Can a government reduce inflation by selling public property – i.e. trading assets for private cash and reducing the money in circulation?
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Sometimes governments do sell off public assets for quick cash flow. It’s almost always detrimental in the long term (like when governments sell off infrastructure like railways, telecom networks, or hospitals to private enterprise). The government of the day looks rosy because they meet budget without deficit / wipe out debt. And then in a few years time the system is terrible, but that’s some other future government’s problem.
To make it even more eli5 , here’s an allegory: 20 years ago I was living in Zimbabwe, and my friend had a farm with a crop of avocados. The farmer had to leave for an extended period and left the farm in the care of some workers. They couldn’t work out how to harvest the avocados from the tops of the trees, so they cut the trees down. Made extra profit that season because they got to harvest a bigger crop with much lower labour cost, plus they sold the timber. But obviously that was the end of the avocado farm.
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