Reply To: Price Controls to Fight Inflation

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#2100372
akuperma
Participant

If you fix prices at a lower level than determined by the law of supply and demand, you will either have shortage (c: Soviet Union, where goods were always inexpensive, but often unavailable) or you need to institute rationing (which tends to mean the well connected get what they need, and others go without).

An alternative is to reduce demand, such as by raising taxes, especially on the poor (since higher taxes on the rich would result in lower savings, rather than consumption). Regressive taxes such as payroll taxes, flat rate income taxes or sales tax would reduce demand to it would be in equilibrium with lower prices. Importing a large number of workers would help to lower wages, but the new workers would also be consumer which would increase demand. Lowering wages would be very useful but that is hard to do (cutting the minimum wage won’t help when employers need to offer wages above the minimum wage to recruit employees). Cutting disability and retirement benefits to force people into the job market would fail since the higher incomes that employment would give the returnees would increase demand. Not printing money would help the most, but that requires raising taxes or cutting benefits from government programs, which raises political problems (few taxpayers want to pay more, and receive less).

You can also increase supply through deregulation (of business hostile rules) and changing the tax structure to encourage more supply, as well lowering tariff and non-tariff trade barriers for imports.