Kamala Gone Wild

“Of course, price controls have never worked anywhere in recorded history. Anywhere. Anytime. Never.”

Even by the virtually nonexistent standards of California and Washington, D.C., Kamala Harris is an extraordinarily empty pantsuit. She is shockingly unserious and unaccomplished, which, of course, makes her extremely dangerous.  

Nonetheless, as the cement hardens over the obvious coup d’état’ that removed the addled President from the November election by some mysterious cabal in Washington (how’s that for democracy!), the major corporate – and very corrupt – media in the county has turned to making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

[The nation rests in the precarious hands of whom precisely at the moment? Who is making what decisions? Who’s running the country? Washington seems blithely unconcerned. Someone or some group just removed a sitting President – however improbable his own election was – and has self-anointed a replacement. The delegates that voted for the President during the primaries are being snatched by someone rejected by those same delegates in the 2020 primaries, where she dropped out before the Iowa primary for want of any support. But, I digress.]

The media now love Kamala – her affected cackling and all. They have taken it upon themselves to airbrush every policy position the woman has ever had for twenty years – all radical-left crazy stuff – and replace them with focus-group soundbites. As a US Senator from California for less than four years, she had a voting record that was even more radical than the socialist Bernie Sanders (I-VT) – as hard as that is to believe.

She is a hardcore radical Marxist raised by two hardcore radical Marxists and has memorized every bromide fed to her with no whisper of thought to interrupt it.    

As of yet, no one has the brass to say the empress has no clothes. No aspersions intended.  

Today, the Vice President finally noticed that regular citizens are furious and overwhelmed by the 20—to 30-percent inflation in food and groceries over the last couple of years on top of the general inflation of the economy. They see it in the prices they strain to pay weekly at the store. The reports that there is only a 3-percent inflation uptick at the moment mean nothing because it sits atop the price mountain that is already unscalable for many.   

But because Kamala and the vast majority of the political ruling class who run Washington never had a job, owned or ran a business, or produced anything of value for society, their answer to the nation’s economic problem is always half-witted. They simply don’t know what they don’t know. They believe that Washington can fix the problems it created in the first place!

So true to form, Kamala, according to various reports and Time magazine, The New York Times, and others, is going to announce that she will establish a first-ever national ban on “price gouging” and price-fixing within her first 100 days in office to demonstrate how tough she’ll be on – well, what is not entirely clear, But she will be tough for sure.

She will direct the Federal Trade Commission and other relevant agencies to “investigate and penalize” big corporations that are price fixing and engaged in anti-competitive practices in the food industry, according to the NYT. “In detailing her presidential campaign’s economic agenda, Vice President Kamala Harris will highlight an argument that blames corporate price gouging for high grocery prices.”

According to the reports, she will also offer a plan to cut prescription drug and housing costs in this announcement and control rent increases. Oh, and she wants to give first-time homebuyers $25,000 of someone’s money for a downpayment.

You’d be right if you’re scratching your head thinking that the FTC and the Department of Justice already pursue and prosecute price-fixing and statutorily defined price collusion. That being the case, the giggler-in-residence and her minions are really talking about centrally administered price controls on food and grocery prices, rents, and home prices, using the pretext of price gouging.  

Of course, price controls have never worked anywhere in recorded history. Anywhere. Anytime. Never. Honestly, only economic illiterates, grifters, con artists, and folks who have never held a real job in their lives would propose such nonsense. Hundreds of millions of people have died of hunger across the world because of this deranged concept that a bunch of bureaucrats can manage incredibly intricate economic interactions of production, distribution, marketing, and pricing. Heck, they can’t even manage the government. Why would anyone think they could manage centralized pricing for 330 million people?

Your humble writer may be in the last generation to see first-hand the effects of centrally commanded price controls. The formative and life-changing experience happened when I was a freshly minted, very young executive with the world’s largest retailer at the time. On August 15, 1971, President Nixon shocked the country when he announced that he was freezing all prices and wages for 90 days to combat a 5 percent inflation rate. He also announced the creation of a “Pay Board” and a “Price Commission” to be in place at least through 1972. (At the same time, he also took the US off the gold standard, ending the dollar’s convertibility for gold, and placed a 10% surcharge on imported products.)

Wage and price controls proved to be a bloody disaster for the country. Who was hurt? Average consumers. Wage and price controls unleashed crooks to feast on the unwitting while turning honest business people into liars and gimmick merchants.

In my experience, since the cost of production and materials kept growing, many suppliers could no longer make an item and sell it at an acceptable profit margin. Shortages soon occurred. Retailers had to stop “sale pricing” on scarcer products since they would need the larger net profit margin to provide the capital to pay for the more expensive products still available. Since everyone had to track all pricing for the government, deviations from “regular” pricing became a real issue. The government would disallow regular pricing reductions, or the “reduced” price would become the new regular price. This is where the idea of rebates came from. Retailers would sell the product at full price for reporting and offer the purchaser a rebate of cash directly sent to them.

Black markets arose, shortages of nearly everything occurred, and over time, honest people became gamesters and gimmick makers, cutting every corner possible to stay in business.

Worse, the controls had no impact on inflation at all.

It’s not really complicated. Economics is a science that conforms to the natural laws we find throughout the universe. Supply and demand for anything, whether in the biological kingdom or the human domain, works in markedly similar ways. They represent the control mechanisms for the distribution and use of resources. Individuals or businesses cannot spend – or consume – more than they make, catch or find. The value provided or brought to any transaction or interaction is rewarded based on utility, while the miracle of the free market is that most people do the right thing in the pursuit of their own interests.   

Price controls and centralized planning have and will always fail in human history because you can’t set aside the universal laws that govern everything we can observe in our lives or in the scope of the natural world.

You would think that someone would have explained this to Kamala already.