All of Nixon’s price controls were removed by sometime in 1974 except for the ones on oil and gasoline. Those led to terrible line-ups and even some violence in lines when the federal government didn’t allow the prices to rise to fully reflect the increase in the price of oil engineered by OPEC in the fall of 1973. (The price rose from $3 a barrel to about $11 per barrel over just a few months.) Those price controls were kept in place until the first 2 weeks of President Reagan’s administration when Reagan ended them in one day. The shortages ended too.
Also decrying Harris’s economic lunacy is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague, Veronique de Rugy.
Imposing price stability by decree was Diocletian’s idea of good policy. The Edict on Maximum Prices was issued in 301 by the Roman emperor. Harris promises fines for price-gougers; Diocletian promised the death penalty for profiteers — it was a more bloody time then. Price controls go back even further: There were price controls in the Code of Hammurabi, and archaeologists have discovered price controls a few centuries before then, ca. 1750 b.c.
Scott Lincicome has excellent intel on Intel and government industrial policy. Two slices:
So, Intel’s problems have been known for decades and run deeper than just some quarterly revenue miss (though losing $1 billion-plus in a single quarter when your competitors are killing it isn’t exactly good news). Yet the U.S. government’s response to these challenges has effectively been to throw the company a big parade. It was the top recipient of CHIPS Act funding this year—a collective taxpayer commitment of as much as $44.5 billion in grants, loans, and tax credits. (Ohio taxpayers are potentially on the hook for billions more.)
…..
That Intel received so much taxpayer money in the face of so much contrary evidence is right out of the Industrial Policy 101 textbook—and past editions of Capitolism. As we’ve discussed, both distant and recent U.S. policy history is littered with examples of “national champions” successfully using their reputations, “strategic” and geographic clout, political connections, and deep pockets to win massive subsidy payouts, regardless of the actual merits. (Here’s a brand new example in the solar industry.)
Politicians, meanwhile, typically aren’t motivated by some mythical “public interest” but instead by their own personal ambitions—getting reelected, winning a sweet job on K Street or in the C-suite, etc. They’re also unencumbered by the usual checks that the market places on private investment. As Milton Friedman reminded us years ago, people spend differently when it’s not their money or lives on the line, and, far from punishing politicians for wasting taxpayer money on subsidized boondoggles, voters often reward them just for trying (assuming they even notice at all). Indeed, for all the noise about Solyndra, it’s not like it cost President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or Leader Harry Reid their jobs. Far from it.
Eric Boehm understandably is no fan of the bipartisan scheme to exempt tips from income taxation.
Some of their efforts have been useful, including their fact-checking of Trump’s more frenetic flights of fancy. (Your inauguration crowd was larger than Barack Obama’s? Um, sure, Mr. President.) But the larger effort has been repeatedly marred when the disinformation experts have acted as censors, suppressing information that turned out to be true, and spreading other information that was false.
Think back to the years the American public spent on the verge of finding out that Trump was a Russian plant. Recall when it was “misinformation” to suggest the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab. Recollect how a bevy of putative experts assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was probably a “Russian information operation” rather than … Hunter Biden’s laptop. If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden’s obvious decline were actually expert-certified “cheap fakes.”
Black voters have repeatedly expressed support for school choice, with nearly 80% endorsing policies like education savings accounts and vouchers, according to Morning Consult. Polling by RealClear Opinion Research also shows that black voters support school choice more than any other race. Clearly, our communities want our children to have the same opportunities as others, regardless of race, geography or socioeconomic status. We need courageous leadership that will equip our students to thrive.
Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are widely courting black voters. They hear, firsthand, from the same people we as pastors and community leaders hear from. But do they listen to these constituents when it comes to education freedom?
The answer has been a resounding no. The Minnesota governor has refused opportunities to work with the Legislature to pass education savings accounts or vouchers. He said in his defense: “We are not going to defund our public schools.” This is a gross misinterpretation of ESAs and vouchers. Black families don’t want to harm our public schools financially. We want properly funded public schools and education freedom at the same time. It’s possible if our leaders don’t play politics.
Mr. Walz said in Philadelphia last week that Ms. Harris wants “education to be that ticket to the middle class.” But she’s never indicated any support for school choice in any of her previous roles.
GMU Econ alum Michael Peterson is a fan of Glenn Loury’s autobiography.
