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IPFS News Link • Economy - Economics USA
Back to the Future With Price Controls
• https://www.lewrockwell.com,By Jacob G. HornbergerRather than focusing on the Federal Reserve as the root cause of prices rising across society, she's blaming rising food prices on grocery-store owners. Consequently, she says that if she is elected president, she'll get a federal "anti-gouging" law enacted that prevents grocery stores from raising prices.
In other words, she's going to impose price controls, which inevitably means that we are going to have to deal with shortages of everything in grocery stores that has a price control imposed on it.
Of course, this is what governments have done since the invention of the printing press. Debasing the currency by printing ever-increasing quantities of money and then blaming the resulting rising prices on greedy, rapacious, evil, profit-seeking, capitalist swine has always been the way that government officials plunder the citizenry without having the citizenry figure out what the government is doing to them.
Let's assume that the government is spending $2 trillion more per year than what it is bringing in with taxes. Let's also assume that the government is already $34 trillion in debt.
Where does the government get that $2 trillion? One way is to raise taxes. Another way is to borrow it and add it on to the overall federal debt. But people get angry when taxes get too high. They also get concerned when they see the government's debt getting excessively high because they know that ultimately taxpayers are on the hook for paying it off.
Thus, the government has to figure out a way to tax people without their realizing that they are getting taxed. That's where a central bank (i.e., the Federal Reserve) and the printing press come into play. The central bank simply prints up that $2 trillion and the government goes out and spends it.
But that $2 trillion in new paper money has consequences. It lowers the value of everyone's money. And there is only one way that that lower value can be reflected: through higher prices of most everything in society. In other words, people's money simply doesn't buy as much as it did before the government's monetary debasement. Let's say it buys 20 percent less than it did before. That's the same as if the government had taxed people an additional 20 percent of their income.