of course, Inflation isn't a new word post-Bretton Woods; there was inflation when people used gold as currency.

> Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage and they're doing okay.

It’s more complicated than that, and you know it, or you’re using that fact to further your point somewhat disingenuously. Yes, there in no minimum wage defined by law, but in practice it’s around €20 due to the collective bargaining agreements (read: unions) in most industries.