Vice President Kamala Harris will unveil a plan to use the federal government to control grocery stores prices at Friday campaign event in North Carolina.
The plan will include a federal ban on “corporate price-gouging,” according to reporting NBC correspondent Yamiche Alcindor.
Harris also wants to grant new authority to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department attorneys to impose harsh penalties on companies suspected of violating these rules.
The price-control scheme is an attempt by Harris, the presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, to rein in the inflation the U.S. economy has experienced under the Biden-Harris administration.
Food, energy, and housing prices have all risen sharply since Jan. 2021.
Harris is far from the first politician to assume that allowing the central government to dictate prices is the solution to economic troubles.
From Fourth Century Roman Emperor Diocletian to the revolutionary government of France, central governments have long entertained notions that they can fix sour economies or halt inflation merely by declaring a ban on price increases.
However, such policies almost invariably lead to shortages and blackmarkets.
In recent decades, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina have all experimented with government-controlled pricing for basic goods.
In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez’s price controls for food, medicine, and gasoline created shortages, massive black markets, and a collapse of domestic production — ironic for a country with some of the largest proven oil reserves in the world.
In Zimbabwe, price controls accelerate economic collapse as businesses found they could not profitably sell goods at the prices set by governments and ceased operating altogether rather than lose even more money.
In Argentina, a bloated central government attempted to set price controls for food, utilities, and other essential goods. The resulting economic distortions discouraged international investment in the once-wealthy country and led voters, ultimately, to back libertarian economist Javier Milei in Dec. 2023.
Price controls in the United States have similarly led to perverse or unintended outcomes.
In major cities like New York City and San Francisco, local governments have attempted to control the cost of housing by imposing rent-control.
While the policies may succeed in limiting rent increases in the short-term for current city residents, rent-controls over the long-term can have unintended consequences, such as reducing the incentive to maintain rental properties, which can lead to urban blight.
Rent-controls can also misallocate affordable housing to wealthier city residents by keeping rents low for those who remain in a specific rental unit the longest.
Harris’s new found support for government-controlled prices, while lacking any example of successful implementation in the entire history of the human race, lays bare the fundamental divide between Democratic and Republican politicians over how to respond to inflation in the U.S. economy.
Democratic politicians like Harris and Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren see price inflation as a sign of corporate greed.
In this scenario, companies like Walmart or Hannaford have arbitrarily decided to raise prices in order to increase profits.
Such a theory supposes that in times of lower inflation, the corporations, for some reason, refrained from indulging their greed, and that the answer to their sudden pang of greed is allowing the government the authority to more accurately determine fair prices.
Republicans and many libertarians, on the other hand, view price inflation as the consequence of unbridled government spending.
In their view, it’s not the cost of grocery store items that is going up, but the value of the U.S. dollar that is going down.
Raising taxes is government greed, borrowing trillions of dollars is government greed, lets start there. Read ” The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shales to see how price controls worked under FDR, hint they have never worked.
These Marxist central planners never learn. Or, they know what they’re doing but during an election cycle will say anything for votes no matter how stupid. Then, the people pay the price for it. No pun intended.
Scratch a liberal, expose a tyrant.
She and her puppet masters are after total govt control.
She already said she wants to end private insurance and have the govt control our health care. That’s worked out great in other countries too. (sarc)
She wants to take our guns and end free speech.
The US Constitution means nothing but a hinderance to her and her pals.
People want to reign in inflation but they don’t want price controls. The only people who lose by price controls are the wealthy stockholders. If you aren’t not making a couple hundred thousand bucks a year, this campaign promise is going to help you.
You want lower prices then you want to support kamalas price controls to fight greedflation and overzealous boardrooms pricing is blue collar workers into poverty.
In the history of man price controls have always worked. Worked that is to impoverish the citizens and reduce prosperity. So now the gov’t knows the proper price for everything? They know the input costs like labor, production, regulatory (enforced by gov’t), employee healthcare, raw materials, insurance, etc etc. Oh, and the company does have to make a profit after all. Harris has her head up her you know what just like all the dem/commies. They want total control. This quack should be nowhere near control of anything except her bowel movements.
Hey Issac, can you show us where price controls have worked in the past? Heck you can start with Argentina or NYC.
Insurance up 70%, energy up 50%, shoplifting up 250%, general inflation up 40%. Start with those and everything else will fall.
The last President to do that was Richard Nixon. It also included a wage freeze.
Hey Isaac ,
We don’t need no Kamala Price Controls ….
How stupid can you be ?
You sound like part of the problem and not the solution .
Maybe there is hope that you can get some factual enlightenment here .
Maybe not .
Price controls are idiotic. They bring shortages, poor quality and black markets. Shortages weaken social bonds. We print money because we overspend. The Fed partners with the government and our gazillion agency bureaucrats to spend what we don’t have. No balanced budgets and inflation is what we get. The problem is greed alright–but it’s government greed. Politicians like to buy supporters by promising largesse that actually comes from the citizen’s themselves. So here we are: A country in debt with no candidate, whether democrat or republican, wanting to discuss the national debt. Folks, we’re being played like fools. We deserve as a people what we get. Too bad that the economically illiterate get to vote, too.
Comrade Isaac DEI is probably still living in his mom’s basement.
Issac is obviously a DemocRAT-Marxist and can hardly wait for the complete conversion of Maine and the USA to communism. Take a look around Maine, people like him are why you have high taxes, ILLEGAL ALIENS taking your housing, lousy schools and infrastructure that is in ruins. Ask Westbrook, South Portland and Lewiston about high taxes and all the issues I listed. You get what you vote for!!! Mainers do you need anymore proof that you gave your state away to out of staters who do not embrace Maine, but want to change it to what they came from.
First they hobble the oil industry (the essential driver of the ENTIRE economy), which drives up prices and simultaneously hurting the supply chain. Next print more money to chase fewer goods, which raises inflation. Now wanting to impose price controls, making/products and services less valuable, while inflation is increasing, hurting your bottom line.
Money/currency is ALWAYS changing hands. Value exchange is cyclical, not linear. LEAVE THE MARKET ALONE.
Tell us, Mr. Dye, do the Demorat/Communists pay you for your trolling by the word or by the post?
When Socialist Democrats come right out and tell you they are Communist, you probably should listen.