Inflation may occur due to uncontrollable factors, like scarcity of resources as they are consumed at a basic rate. Increasing scarcity means everyone must now compete harder to get the same basic rate of consumption from the reduced resource pool size, regardless of whether corporations or investments or governments even existed at all.

Another source of inflation is increasing wage & benefit demands, especially from large middle or lower classes who want to afford to consume more because they value the greater consumption as an important part of life, a noble and intrinsically morally good goal of bettering one’s self through self-determined hard work such that the value of your labor and skill increases over time.

In direct response to large classes of workers demanding more pay & benefits, companies will raise their prices to pay for those increases, again totally regardless of whether a stock market exists.

I think really inflation is a side-effect of nature, and thinking along the lines of how to long-term control or remove it is counter-productive, compared with accepting that it is inevitable and then trying to come to terms with living in the future world that this implies.