The child tax credit is OK with me, though our “kids” are in their 50s.

But building three million housing units? By whom? By the government? Are we getting into the era of complaints about “not enough council housing being built” like in the U.K. or socialist Sweden?

The last time I checked, there was no shortage of housing in the United States of the kind we find abroad. Throwing three million housing units on the real estate market over time would surely increase the supply and lower the prices. 

But the best way to accomplish an increase in the supply of housing and thus lower the price of real estate, which may be what VP Harris has in mind, would be to make it easier for the developers to build more through tax credits and tax abatement plus removing, within reason, the red tape regarding zoning laws.

The worst part of the proposal is the “fight against the price gouging at the grocery stores.”

This has been tried in socialist and communist countries where it failed. The debacle of the communist command economies of Eastern Europe will serve as proof.

Specifically, in the communist country of my birth (which will remain nameless), we had a central price control office that sent inspectors to check on the individual grocery stores about their prices. So who would determine, according to VP Harris’s plan, what prices would be deemed “reasonable” that the individual grocery store would be allowed to charge? The inspector? The government? In our case, the price was determined by an organ of the communist party.

One can easily imagine what kind of a bloated bureaucracy would be required to accomplish such a decadent and counterproductive task.

What VP Harris is proposing here are socialist and communist price controls. Indeed, in communist countries such a non-workable price control system was soon scrapped in favor of direct control—the government under the leading role of the communist party simply decreed the fixed prices for all products. 

Thus, the price was dreamed up by a bureaucrat at the Central Planning Commission with no knowledge of the costs and necessary profits. And this simple economic fact was the main reason for the collapse of the communist-command economies of Eastern Europe.

For in our capitalist national economy of free enterprise, the prices are automatically controlled by supply and demand. Specifically, the prices are pushed down by competition to a minimum that still allows for the recovery of the costs plus a reasonable profit that still makes it possible to stay in business. Those who do not obey this simple rule do not stay in business for too long.

The occasional complaints about the alleged price gouging, namely complaints by those who never had to bite their nails every night thinking about how to pay the suppliers and the employees notwithstanding.

Ivan Orisek
Forestburgh, NY