Pushback against Kamala’s price controls

 Kamala Harris, in an effort to have a good sounding talking point, proposes food price controls in order to stop “price-gouging.”  She claims that price-gouging is why food prices remain high, is a product of corporate greed.  She says inflation caused by Bidenomics has absolutely nothing to do with current  high food prices.

Food price controls failed in the USSR, but not from lack of trying.  Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in 1929, said, “We don’t have an unregulated setting of prices on our markets.”  His planned economy controlled prices on all goods through force.  Even then, it could not sustain high economic performance and got replaced.  Food price controls have also failed in socialist Venezuela.

Now Kamala, whose lets her far-left ideology override reality, wants it in the U.S.  There is, however, pushback.

Here is a remarkably objective assessment by liberal Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell:

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is.  It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.  Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels.  Far-off Washington bureaucrats would.  The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.  Worse, it would require public companies to publish detailed internal data about costs, margins, contracts and their future pricing strategies.  Posting cost and pricing plans publicly is a fantastic way for companies to collude to keep prices higher - all facilitated by the government.  At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times [as] countries tried to limit price growth by fiat.  At worst, it might accidentally raise prices.

More pushback: Podcast host Charlie Kirk wrote, “Her pollsters say, you gotta do something about this grocery problem, this price problem.  So Kamala Harris is going full Soviet. ... She wants to implement totalitarian communist price controls.”

Donald Trump responded to her scheme, said it is a  “Communist price control” that will be a disaster to the economy, said, “Now, Kamala is reportedly proposing Communist price controls.”

But wait!  The U.S. already has a price control — on labor.  It’s called the minimum wage.  That has worked “well” as California continues to wrestle with its unintended consequences.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/pushback_against_kamala_s_price_controls.html

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