Kamala Harris Really is a Communist! By Charles Taylor (Florida)

Kamala Harris has just released her first economic policy, and it is something out of 1920s USSR economic policy. She wants to stop rising grocery prices by rigid price control. That is the sort of "solution" offered by high school economics students, but they soon grow out of it. Not so for university Marxists. Of course, the idea of government control may seem attractive to poor people who do not see the big picture coming from disrupting markets, and the myriad economic problems this will create, as governments are highly ineffective at regulating markets. Here is the standard critique from a free market perspective:

https://www.cato.org/commentary/problems-price-controls.

"… when government adopts a price control, it defines the market price of a product and forces all, or a large percentage, of transactions to take place at that price instead of the equilibrium price set through the interaction between supply and demand. Since supply and demand shift constantly in response to tastes and costs, but the government price will change only after a lengthy political process, the government price will effectively never be an equilibrium price. This means that the government price will be either too high or too low.

When the price is too high, there is an excessive amount of the product for sale compared to what people want. This is the situation with many U.S. and European farm programs; government, in an effort to increase farm incomes, purchases the output that consumers do not want. This, in turn, prompts farmers to raise more cows and convert more land to pasture or cropland. However, the higher prices discourage consumers from buying farm products, causing an excess of supply (e.g. a "butter mountain"). Government then exacerbates this situation by continuing to purchase the excess crop at the set price.

Serious problems also result when government sets prices below the equilibrium level. This causes consumers to want more of the product than producers have available. When the federal government restricted gasoline price increases in the 1970s, long lines formed at gas stations and only those motorists who waited long hours in line received the scarce gasoline.

In both cases of government price controls, serious welfare loss results because not enough of the good is sold. The wasted chance to create both producer and consumer surplus from those sales is known as 'deadweight loss' because it is income that is lost forever. In addition to creating deadweight loss, an artificially high price transfers profits from consumers to producers; these rents are often wasted because producers spend them on lobbying and other influence activities to maintain the regulated price. In the case of a low price, producers transfer profits to consumers. Consumers, in competing for a limited amount of the controlled product, may waste as much as they gain from getting it at a low price. For instance, the people who waited in the 1970s gas lines probably shouldered as much cost from the lost time queuing as they saved from the price controls on gasoline. (Researchers Robert Deacon and Job Sonstelie have even argued that the gas lines cost consumers more than they saved from the controlled gas prices.) Thus, the artificially low prices not only hurt producers, but also consumers."

https://www.thekylebecker.com/p/kamala-harris-gets-roasted-for-disastrous

I imagine Vance will destroy this in debates.