The best thing about Kamala Harris’ policy debut last week was the backlash.
I don’t mean the political backlash. Harris’ attack on “price-gouging” was probably smart politics. It amplified her campaign’s message that she’s “fighting for the people.” That economists scoff at the tools she would use in that fight probably doesn’t matter much.
Nonetheless, it’s reassuring that most economists roll their eyes at government price controls. Few lessons from economic history are more clear than the futility of that approach, as Robert L. Schuettinger and Eamonn F. Butler chronicled in their 1979 book “Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation.”
Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch: thedispatch.com.