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by Liz Wolfe
Reason.com
Please stop talking, actually: For a while, politics watchers were wondering when in her campaign for president Kamala Harris would unveil an actual policy platform.
Now, she’s unveiled some of it, and maybe it was actually better when we knew less.
In a statement released last night, Harris’ campaign said it would enact the “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries—setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries,” with enforcement power given to the Federal Trade Commission. You heard that right: price controls.
It’s not clear how an “excessive” profit would be defined, nor why policing that would be in the purview of the federal government, nor why food prices in particular ought to qualify. It’s not clear what types of behavior that are currently legal would be outlawed.