The Democrat-dominated establishment amounts to a coalition of insufferable narcissists with authoritarian instincts. More often than not, those instincts overlap and lead them all in the same general direction.
Occasionally, however, the establishment authoritarians begin to turn on each other. When that happens, anti-establishment outsiders may applaud particular criticisms while remaining alert to a larger and more sinister agenda.
On Thursday, for instance, in an admirable piece titled “When your opponent calls you a ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls,” Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell delivered a scathing critique of Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s idiotic and authoritarian proposal for a “federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries.”
The summary headline put it bluntly: “It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is.”
Harris, who has spent nearly a month hiding from the media while at the same time benefiting from a propaganda blitz unlike anything in recent memory, was scheduled to announce the proposed ban at a Friday afternoon event in Raleigh, North Carolina, according to ABC.
“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food,” Rampell wrote.
“Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.”
Besides wholeheartedly endorsing the substance of it, what should we make of Rampell’s brutal criticism?
First, we must understand that in this case the Harris campaign and the Post writer serve two different authoritarian masters.
Not long ago, any American with an eighth-grade education would have recognized Harris’s price controls as a staple of totalitarian communist regimes.
In fact, historian Kristy Ironside has described price controls as a kind of civil religion in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
“Price reductions were presented as an expression of Stalin’s care for workers’ economic interests during the process of recovery and as a blow at those who had unfairly profited during the war,” Ironside wrote in 2016.
“By the early 1950s, annual price reductions had become an explicit economic doctrine and a new Stalinist ritual and celebration, despite the persistence of serious shortages, especially of food, and growing evidence of the policy’s shortcomings,” she added.
Rampell predicted something similar.
“At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat,” the Post columnist wrote of Harris’s proposal.