People generally miss fundamentals and don't account for a moving store of value, they often assume its constant. Economics is marginally only used to sell something often with deceit in mind on someones part.
As for what's driving inflation, its obvious its the fact that government is spending more than they have each year, printing the difference, and have now gone gangbusters with manufacturing spending to offset china imports.
They are also printing money to buy back bonds to control yield curve in lockstep with other central bank currencies (you see these fluctuations in the relative value of the currency).
The corruption, fraud, and graft that this money is funneling to have become so large that its inflating the dollar as its not necessarily creating economic activity. Rising interest rates have stressed the already overleveraged companies to the point they are shutting down or massively laying off.
Some producers base their prices off a business as usual approach. Others project profit sufficient to normalize against changes in the currency price level and any additional expenses/shortfalls in supply chain problems during the short term. While prices may be inflexible for some things, that's only if there's no shortage and the product is available.
Also, you have distributors refusing to do business with smaller companies (as has been seen with a couple of the small time farmers). They want shortages, so they can have an excuse to charge more. Classic characteristic of stagflation and lack of antitrust.
All of this can only get up to a point before food becomes relatively unavailable, and then everything hits the fan.
You are attributing a lot of agency to different players.
They generally aren't that monolithic.
You seem to be conflating shortage and scarcity, which generally aren't the same.
It's an interesting theory but I'd like to see some evidence.
For instance, the general consensus is the supply chain issue is from Lean manufacturing which, although has a lower overall cost, trades that off with a much lower tolerance for disruptions. It presumes availability and it turns out these supply lines were both much longer and more delicate then presumed.
You can see that in practice. Monolithic traditional manufacturing didn't have such issues. Things like paper products for instance. When the demand for toilet paper shot up in March 2020, the supply was able to meet it within days, compared to the years for electronics and automobiles.
These are pretty studied topics in the journals. You seem to be interested. They're pretty approachable. Go check them out.
Scarcity is just a given in a scarce world. The perception of shortages on the other hand acts similar to static versus dynamic friction. Once things get moving they become less sticky.
Most of the issues originate in one industry, that says it doesn't pick winners and losers, but consistently does at the tax-payer's expense. They also have a very sordid history as a private institution and to date have never met their chartered mandate. I've read a lot about the history of the Fed.
The supply chain issues rely on cheap labor and cheap transportation that were optimized in many respects for single points of failure due to cost savings. If your an authoritarian regime you usually have both. I've worked as a System's Engineer, and we always look for these in any system for improved resilience in the design.
The lack of silicon processing is a special case, and underlies the complexity of manufacturer; the same issue affected both electronics and automobile shortages. The methods of manufacturing are much more specialized and fault intolerant in the former (because only 1 company supplies the dependencies, ASML) than the latter (paper).
People generally miss fundamentals and don't account for a moving store of value, they often assume its constant. Economics is marginally only used to sell something often with deceit in mind on someones part.
As for what's driving inflation, its obvious its the fact that government is spending more than they have each year, printing the difference, and have now gone gangbusters with manufacturing spending to offset china imports.
They are also printing money to buy back bonds to control yield curve in lockstep with other central bank currencies (you see these fluctuations in the relative value of the currency).
The corruption, fraud, and graft that this money is funneling to have become so large that its inflating the dollar as its not necessarily creating economic activity. Rising interest rates have stressed the already overleveraged companies to the point they are shutting down or massively laying off.
Some producers base their prices off a business as usual approach. Others project profit sufficient to normalize against changes in the currency price level and any additional expenses/shortfalls in supply chain problems during the short term. While prices may be inflexible for some things, that's only if there's no shortage and the product is available.
Also, you have distributors refusing to do business with smaller companies (as has been seen with a couple of the small time farmers). They want shortages, so they can have an excuse to charge more. Classic characteristic of stagflation and lack of antitrust.
All of this can only get up to a point before food becomes relatively unavailable, and then everything hits the fan.