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What Is Dumb May Never Die
Kamala Harris’ price-control gambit has been tried before—and found wanting.
Vice President Kamala Harris talks with North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper
as she makes purchases at Bayleaf Market in Raleigh, North Carolina, on
August 16, 2024. (Photo by ERIN SCHAFF/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
By Jonah Goldberg
Published August 16, 2024 • Updated August 19, 2024
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Dear Reader (especially those who really want some bubbly),
Kamala Harris thinks she knows more about poultry farming than poultry
farmers.
It’s a little more complicated than that, but not much. She has a “plan” to make sure that the price of eggs or chicken breasts won’t be “too high.” She won’t make the call herself, but she’ll have a team of
experts decide when prices are so high they amount to “gouging.”
So, if a breakout of avian flu decimates the chicken population, or an
all-egg diet fad takes off, or if the costs of chicken feed go up for
some reason, the Harris Brain Trust will decide if the higher prices
that result are warranted. That sounds really hard. Fortunately, they
have a really easy way of cutting through all the data: The price of
eggs or chicken tenders at the Kroger. That’s it.
She also thinks she’s smarter and more knowledgeable than dairy farmers,
soup makers, coffee and wheat growers, and countless other producers.
I think this is incredibly stupid. But, honestly, I shouldn’t have to.
First of all, this is Scott Lincicome’s beat. Second, I don’t think I
could improve upon Catherine Rampell’s column in the Washington Post yesterday:
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.
But Rampell is not staking out an edgy or provocative hot take. Harry
Truman once famously joked that he wanted a “one-handed economist”
because all of his economists would answer every question with, “On one
hand this … but on the other hand that.” Well, on price controls, the
vast majority of economists are one-handed. Rampell is simply channeling
the experts.
That’s ironic, because if there’s one thing that progressives pride themselves on is their devotion to, and faith in, “the experts.” On
climate change, food safety, vaccines, etc., they insist that they are
simply listening to those with professional expertise and the
conclusions of “settled science.” But, to echo French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau’s line about war being too important to leave to the generals, prices are too important to leave to the economists—or the
market.
Rather than spend a lot of time on how prices work—which I already did a
few months ago—I want to make three other points.
The corruption of politics.
What Harris is proposing is probably smart politics. Dumb policies are
often the bleeding edge of smart politics. For starters, as the New York
Times notes, this crap polls well with swing voters, and progressive
groups are hot for the idea as well. Tell any politician that a policy
idea simultaneously placates the base and appeals to swing voters, and
they will perk up like a cat when it hears a can of tuna being opened. Moreover, inflation has been an albatross for the Biden-Harris administration—that’s still a thing, by the way—and it’s a powerful and legitimate issue for the Trump campaign. Blaming inflation, or any other economic woes, on “corporate greed” or in Teddy Roosevelt’s famous phrase, “malefactors of great wealth,” is a time-honored, and often
shrewd, form of demagoguery.
Another reason this is probably smart is that the actual substance of
this cockamamie idea matters less than the optics. Harris wants to boost
the impression that she “cares about people like you.” Whether it can
work is of secondary importance to signaling that she cares about the
problems of ordinary people. As FDR said, “Better the occasional faults
of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent
omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
It’s no coincidence that Patrick Buchanan often quoted this line in
defense of his bad economic ideas.
As much as I welcome Harris’ cynical determination to win over the
median voter, this price-fixing nonsense is an exception to the rule.
She should now add this to the growing list of Harris flip-flops. If the
median voter thinks price-fixing is a good idea, then the median voter
is ignorant and wrong—about price fixing (the median voter might be wise
and informed on countless other issues from the inedibleness of marmite
to the non-sandwich status of the hotdog). A bad idea doesn’t become
good just because a large number of people subscribe to it. As I wrote
nearly 20 years ago (when denouncing populism was still fairly
uncontroversial on the right):
Politics has a math of its own. Whereas a scientifically minded person
might see things this way: One person who says 2+2=5 is an idiot; two
people who think 2+2=5 are two idiots; and a million people who think
2+2=5 are a whole lot of idiots–political math works differently. Let’s work backwards: if a million people think 2+2=5, then they are not a
million idiots, but a “constituency.” If they are growing in number,
they are also a “movement.” And, if you were not only the first person
to proclaim 2+2=5, but you were the first to persuade others, then you,
my friend, are not an idiot, but a visionary.
Social justice as will to power.
The appeal of price-fixing should be seen as just one facet of a broader
and more consistent—and consistently wrong—vision. The vision of the anointed, to use Thomas Sowell’s phrase, looks at results, outcomes, and consequences aesthetically. What I mean is, if they don’t like the
result, they assume the process itself is bad, illegitimate, or unjust.
This is the throughline of most arguments for things like DEI or racial
quotas in admissions. It helps explain animosity for vast number of
seemingly unrelated things, such as the Electoral College, standardized testing, the existence of billionaires, income inequality, and
capitalism generally. Indeed, I would argue—along with my friend Cliff Asness—that at least some of the hatred of Israel on the left stems from
the fact that the “Zionist entity’s” success—prosperous, pluralistic, democratic—is aesthetically displeasing because it makes its neighbors
look bad.
Here are two useful questions from Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic
Justice: “If you cannot achieve equality of performance among people
born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic
is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deeper social divisions?”
And: “If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes
be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?”
If these questions really annoy you—if they’re the intellectual
equivalent of petting your mental cat backwards—then you may be
precisely the kind of person I am talking about.
But the important point is not that simply some people dislike
disparate, “inequitable” outcomes. Within reason, there’s nothing inherently wrong with disliking such things, depending on the facts. No,
the relevant point is that they get angry at the idea that they lack the
tools to eliminate them. Places like the old Soviet Union or present-day Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, or North Korea have vastly more unjust,
inequitable distributions of power, wealth, and status than capitalist democracies. But what they have going for them, according to apologists,
is that those with power are “doing something” about it.
I use scare quotes around “doing something” because that’s basically a lie in terms of reality. But where the apologists see a greater truth is
in the idea that something—nay, anything—can be done with the right
people in charge. Tell some people that the New Deal didn’t actually end
the Great Depression and they get very angry, because the point is that
it tried. The New Deal represents the idea that the government, when
controlled by the right people, can do all the things. The New Dealers
ordered the slaughter of some 6 million baby pigs to get the price of
bacon “right”—at a time when many Americans were going hungry. “So what?” the apologists ask, “At least they tried!”
The eternal return of bad ideas.
I could very easily tell you a just-so story about how Harris’ idea is
the fruit of an ideological obsession stretching back to the New Deal,
Marx, the Jacobins or a host of other wellsprings of socialism. But I’m increasingly skeptical of this kind of connect-the-dots intellectual
history. Donald Trump wants you to believe Harris is a communist because communists believe in price controls. I don’t think Harris is a
communist. But she’s wrong about price controls for the same reason communists are wrong about price controls: They don’t work. But Richard Nixon, who also loved him some sweet, sweet price controls, wasn’t a communist, nor was FDR. They were just wrong. And so is Harris.
I think the logic of social justice makes price controls attractive to
Harris and her ideological allies for the reasons I laid out, but I
think the appeal of this sort of thing is way upstream of purely
intellectual or ideological explanations. As I wrote in Suicide of the
West, hostility to the market economy is ancient:
Hostility to innovation and free trade was grounded in a broader
worldview that saw money itself as the root of all evil. From the time
of antiquity until the Enlightenment, trade and the pursuit of wealth
were considered sinful. “In the city that is most finely governed,” Aristotle wrote, “the citizens should not live a vulgar or a merchant’s
way of life, for this sort of way of life is ignoble and contrary to
virtue.” In his Republic, Plato laid out one vision of an ideal society
in which the ruling “guardians” would own no property to avoid tearing “the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine.’” He added
that “all the classes engaged in retail and wholesale trade . . . are disparaged and subjected to contempt and insults.” Furthermore in his hypothetical utopian state, only non-citizens would be allowed to
indulge in commerce. A citizen who defies the natural order and becomes
a merchant should be thrown in jail for “shaming his family.”
In ancient Rome, “all trade was stigmatized as undignified . . . the
word mercator [merchant] appears as almost a term of abuse,” writes
Professor D.C. Earl of the University of Leeds. Cicero noted in the
first century B.C. that retail commerce is sordidus [vile] because
merchants “would not make any profit unless they lied constantly.”
The inestimable Dominic Pino had a great piece the other day noting that
for all the talk about how Republicans are stuck in the policy world of
the 1980s, the Democrats are stuck in the fourth century. “Imposing
price stability by decree was Diocletian’s idea of good policy,” he
notes. “The Edict on Maximum Prices was issued in 301 by the Roman emperor.” My only disagreement is that his start date for bad ideas is
too recent.
“I have been thinking,” Albert Jay Nock wrote in 1934, “of how old some of our brand-new economic nostrums really are. Price-regulation by State authority (through State purchase, like our Farm Board) was tried in
China about 350 B.C. It did not work. It was tried again, with State distribution, in the first century A.D., and it did not work. Private
trading was suppressed in the second century B.C., and regional planning
was tried a little later. They did not work; the costs were too high. In
the eleventh century A.D., a plan like the R.F.C. [Reconstruction
Finance Corporation] was tried, but again cost too much. State
monopolies are very old; there were two in China in the seventh century
B.C. I suppose there is not a single item on the modern politician’s
agenda that was not tried and found wanting ages ago.”
These anti-market attitudes are why it took millennia for the driverless
car of market economics to deliver humanity to more prosperous lands,
and ever since economic planners and politicians have tried to regain
control of the steering wheel. (Edmund Burke and Adam Smith were noting
the already long record of failure of wage and price controls when
capitalism still had that new car smell. “The statesman who should
attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ
their capitals,” Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations, “would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority
which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no
council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as
in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy
himself fit to exercise it.”). Socialism and/or authoritarianism is constantly sold as a new idea, but they are the oldest forms of
political and economic organization in human history. They’re hard to
kill not because they’ve proven their superiority, but because we
haven’t evolved past our taste buds for them.
Hooked on a feeling.
In other words, these bad ideas keep coming back, not because some
scribbler or egghead has come up with a new way to make them work. The
issue isn’t supply, but demand. People want those in power to give them stuff. Moreover, they believe that people in power can and should give
them stuff. Meanwhile, those in power increase their power by promising
to do things they cannot do.
The powerful also have the tendency to disbelieve there are limits and boundaries to their power. Indeed, promising to do the impossible
amplifies the perception of power, which is an intoxicant unto itself,
both for the promiser and the promisee. “Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back
and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before,” Donald Trump vows. This is just as antediluvian as Harris’ price-control nonsense.
We are wired to want kings and priests who can, with the right
incantations and the adequate application of will, conjure good harvests
and chickens for every pot. That desire and those promises get gussied
up in every generation by the scribblers, eggheads, and politicians as a
“new idea” when in reality it’s a very old, but still intoxicating, wine in a new bottle.
When these ideas fail—as they must—their promoters don’t blame
themselves or their ideas. They blame the greedy, the malefactors of
great wealth, the millionaires and billionaires, the kulaks, the Jews,
the financiers, the globalists, Big Corporations, Wall Street, and, of
course, the price gougers, just to name a few scapegoats.
The free market works very, very well at the things it’s meant to do.
But it doesn’t feel like it. And that feeling is why we’re constantly receptive to old bad ideas sold as new ones.
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