The Marxism Is Coming from Inside the House

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 16, 2025

 

When Donald Trump branded “Comrade Kamala” Harris a bona fide “communist” and “Marxist,” the skeptics at PolitiFact did not take the charge at face value. What was his proof, its reporters asked Trump campaign operatives? “Kamala Harris has literally suggested price controls as a matter of economic policy,” wrote campaign spokesperson Caroline Sunshine. “Would encourage you to inspect the well-documented list of Marxist [sic] and communists who’ve suggested the same.”

 

Good advice. If we were to take it literally, we’d now have to add Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the administration he serves to that ignominious list.

 

“When you are facing a nonmarket economy like China, then you have to exercise industrial policy,” the secretary told CNBC’s Sara Eisen this week. “So, we’re going to set price floors and the forward buying to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, and we’re going to do it across a range of industries.”

 

In other words, the Trump administration will be implementing price controls on certain unspecified industries.

 

Now, price-fixing regimes, while a feature of all command economies, are not necessarily indicative of communist sympathies. After all, we can call Richard Nixon a lot of things, but we can’t call him a communist. What we can say about the sort of economic illiteracy Bessant knowingly endorsed is that they are profoundly injurious to the good working order of any economy.

 

The behavior encouraged by price floors is thoroughly known. When an artificial limit is placed on the minimum price of a good — a limit that is almost always above market value because, otherwise, what’s the point of a price floor — buyers will demand less of it, so fewer units will be sold. “This can lead to overproduction or a surplus of goods in the market,” the economist Sarah Thomas observed. The distortion of the price mechanism leaves producers and consumers alike bereft of the information prices convey. So, price fixing schemes tend to beget excess supplies, deadweight loss, consumer flight from a given sector, and even black and grey markets.

 

As the St. Louis Federal Reserve demonstrated in 2022, price floors reliably produce “a glut of supply,” which, in the case of a minimum wage, for example, yields unemployment. Minimum wages distort prices — in this case, for labor — compelling consumers to pay a higher, regulated price for that service while creating incentives for producers — laborers, in this example — to enter the market despite decreased overall demand. Thus, minimum wage laws create a distorted labor market in which there are too many workers looking for too few jobs, thus contributing to visible unemployment among those actively looking for work.

 

The same things happen to commodities and products that are subject to artificial price floors. Producers make more, consumers demand less, and the price mechanism that would correct this imbalance is written out of the equation.

 

It’s not Marxism, but it is dumb. And the Treasury secretary deserves to be confronted with the illogic of this policy as articulated by the president’s allies. They warned that “Soviet-style price controls” were coming, and they were right.