Kamala Wants Price Controls | Reason | Liz Wolfe:
August 14, 2024 - "For a while, politics watchers were wondering when in her campaign for president Kamala Harris would unveil an actual policy platform. Now, she's unveiled some of it, and maybe it was actually better when we knew less. In a statement released last night, Harris' campaign said it would enact the '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,' with enforcement power given to the Federal Trade Commission. You heard that right: price controls.
"It's not clear how an 'excessive' profit would be defined, nor why policing that would be in the purview of the federal government, nor why food prices in particular ought to qualify. It's not clear what types of behavior that are currently legal would be outlawed.
"Price controls have been disastrous whenever they've been implemented. Prices are signals, ways of communicating how much of a good is needed by consumers and how much ought to be produced. Interfering with these signals will create terrible shortages. Giving the government the power to meddle in the economy in this way will not drive prices down, it will force some firms to go out of business and some consumers to experience shortages of goods they would have otherwise been able to purchase. The scale at which this devastation happens is contingent on the scale at which the government chooses to meddle....
"Expect more of the same strategy: blaming big corporations for the fact that Americans' grocery bills are substantially more expensive now than before the pandemic. But this wholly ignores the main driver of this spike in costs: inflation, which was driven in large part by pandemic-era government spending, including stimulus checks. Both former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden share blame for this profligate government spending, and both parties manage to obfuscate, trying to convince voters that some other force (greed?) is at work. But make no mistake: It was government recklessness that got us into this mess, and it won't be government price controls that get us out."
Read more: https://reason.com/2024/08/15/kamala-wants-price-controls/
Kamala Harris is wrong about price controls | ReasonTV | August 27, 2024:
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