Price controls have never worked. The 17th century Puritans tried them in the Massachusetts Bay Colony only to see them fail. They failed when the French tried them during their revolution in the 1790s. They failed when Richard Nixon tried them in the 1970s. And they failed when Jimmy Carter continued them.
But government, like history, repeats itself, and in 2010, in the secrecy of the Dodd-Frank Conference Committee, we got the latest federal experiment in government price controls: the Durbin Amendment, a cap on the fees that banks charge merchants whenever a consumer uses a PIN number with a debit card.
