Looking at that article, price controls are a broad topic (MSRPs are a price control, minimum wages are price controls, rent control is a price control, fixed p

Looking at that article, price controls are a broad topic (MSRPs are a price control, minimum wages are price controls, rent control is a price control, fixed prices for food are a price control), one that results in obvious economic deadweight (scalping, enforcement), and one which is generally pretty heterodox in economics. I'll give a real world example. In Canada, they privatised almost every public telecom in the country except Sasktel. Since Canada has lots of rural customers that would be unprofitable to service, connecting these customers is subsidised by the government, in return for the companies among other things accepting price controls on what they both charge companies and also charge 3rd party providers piggybacking off their infrastructure like MVNO's. Canada has some of the highest telecom prices in the entire world, so price controls at best were inadequate and at worst failed. Yet Saskatchewan notably pays less than the rest of the country, and that's because there's no incentive for them to collude with the big telecoms to raise prices, so they don't. He also mentions anti-trust, anti-trust is all well and good but historically only a very few companies get broken up and it tends to encumber than less than expected, Microsoft is doing OK. Taxing corporate profits more is almost totally hopeless, especially for something like Big Pharma which has countless means to shift around which country profit was realised in. Price controls for pharma make no sense, the government is artificially raising pharma prices through IP enforcement, just don't enforce their patents and you'll have lower drug spending and lower enforcement costs. Why do governments enforce patents for tax dodgers anyways? To me, I feel like Reich is dancing around the crux of the issue, talking about moderate approaches which mostly buy into the status quo, talking about things like price controls with a degree of embarrassment.