Vice President Kamala Harris’s proposed federal ban on price gouging might irritate academics, but it makes sense to everyone else. In this op-ed featured in The Atlantic, Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout—who worked on consumer pricing issues at the New York Attorney General’s office—makes the case for ignoring the economists.
Last week, the economics commentariat and much of the mainstream media erupted with contempt toward Kamala Harris’s proposed federal price-gouging law. Op-eds, social-media posts, and straight news reports mocked Harris for economically illiterate pandering and warned of Soviet-style “price controls” that would lead to shortages and runaway inflation.
The strange thing about these complaints is that what Harris actually proposed was neither radical nor new—and it certainly wasn’t price controls. In fact, almost every state already has a law restricting at least some forms of price gouging. Although Harris has not specified the exact design of her proposal, one hopes that it would follow the basic outline of state-level bans: forbidding unwarranted price hikes for necessary goods during emergencies.
Read “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists” in The Atlantic.