Price controls don’t work; the US figured this out during WW2 when it just led to shortages, had spotty enforcement, and needed a gigantic bureaucracy to actual

Price controls don’t work; the US figured this out during WW2 when it just led to shortages, had spotty enforcement, and needed a gigantic bureaucracy to actually determine prices. It’s easy to see why price controls fail to work: if there’s 10 guys willing to pay 10 bucks for 10 apples, setting the maximum price of an apple to $1 isn’t gonna change the fact that more people want apples than there are apples. This either means queues so those most willing to queue gets things (the soviet model), black markets where things are bought at the true value (nonsensical official exchange rates see this), or a mixture of both (WW2 US). We currently have inflation because of a few things, mainly that there’s too much money chasing too few goods. So the equilibrium is that raised prices lead to people buying fewer things because they can’t afford as many, and a new supply/demand equilibrium is established. But of course this can’t happen if wages are also going up, as people just try to but the same always amount of things with their newly increased salary, and we’re back to the problem of not enough good again. The only way this gets solved is a mixture of increased supply of good, decreased demand through either decreasing real salaries, increasing real prices, and quantitative tightening. People don’t like hearing this, because hearing that you’ll meet to have less purchasing power in order for supply to meet demand means that things that you could afford previously can no longer be bought. Saying that wages shouldn’t go up is a non-starter, and rightfully so, which is how inflation-wage spirals get started. Basically, the only way out that’s politically feasible (I mean politics in the general sense of people interacting with each other, not government) is to trigger a recession and then everybody is forced to buy fewer things and nobody has to say “we’re not raising your salary because that just exacerbated the problem”.