Rachel Reeves & Labour are mental

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]Nate, we need to talk a little bit about price controls.

[00:00:04]We need to talk a little bit about price capping.

[00:00:08]>> Oh yeah, that sounds like not a great idea.

[00:00:12]>> It's not a great idea. It's really not a great idea. First article there came out this morning in this morning, which is the morning of Wednesday the 20th.

[00:00:22]>> There you go. Cap prices on Staple Foods. And if you scroll down a bit on the Financial Times, Treasury asks supermarkets to cap prices on staple foods. Things like eggs, milk, bread.

[00:00:35]Keep scrolling down some of the other front pages.

[00:00:39]The times there, milk, uh, egg and bread prices could be frozen by the government, by the centralized command command economy. U, keep going. I think there's another headline says it.

[00:00:50]>> Um, there you go. Reeves tells shops to cap food prices. All right. And there's a there's there's more, but okay, you get it. Um, the argument from the from the government is it's just to try and help the cost of living crisis that normal families are struggling because food in inflation on food particularly is so high that people that are struggling everyday families to just buy eggs and milk and and uh bread and things. What we'll do as the government is ask or force or cajol coers supermarkets the supermarkets into putting a price cap on things like milk and bread and eggs.

[00:01:36]Now for anyone who might not know, you might think, oh well, what's wrong with that? People struggling to buy bread and milk. What's wrong with that?

[00:01:46]Well, there's something very very profoundly wrong with that >> because >> that has been tried before.

[00:01:56]>> Governments have tried to completely intervene in the market and cap prices, interfere with supply and demand, the equilibrium of what prices are. That's been tried.

[00:02:11]That's been tried ever since the ancient world. In fact, Dialesian, the emperor Dialesian in the age just before Constantine the Great in the late 3rd, early 4th century AD tried to do that.

[00:02:23]What happened? The same thing that always happens is that those that are producing those products can't sell them now because they don't make any sort of profit. That for example, for example, the margins on producing milk are razor thin.

[00:02:41]So if the government say you can't charge more than this amount, this X amount for it, then they then the milk producers simply go out of business and then the supplier falls off a cliff and you get empty shelves.

[00:02:57]>> Yeah. Because what what people fail to realize is there's there's a multiple there's a chain of events that happen before that product gets on your [ __ ] shelf for you to pick it up. And every single element of that chain of events has a transactional value, a price.

[00:03:15]>> If you're not going to and you >> if you're only if you're only capping the end product.

[00:03:20]>> Yeah.

[00:03:21]>> And inflation is still on the rise because of the government [ __ ] things up, >> then yeah, you're screwing everyone over. It's not how it works.

[00:03:31]>> Price caps never ever work. Ever. I mentioned Dlesian in the 4th century AD.

[00:03:37]It was being tried by every single communist state ever.

[00:03:41]Look at Venezuela. When Venezuela uh under Chavez and Maduro put price caps and everything, what happened? The shelves empty very very quickly >> because the people that are producing these things are suddenly no longer able to. And so the supplier falls off a cliff and everyone goes hungry.

[00:04:02]Nixon tried it in the United States in the early '7s, ended in failure. Labour British governments in the 1970s tried it, ended in absolute failure. As it always, always does.

[00:04:16]>> The the things that pro the price of things is not just magicked out of the air by supermarkets, right? Yeah. The supermarkets will add a bit a little bit more on so they can turn a profit and be a business. Okay.

[00:04:31]But the price of things in modern day supermarkets, for example, or in any market, even if it's a market in Rome or in Antioch in the 4th century, that price isn't really magicked out of nowhere, >> right?

[00:04:46]>> It is what it is. There'll be there should be an equilibrium between supply and demand so you don't get a massive surplus or a massive uh fall off in supply.

[00:04:56]>> You know what amazes me?

[00:04:57]>> That's how a free market worked. Okay.

[00:05:00]So uh just real quick to say one caveat is that's if the profit margins on things are small. There are like luxury items like you know the example I gave this morning was a you know a really really high-end handbag maybe like a Gucci handbag or a lam a Lamborghini headlight or something that's actually made by VW and it cost them few dollars to make it and they're selling it for tens and tens of thousands of dollars.

[00:05:26]Okay. All right. That's something different. But where the margins are tiny on like for example the production of milk or bread or eggs, >> if you cap that very very quickly the producers of it go out of business >> and the the shelves are empty and people start going hungry. It happens every single time. Every single time. Only a crazed socialist leftist would dream of bringing in a a price cap in this day and age.

[00:06:03]And yet that's what the Treasury was talking about. Rachel Thieves and the Treasury were talking about well very quickly within the same day as as that headlines shows. Supermarkets hit back over pressure to cap price. Yeah. In the in that article there various people saying this is crazy. Don't do this.

[00:06:22]You know, really don't do this. This is madness. This is the last ditch attempt.

[00:06:29]Like this will not work. It's a false economy. A very, very real false economy. You think you're helping the cost of living crisis.

[00:06:38]No. Tackle inflation in a real way, not just in a cosmetic way.

[00:06:45]>> Stop spending and borrowing massively.

[00:06:47]Stop doing quantitive easing. stop taxing the complete life and soul out of everything along the way. Can't you instead of um capping the price of milk, why don't you take loads and loads of taxes off of milk production?

[00:07:02]>> Yeah.

[00:07:04]>> Won't you do that so that they can produce it more cheaply and then sell it more cheaply? This is that's real economics, not crazy socialist nightmare fuel type policies of just price capping at the supermarket. That's mad. It again, it's been tried over and over again for centuries on giant scales and on small scales. You look at ma China, you look at the entire Soviet experiment. You look at every single communist state that's ever done it. It does not work. It doesn't work. It ends in disaster. But that's what Ra Treasury have been talking about over the last 24 hours or so.

[00:07:45]>> Yeah. Well, she's [ __ ] isn't she?

[00:07:46]>> Yeah.

[00:07:47]>> I'm just an absolute imbecile. But the thing is, they seem to understand supply and demand to some degree when it comes to taxes versus benefits. Well, we want to give out this this amount of benefits, so we need to tax people this much. It's like, right, okay. Yeah, right. Okay. Can Can we not think about caps on anything else? No. No. No. Not allowed caps on anything else.

[00:08:08]Brilliant. Brilliant. So the most the actual way to to facilitate people being better off. Nope. Not going to do that.

[00:08:16]Anything other than lowering taxes. Anything other than lowering taxes. And this is the same, you know, be wary of any government that puts up taxes, right?

[00:08:29]Any any of them because they'll never lower them.

[00:08:32]>> They'll never lower the taxes, right?

[00:08:34]You got uni part like it.

[00:08:39]No one ever lowers taxes. No one ever lowers taxes because they're drunk on the amount of money. Fiscally irresponsible morons. But yeah, getting back to this particularly, this is disastrous.

[00:08:49]>> If I could give any one word of advice to anyone, >> learn how to make bread. It's one of the easiest things to make. So easy to make bread. And it's nicer. It's cheaper.

[00:09:00]Costs really nothing to make bread. You can buy a big 5 10 kilo sack of flour and you can make bread yourself. Really, really easy to make bread yourself. I genuinely genuinely just a few YouTube videos. All the information is there.

[00:09:14]The power to be substantially independent from the state, especially when they want to do stuff like this is there at your fingertips. Really, like empower yourself because holy [ __ ] if they bring this in, it's [ __ ] And it's not just that. It's not just the effect of well the supply chains are done and these suppliers are going out of business, right? That will happen, but it's the second order consequences of that. Okay, >> how much money is it going to cost to bring them back online >> when things are actually, you know, when you when you actually decide, oh yeah, we're mental and we need to fix this.

[00:09:52]Yeah, a lot of money actually.

[00:09:56]>> A hell of a lot of money. And it it you will extinguish businesses permanently.

[00:10:05]>> It's a catastrophic measure.

[00:10:07]Catastrophic.

[00:10:08]The fact that they even mooted the idea means that the people at the Treasury or Rachel Reeves herself knows nothing appears to know nothing of economics or history.

[00:10:24]It's truly scary actually. It's actually truly scary. They would even speak of price caps for things like bread and milk and eggs anyway.

[00:10:39]terrified.