Gary Wolfram Explains Why Price Controls Don’t Work
The Radio Free Hillsdale Hour
Hillsdale College
4.8 • 649 Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2024
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Guests: Gary Wolfram, Hans von Spakovsky, & Patricia R. Bart
Host Scot Bertram talks with Gary Wolfram, William Simon professor of economics and public policy, director of economics, and professor of political economy at Hillsdale College, about the consequences of Kamala Harris’s proposed price controls. Hans von Spakovsky, manager at the Election Law Reform Initiative and senior legal fellow at the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, discusses a report he authored accusing the Biden Administration of unlawful interference in state election administration. And Patricia R. Bart, associate professor of English at Hillsdale College, begins an in-depth series on the history of the English language.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country. |
| 0:25.0 | Ludwig von Mises talked about once the government intervenes, it causes unintended consequences. |
| 0:31.4 | These unintended consequences call for more government intervention, which lead to more unintended consequences and more |
| 0:38.8 | government intervention until he argued that you finally got up with socialism. |
| 0:43.2 | This is your host, Scott Bertram. |
| 0:45.2 | Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. |
| 0:51.3 | That was Dr. Gary Wolfram, William Simon Professor of Economics and Public |
| 0:55.8 | Policy, Director of Economics and Professor of Political Economy at Hillsdale College. He joins us |
| 1:02.0 | today as we discuss the plan from Democratic presidential nominee Kamada Harris to enact |
| 1:07.3 | price controls or price caps. Dr. Wolfram, thanks so much for joining us. Well, I'm glad to be back. |
| 1:14.2 | Talking today about the Harris idea plan for price controls, or she calls them price gouging |
| 1:22.7 | bands, let's start by defining what we know. What do we know about the Harris plan for price controls, particularly on food, right? |
| 1:31.5 | Inflation fighting is what she claims. |
| 1:34.2 | She started out just talking about food, but more recently she's also talking about rent control. |
| 1:40.3 | And actually, one of the interesting things will be that once you've decided you can do it on food |
| 1:47.1 | and you can do it on rents, then you've set a precedent. And then the government will end up setting |
| 1:53.0 | all sorts of prices. And it's interesting that the Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, he once said, |
| 2:00.6 | we economists may not know much about |
| 2:03.1 | things, but we do know how to create a shortage. And that's price controls. So how do price |
| 2:10.9 | controls disrupt the balance in the economy between supply and demand? Well, I always tell my students, you know, like nine million people woke up today in New York |
| 2:21.5 | City and there was exactly the right amount of Starbucks coffee and exactly the round amount |
| 2:25.6 | of peanuts and everything else, we should just be totally amazed that that's what happens. |
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