A New Quarterback, the Same Broken Playbook

When Kamala Harris accepted her party’s nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention, she didn’t mention food prices or cracking down on “price gouging,” a key component of her recently revealed economic plan to tackle inflation. Yet she was quite proud then as she vowed “to pass the first-ever federal ban” on price gouging on food.

Well, technically she spoke about halting “price gauging [sic] on food,” which would mean adopting a federal ban on deciding how large a foodstuff is. But cut her some slack. Reading a speech prepared by others, let alone telling the truth, can be a terribly difficult thing to do. Just ask President Joe Biden (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. We could list many other instances, but you get the point).

To call the Harris plan a set of “populist gimmicks” would leave even Huey Long disappointed. To call the Harris plan “economically illiterate” defames people who can’t read and write. To call the plan half-witted would give it 50 percent more credit than it deserves.

Start with price controls. Cap prices by government fiat and, like the night follows the day, supply will drop, and prices will rise.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis under the Biden-Harris Administration had to say only two years ago about “Why Price Controls Should Stay in the History Books.” As Christopher Neely, a senior economic advisor, explained: “Prices allocate scarce resources” while “[p]rice controls distort those signals, leading to the inefficient allocation of goods and services.” So much for an efficient market.

Want proof that price caps don’t work? Consider the gas crunch in 1979: the odd-even system of gas purchases. Gas rationing. Waiting in long lines, but not getting any gas because the tanks were dry. Maybe Harris did not have any personal experience with that phenomenon in 1979 because she was only 15 or 16 years old at the time and might not have been driving yet. But does she not have an economic advisor who was driving then, or maybe just one who actually has a degree in economics?

Buyers and sellers, however, won’t treat price controls like the law of gravity. They will seek to evade them either by, as Neely put it, “chang[ing] a good slightly to prevent it from being subject to the same price limit” (for example, selling sandwiches rather than cold cuts) or “by trading illegally in black markets.” Cap food prices, and people will commit crimes to feed their families by paying vendors under the table to get priority status for scarce supplies or by conspiring with delicatessen owners to treat selling two pieces or bread with two pounds of cold cuts as a sandwich. That is a type of baloney we don’t need.

“No, no, no,” will be the reply. Harris wants to ban only “price gouging.” That limitation will avoid those harms.

Spare me.

The term “price gouging” has been around for some time. Yet its meaning, like the legal term “obscenity” was for Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, is in the eye of the beholder. A legally understandable and enforceable definition of that term is like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Lots of people have reported seeing it, but no one can offer proof.

That’s a problem when it comes to the law. Legal terms that have no definite meaning are not materially different than terms written in a foreign language. Those options are the equivalent of having no law at all, or a smudge where a definition should be. It allows government officials to favor friends, punish opponents, flip a coin, or vent their spleen.

In short, it is a charade, an attempt to pass what looks like a law but is contentless and therefore allows bureaucrats to do whatever they please. Anglo-American law has prohibited that strategy since the Magna Carta was adopted in 1215, which barred taking life, liberty, or property except pursuant to the “law” of the land. And no one can define “price gouging” with the specificity necessary to qualify as a “law.”

How did this happen?

The Democratic Party might have changed their standard bearer from Sleepy Joe Biden (or, Grumpy, if you watched him at the 2024 DNC Monday night) to Dopey (Kamala Harris). But the game plan is the same: Sandersism.

In 2020, the Democratic Party nomenklatura saw Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders win the popular vote in Iowa and the New Hampshire and Nevada primaries. He was the front-runner to challenge then-President Donald Trump for that office. The DNC politburo (correctly) feared that a man who had spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union would appear far too obviously to be a fellow traveler with, rather than a shield against, Vladimir Putin. So, the party leadership threw its weight behind former U.S. Senator and Vice President Joe Biden.

Why? Biden was a well-known “party man,” someone willing to do whatever it took to endorse the party line and follow the party wherever it was going. Biden’s personal tragedies made it difficult to engender hatred. And Biden wanted to be president so badly that he once even used the life story of Neil Kinnock, British Labor Party leader, when running for president in the 1980s.

Worried that Sanders would go home and take his followers (and potential voters) with him, Biden decided to adopt nearly every jot and tittle of Sanders’s policy preferences so that he could get their votes in November 2020. Since then, Biden has ruled more like a mayor than a president, giving everyone whose votes he needs whatever goodies they want without once thinking of what is best for the nation.

Now we have the current VP following the same game plan. Bread and circuses, instead of serious, rational, well-thought-out, nation-advancing policies.

This is getting old—and dangerous.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.