With inflation hitting Americans at the highest level in forty years, the debate over price controls, a policy tool long considered defunct, seems to be reigniting. As prices surge, many prominent economists including Robert Reich, the former US Secretary of Labor, and Todd Tucker, Director of Industrial Policy and Trade at the Roosevelt Institute, have recently come out in favor of government-imposed price controls.
Even the UK’s new conservative prime minister, Liz Truss, announced a plan to fight inflation by capping household energy prices.
Regardless of whom you blame for the inflation, there could not be a worse way of fighting it than with interventionist price-control measures. As any Econ 101 student could tell you, prices naturally settle at the point where supply meets demand in a market economy. But when the government imposes an artificial cap on prices, supply declines and demand increases, creating a shortage. After all, companies are less inclined to create and distribute products if they can’t get a good price for them. In a survey of forty-one academic economists recently conducted by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, sixty-one percent said that price controls like those imposed in the 1970s would fail to “successfully reduce U.S. inflation over the next twelve months.” Just 23 percent of those who responded said price controls could reduce inflation (and all reported lower levels of confidence in their prediction).
For older Americans, the price control debate is nothing new. In August of 1971, President Richard Nixon announced a 90-day freeze on most wages, prices, and rents. It was a short-sighted attempt to combat the rise of consumer prices that had reached their fastest pace since the Korean War. Following Nixon’s announcement, markets rallied, and seventy percent of Americans backed the plan in polls. However, Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman predicted Nixon’s plan would end “in utter failure and the emergence into the open of the suppressed inflation.” As predicted, prices soared as soon as controls were lifted, exposing the frailty of government interference with pricing.
Among the many bizarre and tragic consequences of Nixon’s price controls was the appalling specter of farmers drowning millions of baby chicks (or gassing them).
As the price for chickens was controlled, but the price of the grain used to feed them was not, they could no longer be sold profitably. Sadly, this meant that the only way for the farmers to avoid losses was to kill them. This is but one example of the unintended consequences of excessive government intervention that prevents market forces from operating.
When left to their own devices, prices tell us vital information about our economy. They pinpoint scarce resources, indicate consumers’ wants, and drive entrepreneurship and innovation. But when the government attempts to cap prices to “protect” consumers, this information becomes distorted.
On an emotional level, the impulse for price controls is understandable. It’s easy to look at your surging gas station or grocery store bill and long for the temporary relief that lower prices would bring. However, avoiding this misguided extreme will allow for a much clearer picture of the state of our economy moving forward and allow us to focus on responses that will actually bring down inflation.
Aadi Golchha is an economic commentator and writer, proudly advocating for the principles of free enterprise. He is also the host of The Economics Review podcast.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
In 1937, Boris Orman was working at a bakery in Russia when he shared a joke over tea with his colleague.
“Stalin was out swimming, but he began to drown. A peasant who was passing by jumped in and pulled him safely to shore,” the joke went, according to British writer Jonathan Waterlow. “Stalin asked the peasant what he would like as a reward. Realising whom he had saved, the peasant cried out: ‘Nothing! Just please don’t tell anyone I saved you!’”
The joke is hardly the funniest ever told, but Orman was nevertheless one of countless Russians in the Soviet Union who received a 10-year stint in a labor camp for uttering the jibe. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, got off a bit easier. He received a mere eight-year sentence in the Gulag after Soviet authorities intercepted a letter he wrote to a friend in 1945 that made a crack about Stalin and criticized the Soviet system.
One might be tempted to think the Soviets just had really bad senses of humor, but there’s a reason totalitarians and authoritarians seek to suppress jokes.
History shows humor is a tool that empowers. It can fortify humans during dark and deadly times, and it can destroy an idea just as effectively as reason, though it’s arguably most powerful when it’s combined with reason.
The most famous such example might be Jonathan Swift’s classic essay A Modest Proposal, a masterpiece of satire that exposed the impoverished conditions of the time by saying poor Irish families could alleviate their condition by selling their excess children to rich people for food.
Combining humor with pointed social commentary is a strategy employed by countless comedians—old and new—including Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Dave Chappelle, and Bill Burr.
Which brings me to Mike Judge.
Beavis and Butt-Head on White Privilege
Judge, a writer, animator, and director, is probably best known for Beavis and Butt-Head, an animated show that ran on MTV in the 1990s and was turned into a feature film, Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, released in 1996.
Since then, Beavis and Butt-Head have mostly been retired, as Judge turned to numerous other projects, including Office Space (1999), Idiocracy (2006), and the HBO hit show Silicon Valley (2014-2019). But Beavis and Butt-head—a pair of metal head morons who snicker at childish things and make crass observations about “babes” and “scoring”—are back.
Earlier this month, a trailer of a new Beavis and Butt-head movie dropped, announcing a June 23 release date (available exclusively on Paramount+) and a plot as bad as one would expect.
Our “heroes” stumble their way to space camp after destroying their school’s science fair exhibit. The lads’ penchant for sexual metaphors lands them a gig on a real space shuttle, and that’s where the time-traveling plot kicks in.
The boys sabotage the mission and enter a black hole. The snafu catapults them from the ’90s to 2022, but their space commandeer (Andrea Savage) is hot on their trail. She’s now a governor with political ambition to burn, and the boys’ survival threatens her ascent.
This sounds silly—especially when the trailer shows Beavis and Butt-head rehashing the same crude jokes and acts they were 30 years earlier (“I am Cornholio; I need TP for my bunghole”)—but that is precisely what is making it attractive to audiences.
“This is one of the stupidest concepts for a Beavis and Butthead movie I can imagine,” one YouTube commenter said, “it’s perfect.”
Not all the jokes are rehashed, however. A subsequent clip dropped, and it explores a theme that Beavis and Butt-head audiences in the 1990s never heard of: white privilege.
The clip shows Beavis and Butt-head in college, where they appear to walk into class late and are reprimanded by their professor.
“This is a classic case of white privilege,” the instructor explains. “And you both have it.”
The duo have no idea what white privilege is, but several members of their class are kind enough to explain it to them.
“So, white privilege is when people, particularly men, automatically assume they can take whatever they want,” one young woman explains.
“And they never have to worry about getting stopped by the police,” another chimes in.
“And they have the inside track for any jobs …”
You get the idea. The funniest part of the clip is that, unlike most people, Beavis and Butt-head are not offended or ashamed when they hear this. They are excited.
“Whoa,” Butt-head says. “And we have that?”
“You sure do,” the professor answers.
Naturally, Beavis and Butt-head decide to use this newly-discovered power, but things don’t go as planned.
Why Beavis and Butt-head Are a Threat
For those less familiar with white privilege, it’s just one aspect of a larger intellectual movement known as Critical Race Theory (CRT). Writers at FEE and other prominent thinkers have explained at length why CRT is a dangerous and damaging philosophy, one that undermines individuality, fosters a victimhood mindset, and divides along racial lines instead of uniting us in our common humanity.
Making the philosophical case against CRT is important, but I don’t think I’ve seen a single scholarly article or lecture expose white privilege and its talking points as effectively as Mike Judge did in that two-minute Beavis and Butt-head clip.
Which brings me back to the power of humor.
Satire and humor still have the power to destroy ideas, perhaps more than ever. This is precisely why comedians like Dave Chappelle and sites like The Babylon Bee have become targets of the woke movement, which continues in its effort to suppress speech that violates its dogmas on race, gender, and class.
Fortunately, today’s commentators in America don’t face prison sentences like Boris Orman and Alexander Solzhenitsyn did when they make jokes criticizing the ascendant orthodoxy, but they still face risks.
Efforts to have Chappelle fired over his comedy show “The Closer,” which included the trans community among its many targets, failed. The Babylon Beehas been suspended by Twitter for referring to Health and Human Services Secretary Rachel Levine, a biological man who identifies as a woman, as a man, but the Bee is still publishing.
The actions against Chappelle, the Bee, and other creators have a clear chilling effect on expression, which is the entire point of cancel culture. Today’s elites, like those of the twentieth century, clearly recognize that humor has the power to undermine their ideas and power, which is why they work so hard to suppress it when it strays from the narrative.
Increasingly, however, creators refuse to be silenced. Beavis and Butt-head taking on white privilege is just the latest example.
With his two-minute takedown of CRT, Mike Judge didn’t just expose the absurdity of white privilege talking points; he won a victory for free expression and struck a blow to cancel culture.
This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.
Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
I was a fourteen-year-old freshman at St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute in Kenmore, N.Y. when I was assigned my first term paper for Mr. Chaya’s World History class. The list of topics included the Charge of the Light Brigade. That’s the one I picked.
Like any boy that age, I still retained a belief in the glory of war, something Tennyson seems never to have outgrown. This despite being trained in grammar school to scurry from my desk and duck against the wall under the classroom window when the air raid siren sounded.
The possibility of being nuked by the Soviet Union at any moment had been a fact of life for all of my life at that point and would be for twelve more years.
The term paper assignment was the first time I was asked to research a historical event, rather than just read a textbook summary about it. By the time I finished, I had my first inkling that “military intelligence” might just be an oxymoron and perhaps war wasn’t the glorious affair Tennyson had cracked it up to be.
To this day, when I hear the lyrics, “a good old-fashioned, bullet-headed, Saxon mother’s son” in the Beatles song “Bungalow Bill,” I think of James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, who led the aforementioned six hundred light cavalrymen into the teeth of Russian artillery.
The Charge of the Light Brigade occurred during the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War (1853-56). Despite the Light Brigade disaster, the port city finally fell to the British and French allies, but not before the Russian Empire sank its entire Black Sea fleet in the harbor to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.
That desperate act should provide a warning to Washington.
The Russians had to fight for Crimea again during the Russian Civil War following the Bolshevik revolution. It fell to the Germans during WWII after a bitter 250-day siege, only to be regained by the Red Army in 1944.
I never dreamed I’d be writing about the same port city thirty-six years after that first term paper. In 2016, the new global empire, the United States, having successfully orchestrated a color revolution to oust Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, was in a stare down with Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin over his annexation of Crimea.
Yanukovich had been falsely portrayed as “pro-Russian” by NATO in its haste to bring Ukraine into the European Union. The coup was the last straw for Putin after watching the U.S. break its promise to Gorbachev not to advance NATO “one inch eastward” in exchange for Gorbachev’s agreement to the 1990 reunification of Germany.
A look at a map of NATO in the ensuing 30 years since that promise puts a somewhat different light on Russia’s troop buildup on the Ukrainian border and at least calls into question just who is the aggressor in this situation.
As I wrote back in 2016, Sevastopol is one of the few reliable Russian ports that remains ice-free all winter. Syria is home to another. If that doesn’t inspire skepticism regarding Washington, D.C.’s humanitarian motives for orchestrating regime change operations in both countries—while remaining bosom buddies with the brutal regime in Saudi Arabia—then, as my friends in the American southeast would say, “bless your heart.”
President Biden told Reuters on New Year’s Eve that he had warned Putin, “if he goes into Ukraine, we will have severe sanctions. We will increase our presence in Europe, with our NATO allies, and there will be a heavy price to pay for it.”
Sanctions don’t sound too ominous if one has zero historical perspective, including, say, the “sanctions” against the Japanese Empire in 1941. It doesn’t really matter who was right or wrong. Sanctions eventually lead to war if their consequences become dire enough.
It doesn’t matter so much who is right or wrong on the matter of Ukraine, either. The reality is this: The Russians are never going to give up that port. They’ve bled for it in the past far more than any American army has ever bled for anything. It is an existential matter for them.
In 1856, they sank their entire Black Sea navy before giving up Sevastopol. What would they be willing to do today?
Meanwhile, it would make not one iota of difference to Americans living in the United States if Russia annexed all of Ukraine, much less Crimea. Washington’s interests in the region are purely imperial and contrary to those of most U.S. citizens. It is also questionable that the U.S. could win a limited conflict in the region against Russia, given the logistics.
It is equally unrealistic that Russia could win a full-scale conventional war against NATO. The U.S. alone had a military budget in 2020 more than ten times that of Russia. That would leave Russia with only one alternative before surrender.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington has thought of itself as the “shining city on the hill” leading a “new world order” of democracy and peace. Considering its recent exploits in the Middle East and Ukraine, in 2021 it more resembles a drunk bully stumbling around the world slurring its words and picking fights with smaller opponents.
That Russia can be treated likewise is as divorced from reality as Washington’s belief it can stop the spread of a respiratory virus with lockdowns and vaccine mandates. But as damaging as the COVID Regime has been to American society, Washington’s delusions about bringing Russia to its knees could result in far worse.
