The Economist argues that those calling price-gouging laws “communist” are wrong. Three-fourths (at least) of American states, whether dominated by Democratic or Republican governments, have them on the books (“America’s Anti-Price-Gouging Laws Are Too Minor to Be Communist,” April 22, 2024). In my view, those who use the epithet in this instance are rather ignorant or sophistical. Labelling them collectivist, however, is correct.

Communism is a Marx-inspired ideology that relies on collective choices as opposed to individual choices for the regulation of society. (The Chinese government has abandoned Marx but not collectivism, of which it is a standard bearer.) Any sort of price control, including milder and intermittent price-gouging caps, is certainly collectivist but not necessarily communist. Communism is just one form of collectivism.

There are other forms of collectivism including on the right, which explains the many price-gouging laws across American states, plus one at the federal level—the Defense Production Act, often invoked by the federal government including during the (extended) Covid emergency. On both the moderate-left and moderate-right sides of the conventional political axis, price-gouging laws are a manifestation of collectivism with a human face. More extreme collectivist regimes impose more permanent, extensive, and arbitrary price controls.

Opposed to the different shades of left and right collectivism stands individualism—from classical liberalism to the ideal of anarcho-capitalism—where individual choices are privileged to coordinate a spontaneous or autoregulated social order and to define a minimal ethics. One should not be scared of the terms “collectivism” and “individualism”: they define the fundamental alternative in political philosophy.

“Price gouging” should of course put in scare quotes. Your preferred manufacturer or egg farmer is not more of a “price gouger” than your expensive babysitter or your own salary. Producers are happy to accept prices bid up by customers and the latter are happy to have prices bid down by competing suppliers. Consumers are happy to bid up the prices of what they want instead of going without it. Many suppliers are willing to accept lower prices rather than leaving the industry. Nobody is obliged to accept a price proposal, while everybody is forced to accept state interference in his life under fear of punishment. Market-determined prices serve to coordinate individual actions without coercion from authority. Nothing is perfect but voluntary interrelations through private choices are generally preferable to prohibitions and obligations imposed by force.

Anthony de Jasay was a contrarian economist and political philosopher who defined himself as both a (classical) liberal and an anarchist. He expressed the fundamental distinction between collectivism (collective choices) and individualism (individual choices) by defining liberalism as the primacy of the latter; quoting from his book Social Contract, Free Ride):

Liberalism … means a broad presumption of deciding individually any matter whose structure lends itself, with roughly comparable convenience, to both individual and collective choice.

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A monument to Karl Marx in Chemnitz, (East) Germany