Price Controls

There is a lack of public comment and debate about Kamala Harris’s call for price controls on groceries and rents, the most stunning and frightening policy proposal made in my lifetime. 

Ten years ago, Venezuela set out on a path to economic ruin and grave shortages of basic consumer goods, because of price controls on groceries and other products. Is the US really going to travel on the same road?

Taxpayers will have to pay more for state construction due to the reinstatement of prevailing wage and workers will be compelled to pay for union representation they don’t want due to the repeal of Right to Work statutes.

If you care about the people struggling to keep their jobs in a difficult economy, you should oppose raising the minimum wage: it hurts the very people you want to help

Reinforcing what economic theory tells us, evidence of the harm of price controls abounds in history, from the infamous 303 A.D. Edict of Emperor Diocletian in Ancient Rome to America’s 1970s gasoline price controls and, perhaps most infamously, New York City’s disastrous eight-decade-long experiment with rent control.

If the United States had had a free market in oil when the Arabs imposed their embargo, its oil supplies could not have been seriously jeopardized.

Anti-price gouging laws are not only unjust, but to the extent they cause shortages in emergencies they also deprive people of things they need badly and would be willing to pay more for.

Higher prices charged have a couple of unappreciated benefits.

If there were no price controls or threat thereof, prices in the present situation would be high enough to keep stocks on the shelves.

The shelves aren’t empty because of free-market capitalism. They’re empty because of active interference with free-market capitalism.

Prices should rise during emergencies. That’s because prices aren’t just money; they are signals, information. They tell suppliers what their customers want most.

The government should have no business in controlling drug prices or regulating drug development.

Instead of finding (temporarily expensive) masks available for sale, we are confronted by “No masks available” signs everywhere we look.

Allowing prices to rise to heights that accurately reveal the intense desperation of the situation is the surest means of encouraging additional supplies of vital goods to be rushed ASAP to the area.

Many high employment “countries such as Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland” have no minimum wage laws.

A mandatory minimum wage rate, to the extent it’s set above the market-clearing wage rate, causes unemployment. 

Does a government-mandated minimum wage help or hurt the very workers and job seekers that Ocasio-Cortez wants to help?

After all the studies and the near-unanimous opinion of economists — and even after the negative real-world effect of the minimum wage — it still remains popular.

Its co-owner, Charles Milite, cited as the primary reason the city’s minimum wage law.

While Amazon has every right to choose how to compensate its workers, this minimum wage increase and Bezos’ encouraging the federal government to do the same are wrong.