This is going to work well, isn't it?

The bill would empower the Federal Trade Commission (which would also get $1bn in additional funding) and state attorneys general to stop companies from charging “grossly excessive” prices, regardless of where alleged price gouging took place in a supply chain.

Of course, it’s Robert Reich so it’s clearly going to be bad economics. The suggestion is that the bureaucracy will tell everyone what prices should be. Which is not, not really, a course of action which has a great track record.

The Soviet Union told everyone what all prices need to be all the time- that didn’t work. Venezuela told everyone what toilet paper prices should be - toilet paper immediately disappeared from Venezuela. True, civilisation existed before toilet paper, civilisation can survive the loss of toilet paper but we’re really very sure that giving bureaucrats the power to determine fair toilet paper prices is not worth the disappearance of toilet paper.

As this is America under discussion it will also get worse. That top layer - some 3,000 people - of the bureaucracy is politically appointed, replaced with each turn of the Presidential administration. Thus in the political campaigns in the run up to any election there will be a certain pressure on those running the bureaucracy to fix prices in only that one, voter pleasing, direction. You know, job preservation? Well, voter pleasing in that short term sense of reducing the price now at the cost or reducing availability a little further out - after the election say.

That 20th century was - among other things - a grand economic experiment. Price fixing by bureaucrats was the system that didn’t work. We really have been there, done that, perhaps we should obey The Science and not do that again?