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JUNE 7, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
The Case for Price Controls
And it's not just that they beat cozying up to Saudi Arabia.
It's been 21 years since I left L.A. for D.C. (I only live in cities
that can be identified by two letters), but having lived in Los Angeles
for nearly 50 years, I still feel its gas prices in my bones. And gas
prices there are rapidly approaching $7 a gallon. In some neighborhoods,
they've already exceeded that.
And as if inflation on that scale weren't bad enough, its electoral
consequences are likely to shift control of Congress to racist,
insurrectionist, conspiracy-addled nitwits in November's elections.
How, then, can the Democrats forestall or at least mitigate this grim
double whammy? Joe Biden appears to grasp the peril he's in; it's
compelling him to make a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and its murderous
crown prince in the hope that the prince will bring more of his
nation's oil to market, thereby driving down prices.
But there's a less morally bankrupt, economically more effective, and
far quicker way of achieving the same ends. It's called price
controls.
Contrary to what economic orthodoxy would have us believe, such controls
have been markedly successful at various times in our nation's
history. (Economic orthodoxy is often clueless about history in its
preference for theory over fact.) According to Hugh Rockoff, a professor
of economic history at Rutgers, price and wage controls brought the
yearly rate of inflation down from 32.4 percent to 7.1 percent during
World War I, and from 11.9 percent to 1.6 percent during World War II.
Of course, as Jason Zweig pointed out in a recent
**Wall Street Journal**column
,
people are more likely to accept such controls during wartime than they
are during peacetime. Then again, having not really experienced a run of
inflation for the past 40 years, Americans are rapidly going into shock
as food and fuel prices continue to run amok. Selective controls on key
commodities might not only provide the only way to achieve some fast
relief, but also demonstrate, in tandem with legislation to cut the
price of prescription drugs and the cost of child care, that the
Democrats can actually and effectively legislate and implement policies
in the public good.
Wages are rising, too, but as they clearly lag inflation, there's no
need to control them, particularly since the sectors in which they're
rising the most are those that have been paying poverty-level wages for
decades. What this country needs is price controls, and if the Democrats
can't figure that out, they're inviting economic and electoral
disaster.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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