It's been nearly a month since Joe Biden began his long goodbye and dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. If you believe the drumbeat of encomiums from the media, Vice President Kamala Harris is far better than sliced bread and could perhaps even walk on water if she had to.
She can do anything. But significantly, what she hasn't done is say a bleeping word about what she plans to do if, God forbid, she's elected president. She's a woman. She's black (and East Asian and whatever else she wants to identify as), she likes abortions, and she thinks Donald Trump is a poopy head (or whatever the equivalent insult would be for Democrats of limited intelligence).
But nary a word has passed her smiling lips about what in the Sam Hill she's going to do about the economy. As if answering a prayer, Harris released a statement in advance of her big, vague, speech on Thursday in North Carolina that will address the aforementioned economy.
It's not good, sports fans.
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.
A question to all you non-economists out there: what's the best way to create a shortage? All you Marxists out there sit down and shut up. We're not going to create a socialist paradise so forget it.
No, the best way to create a shortage of anything is to slap price controls on it. Coming to a grocery store near you.
This is not a scare tactic. It's not an exaggeration. And Harris is serious.
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.
Harris may want to "roll back" prices. That train left the station years ago. The current prices at grocery stores are "baked into" the products being sold. They can't be "unbaked."
Unless there's catastrophic deflation, we will never again pay $1.50 for a dozen eggs of any size or $2.75 for a gallon of milk even though it was less than four years ago that those items could be found in most grocery stores at that price. Harris is desperately trying to absolve herself of the responsibility for the ruinous inflation that is still plaguing the nation.
Trump and the Republicans can't let her get away with it.
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