INFLATION is actually a tool utilised by the rich and powerful to enslave poor / ignorant people and

If I wrote both it was because I meant both, and both are objectively correct. Are you saying they don't need to earn money to afford what they want to buy??

 

If they are investing, inflation is not a problem for them, as the price of whatever their investment helps produce will also increase.

 

Investment comes in many forms. For the average working citizen, it will be property and/or shares.

 

Real estate and share returns both substantially exceed inflation.

 

Exactly. That's why ordinary people (ie, not the wealthy) go for those investments.

 

...until they don't, and there is a crash. Nothing is forever and markets shift. Finding an investment that "can't lose" is not possible. One must be prepared to lose (at least psychologically) or one is not prepared at all. Perhaps the past causes of hyperinflation have been understood and can be avoided, but unseen developments cannot be ruled out. It is excess of optimism and false belief that "it's a sure thing!" that fuel bubbles. These vicissitudes of economics should reveal to us the necessity for total re-examination of the basics; i.e., that all value is based upon life, what living, breathing humans agree is valuable. Money is something we exchange our life for so that we have something portable to exchange with others who agree with our values. Money, itself, is not "wealth", just a tool for exchanging or augmenting it. This is what is so fascinating and dangerous about derivatives; they entail vertiginous quantities of monetary units, but precious little real 'stuff'.

 

In the long run, crashes are always followed by recoveries.

Wrong. In the long run, debt-free landowning cannot lose. The land's exchange value may decline temporarily, but the rent yield will continue and the land will eventually make the owner rich without his having to lift a productive finger:

"The easiest but also the most unproductive way for a capitalist to increase his fortune is to put all monies in sites, and await that time when a society hungering for land must pay his price." -- Andrew Carnegie

"Derivatives are weapons of mass financial destruction." -- Warren Buffett

 

Obviously, you are just flat, outright wrong as a matter of objective physical fact:

https://www.financialsamurai.com/net-worth-composition-by-levels-of-wealth/

Note that "business interests" are just shares in companies that are "privately held" (i.e., not traded on regulated exchanges) or stocks of exchange-traded companies that the stock's owner actively participates in managing (often as a founding principal). Note also that the majority of all real estate by value is corporate-owned, and therefore indirectly owned by shareholders. Stocks are a monotonically increasing share of total assets.