By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, August 16, 2024
Kamala Harris thinks
she knows more about poultry farming than poultry farmers.
It’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.
She has a “plan” to make sure that the price of eggs or chicken breasts won’t
be “too high.” She won’t make the call herself, but she’ll have a team of
experts decide when prices are so high they amount to “gouging.”
So, if a breakout of avian flu decimates the chicken
population, or an all-egg diet fad takes off, or if the costs of chicken feed
go up for some reason, the Harris Brain Trust will decide if the higher prices
that result are warranted. That sounds really hard. Fortunately, they have a
really easy way of cutting through all the data: The price of eggs or chicken
tenders at the Kroger. That’s it.
She also thinks she’s smarter and more knowledgeable than
dairy farmers, soup makers, coffee and wheat growers, and countless other
producers.
I think this is incredibly stupid. But, honestly, I
shouldn’t have to. First of all, this is
Scott Lincicome’s
beat. Second, I don’t think I could improve upon Catherine Rampell’s
column in the Washington Post yesterday:
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.
But Rampell is not staking out an edgy or provocative hot
take. Harry Truman once famously joked that he wanted a “one-handed economist”
because all of his economists would answer every question with, “On one hand
this … but on the other hand that.” Well, on price controls, the vast majority
of economists are one-handed. Rampell is simply channeling the experts.
That’s ironic, because if there’s one thing that
progressives pride themselves on is their devotion to, and faith in, “the
experts.” On climate change, food safety, vaccines, etc., they insist that they
are simply listening to those with professional expertise and the conclusions
of “settled science.” But, to echo French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau’s
line about war being too important to leave to the generals, prices are too
important to leave to the economists—or the market.
Rather than spend a lot of time on how prices work—which
I already did a few months ago—I want to make three other points.
The corruption of politics.
What Harris is proposing is probably smart politics. Dumb
policies are often the bleeding edge of smart politics. For starters, as the New
York Times
notes, this crap polls well with swing voters, and progressive groups are
hot for the idea as well. Tell any politician that a policy idea simultaneously
placates the base and appeals to swing voters, and they will perk up
like a cat when it hears a can of tuna being opened. Moreover, inflation has
been an albatross for the Biden-Harris administration—that’s still a thing, by
the way—and it’s a powerful and legitimate issue for the Trump campaign.
Blaming inflation, or any other economic woes, on “corporate greed” or in Teddy
Roosevelt’s famous phrase, “malefactors of great wealth,” is a time-honored,
and often shrewd, form of demagoguery.
Another reason this is probably smart is that the actual
substance of this cockamamie idea matters less than the optics. Harris wants to
boost the impression that she “cares about people like you.” Whether it can
work is of secondary importance to signaling that she cares about the problems
of ordinary people. As FDR said,
“Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity
than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own
indifference.” It’s no coincidence that Patrick Buchanan often quoted this line
in defense of his bad economic ideas.
As much as I welcome Harris’ cynical determination to win
over the median voter, this price-fixing nonsense is an exception to the rule.
She should now add this to the growing list of Harris flip-flops. If the median
voter thinks price-fixing is a good idea, then the median voter is ignorant and
wrong—about price fixing (the median voter might be wise and informed on
countless other issues from the inedibleness of marmite to the non-sandwich
status of the hotdog). A bad idea doesn’t become good just because a large
number of people subscribe to it. As I wrote
nearly 20 years ago (when denouncing populism was still fairly uncontroversial
on the right):
Politics has a math of its own.
Whereas a scientifically minded person might see things this way: One person
who says 2+2=5 is an idiot; two people who think 2+2=5 are two idiots; and a
million people who think 2+2=5 are a whole lot of idiots–political math works
differently. Let’s work backwards: if a million people think 2+2=5, then they
are not a million idiots, but a “constituency.” If they are growing in number,
they are also a “movement.” And, if you were not only the first person to
proclaim 2+2=5, but you were the first to persuade others, then you, my friend,
are not an idiot, but a visionary.
Social justice as will to power.
The appeal of price-fixing should be seen as just one
facet of a broader and more consistent—and consistently wrong—vision. The vision
of the anointed, to use Thomas Sowell’s phrase, looks at results, outcomes,
and consequences aesthetically. What I mean is, if they don’t like the
result, they assume the process itself is bad, illegitimate, or unjust. This is
the throughline of most arguments for things like DEI or racial quotas in
admissions. It helps explain animosity for vast number of seemingly unrelated
things, such as the Electoral College, standardized testing, the existence of
billionaires, income inequality, and capitalism generally. Indeed, I would
argue—along
with my friend Cliff Asness—that at least some of the hatred of Israel on
the left stems from the fact that the “Zionist entity’s” success—prosperous,
pluralistic, democratic—is aesthetically displeasing because it makes its
neighbors look bad.
Here are two useful questions from Sowell’s The Quest
for Cosmic Justice: “If you cannot achieve equality of performance among
people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic
is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deeper social divisions?”
And: “If there is not equality of outcomes among people
born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of
outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?”
If these questions really annoy you—if they’re the
intellectual equivalent of petting your mental cat backwards—then you may be
precisely the kind of person I am talking about.
But the important point is not that simply some people
dislike disparate, “inequitable” outcomes. Within reason, there’s nothing
inherently wrong with disliking such things, depending on the facts. No, the
relevant point is that they get angry at the idea that they lack the tools to
eliminate them. Places like the old Soviet Union or present-day Venezuela,
Cuba, Nicaragua, or North Korea have vastly more unjust, inequitable
distributions of power, wealth, and status than capitalist democracies. But
what they have going for them, according to apologists, is that those with
power are “doing something” about it.
I use scare quotes around “doing something” because
that’s basically a lie in terms of reality. But where the apologists see a
greater truth is in the idea that something—nay, anything—can be
done with the right people in charge. Tell some people that the New Deal didn’t
actually end the Great Depression and they get very angry, because the point is
that it tried. The New Deal represents the idea that the
government, when controlled by the right people, can do all the things. The New
Dealers ordered the
slaughter of some 6 million baby pigs to get the price of bacon “right”—at
a time when many Americans were going hungry. “So what?” the apologists ask,
“At least they tried!”
The eternal return of bad ideas.
I could very easily tell you a just-so story about how
Harris’ idea is the fruit of an ideological obsession stretching back to the
New Deal, Marx, the Jacobins or a host of other wellsprings of socialism. But
I’m increasingly skeptical of this kind of connect-the-dots intellectual
history. Donald Trump wants you to believe Harris is a communist because
communists believe in price controls. I don’t think Harris is a communist. But
she’s wrong about price controls for the same reason communists are wrong about
price controls: They don’t work. But Richard Nixon, who also loved him
some sweet, sweet price controls, wasn’t a communist, nor was FDR. They were
just wrong. And so is Harris.
I think the logic of social justice makes price controls
attractive to Harris and her ideological allies for the reasons I laid out, but
I think the appeal of this sort of thing is way upstream of purely intellectual
or ideological explanations. As I wrote in Suicide of the West,
hostility to the market economy is ancient:
Hostility to innovation and free
trade was grounded in a broader worldview that saw money itself as the root of
all evil. From the time of antiquity until the Enlightenment, trade and the
pursuit of wealth were considered sinful. “In the city that is most finely
governed,” Aristotle wrote, “the citizens should not live a vulgar or a
merchant’s way of life, for this sort of way of life is ignoble and contrary to
virtue.” In his Republic, Plato laid out one vision of an ideal society
in which the ruling “guardians” would own no property to avoid tearing “the
city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine.’” He added that “all
the classes engaged in retail and wholesale trade . . . are disparaged and
subjected to contempt and insults.” Furthermore in his hypothetical utopian
state, only non-citizens would be allowed to indulge in commerce. A citizen
who defies the natural order and becomes a merchant should be thrown in jail
for “shaming his family.”
In ancient Rome, “all trade was
stigmatized as undignified . . . the word mercator [merchant] appears as
almost a term of abuse,” writes Professor D.C. Earl of the University of Leeds.
Cicero noted in the first century B.C. that retail commerce is sordidus [vile]
because merchants “would not make any profit unless they lied constantly.”
The inestimable Dominic Pino had a great
piece the other day noting that for all the talk about how Republicans are
stuck in the policy world of the 1980s, the Democrats are stuck in the fourth
century. “Imposing price stability by decree was Diocletian’s idea of good
policy,” he notes. “The Edict on Maximum Prices was issued in 301 by the Roman
emperor.” My only disagreement is that his start date for bad ideas is too
recent.
“I have been thinking,” Albert Jay Nock wrote
in 1934, “of how old some of our brand-new economic nostrums really are.
Price-regulation by State authority (through State purchase, like our Farm
Board) was tried in China about 350 B.C. It did not work. It was tried again,
with State distribution, in the first century A.D., and it did not work.
Private trading was suppressed in the second century B.C., and regional
planning was tried a little later. They did not work; the costs were too high.
In the eleventh century A.D., a plan like the R.F.C. [Reconstruction Finance
Corporation] was tried, but again cost too much. State monopolies are very old;
there were two in China in the seventh century B.C. I suppose there is not a
single item on the modern politician’s agenda that was not tried and found
wanting ages ago.”
These anti-market attitudes are why it took millennia for
the driverless car of market economics to deliver humanity to more prosperous
lands, and ever since economic planners and politicians have tried to regain
control of the steering wheel. (Edmund
Burke and Adam Smith were noting the already long record of failure of wage
and price controls when capitalism still had that new car smell. “The statesman
who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ
their capitals,” Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations, “would
not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an
authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to
no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in
the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to
exercise it.”). Socialism and/or authoritarianism is constantly sold as a new
idea, but they are the oldest forms of political and economic organization in
human history. They’re hard to kill not because they’ve proven their
superiority, but because we haven’t evolved past our taste buds for
them.
Hooked on a feeling.
In other words, these bad ideas keep coming back, not
because some scribbler or egghead has come up with a new way to make them work.
The issue isn’t supply, but demand. People want those in power to give
them stuff. Moreover, they believe that people in power can and should
give them stuff. Meanwhile, those in power increase their power by
promising to do things they cannot do.
The powerful also have the tendency to disbelieve there
are limits and boundaries to their power. Indeed, promising to do the
impossible amplifies the perception of power, which is an intoxicant unto
itself, both for the promiser and the promisee. “Under my plan, incomes will
skyrocket, inflation will vanish completely, jobs will come roaring back and
the middle class will prosper like never, ever before,” Donald Trump vows.
This is just as antediluvian as Harris’ price-control nonsense.
We are wired to want kings and priests who can, with the
right incantations and the adequate application of will, conjure good harvests
and chickens for every pot. That desire and those promises get gussied up in
every generation by the scribblers, eggheads, and politicians as a “new idea”
when in reality it’s a very old, but still intoxicating, wine in a new
bottle.
When these ideas fail—as they must—their promoters don’t
blame themselves or their ideas. They blame the greedy, the malefactors of
great wealth, the millionaires and billionaires, the kulaks, the Jews, the
financiers, the globalists, Big Corporations, Wall Street, and, of course, the
price gougers, just to name a few scapegoats.
The free market works very, very well at the things it’s
meant to do. But it doesn’t feel like it. And that feeling is why we’re
constantly receptive to old bad ideas sold as new ones.
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