Harris’s campaign should be worried.
Last night, Kamala Harris told MSNBC personality Stephanie Ruhle that she believes Donald Trump is “not very serious about how he thinks about” economic policy. “And one must be serious.”
Well, that sounds serious. One might assume, therefore, that Harris would contrast herself with her entirely frivolous opponent by demonstrating a searing command of her own governing agenda. But if that was one’s operating assumption, one would be tragically misguided.
The most salient issue in this election — indeed, of the entire Biden administration — has been price instability and the cost burden inflation has imposed on consumers. Harris has proposed a panacea to remedy this problem, which consists of demonizing producers and siccing the Federal Trade Commission on grocers and distributors to lower the cost of food by fiat. That sounds a lot like price-fixing to many — a scheme that reliably raises the costs of goods where they are not made scarcer. “How do you go after price-gouging without implementing price controls?” Ruhle asked the vice president. It won’t shock you to learn that Harris’s response was not especially serious.
“So, just to be very frank, I am never going to apologize for going after companies and corporations that take advantage of the desperation of the American people,” Harris began.
Odd. No one solicited an apology from Harris for her economically illiterate pander to voters who have not availed themselves of price-controlling schemes’ ruinous record, although she probably should. Rather, Harris seems to have responded to this banal overture from a friendly interviewer as an attack and assumed a defensive posture.
She continued: “As attorney general, I saw this happen. In the midst of an emergency, whether it be an extreme weather event or even in the pandemic, we saw it. Where those few companies — not the majority, not most — but those few companies that would take advantage of the desperation of people and jack up prices. Yeah, I’m going to go after them. Yes, I’m going to go after them. And that is part of a much more comprehensive plan on what we can do to bring down the cost of living.”
Unfortunately for her audience, Harris declined to put the emphasis in that last sentence on “much,” which might have mitigated some of the anxiety this answer surely produced. Harris cannot defend her attack on prices for the simple reason that it is indefensible. Instead, she defends her intentions, which are noble and fueled by the deep reserves of empathy she holds for the long-suffering American worker. But what she ended up articulating was the only acceptable rationale for temporary price controls on specific goods: an actual emergency.
Harris’s defenders have made the case that prohibitions on price-fixing are not all that remarkable in the United States because, on the state level, there are anti-price-gouging statutes on the books. But those statutes are triggered by genuine emergencies and the declaration thereof, either by the federal government or state-level executives. What is today’s emergency but the Democratic Party’s imperiled political prospects? Harris cannot claim credit for declining inflationary pressure on the economy and, at the same time, argue that the all-consuming emergency represented by high prices necessitates the recklessly broad intervention into the private economy she has proposed.
Harris isn’t talking to engaged, thoughtful voters at this point. She’s speaking to voters on the margins who she thinks will respond to sentiment more than a coherent prescription for sound fiscal and monetary policy. That’s an insult to voters’ intelligence, but it’s at least a rational calculation. Nevertheless, her campaign should worry that Harris’s inability or refusal to defend the central plank of her plan to combat inflation will leave the public with the impression that she is not, in fact, a “serious” thinker.