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It is notable that the government has been silent on price controls since the weekend —perhaps the tide is beginning to turn against the misguided and short-termist economic approach.

At a conference last week, I spoke with a student and liberal activist from Budapest about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ongoing attempt to control inflation by capping the price of essential goods like food, mortgages, energy, and fuel. My Hungarian friend joked, “Orban used to be one of the biggest anti-communists, now he’s making us all feel like we’re living under communism again.” I laughed along – for all the British government’s faults and the dire state of our country and institutions I thought to myself that it could always be worse. The timing was cruelly ironic. In the last 10 days, reports have emerged that the government is contemplating a price cap on basic food items. Prices are not just made up numbers, they reflect tangible realities like the supply of goods and the ease of co-ordinating them. As such, the sellers of goods which have now had their prices controlled will have to make up the difference elsewhere. In the case of supermarkets, that likely means putting up costs elsewhere or reducing the quality and quantity of their offering. Prices also perform a vital function by communicating to the market that there is money to be made by increasing the amount of a certain good in short supply. This has been shown recently in the United States, where egg prices shot up at the end of 2022, prompting calls for price controls and regulation of ‘big egg’ to stop the so-called ‘greedflation’. These calls were resisted, and the price of eggs has cratered in the first quarter of 2023. If that mechanism is blunted, the incentive to find ways of producing more food products is stymied. Food price controls would represent the zenith of exactly the type of misguided, knee-jerk policymaking that we have come to expect from the current administration. It is yet another reminder that we must make the case for even the most basic free market principles all over again. Thankfully, we seem to have made a good start in doing just that. Our Economics Fellow Julian Jessop’s criticism of the idea has been carried far and wide across the media, featuring in publications ranging from The Guardian and The Independent to The Financial Times and The Telegraph, as well as broadcasters including the BBC and Times Radio. Perhaps the tide is beginning to turn against the government’s misguided and short-termist economic approach.

Nanny State Index 2023


This week, the IEA and EPiCENTER released 2023’s Nanny State Index.

  • Edited by IEA Head of Lifestyle Economics Christopher Snowdon, the index ranks thirty European countries based on their policies towards tobacco, vaping, alcohol, food and soft drink.

  • For lovers of freedom, the results are dire. With few exceptions, all the countries surveyed are moving in a more statist direction.

  • The most draconian state on this year’s list was Turkey, which consistently scored the lowest on all criteria, while the freest country was Germany.

  • The UK took 11th place, up by one spot since the last ranking in 2021. Britain has the most restrictive tobacco regulation in Europe – the only saving grace being a relatively liberal approach to vaping.

Read the full report

IEA Latest.

IEA Insider.

IEA Book Club

There are limited spaces available for both book club events, if you would like to attend please apply by emailing or find out more about joining the IEA Book Club.

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