by Bonchie
A bit of breaking news came across the wire on Wednesday night. You may want to sit down for this, but Kamala Harris finally has an official policy proposal. Given that she’s been in the race for nearly a month, did she cook up some brilliant, novel approach to the issues Americans care about the most?
Nah, she just microwaved some communism and proposed price controls.
Harris will propose, what her campaign bills as “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries—setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) August 15, 2024
Of course, the press lapped it up, with several journalists on social media treating it like Harris had just stepped down from upon high to present the Ten Commandments. Nothing matters on that front. If the Harris campaign says it, it’s going to be spun as “joy” and “optimism” wrapped in abject brilliance.
For normal Americans, though, these policies have consequences, and price controls would be an economic disaster. One only needs to look at the history of the Soviet Union to understand that, or if you’d like a modern day analogue, Venezuela. When government is used to cap the prices, from groceries to rent, it inevitabily leads to stagnation or even regression in the market.
Whatever lower prices exist in the short-term are nothing compared to scarcity that is caused in the long-term. Who cares if bread is “cheaper” if there’s none available because production is quashed with price controls? And who cares if rent is “lower” if you end up with a massive shortage because no one will invest in new housing?
With that said, it’s worth asking if that’s the real issue here. Here’s another theory as to why Harris is announcing this.
Price controls are terrible policy, but their purpose here is political not economic. Harris is trying to rewrite the history of the Biden-Harris years, and to charge that anyone who opposes her idea on the merits wants to keep prices high. It's grotesque. https://t.co/CeeJ4oWuuj
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) August 15, 2024
Proposing a policy and following through with it are two different things. Harris clearly wants the talking point of claiming Republicans don’t want to take action to bring down prices, and the press are absolutely going to play along.
It’s worth nothing how contradictory that is.
Well… attention, every business: Kamala wants to dictate your prices and wages. Attention, all employees: Kamala is about to destroy your job.
All this is merely an excuse to blame someone else for their stupid, socialist and green policies driving all costs up. It’s the Democrat way: create a problem and then, instead of admitting the true cause of the problem, create MORE problems trying to divert attention away from the original problems they created.
Stalin’s upset he wanted to do this
Instead Stalin just enslaved or shot his useless eaters to death . Ergo ; each according to their deeds .