Between Harris’s price controls and Trump’s tariffs, this campaign is a travesty of economic policy.

Asked if he believed in infant baptism, Mark Twain reportedly replied: “Believe in it? Hell, I’ve seen it done!” Today, adding to humanity’s history of magical beliefs, we will soon see the bane of inflation banished by this nifty idea: When prices rise, order some federal bureaucrats to bark at them, “Stop that!”

Adding a dash of substance to her one-word political program (“Joy”), Kamala Harris says that as president, she would tell the Federal Trade Commission to first define “excessive” price increases, then prosecute the living daylights out of the miscreants responsible for cornflakes costing (by some undisclosed metric) too much. She who was in the administration that has approved spending in trillion-dollar tranches, thinks that understanding inflation in terms of mundane matters such as supply and demand is for weaklings who do not grasp the marvels that muscular government can accomplish. Next? Perhaps legislating that lobsters shall grow on trees.

Harris, to whom the private sector is as foreign as Mongolia, has added this filigree to her platform of magic: Because houses cost too much, she proposes a $25,000 subsidy for first-time buyers. She would solve the problem of a commodity’s high price by increasing monetary demand for it. What could go wrong? This:

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When people clamored that a college education costs too much, caring government subsidized students. College administrators, not being ninnies (at least not about elementary economics), raised tuition to capture the subsidies. During a Harris administration, expect sellers of homes to first-time buyers to tack $25,000 onto their asking price.

Donald “Tariff Man” Trump’s Harris-esque contribution to this year’s magical beliefs expands upon his 2016 promise that Mexico would pay for his “beautiful” border wall. Now he says China, like all nations that export goods to the United States, will somehow pay the additional tariffs (the rates he mentions vary with his whims) that he promises to impose on everything from everywhere. So remember: When you pay, say, 20 percent extra for an imported appliance, you did not really pay it. Magic!

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Protectionism, which amounts to blockading one’s own ports, is, always and everywhere, a tax on consumers. At this point, it is unknowable whether Trump’s tax-increase-by-tariffs would be larger than the potential increase from — this prospect horrifies him — Congress allowing some of his 2017 tax cuts to........

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