Kamala Harris runs commercials that identify her plans for the economy. The United States has experienced high inflation caused by the government printing press during the Biden-Harris years. Her solutions include a mix of scapegoating and even more federal spending.
(1) These plans include “going after price-gougers.” Harris and her handlers do not acknowledge the government printing press as the cause of inflation. They scapegoat unnamed “price-gougers” the same way that the Soviet Union used to scapegoat “black marketeers.” One of Ayn Rand’s fictional enforcers in We the Living (depicting life in 1920s Soviet Russia) finally raised the obvious question — “It will be important to explain how a penniless aristocrat [one black marketeer] managed to lay his hands on the very heart of our economic life.” The Harris campaign has not even attempted to explain how a few “price-gougers” managed to create serious inflation throughout the entire U.S. economy. They have not indicated why the “price-gougers” did not create this inflation during the Trump years.
Harris has not explained what she would do to these “price-gougers.” If she provided such a detailed explanation, the obvious question would be why the administration has not already done this in the past four years.
(2) Kamala Harris has promised to crack down on landlords who charge “too much” for rent. The obvious question would be how much is too much. There are thousands of real estate markets in the United States. Each one is subject to the law of supply and demand. The market price for rent is different in each location. How would the Harris administration determine the proper rent amount in each market?
Before, during, and after World War II, the Office of Price Administration (including its related agencies and volunteers across the country) employed hundreds of thousands of people to set prices and monitor compliance. The OPA issued many directives and published many volumes detailing its programs and permitted prices. Shortages resulted. Black markets emerged. The government resorted to printing posters that would shame people away from buying goods on the black market. The nation’s consumers were asked to take a pledge that they would not pay more than “legal” prices and would not use the black market. Ration books and tokens were issued.
Whether all of this tyranny was necessary to support the war effort is an open question at best. But it began months before Pearl Harbor and continued for almost two years after the war ended. The OPA ended despite serious opposition and only when enough Republicans were elected to override President Truman’s veto and overcome Democrat efforts to continue the program indefinitely. Some of the OPA’s functions continued in other agencies for years afterward.
The end of controls brought sudden spikes in prices for which the consumers were unprepared. The evidence tends to show that the Executive Branch and their supporters clung to this program just for the joy of dictatorship instead of fighting a war.
Kamala Harris proposes to bring this chaos back despite having less of a pretext than existed in the 1940s. At least the New Dealers could point to a war during two thirds of the time that the OPA existed. Kamala Harris would reinstate this nightmare solely because her administration printed money and caused inflation. Of course, she cannot acknowledge the printing press and its reign of terror. Such an acknowledgment would be an indictment of her own administration, her party, and the entire mindset that looks to the federal government for more money to solve every problem. Such an acknowledgment would hinder her own efforts to spend money even more recklessly if she somehow is elected president. Instead, she scapegoats landlords and “price-gougers.” Unnamed landlords and price-gougers pale in comparison to World War II as a justification for an expanded bureaucracy and massive crackdowns on both producers and consumers.
We can hope that Harris is simply groping for excuses and things to say related to the inflation problem that her administration created. These ads run much less frequently than her attack ads and vague “fair share” ads. Is it naïve to think no one would actually plunge us into a wartime bureaucratic mess as a cover-up for prior bad policy? These ideas begin to sound like something she might actually do when one considers the third proposal:
(3) Harris promises to solve the problem of skyrocketing housing prices by causing the federal government to build more homes. It appears as if Harris finally recognizes the law of supply and demand by offering greater supply to bring down prices. This proposal does bring a certain superficial appeal for that reason.
But causing the federal government to build houses to fight inflation would be a losing effort. The government would be entering a race to build houses before the government printing press could raise prices yet again by flooding the economy with dollars. The printing press will always win that race, because the printing press will pay for the houses that Kamala proposes to build. It makes no sense for the government to ratchet up inflation on the one hand while providing a few houses with the other. The purchasing power of the middle class will decline further while the price of housing increases.
Even worse, any such new housing will have to be green, thus making it more expensive. The housing will also come with the requirement that it be built with either union labor (another expense) or illegal aliens. (It would at least be entertaining to watch the conflict between unions and the open border advocates on this issue.) The construction would also be characterized by cost overruns, graft, kickbacks, and bribery — all paid for by the printing press, and none of it resulting in prosecution unless the minor officials involved stepped out of line as the next election approached.
Harris’s proposals are nothing new. They promise the same nightmares, corruption, inflation, and business as usual that brought us to our current situation. That she would announce them in an expensive ad indicates that the Democrats have learned nothing from the past four years or the more remote history of their own governance. They believe that their base has learned nothing, either. But this election might indicate to what extent their base has absorbed the lessons of the Biden-Harris administration.
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