“I’ve got those
Payday-Friday
Grocery store blues.”
That working-class-lament is from an old bluegrass song, but millions of working stiffs are singing it today. While many workers have finally seen an uptick in their paychecks, they’ve been dismayed to see the increase quickly gobbled up by jacked-up grocery prices. What the hell?
Kamala Harris has had the honesty to call it what it is: Gouging. And, to put some bite in her bark, she’s proposing a long-overdue, national ban on rip-off pricing by food giants. Of course, this produced outraged squeals by corporate functionaries. But some of the most furious squealing is coming from a supposedly unbiased corner of America’s economic structure: Economists.
A little-known secret of this occult profession is that most economists are schooled by and working for the corporate order, generally hostile to consumers, workers and other competing interests. One absolute rule they learn is that NONE of the inequities and iniquities of America’s laissez-fairyland economy are to be blamed on corporate greed.
Thus, a whole pack of mainline economists raced to poo-pooh Harris’ price-gouging charge, asserting that grocery prices have naturally surged due to what they benignly call “price pack architecture.”
Bovine excrement! Price gouging cannot be perfumed by semantics – it is mass swindling, and people can detect it by its stench. So, let’s follow that stench to its anti-free enterprise source: Monopoly. For the past half century, economists in both Republican and Democratic administrations have looked the other way, allowing food giants to consolidate and conglomerate, shut out competitors, monopolize every aspect of the food economy… and steal.
It’s that theft that Harris is daring to challenge, and Americans will cheer her on – no matter how furiously establishment economists squeal.
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