Weber’s backing for the claim that Harris may be the next Joseph Stalin? Her talk of “price controls.”
However, Weber was less terrified of overweening statism this July when he co-signed a letter requesting federal assistance in the wake of Hurricane Beryl.
"We would be remiss not to express our appreciation for your major disaster declaration earlier this week," then-acting-governor Dan Patrick wrote to "The Honorable Joseph R. Biden, Jr.” at the time.
On paper, “communism” means the public ownership of the means of industrial production — factories, offices, you name it — either by government or by worker cooperatives. The Tennessee Valley Authority, for example, is a 90-year-old state-owned enterprise that played a crucial role in the electrification and infrastructure development of rural Appalachia. The leaders we elect could take a vote tomorrow to abolish it, raise or lower its prices, privatize it or expand it — whichever we choose.
The same can’t be said for Exxon or Amazon or Facebook or Monsanto, because those are private corporations, beholden to the votes of boards of directors and shareholders, not "we the people."
Communism, on the flip side, would mean straight-up expropriating all major businesses and giving direct control over to deliberative bodies to run. Historically, just like abrupt mass privatizations, this has had decidedly mixed results — not least because plutocrats seldom take expropriation lying down, and only the most ruthless and morally flexible revolutionaries tend to survive.
Price controls aren’t the same thing as communism. President Richard Nixon, a fervent anti-communist, instituted price — and wage — controls in August 1971 in response to an inflation crisis. And candidate Harris has proposed nothing so bold. In a milquetoast Aug. 16 speech on creating an "opportunity economy," she suggested fining grocery store chains for gratuitous price hikes.
"We will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead," Harris said. "We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy; more competition means lower prices for you and your families."
That sounds a lot like an unplanned economy — the type to which Soviets applied the slur "anarchic production."
As Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout pointed out last month in The Atlantic, there's a well-established four-pronged legal definition of price-gouging, and the majority of U.S. states already have laws on the books forbidding it during emergencies. That includes Texas. Our state's Business & Commerce Code §17.46 outlaws "taking advantage of a disaster" by "selling or leasing fuel, food, medicine, lodging, building materials, construction tools, or another necessity at an exorbitant or excessive price."
So either you sincerely believe, as many Trump supporters conveniently doomsay, that inflation is a national emergency, or you don’t. But if you do, you can’t call Kamala Harris a “communist' without also calling the one-party state of Texas “communist” as well.
Having never graduated from the Wharton School of Business, the economic phenomena of inflation is well above my pay grade. Some contend it's mostly the result of corporate greed, others that it's mostly the Fed printing money. The strangest paper I read on the topic claimed that much of the price inflation we've experienced over the past four years was due to Republicans freaking out over Joe Biden's election.
I remember telling a pop-up cigar salesman once, “I have $20 to spend.” Wouldn't you know, he had the perfect $25 cigar just for me.
Point being, under the form of capitalism that actually exists, if you're expecting to pay more, you'll get charged more. And wouldn't you know, places where "Republicans live indeed have had significantly higher inflation than Democratic enclaves,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Evidently, right-wing media outlets "de-anchored" conservatives from the reality of consumer prices, and profit-maximizing corporations were only too happy to accommodate them.
By whatever rosy name, polling data from the lefty think tank Data For Progress found that a majority of likely voters in battleground states favor caps on rent increases and cutting the cost of prescription drugs in half. Red-baiting notwithstanding, those are, technically speaking, price controls.
Unlike some big-brained neoliberals though, we should resist the urge to cite esoteric economic indicators to dismiss the misery of everyday people, especially those on fixed incomes.
"Prices are coming down, but the things that seniors are spending on are going up," Mary Johnson, a Social Security and Medicare policy analyst, told Yahoo Finance this summer. Even though overall inflation is now under 3%, the standard of living for many older households is declining rather than improving, she added.
Isabella Weber is one of the good ones — meaning, economists.
“I happen to come from a family where we were living on a budget," she confided when accepting the Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize this May. "I remember how my mom would watch the [bargain] advertisements from supermarkets. If you tell a family like that, ‘[Inflation] is transitory, in two or three years, the storm will be gone,’ it's hypocritical, it's an unbearable message to send from someone who is sitting in front of a full fridge, probably in a fancy apartment in New York, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and going to the grocery store without even noticing how much they are paying.”
Similarly, hearing rich a-holes like Gov. Greg Abbott and washed-up talking head Bill O'Reilly complain about rising prices on behalf of us poors generally makes me want to toss my cookies. I will never live to witness the Star Trek communism of a planet Earth, united in peace, without money or a ruling class.
Until then, I'd wager it's more rational to worry about the domino-spread of "surge pricing” à la Uber than the notion that municipally owned grocery stores might usher in a Soviet-style dictatorship. By that standard, aren’t you a communist too?
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