Ted Soqui/SIPA USA via AP Images
Gas prices in Los Angeles in March
It’s been 21 years since I left L.A. for D.C. (I only live in cities that can be identified by two letters), but having lived in Los Angeles for nearly 50 years, I still feel its gas prices in my bones. And gas prices there are rapidly approaching $7 a gallon. In some neighborhoods, they’ve already exceeded that.
And as if inflation on that scale weren’t bad enough, its electoral consequences are likely to shift control of Congress to racist, insurrectionist, conspiracy-addled nitwits in November’s elections.
How, then, can the Democrats forestall or at least mitigate this grim double whammy? Joe Biden appears to grasp the peril he’s in; it’s compelling him to make a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and its murderous crown prince in the hope that the prince will bring more of his nation’s oil to market, thereby driving down prices.
But there’s a less morally bankrupt, economically more effective, and far quicker way of achieving the same ends. It’s called price controls.
Contrary to what economic orthodoxy would have us believe, such controls have been markedly successful at various times in our nation’s history. (Economic orthodoxy is often clueless about history in its preference for theory over fact.) According to Hugh Rockoff, a professor of economic history at Rutgers, price and wage controls brought the yearly rate of inflation down from 32.4 percent to 7.1 percent during World War I, and from 11.9 percent to 1.6 percent during World War II. Of course, as Jason Zweig pointed out in a recent Wall Street Journal column, people are more likely to accept such controls during wartime than they are during peacetime. Then again, having not really experienced a run of inflation for the past 40 years, Americans are rapidly going into shock as food and fuel prices continue to run amok. Selective controls on key commodities might not only provide the only way to achieve some fast relief, but also demonstrate, in tandem with legislation to cut the price of prescription drugs and the cost of child care, that the Democrats can actually and effectively legislate and implement policies in the public good.
Wages are rising, too, but as they clearly lag inflation, there’s no need to control them, particularly since the sectors in which they’re rising the most are those that have been paying poverty-level wages for decades. What this country needs is price controls, and if the Democrats can’t figure that out, they’re inviting economic and electoral disaster.
