As Democrats whoop it up at their somewhat vestigial (they’ve already nominated Kamala Harris for president in a “virtual vote”) national convention in Chicago, they seem relatively enthused by her economic platform — far more enthused than American consumers will be with its results if implemented.

Two features in particular stand out for their combination of economic ignorance, likely disastrous results, and, unfortunately, political popularity.

First, Harris proposes a federal ban on “price gouging” by sellers of food and groceries.

Second, she touts $25,000  in “down payment assistance” for first-time homebuyers.

Yes, “price gouging” sounds like a bad thing (that’s why it’s called “gouging,” to make it sound bad.) The real term for laws against it is “price controls.”

We’ve tried price controls in the past, and the results are in: They always result in shortages.

Maybe you’ll pay less for that head of lettuce or package of ground beef … if you can find it. But you’re a lot less likely to find it.

Holding prices artificially low by government edict tells producers — at least those producers who aren’t just wiped out of business entirely — that their money is better invested in something other than the price-controlled products.

By all means, enjoy that $3.99 ribeye that isn’t on the shelf in the spot marked “ribeye” when you do your shopping.

As for handing out $25,000 checks to millions of home-buyers, the main effect will be to drive up the price of that house you want to buy … by about $25,000. The word for more money chasing the same amount of goods is “inflation.”

Sure, more houses might get built (especially since Harris also proposes tax credits for homebuilders), but they’ll be more expensive houses.  A government check on the front end won’t reduce your final cost on the back end. Maybe the $25,000 will get you closer to your down payment, but your mortgage payments will be higher or go on for longer.

Not that her major party opponent’s plans make any more sense.

Donald Trump’s “Tariff Man” act, which Harris criticizes even though Joe Biden just continued the Trump-era tariffs and even added some new ones, has been jacking up your cost of living for several years now … and he’s promised to put that on steroids.

Nor does either candidate offer any serious proposals to cut federal spending and balance the federal budget. It’s all tax and spend, all day long, in every direction.

OK, not EVERY direction. If Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver wins in November, he’ll whip out his veto pen and push Congress to cut its spending, pay down its debt, and get its grubby hands out of your pockets.

Yes, I know how unlikely that is. But a man can dream.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“If voting could change anything,” Robert S. Borden wrote in 1976,  “it would be made illegal.” That’s just one variation of a claim enjoying continuous popularity — and common  misattributions to Mark Twain, Phillip Berrigan, Emma Goldman and others — among the politics-skeptical commentariat.

It’s popular because it embodies a self-evident truth. Libertarian podcaster Tom Woods put a finer, more foreign policy specific, point on it: “No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.”

Even after so-called “change” elections, policy shifts tend to be minor and occur at the margins, no matter how revolutionary and game-changing they may sound.

It’s always about raising or lowering income tax rates, never about getting the government’s hands out of our pockets.

It’s always about tweaking, never eliminating, government control of healthcare.

It’s always about “managing” international trade with tariffs and regulations to supposedly benefit domestic firms, never about getting out of trade’s way so as to maximize prosperity for everyone.

It’s always about which “allies” to support or “enemies” to attack abroad, and how generously or violently, never about how to wind the war machine down completely and get the US government back to minding its own business.

None of those results are your fault because you voted for the “wrong” candidates.

Nor, for the most part, is it really the fault of the particular candidates themselves, though it might feel that way.

Remember when many Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008, convincing themselves he was a “peace” candidate? Heck, he may have even believed that himself. But he turned out to be, per Woods, mostly John McCain, keeping the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and embroiling it in (among other impending wars) Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.

Whatever Obama really wanted to do, he found himself a figurehead strapped atop a very large machine with controls — steering wheel, gear shift, accelerator, brake pedal — disconnected from the engine, transmission, throttle or brakes. The horn worked quite well, and he could and did blow it loudly, but that was about it.

If you’re discouraged, I’m doing my job well here. No matter how hard you vote, you’re really just one of millions of judges in a beauty pageant.

Sure, someone will get a bouquet of roses and a fancy sash before embarking on a tour of pep talks, but no matter how well they did in the evening gown or swimsuit competition, none of their gum-flapping about world peace and mutual understanding in the interview section will result in world peace or mutual understanding.

The point of these competitions is to keep the sponsoring organizations going with maximum donations, ad revenues, etc.

The contestants, winners, and fans being made to feel they’re part of something bigger themselves by watching, are mere means to those ends.

Ditto politics. Politicians and voters are just means to the state’s built-in end of, as philosopher Anthony de Jasay put it, maximizing its own discretionary power.

Vote? Sure, why not? But don’t convince yourself you’re making an earth-shaking difference by doing so.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“On its current trajectory,”  Craig Martin & Scott Moore write at Foreign Affairs, “the world is unlikely to meet the limits it set for itself in the 2015 Paris Agreement to halt global warming. … As this reality sets in, once fringe ideas about how to artificially cool the planet are gaining traction. One such idea is lowering global temperatures by effectively shading the planet, a process known as solar geoengineering.”

The premise of solar geoengineering is simple: If we reduce the amount of sunlight (and accompanying heat) that reaches the surface of the planet, we get lower temperatures.

The devil isn’t just in the details — do we seed the upper atmosphere with sulfates, spray seawater into clouds to lighten their color and make them reflect sunlight, maybe even park a gigantic Mylar (TM) mirror in orbit? — but in the fact that cooling the planet portends negative as well as positive consequences. Lower crop yields in some agricultural zones, for example. More violent/damaging weather in certain areas, too. Good things we can maybe predict, bad things we can’t necessarily foresee.

That makes the whole idea a political problem that, Martin and Moore write, “will require a new multilateral treaty with the primary purpose of prohibiting unauthorized deployment and establishing a collective decision-making process for approving and governing any potential future use.”

Count on a long wait and a great deal of acrimony before something, anything, might actually happen … unless rogue state or non-state actors take matters into their own hands. For a gripping fictional account of what that might look like, read Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. You’ll learn a lot, and enjoy the learning.

Let’s look at this from four highly debatable, but not implausible, premises:

First, the earth is warming, at least partly due to human action.

Second, the warming represents something at least approaching an existential crisis for humanity, making life — on balance — worse for humanity and maybe, MAYBE even portending our eventual extinction.

Third, most of humanity is NOT going to abandon the Industrial Revolution and its consequences — healthier, longer, more prosperous lives — to stop the warming.

Fourth, the that Revolution isn’t moving fast enough to get us to “net zero emissions” (with the supposed benefit of ending the warming) in a timely manner.

If those four things are true — and, like I said, they are all debatable — then the alternative seems to be “do some solar geoengineering” or “get used to living in an oven that’s still pre-heating with no top in sight.” The nature of politics probably sticks us with the latter.

As a libertarian, I’d naturally like to see matters resolved with minimal if any government involvement … but figuring out what level of “pollution” constitutes an actionable tort, or how to penalize those whose externalities warm up my house in ways that modify their behavior, may prove even more complicated than “a new multilateral treaty with the primary purpose of prohibiting unauthorized deployment and establishing a collective decision-making process for approving and governing any potential future use.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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