GROVER NORQUIST: Kamala’s Plan To Make Inflation Worse: Price Controls And Rampant Spending

Kamala Harris announced her solution to inflation: price controls. This may be a turning point in the 2024 election.

Until now, she was hiding her policy positions, refusing interviews, and having staff claim she had disowned her longstanding radical positions.

But now, on the central issue of the election – inflation – she has revealed she has no idea what causes it or how to stop it. Voters see the real Kamala Harris that cannot be unseen.

The government setting prices for goods and services has a very long history — of failure. It is not just a bad idea. It is a very old, bad idea.

The failure of wage and price controls (you cannot control the price of goods and services without first controlling the wages of workers) is acknowledged by historians and economists of all political persuasions. This is not a left-right argument.

Government laws setting prices, wages and rents do not bring down prices. They do not make inflation go away.

Even the socialist Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck said, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

The Harris endorsement of the one “fix” to inflation that has never worked highlights her vote for the two large spending bills, the “American Rescue Plan” and the “Inflation Reduction Act” that drove inflation to the point that Americans find the dollars in their pockets are not worth 80 cents today.

Inflation was and is always caused by government spending and government printing money to cover that spending. There is no other cause of inflation.

As Vice President, Ms. Harris cast the deciding vote for large spending bills — increasing the federal spending by trillions.

Now, she acts to remind Americans of her complicity in what (yesterday) was Joe Biden’s unforgivable sin. Yes, she was as much a creator of the price increases we still suffer from as Joe Biden was. But her handlers had hoped that a new face on the ballot might make Americans forget this.