The Conservative government of Great Britain has failed Britons. They’ve failed to protect Britons from excessive, unwanted and sometimes dangerous levels of immigration and types of migrants. They’ve failed to ensure that Britain has a sensible energy policy instead we, the ordinary people of Britain will have to rely on the unreliables in the renewable energy sector for our energy, which is almost certainly to lead to blackouts, brownouts and electricity rationing. Our military is in a dire situation and is not in any sort of position to project large scale force when needed or even defend the United Kingdom should we be attacked. The Tories haven’t even managed to stem the tide of woke bollocks in our public services, schools or even in hospitals. Because of the Tories and their mismanagement we have an overabundance of people here who should not be here, an energy sector that is teetering on the brink of collapse, a neutered and tiny military and teachers in our state schools promoting transgenderism to children and teenagers. What a bloody mess it all is.

However things could be or even might get worse and I’m not talking about a Labour government as we know that it will be a government filled with the worst sort of lefty lunatics who will promote open borders, gender identity bollocks, unaffordable and impractical green bollocks and so much more. No, what I’m talking about is what the Tories are thinking of bringing in.

The Tory government is thinking of bringing in price controls on certain food items. This is going to be a disaster of epic proportions as price controls have failed every time they’ve been tried and there is a record of this failure going back 4000 years to the ancient Iraqi city-state of Eshnunna. Cuneiform tablets found there showed the modern world that price controls had been tried there and most likely failed. There’s a good article all about the failures of price controls over at the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER) detailing every time that price control has failed and the often devastating economic effects that price controls create.

If the government fixes the price that an item can be sold at retail for then it is a disincentive for producers to produce more goods, especially if the producer’s costs are rising.

The Athenian Empire was history by the time Rome attempted its own price control scheme seven hundred years later on a much larger scale. In 301 A.D. the Emperor Diocletian passed his Edict on Maximum Prices, which set a fixed rate on everything from eggs and grain to beef and clothing and beyond, as well as the wages of laborers who produced these items. The penalty for anyone caught violating these edicts was—you guessed it—death. Traders responded exactly as one would expect to these regulations.

“The people brought provisions no more to market, since they could not get a reasonable price for them,” one historian wrote. Not coincidentally, Rome’s empire soon went the same way as that of the Athenians (though the eastern half would survive another thousand years).

If a producer, say for example and egg farmer, is only getting 5 pence for each egg but his cost in feed to produce this egg is 3.5p then after taking into account the energy required to heat the chicken barns and move the eggs to the customer, the farmer is faced with either a situation where there is very little profit in the eggs or zero profit in the eggs. The result is that market forces take over and the farmer decides that growing flowers or non-foodstuff items is a better bet and a better chance of making a profit. This creates a situation where there are less eggs available and what eggs are to be had end up on the black market at excessive prices.

Price controls create black markets and shortages and do nothing to encourage producers to produce more and thereby lower the prices of items to the end customer. Price controls either caused or exacerbated economic and supply problems in Colonial India, post revolutionary France, the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, the USA and in the late and unlamented Communist world.

Price controls will end up being yet another disaster imposed on us by a Conservative Party that not only seems to have given up on conserving much about the Britain they inherited from an equally murky Labour Party in 2010, but which also seems to contain rather too few historians. If the Tories did know history and were aware of the failures of price controls then they’d have known that the sort of price controls they are thinking of bringing in might bring short term succour to hard pressed consumers, but will end up harming those same customers in the medium and long term.

The Conservatives used to have a major selling point when compared with the Labour Party and that was the Tories record for economic competence. You might hate the Tories but at least you could trust them to try to balance the books. By favouring price controls and other similar market manipulation tactics, the Tories can no longer be considered as being economically competent. How other than incompetent can a party be described when they believe that a policy that has failed for 4000 years is the policy to promote?