> To use a metaphor: if your house is on fire, you would not want to wait until the fire eventually dies out. Neither do you wish to destroy the house by flooding it. A skillful firefighter extinguishes the fire where it is burning to prevent contagion and save the house.
Haha, what a wank analogy – fire fighting is infamously destructive, and believe me, the firefighters give no fucks about getting too much water into the rest of the house. It is not a surgical process.
Um, did the author forget that alongside WW2 price controls came rationing?
Not sure how this would work today. For example, if they fixed the price of bread at £1 a loaf, would that mean that no bread could cost more than £1? So hard luck if you wanted to spend £2 on something better than plastic sliced bread.
Or would shops simply be obliged to provide some kind of loaf for £1? Watch the quality of that plummet.
Same with all the staples, we have a range of qualities of almost everything, from the barely edible to the ridiculously expensive. It isn’t 1945 when people got their cheese, eggs and bacon from the corner shop, and nobody had a choice.
The 1% are going to squeeze the system as hard as they can for as long as they can before it implodes and so they’ll have plenty of money to pay for guards and bunkers. We’ll all be dead and they, and their decendents, can have 100% of what’s left.
A big issue with price controls on food is that the cost of the raw materials farmers need to grow food has gone up at a much greater rate than the price of food has. We might be paying 5-10% more for food, but farmers are paying more than 50% more for the seeds, fertilisers and fuel needed to grow that food. That is ignoring the effects of climate changes on harvests, such as the poor wheat harvest last year pushing up the price of pasta. The increasing political tensions across the world are not going to help either, especially as we are so dependent on China for manufacturing (much more than we were at the end of WW2). A global issue will require global solutions, and we all know how easy those are to reach these days.
Why would anyone give oxygen to this daftness? Hardly anything is priced based solely on UK supply chains (when you include raw materials, parts, ingredients, energy etc). That means price controls can’t apply to the whole supply chain, which simply means tanking businesses if you try to apply them to the end product. Larger businesses will stop making loss-making lines and then your upward pressure on (price) which you’re controlling becomes even greater so the gap between market forces and imposed fantasy becomes even bigger.
If we really want to get serious then necessities would be subsidised with taxes on luxuries – but there’s a reason that is a nuclear option, because it may well diminish rapidly if people can’t afford luxuries as the crunch worsens.
When the issue is a lack of stuff, the solution isn’t punishing people who produce stuff.
This is stupid. You can have food price inflation or actual scarcity caused by food price controls. This is basic economics. Food won’t be produced if it is not profitable, and it is already a very low margin industry even now. It will also monopolise the uk food market as only producers with the very largest scale and lowest costs will survive.
Author also wrote a book on why Chinese Communism is a superior model…
Price controls on food are a ridiculously stupid idea, that is asking for more shortages.
No, the labour party running these kind of nuts economic experiments in the 70s is why they are accused of being shit at economics to this day. Would be interested to see if the author even has GCSE maths, let alone any economics
Price control is never good. No one can take into account all the variables involved in the price. Specially politicians that never worked a real job in their lives
Didn’t price controls, when tested, largely lead to the huge United States inflation crisis of the 70’s?
We also have interest rates as a much better tool to combat inflation. Price controls is what the communist block did on their side of the iron curtain, it wasn’t particularly successful. I mean everything was affordable but you just couldn’t buy anything due to shortages.
It’s been far too long since we used Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices anyway…
Because that’s working so well in the energy market?
16 comments
> To use a metaphor: if your house is on fire, you would not want to wait until the fire eventually dies out. Neither do you wish to destroy the house by flooding it. A skillful firefighter extinguishes the fire where it is burning to prevent contagion and save the house.
Haha, what a wank analogy – fire fighting is infamously destructive, and believe me, the firefighters give no fucks about getting too much water into the rest of the house. It is not a surgical process.
Um, did the author forget that alongside WW2 price controls came rationing?
Not sure how this would work today. For example, if they fixed the price of bread at £1 a loaf, would that mean that no bread could cost more than £1? So hard luck if you wanted to spend £2 on something better than plastic sliced bread.
Or would shops simply be obliged to provide some kind of loaf for £1? Watch the quality of that plummet.
Same with all the staples, we have a range of qualities of almost everything, from the barely edible to the ridiculously expensive. It isn’t 1945 when people got their cheese, eggs and bacon from the corner shop, and nobody had a choice.
The 1% are going to squeeze the system as hard as they can for as long as they can before it implodes and so they’ll have plenty of money to pay for guards and bunkers. We’ll all be dead and they, and their decendents, can have 100% of what’s left.
A big issue with price controls on food is that the cost of the raw materials farmers need to grow food has gone up at a much greater rate than the price of food has. We might be paying 5-10% more for food, but farmers are paying more than 50% more for the seeds, fertilisers and fuel needed to grow that food. That is ignoring the effects of climate changes on harvests, such as the poor wheat harvest last year pushing up the price of pasta. The increasing political tensions across the world are not going to help either, especially as we are so dependent on China for manufacturing (much more than we were at the end of WW2). A global issue will require global solutions, and we all know how easy those are to reach these days.
Why would anyone give oxygen to this daftness? Hardly anything is priced based solely on UK supply chains (when you include raw materials, parts, ingredients, energy etc). That means price controls can’t apply to the whole supply chain, which simply means tanking businesses if you try to apply them to the end product. Larger businesses will stop making loss-making lines and then your upward pressure on (price) which you’re controlling becomes even greater so the gap between market forces and imposed fantasy becomes even bigger.
If we really want to get serious then necessities would be subsidised with taxes on luxuries – but there’s a reason that is a nuclear option, because it may well diminish rapidly if people can’t afford luxuries as the crunch worsens.
When the issue is a lack of stuff, the solution isn’t punishing people who produce stuff.
This is stupid. You can have food price inflation or actual scarcity caused by food price controls. This is basic economics. Food won’t be produced if it is not profitable, and it is already a very low margin industry even now. It will also monopolise the uk food market as only producers with the very largest scale and lowest costs will survive.
Author also wrote a book on why Chinese Communism is a superior model…
Price controls on food are a ridiculously stupid idea, that is asking for more shortages.
No, the labour party running these kind of nuts economic experiments in the 70s is why they are accused of being shit at economics to this day. Would be interested to see if the author even has GCSE maths, let alone any economics
Price control is never good. No one can take into account all the variables involved in the price. Specially politicians that never worked a real job in their lives
Didn’t price controls, when tested, largely lead to the huge United States inflation crisis of the 70’s?
We also have interest rates as a much better tool to combat inflation. Price controls is what the communist block did on their side of the iron curtain, it wasn’t particularly successful. I mean everything was affordable but you just couldn’t buy anything due to shortages.
It’s been far too long since we used Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices anyway…
Because that’s working so well in the energy market?