Kamala Harris gaslights America Friday with her fake plan against “price gouging” designed to hide rather than solve what really causes pain at the checkout line.
“Kamala Harris will call for a federal ban on food and grocery price gouging as part of a broader set of proposals intended to reduce consumer costs,” Bloomberg reports. The proposal also seeks to examine the merger between Albertsons and Kroger.
From the people who took inflation from 1.4 percent up to 9.1 percent in their first year and a half in the White House comes this economically illiterate “price control” scheme. It relies not on the democracy of the market, where buyers and sellers set prices based on how much they will pay and sell, but the dictatorship of a few people in Washington to determine by whim the “fairness” of price for this or that item.
Within a short ride from your correspondent’s laptop, Price Chopper, Big Y, Walmart, Shaw’s, Stop & Shop, Target, Trader Joe’s, Aldi, Whole Foods, Wegman’s, and several other supermarkets allow shoppers to, well, shop. If you do not like one store, you can buy groceries at another. And if you do not like the supermarkets, then butchers, produce stands, bakers, and other smaller operations abound. Choice, the prerequisite to a truly free market, exists.
Why must Kamala Harris act as the Instacart shopper for all 340 million of us?
This takes away choice from sellers, which in the past has led to shortages and black markets. No capitalist sells an item for a loss and remains a capitalist for long.
Washington, unfortunately, already determined our high prices through a fiscal policy of trillion-dollar deficits in five of the most recent fiscal years and a monetary policy that finances that fiscal recklessness through a Federal Reserve funds rate that in 2022 effectively stood at zero and a balance sheet that nearly reached $9 trillion at the same time.
A dishonesty characterizes not only Harris’s proposals but the whole conversation surrounding inflation, a word referring to inflating the amount of circulating currency and not to the blowing up of price, which comes as a byproduct of increasing the supply of money (or anything) without a corresponding market demand. Beyond terminological atrocities, the conversation demagogically shifts blame from the malefactors (politicians and central bankers) to the nefarious Them — in this case, middlemen and merchants. In fact, middlemen and merchants did not really increase prices; Washington shrank the value of the dollar. Store prices for the most part merely react to the increasing supply, which drives down value, of dollars.
As with requiring ID to enter some of her rallies as she rails against the states that require them for voting, Harris tells the rest of us to do as she says and not as she does.
Harris charged donors from $3,300 to $500,000 for hors d’oeuvres and mimosas at a Sunday morning fundraiser at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. Would her proposed initiative target such price gouging by politicians? Because it does seem as though hors d’oeuvres at Kroger — Pagoda Frozen Pork Potstickers with Lime Ponzu Dipping Sauce currently go for a sale price of $4.19 for 9.5 ounces while supplies last — run on the cheaper side vis-a-vis a Kamala Harris fundraiser.
Profligate government spending and subsequent bailouts from central banks, which create excessive currency, cause inflation. Switzerland, which did not inflate its currency during and after the pandemic as we did, experienced no annual inflation rate as high as our current “low” consumer price index rate. Turkey, which inflated its currency more than did the United States, experienced triple-digit rates. The profound variation in the most recognizable symptom of inflation — price — resulted from profound difference in monetary policy.
Monetary policy remains the only proven way to effectively curtail rising prices. The best way to allow the Federal Reserve to pursue responsible monetary policy, which they essentially have been doing for the last two years or so, involves legislators and presidents limiting government expenditures. The vice president wants to expand government spending, so she must engage in this subterfuge — blaming the supermarket in your hometown rather than the politicians in the city in which she lives — for the 20 percent spike in everything since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office.
Grocers did not gouge prices. Politicians gouged the value of the dollar.
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