The “power to destroy” is not confined only to one political side.

Julia R. Cartwright is a senior research fellow in law and economics at the American Institute for Economic Research.

In the 1940s, economist John Kenneth Galbraith sat in the Office of Price Administration, helping administer wartime price controls across much of the American economy. Rather than calculating a “correct” price for each good, the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942 let the government lock sellers into the highest price they had charged that March, leaving the agency to issue thousands of industry-by-industry rules to fix the distortions the freeze left behind.

It was, his admirers say, the boldest experiment in economic management the country ever attempted. His critics, on the other hand, saw bureaucratic overreach. Over 80 years later, his son James has written a book arguing that his father’s approach to economic management deserves a revival. What has happened in those 80 years — deregulation, globalization, the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China — is, in James’s telling, one long catastrophe created by economists.

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