By Evelyn Pyburn

The price of something conveys a message.

Looking at the price of a can of soup is a message. Deciphering that message might be complicated but attempting to arbitrarily change it will not change the facts it attempts to convey.

If the price has increased it may be saying the cost of the labor has increased. Or perhaps that the cost of the gas in the truck that brought it to the grocery store has gone up. If it has dropped in price perhaps it is saying there is a glut of canned soup on the market.  Or, maybe it is saying that no one else is making cans of soup and therefore customers have no choice but to buy this brand.

If one is buying an orange, a sky high price could be conveying that a late freeze destroyed much of the orange crop. Or that an infestation of bugs did so. Or perhaps that there are few people willing to pick oranges and labor costs are higher, or perhaps that the quality of the orange isn’t that great and the price has to be lowered to sell it.

All those things, individually or in concert with one another, dictates the utilitarian cost of everything we buy – or sell. How it works at a very basic level is not complicated. In fact, it is so simple that it feels almost condescending to write an explanation, but apparently some people need explanations.

In a free society, the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree upon. If the buyer refuses to purchase at what the seller is asking, then there is a message in that. And, the seller better pay attention. He may have just been informed that someone else can produce it for less, or that there is more of that product available than there are buyers to buy it. It’s a message that can change from one locale to another, and from day to day, or even minute to minute. It’s so multi-faceted and world encompassing that probably even God has trouble keeping tract – but not so our prospective presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Everyone involved, even in a slight way in business, knows they have to pay attention to all those many messages, if they are to survive in the business world. To ignore or mistake any one of those messages could spell doom for your business or your household budget. It’s a huge challenge just for the owner of one small business – but apparently it’s nothing for Kamala to manage the entire world of economics.

Kamala seems not to realize that if someone capriciously and arbitrarily sets prices without relationship to any facts of the reality that it takes to create a product or service, they will destroy markets. That means they are destroying the means of human survival in the modern day world.

Mandatory price and wage controls – being told what to sell a product for or what the value of your labor is  — is also a message – a message that comes with a club, which has absolutely nothing to do with the market.

If you arbitrarily limit the price on a loaf of bread, you do not lower the cost of bread. You assure that there will be no more bread. Who makes bread when they can’t recover the cost for labor and materials to make it?

And while the fundamental basics of a single transaction is the same the world around, trying to manage all of the world’s transactions is not. Just think of the billions of such transactions that happen every single day in the world, for billions of products and services, by billions of people, and then imagine how every little transaction has its own ripple effect of information and impacts in the economy, world around. What human being can track all that, much less know how to manipulate it all, for any specific outcome? Well, apparently presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris can, which makes her most amazing.

She hasn’t been the only one, however. President Richard Nixon, in the early 70s tried the same thing. Fortunately, he understood his folly within just a couple years, and while having undoubtedly harmed thousands of individual citizens he abandoned the policy before destroying the whole economy. But one would really hope that people with such a profound lack of economic understanding would never rise to such high levels in government.

One has to wonder if Kamal Harris would ever figure it out or even see the disaster that would surely befall us all. One has to suspect she would see the consequences as being unrelated, Perhaps they would appear as inexplicable and mysterious as many of our other current leaders and “experts” seem to view inflation.

Economic literature is full of explanations — not only about why price and wage controls don’t work, but what has happened in the past when someone else tried it. Most of those same books also explain that high prices is what happens when you inflate the money supply. Apparently, that’s another read that Kamala missed.

Of course, governments and bureaucrats are already deep into manipulating markets. That they screw things up quite frequently usually passes unremarked upon. It’s another strange and mystical manifestation that just happens. No one traces it back to some stupid regulation or arbitrary restraint on the market. Apparently mystical and strange things happen all the time in the market place, just like they seem to do in how people rise to power.