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How Did Conservatives Get the Idea That Price Controls Whip Inflation?

The path to lower prices is always and everywhere the division of production across as many hands and machines as possible. The latter explains why the poor of today enjoy technology that the richest of the rich had no access to as recently as ten years ago, and also why those same poor have abundant access to clothing of varying styles and sizes that the rich throughout much of ancient and modern history could never really have imagined. It’s surprising something so basic requires stating, but it’s required.

To see why, consider the conservative belief that won’t die about the path to lower prices being paved by so-called Federal Reserve “tightness” in the form of higher interest rates. Price controls to whip higher prices? Can the Right be serious?

Furthermore, governments have no resources. To then suggest the Fed can “tighten” access to credit always and everywhere produced in the private sector is the stuff of fantasy.

Read the entire article at Forbes.

Author

  • John Tamny

    John Tamny is Founder and President of the Parkview Institute, editor of RealClearMarkets, senior fellow at the Market Institute, and Senior Economic Adviser to mutual fund firm Applied Finance Group. Tamny is the author of eight books. His latest is The Deficit Delusion: Why Everything Left, Right and Supply-Side Tell You About the National Debt Is Wrong. His others are Bringing Adam Smith Into the American Home: A Case Against Home Ownership, The Money Confusion, When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason, Popular Economics, Who Needs the Fed?, The End of Work, and They're Both Wrong: A Policy Guide for America's Frustrated Independent Thinkers.

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