Price Controls and Ways Around Them

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Donald Boudreaux and Richard McKenzie, economics professor at George Mason University and emeritus economics professor at UC Irvine’s Merage Business Schoo, respectively, reflected on Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ price control scheme and some ways around them.

[C]competitive market forces will encourage them to do so, even when illegal.

Competitive forces, especially, are human nature: all of us want our goodies for as little as possible, and where there are at least two suppliers of something, those suppliers will compete with each other on some form of price in order to get our business.

Thus:

  • “shrinkflation”— keep prices the same but shrink the portions of goods
  • nonprice adjustments, such as relabeling/redefining “select” grade steaks as higher-ranking “choice” grades
  • hire fewer workers
  • devote less effort to cleaning produce
  • reduce hours of operation

Another major way, for all that it’s an illegal path—that pesky human nature—is the black market. Price controls are an open door for these to thrive, even where they’re illegal. And yes, that includes here in these United States. Keep in mind, especially vis-à-vis black markets that human nature—wanting stuff for as little as possible—can be made to work strongly against black market: free markets, especially those without price controls, will always and everywhere be able to produce goods and services at less cost and so for lower prices than can any black market. The latter’s production costs always include things that are intrinsically absent in free markets: the cost of evading the lawman along with the risk premium necessarily charged against the likelihood of getting caught.

Musk for NASA?

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That’s the suggestion for SpaceX’s (and Tesla’s, and a couple other enterprises) CEO Elon Musk from Hudson Institute‘s Arthur Herman. Both Musk and former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump say they are open to working with each other in a Trump administration.

An entrepreneur who isn’t afraid to fail, and thereby push, successfully, for more rapid progress than bureaucracies and their bureaucrats will permit, could be a good move for a bureaucratic and bloated agency like NASA, but….

The move would work only if Musk were given the hiring and firing authority the leaders of private companies have. With a government entity, though, that would be hard to achieve with all the unionized civil servants (over)populating NASA. This is, after all, the collection of bureaucrats with engineering degrees that gave us long, slow, cost-overrun and overrunning rockets for the return to the moon, and who can no longer even get a manned capsule to low earth orbit and back, leaving two aging astronauts stranded on the space station. It’s true enough that the rocket is reliable, but it’s still—all these years after SpaceX—an expensive use once and throw it away device, and Starliner appears not to work. Yes, yes, the rocket and its manned Starliner capsule were built by Lockheed-Martin’s and Boeing’s United Launch Alliance and by Boeing. But they were built under contracts let by those too-permissive bureaucrat engineers of NASA.

The long line of slow, bloated development and launch by NASA dates back to the period after NASA successfully landed astronauts on the moon and brought them back. It’s been those 50-ish years since, and no serious effort has been made to go back—it’s too expensive, say the NASA bureaucrats and the politicians of Congress, observing the expensiveness of NASA programs.

Another serious impediment to Musk having a chance of success at NASA is Congress. That body will be leery of angrifying unions generally and especially the Federal civil service unions by letting Musk get rid of the dead wood in NASA and bring in folks of his choosing. Even more, that body will be leery of Musk’s risk-taking, this time with tax dollars instead of his own and his private citizen shareholders.

My suggestion: give Musk a shot, with full backing from the White House. If he can’t bring about significant improvement in NASA’s performance and cost structure, then disband NASA altogether and leave its…programs…to the private enterprises in our private economy.

Flip-Flopping for Fun and Profit

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has completely repudiated her prior positions across a range of questions—or so she says—and she’s repudiated her own Biden-Harris administration policies in the process.

Her positions and her positions (not prior and current because she’s moving to erase the former from history and pretend the latter are all that ever existed) include the following:

  • border czar responsible for the current wide-open border, now claiming to be willing to take strong steps to stop illegal aliens from entering
  • “Bidenomics is working,” now claiming to wanting to fight the inflation, which her administration caused over the last three and a half years, by punishing price-gouging grocers
  • contributing to funds to bail criminals—including violent criminals—from jail, pushing for cashless bail, defunding police, now claiming to be the hard-nosed California AG. Except that hard-nosed AG was so hard-nosed she held prisoners scheduled for regular release for additional months, so hard-nosed she moved to reduce penalties for shoplifting. Pretending she didn’t do that is more of her gaslighting
  • wanting to ban fracking, now claiming to allow it
  • wanting Medicare for all, now claiming “if you like your insurance policy, you can keep your insurance policy”
  • wanting to erase ICE, now claiming…not so much

Harris’ originally made statements came from her heart and her core beliefs. Now, given the failure of those policies, she’s claiming to take other positions solely to cover her political behind.

Can we trust a politician who has so blatantly who made bold, clear statements of policy and belief in one direction to, on the eve of an election, makes diametrically opposite statements of policy and belief?

“I live, you…meh”

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That’s the deal Hamas’ MFWIC Yayha Sinwar is demanding before he’ll agree to a cease fire with Israel. Never mind that all the players but Hamas—Sinwar—have agreed to the latest set of ceasefire terms.

Sinwar emphasizes that the security of his life and well-being must be ensured, according to Egyptian officials.

Sinwar’s life matters; the lives of Palestinians, for whom he pretends to be fighting, don’t in the slightest. Sinwar and the terrorists he leads will go on killing Palestinians or arranging their deaths by using them as shields, using their schools, residences, hospitals, mosques and churches as weapons caches, weapon launch sites, control centers.

This is what Israel is fighting; this is what the Biden-Harris administration is so desperate to protect with its incessant demands for cease fires, withholding weapons from Israel, anti-Israel rhetoric.

“Conservative Leanings”

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on a Federal judge’s ruling against the FTC’s rule presuming to ban noncompete agreements between employers and employees, the author quoted Mark Goldstein of ReedSmith LLP who characterized the Supreme Court as having conservative leanings.

This is a misapprehension that’s all too widespread among both conservatives and liberals.

In fact, the Supreme Court does have, currently, a strong originalist/textualist bent. There’s nothing particularly conservative, or liberal, in originalism/textualism, though; there is only rule of law.

This core tenet of our republican democracy runs contra activist judges’ and today’s political liberals’ demand for rule by law. That demand is epitomized by the late Justice Thurgood Marshall’s proudly self-important statement that he rules and expects the law to catch up and by today’s Progressive-Democrat administration’s repeated attempts to cancel student debt after each of our courts’ repeated strikes of prior attempts as contrary to existing law.