The Soviet Legacy of Harris’s Price Control Plan

As Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party have rolled out their 2024 agenda at the DNC Convention in Chicago this week, the economic “solutions” advanced by the vice president have been eerily similar to the communist programs that reigned behind the Iron Curtain for more than 50 years.

Along with price controls – a central tenet of communist ideology – Harris has also proposed giving $25,000 to first-time homebuyers and allocating a total of $1.7 trillion in government handouts despite the country’s ballooning $35 trillion national debt. Add to this Harris’s prior threat to “snatch” patents from drug companies to lower prices and her support for banning private health insurance and forcing all Americans onto government healthcare, and an image emerges of a political leader whose economic policy seems more in line with China, Cuba, and Venezuela than the United States.

Professor Franz von Findelstein, an eminent German economist and expert in Marxist-Leninist political economy, told me in an interview that, while price controls are in theory an economic tool, their aim is always ultimately political. In Soviet Russia, he explained, “the Bolsheviks created a fiction of a new miracle-making economic system” which was based on price controls. They then exported this fantasy to the West “in the hopes of using it as an instrument for subversion” of capitalist systems, where it took root in academia and fringe left-wing political groups.

After incubating for decades, Americans are now seeing those same communist precepts form the foundation of the economic platform of the modern Democrat Party.

Vladimir Lenin, the founder and chief ideologue of the socialist state, thoroughly explained the importance and value of price controls for totalitarian authority. In his debates with Western socialists published in 1919 and 1920, Lenin used the term “school” to describe the significance of price controls. Lenin’s vision for a planned economy involved the state playing a central role, with “a permanent price-gouging mechanism as its main instrument.” He believed this would be “a school for the education of exploited classes in the spirit of labor and socialism.”

In other words, price controls were the first step toward implementing full-scale communism.

Lenin argued that the free-market price system was a fundamental obstacle to constructing a workers’ state ruled by the Party’s vanguard. The price controls system would address “a profound distrust of anything related to the state inherited from the inglorious past.”

Spanish economist and philosopher Dr. Bautista Quixano also told me that Harris and other modern American leftists have even borrowed a term from Lenin to describe their economic agenda – “progressive.”

“Lenin unequivocally rejected all Western heritage and its foundation of the Christian view of the human person while laying down a ‘progressive’ basis for his economic and political system,” Quixano said. “However, Lenin attempted to conceal that this was his original goal and masked the price control system under the cover of ‘equitable development’ and ‘social justice.’ But this was a lie since his vision conflicted with human nature and natural laws.”

Likewise, the 2024 Democrat Party platform and economic agenda is rife with references and allusions to “equity” and “social justice.”

As part of this “equitable” agenda, Lenin recommended that the Party control the price of electricity, housing, and food supplies. Eventually, the Party’s implementation of these policies led to the disappearance of the old price system, with strict control maintained over prices in every industry. Shortages, debt, and waste followed, causing an enormous economic crisis and eventual collapse.

The never-ending lines leading to empty grocery store shelves symbolized everyday life under socialism. Hunger and poverty became the norm. Retirees and the unemployed took paid roles standing in line for the working population during their shifts.

Throughout the Soviet Union, local queue committees gathered information on what limited products like furniture, bathtubs, or even meat would be available in their area, and then managed lists of people who would be in line. A citizen could only purchase strictly defined portions of certain “rare goods” like sugar and fuel on assigned dates by presenting a government-issued coupon. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, even soap and toilet paper were difficult to obtain.

Common jokes from that era perfectly capture the devastating impact of price controls.

“A customer walks into a fish shop,” one Soviet citizen might muse to another. “And he says, ‘I’d like two kilos of cheese.’”

“’That’s where they don’t have any cheese,’ the fish monger says, pointing to a shop two doors down. ‘Here is where we don’t have any fish.’”

Another joke went something like, “A customer enters a butcher shop and, seeing the empty hooks where meat should be, hangs up his coat and hat. The salesman says to him: ‘what are you doing? This is a butcher shop!’ ‘Oh, I thought it was a cloakroom,’ replies the customer.”

Life in this socialist climate of humiliation created by price controls bred endemic corruption and damaged the social fabric of every nation behind the Iron Curtain. It was in large part price controls that sparked revolts against the communist system, including in Poland with the famous Solidarity movement.

Anna Walentynowicz, known as the Mother of Solidarity, once told me in an interview that workers rose up when they “realized that the economy was working against them and their families.”

“Everything was scarce and expensive,” she continued. “The Party controlled all purchases, making it impossible for people to buy what they wanted, even if they had money. They had to bribe officials. It is why they joined strikes, willing to help each other and hoping to repair the evil.”

The strikes by Polish workers, which made international headlines, helped “debunk the myth that the socialist planned economy met the needs of working people,” Professor von Findelstein told me. “Even the most gullible Western academics should have learned this lesson.”

Price controls fell throughout most of Eastern Europe along with the Soviet Union in 1989. It took decades to rebuild from that economic devastation, and many countries in the old Soviet bloc are still recovering.

The lessons of the Soviet Union’s price controls scheme are more urgent today than perhaps ever before. Calling the Harris campaign’s proposals an effort to stop “price gouging” is not only disingenuous, it is a threat to America’s free-market system that has made the United States the land of opportunity.

Americans must guard this system with their vote this November.

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.