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Good Friday Morning! Except for “harbingers of doom.” In California this week, a 12-foot-long oarfish carcass washed up on the shores of San Diego. This specific fish is believed to be a harbinger of doom, specifically the impending earthquakes kind of doom. After that story had dropped, Southern California was hit with a 4.4 earthquake. So, if you’re deep-sea fishing, watch out for oarfish.
Instead of fish signaling earthquakes, I’m covering the Kamala Harris economic plan, which has all the same pleasantness of mythical dead fish bringing doom. Harris is bringing back price controls and all the worst parts of 1970s economics. I’ll get into that below – links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- One of the Washington Post’s misinformation reporters got busted this week pushing… wait for it… misinformation! Jon Levine at the NYPost posted on X/Twitter that Lorenz, a reporter at the Post, put up a picture on Instagram at a Biden press conference with this caption: “War Criminal :(” After Levine posted that, Lorenz fired back on X/Twitter saying it was fake. It might have ended there, but it didn’t. NPR confirmed Levine’s posts: “NPR has obtained a screengrab of Lorenz’s actual post, which contained that caption. It was not shared with her wider Instagram audience of 143,000 followers. Four people with direct knowledge of the private Instagram story confirmed its authenticity to NPR.” Lorenz is trying to pass it off as a friend who posted it (the “it’s not my drugs officer, it’s a friends” defense). It’s another blow to the Washington Post’s reputation, and it’ll be interesting to see how they handle it.
- The Tim Walz “stolen valor” angle has had more legs than I ever thought possible. ABC News got letters from former military members with Walz who blasted him for claiming the rank of Command Sergeant Major. John Kerry got hammered by the Swift Boat attacks in 2004. Walz likely faces something similar this cycle, though he’s the VP, not the top of the ticket. Trump and his team need to focus on Harris and not on Walz.
Where you can find me this week
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Biden-Harris Negotiate With Terrorists – Conservative Institute
The Campaign Of Kamala’s Contempt – Conservative Institute
Three Years Later Biden’s Afghan Debacle Reverberates – Conservative Institute
Kamala Harris Goes Forward With… 1970s Economics.
In high school, one of the earliest “conservative” books I read on economics was William E. Simon’s “A Time For Truth.” I somehow came across it at a garage sale. I knew nothing about the guy or the book, but I thought it sounded interesting, so I read it one week. Simon covers a lot of ground in the book, but one of the things he covered early on was price controls.
Simon was the Treasury Secretary for Nixon and Ford. Nixon appointed him as one of the first “czars“ in US politics to be responsible for Energy from 1973 through 1974, the peak of the OPEC oil embargo crisis. Simon was one of the first and early examples of political czars in US politics.
At the time, Congress and Nixon deeply believed that the only way to temporarily relieve the United States from OPEC’s cranking oil prices was through price controls and rationing. Nixon began price controls in 1971 and continued them through most of his time in office. These price controls were, to Simon and others, a total disaster and likely exacerbated the OPEC oil embargo.
Rent and price controls are one of those things where economics is largely of one accord: they do not work and often make things worse for consumers of those products. A famous IMG survey found that 2% of economists said rent control has had a positive impact.
Kamala Harris is rejecting all known evidence we have on this subject and going full-throttle into price controls and focusing on the wrong side of the economic spectrum.
First, she’s going after high grocery prices by attacking “corporate price gouging.“ The plan is to ban price gouging on groceries. The NYTimes’ framing of this issue is very funny:
Economists have cited a range of forces for pushing up prices in the recovery from the pandemic recession, including snarled supply chains, a sudden shift in consumer buying patterns, and the increased customer demand fueled by stimulus from the government and low rates from the Federal Reserve. Most economists say those forces are far more responsible than corporate behavior for the rise in prices in that period.
Biden administration economists have found that corporate behavior has played a role in pushing up grocery costs in recent years — but that other factors have played a much larger one.
Basically, there’s no proof that anything Biden-Harris is saying is true or that their plan will work. The White House has its own economists who think price gouging is to blame, but the other economists are likely right.
Price controls don’t work. Usually, price gouging comes up during a crisis, like a hurricane or something else, when things like food and gas become artificially scarce. Here’s a 2017 piece in Marketplace discussing it:
But most economists think those high prices can actually benefit communities during a crisis. Sky-high prices are the market at work, the basic laws of supply and demand in action.
There are a couple of reasons economists don’t like laws against price gouging.
On the demand side, laws that keep prices artificially low can encourage overbuying. They benefit the people who get to the store first.
“If prices don’t rise,“ explained Texas Tech economics professor Michael Giberson, “they just get plenty.”
If water is cheap, I might be tempted to buy as much as I can jam in my car — just in case. If, on the other hand, prices shoot up, Giberson said, “it encourages consumers to be a little more careful in using the goods.“
There’s also a supply-side argument that economists make.
“When the price of vital goods go up in an area affected by an emergency, that sends a signal by areas not affected by the emergency to bring more,“ explained Matt Zwolinski, director of the University of San Diego’s Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy.
Zwolinski argues that the practice of price gouging can actually be admirable from a purely moral perspective: “It allocates goods and services in a way that best meets human needs.“
Gouging signals to the markets to respond. Higher prices indicate that more product is needed in one place over another. It also forces people to conserve instead of just depending on the honor system.
We saw this quickly during the pandemic. Overnight, things like toilet paper vanished off the shelves as people panicked. If prices could have exploded during that time, we’d have gotten more conservation. Instead, low prices encouraged bulk panic buying (and it’s why I started buying from Office Supply stores for a few years).
By banning “price gouging,“ which is also impossible for the government to define or track in grocery stores, Harris will create more scarcity. Whatever product the Feds claim is being gouged will soon run out. William Simon made this argument during the peak of the Oil Embargo that price controls made things worse. He was right then, and every economist who’s not a lying hack for the White House knows it, too.
Harris isn’t done there. She’s also proposing a new incentive program for first-time homebuyers. She wants to encourage the construction of new homes by giving tax credits and down payment help to homeowners.
Here’s the problem: The United States has a housing shortage. That’s a given. There’s a reason prices are so high right now. We need more supply: cities need to zone more dense residential housing and allow more zoning for building more homes. We need more homes of all sizes and shapes.
Harris isn’t doing that. She’s going to push cash into the hands of buyers and construction companies to juice the demand side. She’s claiming that juicing demand will encourage more building. That might happen, or we can just watch prices go higher—again.
Democrats can’t push the supply-side button because that would mean helping out the businesses building homes. They want to claim they’re helping people, so they push hands into consumers’ hands instead of suppliers. In the end, we don’t get price drops; we just get people more willing to buy what’s out there, boosting demand.
Don’t believe me? Look at all the cash pumped into the US economy during the pandemic. Trump and Biden expressly boosted demand through multiple rounds of stimulus. That money is still sloshing around in the US economy, rocketing up demand, crippling supply.
Harris wants to increase inefficiencies in the market instead of lowering them.
It’s the 1970s all over again, except this time, Democrats are far more blunt about their socialism. Declaring everything a human right encourages more government stimulus, which makes everything even more unaffordable. It’s definitionally insane.
There’s also a deep irony to Democrats claiming that Biden defeated inflation only to turn around and claim we need to tackle high prices at the grocery store. It’s utterly incoherent. They praise Biden’s success on the one hand while claiming that society needs emergency price controls to save Americans.
There’s no coherent ideology stringing any of these policy proposals together. It’s a meme-deep campaign pretending it’s the savior of all.
Links of the week
Harris campaign’s Google ads rewrite news headlines – Axios
The power of the white woman savior complex: No one has learned anything – Bridget Phetasy, The Spectator
Leaked Documents Vindicate Netanyahu on Ceasefire Deal – Seth Mandel, Commentary
Prepare for Trump to be sentenced to prison on September 18: The objective here is to enable VP Kamala Harris and the media-Democratic complex to label Trump ‘a convicted felon sentenced to prison’ as voting begins – Andrew McCarthy, FoxNews
Walz once praised Muslim leader who shared antisemitic propaganda – CNN
The Palestinian ‘Traitor’ Risking Everything to Speak Out: He condemned the Hamas massacre. Now, his life is in danger. ‘I’m scared as hell. But this is how change happens.’ – Bari Weiss, The Free Press
One Rule for Frat Boys. Another for Violent Activists. Greek students are targeted based on rumors. College protesters who break laws get off scot-free. Francesca Block reports on the double standard on the American campus. – Francesca Block, The Free Press
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Lane Kiffin talking about his dad Monte Kiffin is very touching.
Satire of the week
Nation Wary Of Suddenly Usable Website – Onion
Biden Bummed To Realize That All He Had To Do To Stay In Race Was Not Show Up To Debate And Never Speak To Reporters Ever – Babylon Bee
Taliban Holds Parade In Honor Of Kamala’s Achievements In Afghanistan – Babylon Bee
Yay! Dino Nuggets Just as Big a Part of Woman’s Adult Diet as She Always Dreamed – Reductress
Unprepared Eulogist Opens with Webster’s Dictionary Definition of Death – The Hard Times
Deal Alert! This Salvation Army Has Nine Copies of Wii Fit Plus – The Hard Drive
Taliban Unveil Joe Biden Statue To Mark 3rd Anniversary Of Takeover Of Afghanistan – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!