Nico Antuna Cooper is a university lecturer and works in the borderland. He witnesses the cultural opportunities of Bitcoin in both Latin America and the United States on a daily basis.
Inflation is reaching a level so high that even mainstream news sites[1] care now. Across the board, the average American is seeing an increase in prices in almost everything. From real estate to groceries to gasoline prices, consumers are getting less for more in nearly every sector. Even the massaged CPI inflation calculations[2] provided by the government are looking pretty bad these days. As a result, policymakers like Elizabeth Warren are proposing legislation [3]to enact widespread price controls and prevent “price gouging” across the country, protecting the consumer from the coming storm of hustlers.
On the surface, this seems like a good idea as there is no federal law currently making price gouging illegal on a national basis. For those who have faith in the government's ability to control the economy this seems like a great relief to average people everywhere.
Unfortunately, a price control law does not address the underlying mechanisms causing prices to rise in the first place: currency debasement and its ugly brother, inflation. There are other factors as well. Notably, when we are speaking about high prices, the conversation largely revolves around gasoline, which in turn affects the price of everything else. The price of oil is largely set by the global supply provided by OPEC[4], an entity over which U.S. policymakers have no control. Remember that OPEC is a cartel[5] and cartels, by definition[6], exist to control the price of a commodity, e.g., crude oil, cocaine, etc. Regrettably, cartels do not respect U.S. price controls. So
