” Kamala Harris Is No Socialist, Socialist, or Nixon”, Jill Lawrence assures us. Fine. But are we know?
Not that anyone has asked me, but I believe I may help explain why many voters are receiving the wrong impression as someone who frequently accuses liberals of being” commies.”
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For one thing, giving the Democratic National Convention’s self-professed communists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez prime-time games might send mixed signals to some independent citizens.
Nominating a vice-presidential candidate who once taught high school students that the Maoist program, one of the most ( if not the most ) violent and dehumanizing governments in background, is a place where “everyone stocks” and receives complimentary food and housing? That was n’t good, either.
Having said that, you undoubtedly do n’t need to place value controls on one of the pillars of your financial plan.
Although Kamala Harris is n’t the first politician to propose regulating socially awkward costs, it has been established from the beginning that price caps lead to shortages, hoarding, black areas, and a myriad other unpleasant effects.
If you’re going to explain this plan by blaming the “price gouging” cult and spreading the cherished idea that cabals of evil guys in competitive markets can band together to control prices, it’s going to boost alarm bells.
There is n’t a scintilla of information that “price gouging”– a quickly flexible expression, to begin with– exists. With a profit margin of just under 2 %, which is among the least attractive major businesses in history, it is 1.18, which is on the lower end of the historic income spectrum. Regular margins indicate that price spikes are driven by inflation, no some irrational story, despite the fact that making a good profit is fine.
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Prior to the government shutting down the business during the COVID pandemic, food prices had been low and declining. Perhaps because Big Grocery is also one of the most competitive industries in the country, with many national chains, local chains, higher-end markets, cheap big-box chains and virtual competitors, including Amazon.
Yet we’re supposed to think that one day, as global inflation reached a 40-year higher, everyone in the food industry banded together to raise rates in a way that was in line with global prices. They think you’re stupid.
In an embarrassing Axios defense of Harris ‘ plan, headlined” Do n’t call it price controls: How price gouging bans really work”, Emily Peck contends that” Harris ‘ economic proposals, broadly speaking, are meant to help middle-class Americans deal with a higher cost of living”.
Oh, is that what they’re meant to accomplish? Forbes assures us that states now have harmless anti-gouging regulations on the books for emergencies. ( Yes, those are also fully contradictory. ” Price gouging” during emergency shortages helps alleviate hoarding. )
In any case, Peck is compelled to depend on the expertise of far-left Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout, as one assumes no self-respecting analyst would go on the report defending price caps, to highlight the harmless and pervasive character of anti-“price cutting” rules.
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Which brings me to The New York Times ‘ Paul Krugman, who argues Harris actually is n’t backing price settings, per se, but only a moratorium on “price cutting on foods”– which he certainly knows is a myth. Harris ‘ program is nothing but a “populist social gesture”, the Nobel Prize-winning scholar explains.
We may assume that the presidential candidate also supports enacting Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, which, despite the claims of Axios and Krugman, would grant the Federal Trade Commission broad-ranging, punitive federal authority to dictate pricing on groceries. She has n’t offered any concrete plans. I have some good news for you if you think that government regulatory bodies will use this authority wisely.
So, sure, it’s a bad sign that Harris intends to fight inflation using failed socialist policy prescriptions. Let’s not forget, though, the last time Harris vowed to help fix inflation, she was the “tie-breaking vote” on the effort to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into an overheated economy.
It’s fair to say that inflation is a complex, multifaceted issue that is n’t entirely any one entity’s fault. The Biden administration used parliamentary tricks to cramm through a massive partisan spending bill, undermining energy production, and you do n’t need to be a socialist lawyer from Fordham to understand this.
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Last I heard, Kamala was a member of that administration.
Has Harris, despite her professed Marxism, suggested price caps on groceries? Unlikely. The power-hungry politician’s tendency to embrace collectivist and zero-sum economic thinking is merely a sign of an authoritarian demagogue. Kamala is not Stalin. She’s more like some middling Latin American dictator. That’s bad enough.
