[_pi]

My usage of price controls in that way is intentional. The average argument against price controls (e.g. price ceiling sand price floors) is like saying knives bad because I can cut my fingers off. Price controls are tool, it's about how you use them.

> Subsidies obviously work and have been shown to work for decades.

Subsidies obviously work and subsidies don't work in the same way that price controls obviously work and price controls don't work.

These are tools.

You're not talking about the application of tools, you're simply talking about ideologically preferential ways to change an economy.

Subsidies are considered good and price controls are considered bad because of how they affect private capital not due to any argument that a rigorous data driven modern application of economics would provide. By modern standards those statements "price controls are bad" and "subsidies are good" and their inverses are unfalsifiable.

[Vt71fcAqt7]

I take back some of what I said about subsidies. This was because of how I read "every subsidy is a form of price control." On reading your post again you are talking more about welfare specifically. I was thinking of subsidies meant as part of industrial policy, but thinking about this more we are talking about welfare. Although this wasn't obvious to me at the time as price controls are also used in industrial policy. And arguably the Apple lawsuit and anti competition law in general is about industrial policy. I should also point out that I never said price controls never work, although I perhaps implied that by saying subsidies do work implying that price controls don't. But that wasn't my point. My point was that you cannot conflate subsidies with price controls because they are not the same. I don't think your usage of price controls being intentional here makes it any better and FWIW it didn't read that way at all to me, it just read like you don't know what you're talking about, especially combined with your usage of "ooga booga free marketers." I don't mean this in an offensive way I'm just trying to explain how your comment read to me.

>Subsidies are considered good and price controls are considered bad because of how they affect private capital not due to any argument that a rigorous data driven modern application of economics would provide.

For industrial policy this is certainly wrong. For welfare which is what I again assume now you are talking about I don't know enough to make a statement on it. I have read that price controls often decrease supply of the product in question. For example in a housing shortage price controls on rent decrease the number of new apartments built. Price controls make sense when the market in question is monopolized by a single company like in the case of utility companies. Generally these monopolies are given by the government and can be thought of as contractors for the government in the market in question.