Vice president Kamala Harris has disqualified herself as a candidate for the position of president of the United States on two counts: The lack of knowledge of law and the lack of knowledge of economics. Both are necessary requirements for the chief executive of the United States.

This is not a question of being a Democrat, a Republican or an Independent. When I talked to voters, I realized that some women were voting for Hillary Clinton and may vote for Kamala Harris only because they are women. Similarly, many blacks voted for Barack Obama only because he is black. But neither the gender nor the race tell us anything about the fitness of a candidate for an office.

Vice President Kamala Harris said during the presidential debate that her opponent, the former president Donald Trump, wanted to “cancel the Constitution.” Vice President Harris is a lawyer. 

Leaving political bias and everything else aside, a lawyer should know better than anybody else that the president of the United States, as the chief executive officer and the head of the executive branch of our government, does not have the requisite powers to cancel the Constitution.

Secondly, as part of her economic plan, vice president Harris announced the effort to lower the prices of groceries and to eliminate “price gouging.” Such a plan demonstrates a serious lack of understanding of economics.

Before Harris’s opponents start crying “socialism” without much evidence, I want to explain on the basis of economic theory why such a plan demonstrates the lack of understanding of economics.

In our capitalist system of free enterprise, the prices are regulated automatically and without any human intervention by supply and demand. See on this, for instance, Friedrich von Hayek, the 1974 Laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

What really happens is this: Competition among the market participants drives the prices under any circumstances to the absolute minimum at which the producers and the retailers can recover their costs and earn a profit that justifies being in business.

There is no doubt that when there is a significant upset in the economy, such the one caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, some market participants took advantage of it in the very short term—and may, again in a very short term, lower the prices in tandem with competition. The upshot however is that no market participant can stay in business for long without following the dictum of the competition.

Indeed, the government’s own recent studies confirm no “price gouging.” 

I have personal experience with such economically faulty policies. I was born in a communist country and spent the following 30 years living in the socialist-command economy. 

In the socialist Czechoslovakia of 1947, soon to become communist, we had a central office that sent out inspectors checking whether shopkeepers were not “overcharging” their customers. Such a populist, non-workable and economically faulty proposal may be liked only by all those who had never had to bite their nails every night, thinking about how to meet the payroll and how to pay suppliers.

This non-workable system soon degenerated into a communist-command economy, with price controls wherein the prices were determined by the Central Planning Commission. The result of such price controls was that we experienced constant and repeated shortages of the most basic products, such as matches, toilet paper, eggs, meat, etc., while we were looking with envy at the high standard of living in the “inhumane” capitalist West.

Thus, such a socialist-command economy and the price controls were the real reason for the demise of the communist system in the Eastern Europe. It died of its own sins in 1989. 

But it took 41 years.

Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian Economic School, a compatriot of von Hayek, postulated as early as the 1920s why such a socialist system of price controls could not work: As the price of one person is the cost for the other person, the real reason why such a socialist system of price controls cannot work is that nobody knows what the real costs are while “profit” is a bad word.

Von Mises determined this theoretically. In communist Czechoslovakia 30 years later, we experienced this in real life.

Thus, Vice President Kamala Harris disqualified herself from being a viable candidate for the office of the president of the United States because of her severe lack of knowledge of both economics and the law.

Can anybody imagine the bureaucracy that would be required to determine the prices of thousands of items in our supermarket? Who would be authorized to determine these prices?

The inspector, the government central planning office or the Party, like in the communist Czechoslovakia? 

Finally, how would such prices be determined without knowing the costs and necessary profits, only because somebody thinks that the prices are “high”?

I would therefore recommend to everybody to vote for former President Trump. He ran the country as a business and it showed: One of the lowest unemployment numbers of black people in history and one of the lowest overall unemployment rates since 1959. The national economy skyrocketed because President Trump cancelled a multitude of Obama-era regulations that were hamstringing business. 

As business provides employment and pays wages, President Trump’s opponents dishonestly describe this as Trump “preferring business.”

In the international arena, former president Trump achieved the “impossible” while he was not even in office, according to NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg: By threatening Europeans that he would not defend them if he becomes president unless they raise their defense expenditures closer to the agreed-upon 3 percent of GDP. The members of NATO swiftly increased their defense budgets earlier this year.

The problem here is that Europeans as well as Canadians have been relying on U.S. taxpayers for their defense for decades. Yet, President Trump’s opponents were dishonestly falling all over themselves with charging that Trump wanted to “abandon” Europe and let Putin take it over.

On that note, it is symptomatic that the last three Democratic presidents of the United States, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris, are all lawyers—whereas the last three Republican presidents, including President Trump, are people with education in business and economics. All have experience running large businesses.

I remember President Bush the elder saying, “I am watching people working and meeting payroll and I am moved.” The fact remains that neither the last three Democratic presidents nor Vice President Kamala Harris were ever in a position where they would have to meet the payroll or run any kind of a business.

I am making this recommendation to vote for President Trump, being fully aware of his faults, the chief of them being his mistaken insistence on “stolen election,” in which he was also prodded by his accolades. He could sometimes act more “presidential,” whatever that means.

On the other hand, he was falsely impeached on the basis of a fraudulent “dossier” that claimed Trump was a Russian agent, which was ordered by the Hillary Clinton campaign and was paid for by the Democratic National Committee. Trump has been prosecuted and this prosecution has now been dropped for his nonsensically cavalier handling of classified documents, while neither Hillary Clinton nor President Biden were prosecuted for similar conduct. 

Trump is being falsely accused of organizing the January 6 riot, during which thugs trashed the Capitol and falsely claimed they were there “per request by President Trump” while Trump specifically urged his supporters to demonstrate peacefully. He is accused of alleged sexual misconduct that took place years before Trump entered politics, while we all well remember the confirmed sexual misconduct of JFK and Bill Clinton while they were in the White House.

Finally, there is that laughable prosecution for some of Trump’s business dealings.

Hate, political bias, assumptions without evidence and false accusations are not good guidance in selecting our next chief executive. For instance, the Washington Post assembled more than 30,000 alleged Trump “lies.”

As an example, Trump is being accused of “lying” when he said that “the economy of the country was in a dire state.” Do I have to remind everybody that assorted pundits and journos were forecasting a recession for the United States—and the economic model of Bloomberg News was “forecasting” with certainty a recession in November 2023 with a probability of 100 percent? This is merely a bad case of incompetence in economic forecasting, as the readily available economic data were pointing to no recession whatsoever. Most of the accusations of Trump’s “lying” are of such specious type.

On the other hand, was President Biden “lying” when he said during his State of the Union address that he already lowered the budget deficit by $1 trillion, or was he just being economical with the truth by twisting the facts a little? Or, was President Biden “lying” when he said that he inherited from his predecessor the national economy in shambles or was he just using the economic slump caused by the COVID-19 epidemic for his political purposes?

In my opinion, it is unseemly to accuse a president, any president, of lying. By the same token, it is unfortunate that our candidates regularly resort to accusing each other of “lying,” of trying to destroy American democracy or the newest thing—being weird—instead of discussing the matters of politics and economics in an intelligent manner.

Ivan Orisek lives in Forestburgh, NY.