Price controls don’t work, yet Kamala Harris has just proposed them as the centerpiece of her new “Opportunity Economy” agenda. That means one of two things is true: Either Harris is ignorant of fundamental economic principles and the history of the failure of price controls, or she’s extraordinarily cynical, and is willing to pitch a plan she knows won’t work in the hope and/or belief that enough of her target audience is ignorant that she can get away with it.

Speaking last Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina, Harris proposed what she called “the first-ever federal ban on price-gouging on food.” She continued: “My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules.”

Though she did not give details in her remarks, her campaign went a bit further. In a press statement released even before she spoke in North Carolina, her campaign said her plan would set “clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.” Further, said the campaign, the plan would implement the ban as part of her first 100 days agenda, at least in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose what the campaign called “harsh penalties” on “excessive profits.”

Neither “unfairly exploiting,” nor “price gouging,” nor “excessive profits” were defined. Come to think of it,........

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