Is Kamala Harris Really that Dumb or is she just a Demagogue?

by Rod Williams, August 21, 2024 - If you thought the Jewish space lasers causing California wildfires was a weird conspiracy theory, or that the theory that Kamala Harris' crowds were really AI generated images was kind of nuts, well, Kamala Harris has topped that. If you thought blaming American crime and inflation and housing shortages on illegal immigrants was demagoguery, well Kamala Harris has topped that. 

Kamala Harris believes that high food prices are based on price gouging.  To believe that you must believe that thousands upon thousands of people across the world are colluding in a massive conspiracy to set prices. This would really be a big conspiracy- more complex than the fake moon landing or the 9-11 as an inside job. 

If she believes wage and price controls can fix this non-existent problem, then maybe Donald Trump is on to something when he says she is not a smart person. I don't think she is really that dumb. I think she is a demagogue responding to a pubic that wants scapegoats and simple answers. 

Kevin Williamson writing in The Dispatch explained it like this: 

Why doesn’t a Big Mac cost $500? Why doesn’t a pack of socks at Walmart cost $500? “Well, nobody would pay that!” comes the usual answer. Au contraire mon frère! People will pay $500 for a hamburger—and some people will pay $5,000 for a hamburger. And $500 for a six-pack of socks? Pantherella does a brisk business in socks at that price point. “Oh, but those are super-high-end luxury goods!” you may retort. Of course—and in most of the world, for most of human history, paying somebody else to cook you a meal was a 1-percenter luxury good, too. But the luxury goods are interesting for the same reason the bargain-basement goods are interesting: because in a robust marketplace, you have lots of buyers and lots of sellers, and lots of products at lots of price points. So you can buy your tailored silk socks for $80 a pair or buy 300 on Amazon for 22 cents a pair. There are a lot of car buyers and car sellers in the United States, and a lot of good options at different price points. 

The food market is, as you might expect, a big one: There are a lot of different places to buy groceries in the United States, from big corporate behemoths such as Walmart and Amazon (which owns Whole Foods Markets) to the major national chains such as Kroger (which is, among other things, the largest sushi seller in the country, as well as the owner of Southern California’s beloved Ralphs, no apostrophe), to more regional concerns such as Meijer (“Meijer’s” if you are from Michigan) or Piggly Wiggly (which is a real thing in the South!). There are also locally owned independent shops, and insufferably twee people such as the Williamsons may sometimes get up on a Saturday morning and go down to the local farmer’s market and buy bacon from a guy who was personally acquainted with the pig. Behind those consumer-facing retail outlets is a large and complex network of distributors—national and regional—warehouses, trucking and logistics operations, and, upstream of them, producers ranging from domestic farmers and ranchers to Israelis who sell us olive oil to Mexican lettuce farmers and Thai fruit-juice producers. We grow more than $700 million worth of tomatoes in the United States and import another $2.5 billion worth. We import seafood from India, potatoes from Canada, and meat from Australia (and New Zealand, and Mexico, and Italy, Canada, and Chile—we love the stuff). Millions upon millions of people and firms, billions of transactions, scores of countries—and, somehow, Kamala Harris imagines a shadowy figure behind it all, pulling the strings.

If you believe that food prices are high because of price gouging, I don't want to hear you try to tell me that Marjorie Taylor Green is an idiot.  

Top Stories