Last month, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris announced that, if elected, she would advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries. In this op-ed featured in the Washington Monthly, Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout—who worked on consumer pricing issues at the New York Attorney General’s office—writes that Harris’s plan to control inflation is rooted in mainstream American legal tradition and sorely needed.
Harris’s actual plan has nothing to do with price controls. Instead, it would clearly tap an entirely different set of government powers that states, including ruby red ones like Alabama and Kentucky, have exercised robustly and with little controversy for decades. They are also widely popular, garnering 80 percent approval ratings in some polls. I have personal experience in this area, having used anti-price-gouging laws in legal work I did for New York Attorney General Letitia James during the pandemic. The vice president is simply proposing that Congress extend these longstanding powers to the federal government—though a strong argument can be made that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) already has anti-price-gouging authority, and therefore a future Harris-Walz administration would be able to act regardless of what Congress does.
