And You Thought She Did a Poor Job as ‘Border Czar’

The media industry may need to issue a lot more corrections. Recently some news outlets rebutted their own 2021 stories referring to Kamala Harris as the “border czar.” The idea is to help her evade accountability for the chaotic illegal migration of the Biden-Harris era. In the current retelling, she was not responsible for the border but only for trying to ameliorate the “root causes” that motivate people to flee dysfunctional countries in the first place. But now the ugly truth appears much worse. As a presidential candidate Ms. Harris is proposing to import one of the root causes that created much of the foreign dysfunction.

For years as vice president Ms. Harris has allegedly been studying the reasons motivating people to flee impoverished, violent hellholes. Yet this intensive research has somehow motivated her to propose perhaps the single most popular economic policy among dictators who run impoverished, violent hellholes.

Catherine Rampell writes in the Washington Post:

“Price gouging” is the focus of Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic agenda, her presidential campaign says. She’ll crack down on “excessive prices” and “excessive corporate profits,” particularly for groceries.

So what level counts as “excessive,” you might ask? TBD, but Harris will ban it.

Ms. Rampell correctly notes:

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.

At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat.

Inflation occurs when government prints too much money, which ends up chasing too few goods. Instead of acknowledging their monetary mistakes, thuggish dictators respond by punishing the producers of goods and invariably end up with an economy that produces even fewer goods and suffers from even more inflation. Why produce anything if the government makes you operate at a loss?

What’s especially disturbing for the U.S. is that the Harris investigation into root causes of migration came at a time when one of the most well-documented hellholes triggering illegal migration was suffering from years of socialist experimentation with exactly the policy she is now embracing.

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