The Road to Price Controls

Source: Cato Institute
by Ryan Bourne & Sophia Bagley

“High inflation has resulted in some wild and damaging policy proposals during this presidential election campaign. The pinnacle perhaps came on 17 September, during a town hall in Flint, Michigan for former President Trump. A month earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris had blamed corporate price gouging for families’ high grocery bills. … The Democratic presidential candidate promised to sign an anti-price gouging law to help avoid grocery prices spiking during future ’emergencies,’ providing the Federal Trade Commission with a raft of new powers to go after stores deemed to be charging unconscionably high prices during crises. … Trump himself joined the chorus of criticism, bemoaning the prospect of Harris’s ‘socialist price controls.’ Yet, there, in Flint, Trump himself started embracing his own economically illiterate proposals for reducing voters’ living costs.” (10/31/24)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/road-price-controls