Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls Quotes

“The Saturday Review declared that it is much easier to fix price ceilings than to make certain that there actually will be goods available at such prices. Once government fixes prices it is forced into the position of seeing to it that the owners of goods do not withhold them from sale and that manufacturers and farmers continue production. This amounts to nothing less than industrial conscription.”
― Robert Lindsay Schuettinger, Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation

“The consequences of this policy were twofold,” according to the historian John Fiske. “It was a long time before the Duke of Parma, who was besieging the city, succeeded in so blockading the Scheldt as to prevent ships laden with eatables from coming in below. Corn and preserved meats might have been hurried into the beleaguered city by thousands of tons. But no merchant would run the risk of having his ships sunk by the Duke’s batteries merely for the sake of finding a market no better than many others which could be reached at no risk at all. . . . . If provisions had brought a high price in Antwerp they would have been carried thither. As it was the city, by its own stupidity, blockaded itself far more effectually than the Duke of Parma could have done.” “In the second place,” Fiske concludes, “the enforced lowness of prices prevented any general retrenchment on the part of the citizens. Nobody felt it necessary to economize. So the city lived in high spirits until all at once provisions gave out. . . .”[10] In 1585 the city of Antwerp surrendered and was occupied by the forces of Spain.”
― Robert Lindsay Schuettinger, Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation

“Indeed, there is not a single episode where price controls have worked to stop inflation or cure shortages.”
― Robert Lindsay Schuettinger, Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation