Dear Reader (especially those who really want some bubbly),
Kamala Harris thinks she knows more about poultry farming than poultry farmers.
It’s a little more complicated than that, but not much. She has a “plan” to make sure that the price of eggs or chicken breasts won’t be “too high.” She won’t make the call herself, but she’ll have a team of experts decide when prices are so high they amount to “gouging.”
So, if a breakout of avian flu decimates the chicken population, or an all-egg diet fad takes off, or if the costs of chicken feed go up for some reason, the Harris Brain Trust will decide if the higher prices that result are warranted. That sounds really hard. Fortunately, they have a really easy way of cutting through all the data: The price of eggs or chicken tenders at the Kroger. That’s it.
She also thinks she’s smarter and more knowledgeable than dairy farmers, soup makers, coffee and wheat growers, and countless other producers.
I think this is incredibly stupid. But, honestly, I shouldn’t have to. First of all, this is Scott Lincicome’s beat. Second, I don’t think I could improve upon Catherine Rampell’s column in the Washington Post yesterday:
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. 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.
But Rampell is not staking out an edgy or provocative hot take. Harry Truman once famously joked that he wanted a “one-handed economist” because all of his economists would answer every question with, “On one hand this … but on the other hand that.” Well, on price controls, the vast majority of economists are one-handed. Rampell is simply channeling the experts.
That’s ironic, because if there’s one thing that progressives pride themselves on is their devotion to, and faith in, “the experts.” On climate change, food safety, vaccines, etc., they insist that they are simply listening to those with professional expertise and the conclusions of “settled science.” But, to echo French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau’s line about war being too important to leave to the generals, prices are too important to leave to the economists—or the market.
Rather than spend a lot of time on how prices work—which I already did a few months ago—I want to make three other points.
The corruption of politics.
What Harris is proposing is probably smart politics. Dumb policies are often the bleeding edge of smart politics. For starters, as the New York Times notes, this crap polls well with swing voters, and progressive groups are hot for the idea as well. Tell any politician that a policy idea simultaneously placates the base and appeals to swing voters, and they will perk up like a cat when it hears a can of tuna being opened. Moreover, inflation has been an albatross for the Biden-Harris administration—that’s still a thing, by the way—and it’s a powerful and legitimate issue for the Trump campaign. Blaming inflation, or any other economic woes, on “corporate greed” or in Teddy Roosevelt’s famous phrase, “malefactors of great wealth,” is a time-honored, and often shrewd, form of demagoguery.
Another reason this is probably smart is that the actual substance of this cockamamie idea matters less than the optics. Harris wants to boost the impression that she “cares about people like you.” Whether it can work is of secondary importance to signaling that she cares about the problems of ordinary people. As FDR said, “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” It’s no coincidence that Patrick Buchanan often quoted this line in defense of his bad economic ideas.
As much as I welcome Harris’ cynical determination to win over the median voter, this price-fixing nonsense is an exception to the rule. She should now add this to the growing list of Harris flip-flops. If the median voter thinks price-fixing is a good idea, then the median voter is ignorant and wrong—about price fixing (the median voter might be wise and informed on countless other issues from the inedibleness of marmite to the non-sandwich status of the hotdog). A bad idea doesn’t become good just because a large number of people subscribe to it. As I wrote nearly 20 years ago (when denouncing populism was still fairly uncontroversial on the right):
Politics has a math of its own. Whereas a scientifically minded person might see things this way: One person who says 2+2=5 is an idiot; two people who think 2+2=5 are two idiots; and a million people who think 2+2=5 are a whole lot of idiots–political math works differently. Let’s work backwards: if a million people think 2+2=5, then they are not a million idiots, but a “constituency.” If they are growing in number, they are also a “movement.” And, if you were not only the first person to proclaim 2+2=5, but you were the first to persuade others, then you, my friend, are not an idiot, but a visionary.
Social justice as will to power.
The appeal of price-fixing should be seen as just one facet of a broader and more consistent—and consistently wrong—vision. The vision of the anointed, to use Thomas Sowell’s phrase, looks at results, outcomes, and consequences aesthetically. What I mean is, if they don’t like the result, they assume the process itself is bad, illegitimate, or unjust. This is the throughline of most arguments for things like DEI or racial quotas in admissions. It helps explain animosity for vast number of seemingly unrelated things, such as the Electoral College, standardized testing, the existence of billionaires, income inequality, and capitalism generally. Indeed, I would argue—along with my friend Cliff Asness—that at least some of the hatred of Israel on the left stems from the fact that the “Zionist entity’s” success—prosperous, pluralistic, democratic—is aesthetically displeasing because it makes its neighbors look bad.
Here are two useful questions from Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice: “If you cannot achieve equality of performance among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deeper social divisions?”
And: “If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?”
If these questions really annoy you—if they’re the intellectual equivalent of petting your mental cat backwards—then you may be precisely the kind of person I am talking about.
But the important point is not that simply some people dislike disparate, “inequitable” outcomes. Within reason, there’s nothing inherently wrong with disliking such things, depending on the facts. No, the relevant point is that they get angry at the idea that they lack the tools to eliminate them. Places like the old Soviet Union or present-day Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, or North Korea have vastly more unjust, inequitable distributions of power, wealth, and status than capitalist democracies. But what they have going for them, according to apologists, is that those with power are “doing something” about it.
I use scare quotes around “doing something” because that’s basically a lie in terms of reality. But where the apologists see a greater truth is in the idea that something—nay, anything—can be done with the right people in charge. Tell some people that the New Deal didn’t actually end the Great Depression and they get very angry, because the point is that it tried. The New Deal represents the idea that the government, when controlled by the right people, can do all the things. The New Dealers ordered the slaughter of some 6 million baby pigs to get the price of bacon “right”—at a time when many Americans were going hungry. “So what?” the apologists ask, “At least they tried!”
The eternal return of bad ideas.
I could very easily tell you a just-so story about how Harris’ idea is the fruit of an ideological obsession stretching back to the New Deal, Marx, the Jacobins or a host of other wellsprings of socialism. But I’m increasingly skeptical of this kind of connect-the-dots intellectual history. Donald Trump wants you to believe Harris is a communist because communists believe in price controls. I don’t think Harris is a communist. But she’s wrong about price controls for the same reason communists are wrong about price controls: They don’t work. But Richard Nixon, who also loved him some sweet, sweet price controls, wasn’t a communist, nor was FDR. They were just wrong. And so is Harris.
I think the logic of social justice makes price controls attractive to Harris and her ideological allies for the reasons I laid out, but I think the appeal of this sort of thing is way upstream of purely intellectual or ideological explanations. As I wrote in Suicide of the West, hostility to the market economy is ancient:
Hostility to innovation and free trade was grounded in a broader worldview that saw money itself as the root of all evil. From the time of antiquity until the Enlightenment, trade and the pursuit of wealth were considered sinful. “In the city that is most finely governed,” Aristotle wrote, “the citizens should not live a vulgar or a merchant’s way of life, for this sort of way of life is ignoble and contrary to virtue.” In his Republic, Plato laid out one vision of an ideal society in which the ruling “guardians” would own no property to avoid tearing “the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine.’” He added that “all the classes engaged in retail and wholesale trade . . . are disparaged and subjected to contempt and insults.” Furthermore in his hypothetical utopian state, only non-citizens would be allowed to indulge in commerce. A citizen who defies the natural order and becomes a merchant should be thrown in jail for “shaming his family.”
In ancient Rome, “all trade was stigmatized as undignified . . . the word mercator [merchant] appears as almost a term of abuse,” writes Professor D.C. Earl of the University of Leeds. Cicero noted in the first century B.C. that retail commerce is sordidus [vile] because merchants “would not make any profit unless they lied constantly.”
The inestimable Dominic Pino had a great piece the other day noting that for all the talk about how Republicans are stuck in the policy world of the 1980s, the Democrats are stuck in the fourth century. “Imposing price stability by decree was Diocletian’s idea of good policy,” he notes. “The Edict on Maximum Prices was issued in 301 by the Roman emperor.” My only disagreement is that his start date for bad ideas is too recent.
“I have been thinking,” Albert Jay Nock wrote in 1934, “of how old some of our brand-new economic nostrums really are. Price-regulation by State authority (through State purchase, like our Farm Board) was tried in China about 350 B.C. It did not work. It was tried again, with State distribution, in the first century A.D., and it did not work. Private trading was suppressed in the second century B.C., and regional planning was tried a little later. They did not work; the costs were too high. In the eleventh century A.D., a plan like the R.F.C. [Reconstruction Finance Corporation] was tried, but again cost too much. State monopolies are very old; there were two in China in the seventh century B.C. I suppose there is not a single item on the modern politician’s agenda that was not tried and found wanting ages ago.”
These anti-market attitudes are why it took millennia for the driverless car of market economics to deliver humanity to more prosperous lands, and ever since economic planners and politicians have tried to regain control of the steering wheel. (Edmund Burke and Adam Smith were noting the already long record of failure of wage and price controls when capitalism still had that new car smell. “The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals,” Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations, “would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”). Socialism and/or authoritarianism is constantly sold as a new idea, but they are the oldest forms of political and economic organization in human history. They’re hard to kill not because they’ve proven their superiority, but because we haven’t evolved past our taste buds for them.
Hooked on a feeling.
In other words, these bad ideas keep coming back, not because some scribbler or egghead has come up with a new way to make them work. The issue isn’t supply, but demand. People want those in power to give them stuff. Moreover, they believe that people in power can and should give them stuff. Meanwhile, those in power increase their power by promising to do things they cannot do.
The powerful also have the tendency to disbelieve there are limits and boundaries to their power. Indeed, promising to do the impossible amplifies the perception of power, which is an intoxicant unto itself, both for the promiser and the promisee. “Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back and the middle class will prosper like never, ever before,” Donald Trump vows. This is just as antediluvian as Harris’ price-control nonsense.
We are wired to want kings and priests who can, with the right incantations and the adequate application of will, conjure good harvests and chickens for every pot. That desire and those promises get gussied up in every generation by the scribblers, eggheads, and politicians as a “new idea” when in reality it’s a very old, but still intoxicating, wine in a new bottle.
When these ideas fail—as they must—their promoters don’t blame themselves or their ideas. They blame the greedy, the malefactors of great wealth, the millionaires and billionaires, the kulaks, the Jews, the financiers, the globalists, Big Corporations, Wall Street, and, of course, the price gougers, just to name a few scapegoats.
The free market works very, very well at the things it’s meant to do. But it doesn’t feel like it. And that feeling is why we’re constantly receptive to old bad ideas sold as new ones.
Various & Sundry
Canine Update: First off, the response to The Dispawtch was huge. At the current rate we already have enough submissions to last for several years. We will figure out a way to deal with this excess of both supply and demand in due course, so keep ‘em coming.
As for my own beasts, they are thriving, though I am a little worried that Zoë’s bad breath has returned, and I can’t even think about having more of her chompers pulled. She doesn’t appear to be in any discomfort, but it’s still something we need to keep an eye on. We had a bunch of the D.C.-based staff—and a couple out-of-towners—over to the house last night and while Zoë was a little concerned about all the interlopers inside the perimeter, she was satisfied that none of them were smuggling squirrels or other infiltrators into the house. And the fact that quite a few people were willing to “accidentally” drop some meat products in her vicinity made her as pliant as a bribable border guard.
Pippa was in heaven. She told pretty much everyone that she loved them. What she does not love are pickleballs. We find them more and more in the park, and she spits them out like a baby trying a lemon for the first time. Zoë and Gracie continue their vibe wars. Pippa has also found a really good life hack—putting her belly on the air conditioning vent. I think this is preferable to Clover’s apparent fondness for edibles. No one was more excited about the return of the Fair Jessica than Chester, who has taken to holding my Amazon packages hostage.
Lastly, the other day, I posted Pippa’s morning message, but I forgot to include the picture. So it seemed to some that I had declared, “Good morning! It’s Thursday! It’s another cool morning, which we like! Yesterday they gave us a bath which we didn’t like. But then I got to run zoomies all around the house naked, which I like! So it’s all working out ok. Also, I love you.” This was not an image anyone needed. Pippa thought it was very funny.
The Dispawtch
As mentioned above, the debut of The Dispawtch last week was a hit. I’m reliably told we received more than 100 of your quadruped submissions—which means you should not despair if it takes a while for your canine or feline to be featured. Anyway, meet Meeko.
Owner’s Name: Alan Smith
Why Owner Is a Dispatch Member: First and foremost, I really appreciate the solid reporting from The Dispatch. The newsletters are top notch and I look forward to reading The Morning Dispatch, G-File, Boiling Frogs, Capitolism, Techne, and Wanderland. The subscription is a must in my monthly budget planning. Politics over the past few years have been head-spinning. When I feel politically homeless, it is reassuring to know I am not alone. I really enjoy and appreciate Tthe Dispatch community.
Pet’s Name: Meeko
Pet’s Breed: Pembroke Corgi
Pet’s Age: Six Months
Pet’s Gotcha Story: My wife has been a huge fan of Corgis for quite some time. She was not subtle about dropping hints that we should get a Corgi. I had dogs as a kid, but I did not think I had time and energy to devote to a pet. Our prior landlord did not allow pets and I used that as cover for my selfishness. After a new landlord who allowed pets bought our house, that excuse became less tenable. Then after my wife and I dealt with a difficult loss in our life, I felt my selfishness could no longer take precedence over the potential joy that a pet could bring. I had help from my parents who were able to pick up the good boy during the work day and surprise my wife.
Pet’s Likes: Chasing and capturing (eating) crickets, hiking, playing in the river/creek, belly and back scratches, playing tug-of-war, and pets from literally anyone.
Pet’s Dislikes: Drying off after a bath and neighbor kids playing without including him.
Pet’s Proudest Moment: Each and every time he catches a cricket.
Moment Someone (Wrongly) Said Pet Was a Bad Dog: On his first puppy visit to the local vet, a pug mix (with at least a 4:1 size advantage) got a little too close to Mom and Meeko boy had to get rowdy. Other patients in the office mistook him for a ferocious beast when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Do you have a quadruped you’d like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate.
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