Joe Biden’s latest solution for combating rising prices is to impose Soviet-style price controls and government regulations on pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, and now beef. This will be about as effective as Gerald Ford’s Whip Inflation Now buttons.
As Robert Crandall of the Brookings Institution proved conclusively many years ago, it was the Carter-Reagan era of lifting of price controls and the DE-regulation of the energy, trucking, and airline industries and the end of rent control in many cities that sharply REDUCED prices for these services.
Alas, Biden and his progressive advisors never learned this basic economic lesson.
We didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when we saw New York Magazinerhapsodize about rent control, which may have been the dumbest “progressive” policy in world history.
Bottom line: price controls ALWAYS lead to three consequences: product shortages, quality reduction, and black market activity.