You'd have to wrinkle your nose when you say it, to convey Sumner's disgust

Scott Sumner at EconLib, 5 January 2022:

"The dirty little secret of wage/price controls is that the government’s actual objective is to control wage growth, and the price controls are a fig leaf added to make the policy seem more “fair”, thus making it more politically feasible."

Even completely wrong statements can get points for clarity. But my first reaction --
Well, my first reaction was "Sumner's disgust".

My second reaction was "If his statement wasn't so political, I  might agree". But on second thought, no.

My third reaction is this. The government's actual objective is to control the value of the dollar. The way it goes about that task, or so I've read maybe three times, is by controlling wage growth. This is more or less what Sumner says.

But things are not as simple as Sumner indicates. I will say again the same thing I have said 100 times before: The government's objective should NOT be "to control wage growth", nor "to control the value of the dollar". The government's objective even at this late date should be to understand the source of the problem -- to understand why the upward pressure on wages and prices was so powerful that we were unable to push inflation down to zero. (I refer to four decades of "low" inflation from 1983 thru 2020 when the price index rose from 100.0 to 261.6.)

I guarantee you that if and when the source of the problem is correctly understood, eliminating the upward pressure on wages and prices will be a much easier task.

Oh, and the rising inflation of the last couple years? Caused by "supply chain" issues, they say. I think the cause of this rising inflation is that we never really solved the inflation problem that has troubled our economy since the 1970s. And the covid disruption was enough to upset the tenuous price stability we had "achieved" since the '80s.