Counterfeit money “enters” the economic system at some point and then spreads from there throughout the entire system. This process can be visualized as a chain: the first participant, who introduced the counterfeit money, receives the maximum benefit—he essentially appropriates the goods and services purchased with it—while the last one (the person who receives this money after the system has already “digested” the change in the money supply) finds himself facing altered (usually higher) prices and an altered economic structure; effectively, he pays the most for the pleasure enjoyed by those at the beginning of the chain. In other words, inflation redistributes wealth from those at the end of the monetary chain to those at the beginning.
They categorically fail to grasp one crucial point: an increase in the money supply does not mean an increase in the goods and services available in society. Yet it is precisely goods and their availability, not money, that matter to people. My experience in these discussions has taught me that the mechanics of “more money, higher prices” are quite easy to understand, but grasping that inflation is a mechanism of redistribution comes with greater difficulty. People believe that during inflation “some new benefits” are being distributed. “Yes, perhaps some benefit from this, well, God bless them, we get something too.” This, roughly, is how the common view on the matter looks. It is incorrect, however. Inflation redistributes what already exists. It takes goods from some and gives them to others. I should note in passing that supporters of inflation are usually leftists. It is amusing that inflation robs, as a rule, precisely the “poor segments of the population” about which they are so concerned. The first to receive the new counterfeit money are bankers and entrepreneurs close to power (oligarchs), and the ones who end up robbed are public sector workers and pensioners, who usually find themselves at the end of the inflationary chain.