“Kamala Harris Is No Communist, Socialist, or Nixon,” Jill Lawrence assures us. OK. But are we sure?
Not that anyone’s asked me, but as someone who regularly accuses progressives of being “commies,” I think I can help shed some light on why many voters are getting the wrong idea.
For one thing, handing self-professed socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez prime-time slots at the Democratic National Convention could send some independent voters mixed signals.
Nominating a vice-presidential candidate who not only honeymooned in Red China on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre but once taught high school kids that the Maoist system — one of the most (if not the most) murderous and dehumanizing regimes in history — is a place where “everyone shares” and gets free food and housing? That wasn’t helpful, either.
All that said, you definitely don’t want to make one of the pillars of your economic plan price controls.
Kamala Harris certainly isn’t the first politician to suggest controlling politically inconvenient prices, but history has conclusively proven that price caps cause shortages, hoarding, black markets and an array of other unpleasant outcomes.
If you’re going to rationalize this policy by blaming the kulaks of “price gouging” and peddling the age-old notion that cabals of bad guys in competitive markets can get together and dictate prices, it’s going to raise alarm bells.
There isn’t a scintilla of evidence that “price gouging” — a conveniently elastic term, to begin with — exists. Big Grocery is one of the least lucrative big businesses in America with a profit margin consistently under 2% — in fact, this year it was 1.18, a figure that lands on the lower end of the historical profit spectrum. While there’s nothing wrong with making a healthy profit, consistent margins tell us that price spikes are propelled by inflation, not some insidious plot.
Until the government shutdown of the economy during the COVID pandemic, grocery prices had been low and dropping. Probably because Big Grocery is also one of the most competitive industries in the country, with numerous national chains, regional chains, higher-end markets, affordable big-box chains and online competitors, including Amazon.
Yet we’re supposed to believe that one day, just as overall inflation happened to hit a 40-year high, everyone in grocery business decided to get together and collude to raise prices in a manner that was consistent with overall inflation? They think you’re idiots.
In an embarrassing Axios defense of Harris’ plan, headlined “Don’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 do? Axios assures us that states already have innocuous anti-gouging laws on the books for emergencies. (Yes, those are also completely counterproductive. “Price gouging” during emergency shortages helps alleviate hoarding.)
In any event, to stress the innocuous and ubiquitous nature of anti-“price gouging” laws, Peck is compelled to rely on the expertise of far-left Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout, as one assumes no self-respecting economist would go on the record defending price caps.
Which brings me to The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who argues Harris really isn’t backing price controls, per se, but merely a ban on “price gouging on groceries” — which he surely knows is a myth. Harris’ plan is nothing but a “populist political gesture,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist explains.
Since the presidential candidate hasn’t offered any concrete plans, we must assume she still supports enacting Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, which, despite the assurances of Axios and Krugman, would imbue the Federal Trade Commission with wide-ranging unilateral federal authority to dictate prices on groceries. And if you believe government regulatory agencies will judiciously use this power, I have news for you.
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 isn’t entirely any one entity’s fault. You don’t need to be a socialist lawyer from Fordham to understand that the Biden administration did everything to exacerbate inflation — ignoring warning signs, cramming through a massive partisan spending bill using parliamentary tricks, all the while undermining energy production.
Last I heard, Kamala was a member of that administration.
Has Harris proposed price caps on groceries because she’s a devout Marxist? 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.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books — the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.” His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
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When prices are frozen they can’t go up but they can’t go down either? When the free-market is price handcuffed, all we get are the bad situations where increasing costs to produce products, brought on by the chuckleheaded Harris/Bidenomic petroleum energy policy restrictions of USA energy production, the manufacturer can either sell smaller product packages to make a profit, or just go out of business. All the now chain of production gone jobs and incomes gone to China or gone out of business that once produced income tax wealth, now disappear and the mindless socialists begin to blame the big bad capitalists whom they seek to destroy, and they are forced to print useless money to cover their mistakes followed by more inflation taking more undervalued inflated dollars to purchase the same diminishing but once affordable goods. Yes Margret Thatcher was right about socialism,,,it does not work,,,because like right now, you DO run out of other people’s money, even faster when the unvoted for government Democrat bought and paid for FED apparatchiks flood the market with useless printed dollars to cover the sins of their voted in political puppets. Big Brother is wearing the skirt of a puppet Punch and Judy show Kamala, who is about to punch WE THE PEOPLE in the gut, while their media takes away our clubs.
AND as we’ve seen TIME and TIME Again, when the govt gets involved, THINGS ALWAYS go to zit.
Let’s just make this very simple, very easy, and very truthful. Camela will lead to socialism. Maybe even communism. She and her ilk don’t give two shoots about the Constitution and basic civil rights.
Camela Harris is just another corrupt puppet of the Treasonous, Destructive, Lying, Socialist Democrat Party, that has no regards for anyone or anything except their ability to dictate their traitorous will over our country.
I honestly think if they could get away with it, they’d SHRED the constitution..
Harris would probably like to be Stalin, if it didn’t require so much effort.