It's too bad Milton Friedman perpetuated the myth that inflation is caused by paper printing. It's a misleading oversimplification to point to a machine or to a plot of land as the cause. It's the legal theft of fractional reserve credit expansion that causes inflation, not a printing press. The printing press is downstream from the act of currency creation that is lending out the same reserves over and over, and then lending out again the reserves accumulated from deposits generated by the bank's own loans. The government only allows fractional reserve lending because without it they wouldn't be able to tax through inflation.