[guest post by JVW]

Now that Kamala Harris has spent the last twenty-four days avoiding having to stake out any positions on hot-button issues, buttressed along by a compliant media which is content to honor her vow of silence at least until the Democrats convene in Chicago next week, the current Vice-President apparently feels comfortable that she can tease out some of her dumbest ideas. Behold:

On Friday in North Carolina, Vice President Harris intends to announce a plan to prevent corporations in the food and grocery industries from unfairly jacking up prices on consumers, by imposing the first-ever federal ban on corporate price-gouging in these industries.

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) August 15, 2024

I’m not going to waste anybody’s time explaining why price controls, even those described as anti-“price gouging,” are such a horrible idea and what the quite foreseeable unforeseen consequences of this nonsense are. I know that most readers here (with a few notable exceptions) understand this fully. But for as ridiculous as the policy is, this likely represents moderately smart politics. Among the shrinking number of undecided voters, I would hazard a guess that a majority of them actually do believe that a “ban” on “price-gouging” is workable and wise. And this sort of cynical pandering is a way to deflect attention from the fact that inflation has run rampant during the Biden years. Sure, some of that is the inevitable supply-chain disruptions caused by the pandemic, but it has become more and more clear even among progressives that the Democrats’ obsession with haphazardly throwing around fiat money has exacerbated the problem.

Perhaps Team Kamala is counting on the Council of Economic Advisors or even skittish Congressional Democrats to put the kibosh on price controls should she be elected, or at the very least to undermine them in such a way that they serve as nothing more than a harmless PR stunt designed to impress the mush-minds. But as we start to hear more policy prescriptions from the Democrat ticket, it will likely be quite difficult for them to restrain their inner Naderism and hostility to certain forms of capitalism. A competent and thoughtful Republican nominee could do a lot of damage pointing out the folly of these harebrained schemes, but alas, that’s not whom the GOP chose to nominate this year. So much the worse.

– JVW