“It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra famously observed, “especially about the future.” Perhaps, then, we should forgive the Biden administration’s Team Transitory for its months of erroneous forecasts about inflation—now running at a 31-year high. What we should not ignore or forgive, however, is dissembling about inflation’s true causes. Many on the left blame corporate greed and unfettered monopoly power. Progressives are eager to deploy the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department in pursuit of more control over the private sector. But greed and market power were presumably just as prevalent over the many years when inflation ran between 1 percent and 2 percent as they are now. Talk of “profiteering” is at best a distraction and at worst a misguided rationale for regulatory actions likely to have bad effects.
