The Economist argues that these calling price-gouging legal guidelines “communist” are fallacious. Three-fourths (a minimum of) of American states, whether or not dominated by Democratic or Republican governments, have them on the books (“America’s Anti-Price-Gouging Laws Are Too Minor to Be Communist,” April 22, 2024). For my part, those that use the epithet on this occasion are reasonably ignorant or sophistical. Labelling them collectivist, nevertheless, is right.
Communism is a Marx-inspired ideology that depends on collective selections versus particular person selections for the regulation of society. (The Chinese language authorities has deserted Marx however not collectivism, of which it’s a commonplace bearer.) Any kind of worth management, together with milder and intermittent price-gouging caps, is definitely collectivist however not essentially communist. Communism is only one type of collectivism.
There are different types of collectivism together with on the suitable, which explains the various price-gouging legal guidelines throughout American states, plus one on the federal stage—the Protection Manufacturing Act, typically invoked by the federal authorities together with throughout the (prolonged) Covid emergency. On each the moderate-left and moderate-right sides of the traditional political axis, price-gouging legal guidelines are a manifestation of collectivism with a human face. Extra excessive collectivist regimes impose extra everlasting, intensive, and arbitrary worth controls.
Against the totally different shades of left and proper collectivism stands individualism—from classical liberalism to the best of anarcho-capitalism—the place particular person selections are privileged to coordinate a spontaneous or autoregulated social order and to outline a minimal ethics. One shouldn’t be afraid of the phrases “collectivism” and “individualism”: they outline the elemental different in political philosophy.
“Price gouging” ought to after all put in scare quotes. Your most well-liked producer or egg farmer shouldn’t be extra of a “price gouger” than your costly babysitter or your personal wage. Producers are pleased to just accept costs bid up by clients and the latter are pleased to have costs bid down by competing suppliers. Customers are pleased to bid up the costs of what they need as an alternative of going with out it. Many suppliers are keen to just accept decrease costs reasonably than leaving the trade. No one is obliged to just accept a worth proposal, whereas everyone is compelled to just accept state interference in his life underneath worry of punishment. Market-determined costs serve to coordinate particular person actions with out coercion from authority. Nothing is ideal however voluntary interrelations by means of non-public selections are typically preferable to prohibitions and obligations imposed by drive.
Anthony de Jasay was a contrarian economist and political thinker who outlined himself as each a (classical) liberal and an anarchist. He expressed the elemental distinction between collectivism (collective selections) and individualism (particular person selections) by defining liberalism because the primacy of the latter; quoting from his e book Social Contract, Free Experience):
Liberalism … means a broad presumption of deciding individually any matter whose construction lends itself, with roughly comparable comfort, to each particular person and collective selection.
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A monument to Karl Marx in Chemnitz, (East) Germany
