Pyro as Bill said:
Nobody taught you that price controls are the quickest way to make a bad situation worse? Bakers make bread for 9 cents and sell for 10 cents. Government increases money supply causing inflation. It now costs bakers 10 cents to make bread and they have to sell at 11 cents. Gov decrees bread must be capped at 10 cents (no profit for the bakers). Bakers stop making bread for the poor and bake cakes for the rich instead. No bread on shelves but black market bread is available at 20 cents (risk-reward cost for breaking law). The poor starve, the rich get cheaper cake. Socialism wins again. |
Price controls on items like housing, not on food or food ingredients. You have a situation now where companies like Exxon make billions more every time a natural disaster happens. Regardless of if they are actually affected or not, they raise prices to increase profit. Summer time and more people driving? Raise prices. Does it actually cost more to make gasoline in the summer? No. Housing is in a similar situation, rent or even a mortgage on a house that cost maybe 20K to build is going for $1 million because of its location, cities like SF, LA etc. Setting a cap on price based on square footage would help the housing market greatly. How is my house worth 300K now when I only bought it for 150K? It sold before I bought it for 450K. It’s not a collector car, it’s a house. Making things like car insurance mandatory but not creating a limit on price only allows the companies to gouge you and leaves you defenseless against it. Creating a high minimum wage just increases inflation since now all food items will cost more, do you think the restaurants will only increase the price to offset the new labor? No, they will increase it to offset plus some and end up making more money while the person with the new "high wage" now ends paying an even higher percentage of their income for the same items.
Items like electricity, gasoline, natural gas etc. are all a required item to live now. Even having Solar on your house doesn’t get you “off-grid”, you still need to keep your house connected and pay the connection fees. Once an item becomes required or mandatory it needs to 100% be regulated and pricing controlled.
