I think you're deliberately avoiding what I am saying, which is "price controls" and pretending that I am saying "regulation". Those are completely different concepts.
The article itself is showing exactly what happens when you have price controls - supply dries up and the market falls apart.
I never said "price regulation". The government should take steps to ensure things are priced fairly and (even more important) transparently. That will look different for different markets, products, market structures (sometimes the government needs to break up the monopoly), ... The situation in healthcare is very complicated and has a lot of moving parts, but the situation in energy less so (AFAIK), it's just that some externalities are not accounted for at all. Opposing that you have lobbyists (e.g. oil) and ideologically-driven players (e.g. some people want to ban meat).
There is a difference between oversight and control. Maintaining market inefficiencies to the detriment of consumers, simply for the sake of maintaining status quo and profit allocation to the establishment, goes beyond mere regulation.
That’s not what I said. There’s good and bad regulation. Things aren’t black and white; a truly free market with no government intervention at all will harm consumers, and governments with a hand in everything will harm consumers too.
Those are two different things. I didn't say we need less regulation. I said that the deregulation that happened over the last few years is irrelevant.
The regulation also doesn't do price fixing. It sets additional standards, or what I refer to as 'quality fixing'. The effect is that prices go up and competition go down, but quality will at least be something people will complain about less.
And it doesn't work for housing and about a million other goods and services that have been subject to price controls.
Just look at California's water shortage issues. Water prices are basically fixed so huge farms suck up all the water to irrigate a desert while ordinary people are told to stop bathing. Seems like an externality of price regulation, no?
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