Vice President Kamala Harris will unveil a plan to use the federal government to control grocery stores prices at Friday campaign event in North Carolina.

The plan will include a federal ban on “corporate price-gouging,” according to reporting NBC correspondent Yamiche Alcindor.

Harris also wants to grant new authority to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department attorneys to impose harsh penalties on companies suspected of violating these rules.

The price-control scheme is an attempt by Harris, the presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, to rein in the inflation the U.S. economy has experienced under the Biden-Harris administration.

Food, energy, and housing prices have all risen sharply since Jan. 2021.

Harris is far from the first politician to assume that allowing the central government to dictate prices is the solution to economic troubles.

From Fourth Century Roman Emperor Diocletian to the revolutionary government of France, central governments have long entertained notions that they can fix sour economies or halt inflation merely by declaring a ban on price increases.

However, such policies almost invariably lead to shortages and blackmarkets.

In recent decades, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina have all experimented with government-controlled pricing for basic goods.

In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez’s price controls for food, medicine, and gasoline created shortages, massive black markets, and a collapse of domestic production — ironic for a country with some of the largest proven oil reserves in the world.

In Zimbabwe, price controls accelerate economic collapse as businesses found they could not profitably sell goods at the prices set by governments and ceased operating altogether rather than lose even more money.

In Argentina, a bloated central government attempted to set price controls for food, utilities, and other essential goods. The resulting economic distortions discouraged international investment in the once-wealthy country and led voters, ultimately, to back libertarian economist Javier Milei in Dec. 2023.

Price controls in the United States have similarly led to perverse or unintended outcomes.

In major cities like New York City and San Francisco, local governments have attempted to control the cost of housing by imposing rent-control.

While the policies may succeed in limiting rent increases in the short-term for current city residents, rent-controls over the long-term can have unintended consequences, such as reducing the incentive to maintain rental properties, which can lead to urban blight.

Rent-controls can also misallocate affordable housing to wealthier city residents by keeping rents low for those who remain in a specific rental unit the longest.

Harris’s new found support for government-controlled prices, while lacking any example of successful implementation in the entire history of the human race, lays bare the fundamental divide between Democratic and Republican politicians over how to respond to inflation in the U.S. economy.

Democratic politicians like Harris and Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren see price inflation as a sign of corporate greed.

In this scenario, companies like Walmart or Hannaford have arbitrarily decided to raise prices in order to increase profits.

Such a theory supposes that in times of lower inflation, the corporations, for some reason, refrained from indulging their greed, and that the answer to their sudden pang of greed is allowing the government the authority to more accurately determine fair prices.

Republicans and many libertarians, on the other hand, view price inflation as the consequence of unbridled government spending.

In their view, it’s not the cost of grocery store items that is going up, but the value of the U.S. dollar that is going down.