Kamala Harris' Price Control Proposal Is Really Dumb, Even for Her

Kamala Harris, Price 'Gauging,' and Her Father's Legacy in Jamaica

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”

~ Albert Einstein

Last week, we got a peek into the policies Kamala Harris, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate, might support.

This was a refreshing change, given she's been sticking to rehearsed sound bites and scripted interviews since becoming her party's presumptive nominee a month ago.

And she's not thinking small either. At a North Carolina campaign event on Friday, Harris unveiled her plan to address rampant inflation and skyrocketing grocery prices.

It’s a problem worth tackling, no doubt, since prices have jumped more than 20% under the Biden-Harris administration.

Her solution (to a problem of her own making)?

Price controls.

You read that right. Harris wants a federal ban on what she calls “price gouging” in the food industry.

She introduced this “brilliant idea” to her supporters in a Biden-esque way, stumbling over and mixing up words. Take a look at the video below.

Geesh. She wants to take massive, unprecedented control over key economic sectors, including groceries, and she can't even pronounce "gouging" right?

Aside from that, Harris' entire speech was extremely light on details. She didn't define what counts as "price gouging" or explain how she'll bypass supply and demand laws without wrecking the economy.

Regardless, it looks like Democrats now want to import Soviet-style communism. In Kamala's world, your milk and egg prices won’t be determined by those old-fashioned market forces anymore. Nope, a D.C. bureaucrat will be calling the shots instead.

Unfortunately for Harris, this was a bit too much even for the mainstream media. Outlets like the Washington Post, which have gone out of their way to support her candidacy, have come out with headlines like: “When Your Opponent Calls You Communist, Maybe Don’t Propose Price Controls.” Here’s a snippet from that piece:

It's hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris's price gouging proposal is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry. Not only would supply and demand no longer determine prices or profit levels, far-off Washington bureaucrats would—at best—this would lead to shortages, black markets, and hoarding. Yes, at best. That's the best-case scenario.

It’s odd to say this about something published in the Washington Post, but I couldn’t agree more.

Even CNN, the trusted mouthpiece for the Biden-Harris administration, had articles with headlines like “Harris's Plan to Stop Price Gouging Could Create More Problems Than It Solves.”

It honestly felt like everywhere you turned in left-wing media, “allies” were turning against Harris.

And there’s a reason for that… her grocery price gouging plan is just really dumb. And that’s saying something by Kamala's standards. But, as is often the case in politics, there’s more to the story.

Donald J. Harris' Jamaican Legacy

Milton Friedman, the 1976 Nobel Prize-winning economist, said price controls are just governments trying to hide their failed policies. This fits perfectly with what Kamala Harris is trying to do now.

Didn’t she cast the tiebreaking vote for that so-called "Inflation Reduction Act" back in 2020? You know, the one that was supposed to magically fight inflation by... checks notes... spending nearly a trillion dollars? How did that work out?

Kamala Harris kept silent about that on Friday, but she did complain a lot about inflation... as if her administration hasn't been running the country for the past four years.

Here’s Friedman’s quote:

I’m afraid that the chances that we shall have price and wage controls are unfortunately not negligible. It is a device that governments have repeatedly resorted to, to try to cover up the effects of their own policies. If it is offered as a cure for inflation, it is not a cure for inflation. It has never been a cure for inflation. It is an alleged cure that is far worse than the disease because its effect is to repress the symptoms, to repress the consequences of the more basic forces.

Milton Friedman was, of course, 100% right. Price controls always lead to empty shelves, fewer stores able to stay profitable and in business, food shortages, to name just a few outcomes.

We know this for a fact because we’ve seen this kind of thing tried in many other countries before… the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Argentina—you name it.

It never works.

And Kamala Harris should know this better than anyone, since her dad, Dr. Donald J. Harris, was an economic advisor to the Jamaican government and helped introduce price controls back in the 1970s. You can see him in the middle of the photo below from another Washington Post piece.

Source: Washington Post

The article barely touches on this, just saying that “steeped in Marxist theory, Harris’s recommendations can appear strikingly nonideological,” and calling Jamaica a “fragile economic success story.”

Riiight... I never thought I’d see "Marxist" and "nonideological" in the same sentence. But let me quickly share the real story of Jamaica's “success.”

In the 1970s, Jamaica underwent a major economic overhaul under Prime Minister Michael Manley's socialist agenda. As an economic advisor to the Jamaican government, Harris was involved in shaping these policies. Their goal was a classic communist one: to eliminate economic inequalities by redistributing wealth. And of course, a key part of this “economic strategy” was putting price controls on essential goods.

The result?

A complete disaster.

When price controls were introduced, suppliers either couldn't or wouldn't sell goods at the artificially low government-set prices. This sparked black markets where you could get anything - if you could afford the sky-high prices. Those without deep pockets were out of luck.

Food shortages, hunger and malnutrition among the general population quickly set in.

Businesses couldn't survive, let alone grow, so it didn't take long for Jamaica's economy to come to a halt. Just take a look at the numbers:

• GDP growth nosedived to -2.3% in 1976, then plummeted further to -6.5% in 1977.

• Inflation hit 27.8% in 1976 (so much for price controls taming prices).

• By 1978, unemployment had shot up to about 24% - double what it was at the decade's start.

• Come the late 1970s, an estimated 40% of Jamaicans were living in poverty, way up from earlier in the decade.

To this day, Jamaica is often used as a classic example of the unintended consequences of government intervention in the economy.

Is this the kind of economic "success" Kamala Harris wants to bring to America? Honestly, I don’t know; but she IS stupid enough to think she can improve on her dad's “legacy.”

Regards,

Lau Vegys