Should prices on products be dictated by producers and consumers or by fat-cat bureaucrats in the federal government? Well, if Kamala Harris is elected president in November, she proposes a “first-ever federal ban” to prevent price gouging on food.

To be clear, the economy is in a bad way because too many dollars are chasing after too few goods, which creates inflation. This flood of cash was caused by President Joe Biden and VP Harris — the latter of whom, as president of the Senate, cast the deciding vote on the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act. Yet to solve the inflation problem, Biden and now Harris are blaming “price gouging.”

Harris’s price control plan at the federal level is a staple in the communist dictatorship playbook. When the principles of free market economics are ignored and the government artificially tries to “fix” everything, nations and their people end up impoverished and miserable. Just ask Venezuela.

But the Leftmedia cavalry have come out swinging to defend Harris’s price control scheme. NBC News and Axios pointed out that most states have anti-price-gouging measures on the books. Axios even crowed, “If banning price gouging is communist, then the U.S. went Marxist long ago. Most of us live in states that already have bans in place.” However, what they failed to effectively communicate is that these measures are generally only enacted during emergencies (like COVID) and are rarely enforced. Furthermore, there’s a huge point they’re missing: federalism. The difference between individual semi-autonomous states regulating price gouging in specific situations and the central government doing the same more generally is enormous.

The reporters could ask Harris to clarify her “first-ever federal ban.” What does it entail? When is it enacted? But asking them to do the job of speaking truth to power is too much. They’d prefer to be the puppets of the Democrat Party, spewing whatever messaging the White House is feeding them.

By the way, Axios’s defense of Harris represents another egg on its face. Remember when Axios whitewashed Harris’s “border czar” title? And then was embarrassingly forced to acknowledge, “Axios was among the news outlets that … labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021”? Well, this time, Axios’s defense of Harris’s price gouging plan got it slapped with a brilliant X Community Note.

As The Daily Wire points out: “X slapped a community note on Axios’ post, pointing out that the same author called it ‘price controls’ when the U.K. considered a short-term policy in 2023 to push retailers to agree to standardized prices on certain groceries like milk and bread. In 2022, another Axios writer, Matt Phillips, referred to the G-7’s pledge to limit how much Russia could profit from oil sales as ‘price controls.’”

The Atlantic joined in performing contortions to reframe Harris’s troubling and vague proposal. Its headline reads, “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists.” So, we should ignore economists but blindly trust bureaucrats in DC to set and protect the price of goods? That’s ridiculous.

The economy and the border are the top issues for voters in this election. Kamala has been behind the misery of both during her tenure as vice president. Her father was a Marxist professor, so it’s not a big leap to think that she’d want to impose some socialist economics on the American people.