United Kingdom

Ah! the old spectre of the 70s with the wailing piles of uncollected bins and rattling power cuts! Those of us who grew up then seem to have fonder memories of a happier Britain. Price controls have been used successfully in the past (particularly in the post-WW2 period up until 1954). Other countries - significantly Singapore - use price controls to manage their economies efficiently.

I agree that poorly implemented price controls would be a bad idea because without proper considerations you end up with bread queues for crops or what we have currently for the energy market where the government is forced to cover losses from unsellable wind power because the energy companies don't want to turn off the gas baseline so they can charge the highest electric rate possible.

Trying to wrangle market forces is nigh on impossible which is why the most effective ways to incentivise and deincentivise economic activity is through tax-breaks and raising taxes respectively.

An example would be a land tax and a brown-field rebate. You want to stop property developers from buying up land just to sit on it waiting for the value to increase so that more housing and infrastructure can be built so you implement a land tax to stop them from sitting on said land and do something useful with it. At the same time you don't want them to be paving over an easy to develop on green space when a brown-field site would be much more preferable so you give them some rebate money to cover additional clean up costs before development work can begin.

We already have effective economic tools before us to leverage the speed that a free market can move at by giving them a very clear preferred direction by influencing profitability indirectly.

So I don't see how opening a chain of stores that provides basic essentials that would compete on the open market is akin to price controls or the fall out from it.

Large chain supermarkets like Tesco, ASDA, and Aldi put enormous pressure on farmers to reduce the purchase price per tonne by leveraging their huge market share. If you don't want to agree to sell to Tesco at the price they negotiate, fine, but you'll struggle to shift that volume that Tesco would buy to other suppliers.

This is why owner-operator farmers, despite being wealthy in terms of land can see little income financially from the sale of their crops and produce. This is also why they're slowly selling off land for housing development or selling the whole farm to a larger international farming conglomerate who can compete on the same scale of supermarket chains like Tesco.

This is not good for food security, which is going to come under further strain from climate change as yield prediction will become increasingly harder.

So why not create a nationalised retainer that can buy these goods for a better price per tonne for the farmers and sell them at or slightly below market rate to the consumer because they're not beholden to increasing supermarket shareholder value quarter on quarter?

With that massive financial pressure gone all they have to do is price goods to cover the costs of buying produce, distribution, and all the usual overheads (wages, etc.).

This way the corporately operated supermarkets either have to compete on price and offer better deals to farmers or find a different way to add value.

It's the same logic behind Great British Energy just with food security rather than energy security.

Sadly it's not just inflexibility of Universal Credit - the base rate of Universal Credit isn't high enough anyway, but you've also particularly got elderly people on state pension only, people with disabilities and people with children.

Surprisingly, the majority of food bank food apparently goes to households with at least one person in work - though this might not be "old style" work where you have set hours and wages and rights, but instead "zero hours" or "flexi hours" or "our company considers you self employed" etc.

Huge increases in gas costs are one of the biggest contributors - children, the elderly and the ill couldn't manage to just switch the heating off all winter. Ridiculous house price/rent increases are also a massive factor.

I'm also a little unsure about a nationalised supermarket - but there are probably some solutions in this direction that would work.