A $1,000 per month cash handout would grow the U.S economy by $2.5 trillion, new study says

[DonFerrari]

freedquaker said:

So explain how price regulation on the bread that you already understood doesn't work would suddenly work for anything else.

I already told on this very thread what happened to ALL prices being frozen in Brazil.

The real evidence of a full market like Brazil clearly showed what happened on government doing price control full scale instead of sanitizing it's own cost structure and debt heavy strategy.

And basically your solution to a market that is imperfect basically because of government control is increase government control? Makes zero sense and you know it. You may have 20 PhDs if you want, but infering that increasing something ineficient will make it efficient is bizarre to say the least.

Like I said, price controls may be good or bad for the economy and it is a case by case situation, varying between the type of markets and economies. Brazil and US are VERY DIFFERENT end of the spectrum, and a policy that works perfectly in one may not work at all in the other. I believe you are coming from a Brazil point of view, about which I do not have sufficient information and a subsequent analysis, so I will reserve judgment on that. But you should realize that you simply cannot generalize your conclusions from one country, even one time frame, even a market to all.

Like I said, if the market is highly IMPERFECT (oligopoly, monopolistic competition, imperfect competition etc.), then the prices, by definition, are already higher than the equilibrium level, with an aritifcially restricted market output. In this case, establishing or raising the minimum wage to the virtual market equilibrium levels would, at the same time,

a) decrease the marginal cost of labor (as it is simply zero at the frozen minimum wage up to the equilibrium point)
b) thus increase the employment and market output (reaching to the market equilibrium)

However, if you go beyond that equilibrium point and raise the minimum wage too much, then the both the employment, and market output along efficiency will fall again. The problem with developing countries like Brazil is (among others),

a) There are too many market imperfections that need to be tackled before price controls (which also make it real difficult to have a real direct and clear results from the policy decisions),
b) The populist policies usually push the wage controls too high (for the economic efficiency, not necessarily sufficient for a decent living).

The very same thing can be said for pretty much all other markets with certain caveats.

I'll agree with you, even more because you seem to understand that the government control contributes more to the problem than to the solution of most problems related to economy (mainly due to the excessive power in the hand of few helping to create or nurish the examples you gave of imperfect market).