“She proposed price controls, so now they’re going to bat for price controls.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ proposed “price gouging” ban has been panned as a radical policy, and some Democrats and members of the press are working to clean up the fallout.
During an Aug. 16 speech in North Carolina laying out some of her economic ideas, Harris proposed to impose a federal ban on “price gouging” to bring down prices of food and groceries, an idea that critics from across the political spectrum derided as collectivist price controls, extreme and unlikely to work.
That is also why her partisans are trying to claim that price gouging bans aren’t really price controls.
“That is why Harris’s price gouging proposals have gotten a cold reception.
In the week since Harris announced her idea, numerous Democrats and some prominent media personalities and outlets have mobilized to redefine or explain away Harris’ proposal as more nuanced and less radical than the GOP is making it out to be.
Axios ran a Tuesday story under the headline “How price gouging bans really work.” The article states that policies like the one Harris proposed are “oft-hated by economists, but they’ve been around for a long time” and that “most Americans intuitively understand the rationale behind them, and Harris is trying to appeal to voters — not academics or newspaper columnists.” The Axios story cites Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham Law School, for color; Teachout wrote her own Thursday piece for The Atlantic with the headline “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists.” In her column, Teachout writes that “Kamala Harris’s proposed price-gouging ban might irritate academics, but it makes sense to everyone else,” simultaneously defending the policy as neither radical nor novel while conceding that its exact parameters are unclear.
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