Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 3-4 of the late David Meiselman’s Foreword to Robert L. Schuettinger’s and Eamonn F. Butler’s important 1979 book, Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to fight Inflation:

What, then, have price controls achieved in the recurrent struggle to restrain inflation and overcome shortages? The historical record is a grimly uniform sequence of repeated failure. Indeed, there is not a single episode where price controls have worked to stop inflation or cure shortages. Instead of curbing inflation, price controls add other complications to the inflation disease, such as black markets and shortages that reflect the waste and misallocation of resources caused by the price controls themselves. Instead of eliminating shortages, price controls cause or worsen shortages. By giving producers and consumers the wrong signals because “low” prices to producers limit supply and “low” prices to consumers stimulate demand, price controls widen the gap between supply and demand.