What? Price controls?! That work??!!?!

One of Argentina's current heresies against the neoliberal doctrine of what not so long ago was commonly called the Washington Consensus is that the government practices price controls. Verónica Andrés y Florencia Mambreani report in Un jugador para poner en la barrera Página/12 30.06.2014 that they are working reasonably well:

A inicios del 2014, el gobierno nacional lanzó el programa Precios Cuidados con el objetivo de regular y monitorear los incrementos nominales de precios y, de tal modo, contribuir a contener la inflación. Transcurrido casi un semestre desde el comienzo de su implementación, es posible afirmar que el programa ha tenido relativo éxito, dado que no sólo contribuyó a moderar el incremento de precios de ciertos productos, sino que también logró instalar públicamente la necesidad de que el conjunto de los consumidores esté atento a dicha evolución, teniendo la posibilidad, a su vez, de denunciar los incumplimientos.

[At the beginning of 2014, the national government launched the Precios Cudados program with the objective of regulating and monitoring the nominal increase in prices and, in that way, to contribute to containing inflation. Half a year having passed since the commencement of its implementation, it is possible to affirm that the program has had relative success, given that it has not only contributed to moderate the incremental increase of prices of certain products, but also succeeded in publicly establishing the necessity for the body of consumers to be attention to that evolution, having the possibility in their turn to denounce those not complying. ]

Somewhere in the Great Beyond, John Kenneth Galbraith must be smiling sardonically. Galbraith headed the Office of Price Administration (OPA) for a while during the Second World War, where the future President Richard Nixon was one of the employees.

Ahora bien, herramientas de control de precios de esta naturaleza requieren indudablemente de un Estado dotado de una altísima capacidad técnica y fiscalizadora, que le permita por un lado evaluar y determinar con justeza la estructura de precios relativos en el interior de cada cadena productiva y, por otro, garantizar el efectivo cumplimiento de los compromisos acordados.

[Now it's true that price control mechanisms of this kind undoubtedly require a government equipped with technical and fiscal capacities of the highest quality that will permit, one the one hand, fairly evaluating and determining the structure of relative prices inside every production chain and, on the other hand, guaranteeing the effective fulfillment of agreements reached.]

It's not easy. But when it's necessary, it can be done.

Tags: argentina, john kenneth galbriath, neoliberalism, price controls