The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell came out on Thursday with the holy grail of both-sideisms. A monumental achievement in the quest for journalistic cowardice. After railing against the disgusting libelous claims of pet-eating spread by JD Vance and Donald Trump, Rampell decided that she couldn’t let Democrats get off scot-free. They too must be held accountable for their disgusting lies. In this case that lie is… questioning orthodox economic thought with thorough academic research. This is understandable, after all, one case led to countless bomb threats and threatens to spark a modern pogrom. The other makes established economists feel bad. This should be of nearly equivalent public concern, even if Rampell generously acknowledges that heterodox economists are unlikely to unleash violent hordes.
There’s really not much to say here. We’ve written at length about how Sellers’ Inflation (the real name of the phenomenon Rampell derides as “greedflation,” and which posits that concentrated markets and shifting contexts can allow companies of constant levels of greediness to extract undue rents from consumers) is real and consistent with economic thought. But even if someone disagrees with the view that concentrated markets can impact prices differently when events change, to compare that viewpoint to the discourse around Springfield, Ohio and Haitian migrants over the past several weeks is disgusting. If progressives were to compare Reaganite trickle-down economics to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion they would be rightly lambasted. But to a “greedflation” obsessed Rampell, the (essentially) inverse seems perfectly fine. It’s time she ends her crusade against Sellers Inflation before she’s unable to focus on anything else. Though it may already be too late.