This article is excerpted from the book Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation. From the earliest times, from the very inception of organized government, rulers and their officials have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to “control” their economies. The notion that there is a “just” or “fair” price for a certain commodity, a price which can and ought to be enforced by government, is apparently coterminous with civilization. For the past forty-six centuries (at least) governments all over the world have tried to fix wages and prices from time to time. When their … Continue reading Wage and Price Controls in the Ancient World