"The ignorance on display is enough to make you want to cry. Or maybe to require a test of basic economic literacy as a qualification to serve in government. Or, better yet, to vote."
If you believe in price controls, you will not understand this chart:
price controls graph - Search Images
"Price controls are in the Hall of Fame of bad ideas. They have an unbroken record of failure, stretching back literally thousands of years. And yet, they remain alluring to people with no knowledge of either history or economics, or–probably more relevant–to failing governments.
"There was a time when Britain’s government was known for a certain level of financial sophistication. No longer:
[British Chancellor] Rachel Reeves is pressuring supermarkets to cap food prices in an attempt to limit inflation unleashed by the Iran war.
"The Iran war has nothing to do with it. The inflation rate on grocery prices in the U.K. is lower than in mid-2025, and the world has plenty of oil. A temporary disruption of a single channel of transportation will have no impact on gas prices beyond a couple of months:. . . "
Only a Fool or a Politician Would Cap Food Prices - FEE . . . "Indeed, large supermarkets are a marvel of the modern age, on a par with wonders such as the Internet. We have a cornucopia of goods available, allowing us to buy almost anything we could want in multiple variants, from around the world. These are provided to us via the automatic responses of thousands of economic agents to thousands upon thousands of prices, in a web of interactions far beyond the ability of any human mind or machine to duplicate. Tampering with that process is so obviously potentially harmful that only a fool, or a desperate politician, would contemplate it.
"If the government caps the prices of supermarket products, that will make those products unprofitable for the supermarket to stock and also mean that consumers have to pay less for them than their economic value, the consequence being that they will sell out and not be available. Why would I, as a consumer, want key products to be unavailable in supermarkets?"
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