Kamala Harris’s Price-Control Plan Is an Attempt to Rewrite History

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, August 15, 2024

 

Per the New York Times:

 

Vice President Kamala Harris will call for a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries in a speech laying out her economic agenda on Friday, campaign officials said late Wednesday, in an effort to blame big companies for persistently high costs of American consumer staples.

 

The plan includes large overlaps with efforts that the Biden administration has pursued for several years to target corporate consolidation and price gouging, including attempts to stoke more competition in the meat industry and the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuit this year that seeks to block the merger of two large grocery retailers, Kroger and Albertsons.

 

Far be it from me to downplay Kamala Harris’s radicalism — which is real — but it seems pretty obvious to me that, despite her insistence to the contrary, Harris is not genuinely interested in “a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries.” Instead, she’s interested in whitewashing the record of the Biden-Harris administration in which she serves as vice president, and thereby in eliminating one of her key liabilities going into the election in November.

 

In and of itself, the plan that the Times describes is preposterous. It proposes a remedy that won’t work, to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. The record inflation of the last few years is not the product of “corporate price gouging,” and even if it were, in some limited and marginal form, an attempt to address that with price controls would fail. If, once in office, Harris were to push this idea seriously, the results would be as deleterious as they have been in the past.

 

Fortunately, though, the plan is not designed to be passed — or even to be advanced intellectually. Rather, the plan is designed to (a) get the disgracefully compliant media to repeat the premise — that the disastrous Biden-era inflation has been the fault of greedy corporations, and not of reckless fiscal policy, and (b) to get Republicans to oppose it as the terrible notion that it is so that Harris can insist to indignant cheers that she wants to bring grocery prices down while her opponents want to protect Big Meat.

 

The past month has brought with it the single greatest abdication of media responsibility that I have seen in my lifetime. It is not unreasonable for Harris to assume that this will continue. A legitimate press would explain that what Harris is submitting here is bad history and worse economics. The press we actually have will report her cynicism as if it constitutes a serious assessment of the issue. Already, the media casts the recitation of objectively true observations about Harris as “accusations” or “attacks.” Who can doubt that Harris’s self-serving and illiterate pretense that there is a corporate grocery conspiracy will be relayed at face value? And when it is, a good number of people will be given permission to forget their concerns about the Biden-Harris years, to shift the blame for their higher bills to some shadowy version of the mustachioed Monopoly Man, and to regard Harris as a plucky outsider who is fighting for the little guy.

 

Since she became the nominee, Harris’s aim has been to remove each and every one of her liabilities before she ever sits down for an interview. Her past positions have been discarded without explanation or pushback, via nameless campaign aides who report bloodlessly that Harris no longer holds the views she once did. Her tasks as vice president — including her responsibility for the border — have been wiped away in games of semantic renunciation. Her association with the White House has been loosened by leaks that inform us that, despite having been one half of what has been routinely and pointedly described as the “Biden-Harris administration,” she wishes to distance herself from the president. Now, the blame that that administration has attracted for its foolhardy overspending is being shifted to innocent parties. I hear the term “Etch-a-Sketch” used to describe this process. “Forest fire” might be more appropriate.