Left-Wing Economic Columnist Blasts Harris’ Price Controls: ‘Hard To Exaggerate How Bad This Policy Is’

Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell slammed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris‘ proposed price controls after they were unveiled this week, warning that the plan was something straight out of the failed Soviet Union or modern day Venezuela.

Rampell — who is so left-wing that she wants Democrats to officially make their agenda: Make America Minnesota Already — wrote that it was “not hard to figure out where this proposal came from.”

“Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed,” Rampell wrote. “Harris has chosen the latter.”

Harris said in a statement from her campaign this week that she would create the “first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

Rampell noted that since the campaign gave no details about the plan, they are most likely using as a template a recent bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), which is similar to a bill that then-California Sen. Harris co-sponsored with Warren in 2020.

The bills would ban any “grossly excessive price” during any “atypical disruption” of a market, thus empowering the Federal Trade Commission to ban any price it wants to using any metric is chooses to.

She continued:

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.

At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat. (There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U.S. states are rarely invoked.) At worst, it might accidentally raise prices.

That’s because, among other things, the legislation would ban companies from offering lower prices to a big customer such as Costco than to Joe’s Corner Store, which means quantity discounts are in trouble. Worse, it would require public companies to publish detailed internal data about costs, margins, contracts and their future pricing strategies. Posting cost and pricing plans publicly is a fantastic way for companies to collude to keep prices higher — all facilitated by the government.

Rampell said that Harris’ economic advisers were “either too confused or lazy” and they did not know “the history of these kinds of policies and apparently haven’t thought very hard about what would make markets more competitive or improve the lives of voters.”

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She implored Harris to drop the policy because she was worried that keeping it will better enable Republicans, who she claimed only had “gibberish” ideas, to label Harris a “communist.”

During a subsequent CNN interview, Rampell said that these failed policies have been tried in “Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union, et cetera,” and that they cause “a lot of harm.”

WATCH:

WATCH: The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell blasts Kamala Harris and PA Democrat Senator Bob Casey’s price control proposals:

“Well, first of all, nobody can explain what price gouging means. It’s like that old line about pornography: I know it when I see it, in the sense… pic.twitter.com/2f0hqdl1cr

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 16, 2024