Are price gouging laws communist? – Ecolib

The Economist argues that those who call price gouging laws “communist” are wrong. Three-quarters (at least) of US states, whether dominated by Democratic or Republican governments, have them on the books (“America’s anti-price gouging laws are too small to be communist”, April 22, 2024). In my opinion, those who use the epithet in this case are rather ignorant or sophistic. However, it is correct to label them collectivist.

Communism is a Marx-inspired ideology that relies on collective choices as opposed to individual choices for the regulation of society. (The Chinese government has abandoned Marx, but not collectivism, of which it is a standard-bearer.) Any form of price controls, including milder and periodic price gouging, is certainly collectivist but not necessarily communist. Communism is just one form of collectivism.

There are other forms of collectivism, also on the right, which explains the many price gouging laws in the US states, plus one at the federal level: the Defense Production Act, which the federal government often invokes, including during the (long) Covid emergency. On both the moderate left and moderate right sides of the conventional political axis, price gouging laws are an expression of collectivism with a human face. More extreme collectivist regimes impose more permanent, extensive, and arbitrary price controls.

Opposed to the different shades of left-wing and right-wing collectivism is individualism:from classical liberalism to the ideal of anarcho-capitalism–where individual choices have the prerogative to coordinate a spontaneous or self-regulated social order and define a minimal ethic. One should not be afraid of the terms ‘collectivism’ and ‘individualism’: they define the fundamental alternative in political philosophy.

“Price gouging” should of course be in scare quotes. Your preferred manufacturer or egg farmer is no more of a “price gouger” than your expensive babysitter or your own salary. Producers are happy to accept prices offered by customers, and the latter are happy when prices are reduced by competing suppliers. Consumers are happy to offer the prices of what they want, rather than go without. Many suppliers are willing to accept lower prices rather than leave the industry. No one is obliged to accept a price offer, while everyone is forced to accept state interference in their lives for fear of punishment. Market-determined prices serve to coordinate individual actions without government coercion. Nothing is perfect, but voluntary interrelationships through personal choices are generally preferable to prohibitions and obligations imposed by force.

Anthony de Jasay was a contrarian economist and political philosopher who described himself as: both a (classical) liberal and an anarchist. He expressed the fundamental distinction between collectivism (collective choices) and individualism (individual choices) by defining liberalism as the primacy of the latter; quotes from his book Social contract, free ride):

Liberalism means a broad assumption to decide individually on every issue whose structure lends itself, with approximately comparable ease, to both individual and collective choice.

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