Former President Donald Trump is attacking Vice President Kamala Harris’ plan for a federal ban on price gouging by grocery stores and food suppliers as “Soviet-style” controls.
But Republican state officials across the country have embraced the idea of capping excessive prices for years.
GOP state attorneys general, as well as many of their Democratic counterparts, have moved to stop companies from charging what they view as exorbitant increases in the cost of some goods in certain circumstances.
In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, sued a large egg supplier for raising prices by about 300 percent at the height of the pandemic lockdowns in 2020.
Laws that help regular people are communism and bad. Laws that help rich people are capitalism and good.
It’s baffling that this idiotic messaging has controlled American politics for 4 decades.
Edit: meant to reply elsewhere but I’m leaving it.
It’s also just literally not communism. That’s just the word they use when there is no real argument. Americans have been conditioned by 50+ years of “communism bad”, so it tends to work, especially as a conservative dog whistle.
Most of the stuff they label as communist or socialist actually sounds great.
I mean capped prices at the shop? Awful. /s
The bad bits of communism and Socialism are basically greed, corruption, and nepotism - and we have plenty of that anyway.
Greed, corruption, and nepotism are effects of power structures, not socialism. That’s why we have them under our economic system as well as socialist/communist states in the past.
Yes and the entire point of socialism is to limit the effects that individual greed, corruption, and nepotism can have on society.
Like a fist vs a hand or a union vs unionized industry.
Only words left in the conservative vocabulary: “Socialism” and “Communism.” Every time they don’t like something, they just indiscriminately slap one of those labels on it.
Wait, we’re not doing “woke” anymore?
Fuck suing these looters; anyone that was gouging during the pandemic should be put up against a wall so they know what happens to looters during a international emergency.
My prediction for this courts interpretation:
Money is speech, and corporations are people, ergo banning price gouging is an explicit violation of the corporations first amendment rights.
The GOP is communist.
Based accelerationist GOP?/s
Dementia DonOLD the weird racist rapist with 34 felonies is losing his battle with dementia. He’s always been dumb as fuck, but now the dementia is really tightening its grip. It’s sad, he should just drop out.
Politico - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for Politico:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High - United States of America
Wikipedia about this sourceSearch topics on Ground.News
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/24/trump-harris-price-gouging-groceries-00176247
Honestly any of these price controls by governments are quite terrible and usually just form of populism.
Actually it’s not even beneficial for markets to artificially increase prices.
Oh, so therefore the Invisible Hand will prevent artificial price increases. We only imagined prices increasing while companies were boasting of record profits.
I don’t know how competition is invisible hand. If companies want record profits, they cannot just increase prices because some will undercut them.
Have you just not heard of price collusion in the past?
Who will force you to follow it? I mean if you think that the companies are keeping prices artificially high, thanks to free market, you can open your own store with fair prices.
You will get most of consumers because you are cheaper and you make quite a lot of money because everyone comes to you.
That’s literally not going to happen. People are going to do what’s convenient, and when grocery stores have already priced out nearly every mom & pop grocer, there is no competition.
And if you open another grocery store, you’ll be beaten by market share and economy of scale.
Seriously dude, the “magic hand” of capitalism is busted when you’re talking about billions of dollars of force tipping the scales in large corporations’ favor.
So if it is convenient for people to pay unfair prices, they can. If they are unhappy, they can start their own shop. It’s fully their choice. If there are issues with crops, vegetables, etc. prices will go automatically up unless we find a way how to control weather.
Also, the statement that opening a grocery store automatically means they will be beaten by the economy is very incorrect because by this logic there would be zero grocery stores.
I mean, competition has led to a small number of giants coming out on top, then crushing all their competition. Now they do just raise prices. Agriculture, and grocery, are primarily industries made up of a small handful of corporations in “developed” economies. It got that way without price controls, and the cost of food is still going up, even though inflation is down. You need to control the size, and scope, of corporations, and then regulate a lot of pricing. When you don’t you just get this.
Man forgets that people don’t operate with the good of “the market” in mind.
Won’t someone think of the market?!?
Pro-tip: if you want an actual predictable market which actually follows known rules, instill a centrally planned economy.
We don’t have that.
So you are saying that communist practices would work well… Sure because when there is totally no place for competition, it very much helps the growth and it very motivates everyone to keep prices down and is not monopolistic at all.
I didn’t say any of that actually.
Centrally planned economy ≠ communism. Walmart, Amazon, etc literally have a centrally planned economy within their national organizations.
I also didn’t say anything about “helping the growth” or motivating “everyone to keep the prices down” or stop it from being “monopolistic”.
I just stated that since the current market is based on the wills of the ultra wealthy and is subject to extreme fluctuations based on nothing objective… if you want a market that is predictable and follows hard rules (like you tried to apply to the current market) you need to have a central body planning and controlling the market.
How is market based on the will of ultra wealthy.
By the way, centrally planned economy is one of they key factors of communism.
