"Even Milton Friedman, the high priest of monetarism (or perhaps Scott Sumner today on market monetarism) insisted that you want the money supply to be expanding so as to cater to the greater demand for money as the economy grows. Sure, too much monetary expansion will lead to inflation, too much money chasing too few goods. But deflation means the opposite, where the economy, if the deflation is strong enough, will shrink in terms of the goods and services available to us. That is indeed the same thing as saying we'll all get poorer."