The dark history of 20th-century Communism offers many lessons about the nature of power.
For instance, when it comes to alleged undesirables, Communism’s pattern reveals a very small step from restriction to outright elimination.
In related news, according to the Wall Street Journal, industry representatives have pushed back against Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s Communist-like proposal for a federal ban on alleged “price gouging” in the food industry.
For instance, Andy Harig, a vice president at the food industry association FMI, which represents retailers, producers and others involved in the industry, used overly charitable language in characterizing Harris’s proposal as amateurish.
“We understand why there is this sticker shock and why it’s upsetting,” Harig said. “But to automatically just say there’s got to be something nefarious, I think to us that is oversimplified.”
The National Grocers Association offered a more pointed criticism.
“The proposal calling for a ban on grocery price gouging is a solution in search of a problem,” the NGA said.
Harris, an intellectual lightweight and thus an instinctive Marxist, has proposed using the federal bureaucracy to fight rising food prices.
More specifically, she would entrust the Federal Trade Commission with cracking down on ill-defined excess profits.
Would a Kamala Harris presidency be a disaster for the economy?
In other words, she has pledged to reduce inflation by empowering its primary culprits. After all, federal bureaucrats amount to parasites on private wealth. They generate no value of their own but merely subsist on the federal government’s inflationary spending.
Unsurprisingly, Harris’s proposed federal ban has encountered resistance from conservative voices.
For instance, in recent days the New York Post headline-inspired hashtag #Kamunism has trended on the social media platform X.
This is how you have hoarding, food shortages, and a black market for groceries.
Next thing the government will issue you ration stamps and you’ll buy your food at a government store.#Kamunism
— Eric Matheny 🎙️ (@ericmmatheny) August 18, 2024
Meanwhile, in an unexpected development, establishment media sources have also panned Harris’s Soviet-style proposal.
Of course, one need not engage in hyperbole to note that 20th-century Communist regimes always resorted to price controls.
But we must also remember that price controls constituted a mere tool in a much larger and more sinister plan.
In the 1920s, for reasons entirely pragmatic, the Soviet Union’s ruling Communist Party permitted some prosperous farmers, known as kulaks, to continue growing food for profit.
Then, as the 1930s approached, Soviet premier and murderous tyrant Joseph Stalin decided to eliminate the kulaks. In short, he needed to make way for the state-owned collective farms that would replace the capitalists.
“That is why we have recently passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class,” Stalin said in a 1929 speech on agrarian policy.
Some modern scholars treat the resulting famine in Ukraine as a genocide.
Harris’s proposed restriction on “price gouging” as defined by federal bureaucrats might not have the same Stalinist intent. But it derives justification from the same crackpot Marxist theories. And it would have catastrophic results.
In short, by restricting food prices, Harris would eliminate a good deal of food.
