As Milton and Rose discussed in Chapter 9 of the 1980 edition of Free to Choose, popular views in the 1960s and 1970s (and even the views of some Federal Reserve  2  BIS Review 45/2003  officials) held that inflation could arise from a variety of non-monetary sources, including the power of unions and corporations and the greediness of oil-producing countries.
An unfortunate implication of these views, whose deficiencies were revealed by bitter experience under President Nixon, was that wage-price controls and other administrative measures could successfully address inflation. We understand today that the Great Inflation would simply not have been possible without the excessively expansionist monetary policies of the late 1960s and 1970s. Some of Friedman’s descriptive propositions remain the subject of active research.