How about every standard economics class you can find at a reasonable school? This is covered in high school and university economics courses. Oh, it's not usually stated as "price controls don't work", but it's covered.
It's quite simple: forcing the price of some good while allowing supply and demand to adjust accordingly necessarily causes them to adjust accordingly. Set prices too low and supply shrivels, leading to shortages. Set prices too high and demand falls off and searches for substitutes.
The ostensible goal of price controls is always just that: to set the price of some good so as to alleviate the burden on some class of people (either the producers or the consumers, depending on whether the price is set too high or too low).
The actual goal of price controls, if it's anything other than propaganda value ("look! we care about you! we're doing something you want!"), does get met. So in that sense price controls may work, of course, if the target of the propaganda is too dumb to understand they've been had or if they have no way to reject proposed price controls. But that's not the sense people want -- every consumer wants lower prices, and every producer wants bigger profits (which often, but not always, means higher prices).
All that said, you can make price controls work. Like, if you enslave some people (generally that would be producers, when you want to set an artificially low price on some good or service). Or maybe if automation reaches such levels that marginal costs are zero for most goods in most goods baskets -- I'm not sure if this has been studied.
I took high school and university economics, and they talked about rent controls and a few other price controls, and I agree that generally they probably aren't a good idea, but they never said that they could never work in those classes. Maybe I just went to a shitty school (Florida State University) but it wasn't a diploma mill or anything.
That said, your big rant isn't a citation, and saying "LOL IT'S IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL CLASS YOU GOOFBALL" doesn't really count. I'm looking for one prominent economist that has stated the price controls can never work.
Generally it's not a great idea to rely on high school or entry-level university courses as the final word on anything... for starters, what about situations where the price is already distorted by bad actors fucking with the supply levels, such as cartel or monopolist situations?
You've been replying to questions about specific situations with generalities! That's not compelling.
Hell, oil was at $100+ a barrel for years within the past decade, without the same level of gasoline prices seen today in the US: that suggests there's more to the current situation then just econ-101 "high input prices mean output price has to be high too".
Why do manufacturers sometimes set retail pricing, aren’t those price controls? AIUI, some products have minimum contractual prices that retailers have to sell for.
I’m not an economist, and I tend to see economics “laws” more akin to social science than physics. Ie, economists describe plausible mechanisms and principles, but they are not very useful to make predictions.
Manufacturers are not interest in maximising their social benefit: they want to maximise their profit and this is done by producing fewer items but at a higher price (to be technical, a monopoly would produce until marginal revenue = marginal cost).
Manufacturers can set recommended retail prices but their are limitations to how these can be enforced.
> Why do manufacturers sometimes set retail pricing
depending on how it is set - most manufacturers set a recommended price, rather than contractually obligate the retailer to sell at a particular price. It's an attempt at price-fixing (without it being price-fixing), but other manufacturers of the same goods could choose to lower their price for competition. It's not the same as price-control.
How about every standard economics class you can find at a reasonable school? This is covered in high school and university economics courses. Oh, it's not usually stated as "price controls don't work", but it's covered.
It's quite simple: forcing the price of some good while allowing supply and demand to adjust accordingly necessarily causes them to adjust accordingly. Set prices too low and supply shrivels, leading to shortages. Set prices too high and demand falls off and searches for substitutes.
The ostensible goal of price controls is always just that: to set the price of some good so as to alleviate the burden on some class of people (either the producers or the consumers, depending on whether the price is set too high or too low).
The actual goal of price controls, if it's anything other than propaganda value ("look! we care about you! we're doing something you want!"), does get met. So in that sense price controls may work, of course, if the target of the propaganda is too dumb to understand they've been had or if they have no way to reject proposed price controls. But that's not the sense people want -- every consumer wants lower prices, and every producer wants bigger profits (which often, but not always, means higher prices).
All that said, you can make price controls work. Like, if you enslave some people (generally that would be producers, when you want to set an artificially low price on some good or service). Or maybe if automation reaches such levels that marginal costs are zero for most goods in most goods baskets -- I'm not sure if this has been studied.