As an academic economist who regularly reads newspapers and other media, the amount of economic ignorance promoted by professional journalists is astounding to me. Perhaps we should not be surprised, given that most of the economists quoted in the media are economic illiterates like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.

Economic illiteracy is a regular staple of the establishment media. One cannot go through any issue of the New York Times without running into the promotion of economic fallacies. Occasionally, however, a “prestigious” publication goes off the rails so badly that it demands a response, with the latest outrage appearing in The Atlantic, called “The Great Grocery Squeeze: How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert.”

Written by Stacy Mitchell, the article claims that the Reagan administration’s decision not to enforce the Great Depression-era’s Robinson-Patman Act ultimately led to a modern condition in which many communities are not served by grocery stores. Thus, the notion of the “food desert.”

What is important to understand is that much of the New Deal economic legislation was based upon the belief that low prices caused the economic downturn and that the key to recovery was to keep prices high, hence the impetus for both the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Both laws sought to cartelize portions of the US economy in order to keep prices high by reducing output. Despite Mitchell’s claims that the Robinson-Patman Act was passed to increase competition (or to permit smaller food retailers to compete with the grocery giant of the time, Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, or A&P), the law existed to keep prices higher than they would be in a free market setting.

Mitchell’s argument in favor of Robinson-Patman is framed as government intervention keeping the grocery markets competitive, which on its face is questionable. First, and most important, price fixing—which is at the heart of applying the R-P law—by definition cannot promote competition. Second, the lack of small grocery stores in many neighborhoods not served by the “big box” grocery stores like Walmart is not simply a matter of stores being priced out of the market.

Because many of the so-called food deserts are located in cities that are governed by progressive Democrats, business owners face obstacles that often are insurmountable. Governing councils in these cities often are dominated by activists who never have been entrepreneurs and are ideologically opposed to private enterprise and who believe that the mere sale of goods is an act of theft. It does not take long for the costs of petty thefts to overwhelm these small businesses, and progressive city governments are unsympathetic to their situation.