LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER.

Liberty Unyielding's Hans Bader has the receipts.

In the 1970s, Kamala Harris’s father, a Marxist economist, advised Jamaica’s government to adopt price controls for food. The result was food shortages and people waiting in long lines for scarce food.

Kamala Harris is now backing price caps for food and groceries in the U.S., which could have the same harmful effect. She’s doing it as a way of deflecting blame for rising inflation under President Biden, which drove up grocery prices. As journalist Guy Benson notes, Harris “cast tie-breaking votes for the inflationary Biden-Harris agenda — and advocated for trillions in *additional* spending. She owns all of it, and then some.”

Grocery prices went up due to inflation under Joe Biden, not greedy grocery stores. Grocery stores’ profit is so small that even if they made no profit at all, grocery prices would fall by only a little over 1%. As economist Scott Lincicome explains, “the American grocery industry….had a 1.18% net profit margin last year.” But the Biden-Harris administration views grocery price increases as the product of greed.  As NBC notes, Biden has “spent more than a year … blaming corporate greed for consumer prices driven higher by inflation.” On Friday, Harris will “propose the first-ever federal ban on ‘corporate price-gouging in the food and grocery industries.'”

Ah yes, the ever-popular with populists, and eternally empirically empty, notion of price gouging.  (Fortunately the election will be over by Thanksgiving and we will be spared any Marxist wisdom about the predatory pricing of turkeys on Black Friday.)

But should the lady become president, and should she implement Daddy's price ukases, her own base will be hardest hit.

Preventing grocery stores from raising prices along with inflation could result in them losing money on every sale, encouraging them to leave shelves bare, as happened in Venezuela due to price controls on food. Food might end up on the black market, where it would be even more expensive. For such reasons, 73.9% of economists say that price controls are not a “useful policy option in the control of inflation.”

As AG notes, “instead of dealing with the actual sources of inflation, the Harris plan is going to be to continue to pretend price increases are a result of price gouging in an industry with razor thin margins.” Given the razor think profit margins, banning “price gouging” won’t do much to reduce prices (and to the extent it does cut prices at all, it will make grocery stores lose money, which will lead to them stocking less food because they lose money on it, which will lead to empty shelves and maybe long lines for what little food they do stock).

“Do you like store shelves that look like Venezuela’s [empty shelves]? Because this is how you get store shelves that look like Venezuela’s,” notes journalist Franklin Harris.

Progressives on TV who are ignorant of economics praised Harris’s “bold” proposal. But it’s as foolish as it is bold. “Putting grocery stores out of business and creating food deserts is certainly a bold campaign promise,” points out Chris McGowne.

Harris’s father was similarly given to bold proposals that backfired. The Economist describes Kamala Harris’s father, Donald Harris as a “combative Marxist economist.” But when Jamaica’s left-wing government took his advice, it sent Jamaica’s economy into a tail-spin. Jamaica’s per capita income fell sharply in the late 1970s, and its GDP fell from $3.25 billion in 1977 to $2.43 billion in 1979. Jamaican per capita income was lower in 1980 than in 1976, even as incomes rose in other Caribbean countries and Puerto Rico.

So it always is with dirigiste policies.  "People need to stop overreacting about Kamala’s plan to reduce food inflation, as if it would lead to communism, mass starvation, and the end of America."

Do you still ask who is John Galt?  "Shockingly, the government struggles to operate one of the most complex industries on the planet. The entire food supply chain starts imploding."

Sometimes you have to be absurd to keep from going mad.