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Trump’s ‘Comrade Kamala’ insult is a bit much, but price controls really are an awful idea
By Ingrid Jacques, USA TODAY,
2 days ago
One of former President Donald Trump’s shticks is to come up with nicknames for his opponents. They aren’t usually complimentary.
The one he's landed on for his new Democratic opponent in the presidential contest is “ Comrade Kamala Harris. ”
Trump wants to paint the vice president as a candidate who’s about as far left as one can get.
Lucky for him, Harris’ new light-on-facts blueprint for the economy, which she outlined Friday , plays right into the socialist stereotype.
There’s lots to dislike about her big-government agenda and costly ideas.
One of the worst is Harris' proposal to impose government price controls on private-sector businesses. Democrats love to blame “ greedy corporations ” for all the country’s ills, but the reality is much more complicated. And if they force the government further into the private marketplace, they’ll make things much worse for Americans.
Price controls have been tried in various forms around the world for centuries. (Not to give away the suspense, but they always fail.)
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris during the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 19, 2024. Josh Morgan/USA TODAY
What’s going on here is that Harris is trying mightily to deflect from the pain of high inflation during the Biden-Harris administration.
She’s also trying to deflect any blame for the administration’s role in it.
As much as Democrats have tried to make this presidential election about what a boar Trump is or how much they want to expand abortion around the United States, they can’t shake the unease voters feel over the economy and inflation.
Inflation has hit many sectors hard, but something we all have felt whenever we’re in the checkout line is the high cost of groceries. So that’s what Harris chose to focus on in proposing a federal ban on “price gouging” from food and grocery industries .
The rate of inflation is already slowing, including for food, because of the Federal Reserve's decision to set high interest rates, although the effect of higher prices will stick around for a long time.
Harris may want to look like she’s “doing something,” but government interference isn’t the answer. And that is what price controls would do in practice.
“It is going to lead to shortages,” Scott Lincicome, senior fellow with the Cato Institute, told me. “It’s going to decrease investment in that area. It is going to lead to higher prices in the long term.“
"If you can’t get a good return on that investment or simply you’re gonna have to deal with the hassle of bureaucrats telling you how to run your business, you’re going to invest less or not at all in that industry," Lincicome said. “So over time, that means less supply, that means less competition and that’s worse for consumers. And you know what? We have centuries of evidence of this.”
A street sign reading "Biden St" in downtown Scranton, Pa., where President Joe Biden was born in 1942. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Yet, just like price controls, rent caps lead to housing shortages and other problems and are denounced by a wide array of economists. Even a former top economic adviser for President Barack Obama told The Washington Post: “ Rent control has been about as disgraced as any economic policy in the tool kit.”
Free market trumps the government every time
Harris’ price-control plan may not be communism-lite. Even so, it’s a bad idea, and it's concerning that it was one of her first major policy proposals.
“You don’t have to call it communism,” Lincicome said. “I mean, it’s just bad economic policy.”
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