Price controls are economic dictatorship.

 

It has been said that free trade of the free market means the sovereignty of the consumer. And so effective, so necessary, so ineluctable is this sovereignty that, not even the communist economic can suppress it completely. And as the consumer is the public in general, without distinction of rank or fortune, the free market is the most obvious expression of the sovereignty of the people and the best guarantee of democracy.

 

Individual guarantees stated in writing in the constitution are of no use to a nation if it is not the people, but a third party, whether government or trade-union, that fixes prices and wages and determines what is to be produced and what is to be sold; for in that case the people, are being deprived of their right of free choice in the market, i.e., their right to assign everything the rank and the value it suites them to give it, from being sovereign are reduced to the status of slaves.

 

Control of the market by the governmental authorities is the instrument of the modern dictatorship, much less cruel in appearance, much less spectacular, but for more effective than the police and resorting to naked force.

 

The sovereignty of the consumer does not mean the tyranny of the consumer, in other words if the consumer wants to purchase a product of which supply and demand exist the free market will set the proper price. Increasing or decreasing as the market reacts to the consumers activities. 

 

Economic dictatorship deprives the people.

 

Neither does a free market involve the dictatorship of the producer or of the merchant. Economic dictatorship arises when production and trade are withdrawn from the mechanism of the market by the action of the governmental authorities. Then either the consumer nor the seller is sovereign, but only the dictatorship of the bureaucracy over both.

 

From the book: Essentials of economics – Faustino Ballve pages 16-18

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