There's been inflation, and there have been calls for price controls, and so I've been reading a bit about price controls in history. Pretty much every time price controls with substantial bite[1] are implemented, you get shortages and black markets; additionally, I had failed to consider how expensive enforcement costs frequently are. Usually the government gives up on price controls fairly quickly as it becomes clear that the problems created are worse than any mitigation; exceptions seem to be in cases where there is some other form of rationing taking place, typically in war time.
There may be a semantic argument whether rationing avoids shortages or repackages them, and they certainly don't avoid the black markets or enforcement costs, but they do create a little bit more reliability; sometimes consumers are unable to buy as much as the rationing system entitles them to, but it will be less common that they will be unable to buy anything than it will if there is not rationing and similar price controls are enforced. This made me wonder whether, if price controls did gain political popularity now, we could mitigate some of their effects by implementing a rationing program as well. After a bit more thought, though, it occured to me that this is a bit redundant; if you impose and enforce a rationing program, that should bring down market demand and reduce prices. If the rationing is tight enough to bring prices to where you would "control" them, the control becomes superfluous; if it is not, then it isn't enough to restore the sort of reliability being sought with the controls in place, either.
As a political matter, perhaps the price controls would not be superfluous; the price controls may be the popular part, at least to the extent that people don't realize that it will amount to stochastic rationing. The implementation cost, even if greater than many people appreciate, may also be less than that of a rationing system, and it would certainly tend not to fall directly on individual consumers to the same degree; carrying around ration coupons would be less convenient than heading to the store and seeing what they have in stock. It would, however, keep prices "controlled" while substantially mitigating the biggest problem simple dictated price controls present — and you wouldn't even need the price controls themselves to do it.
[1] If the price is set at $5, and the market price would be $5.10, effects will naturally be minimal; if the price is set at $5 and the market price would be $20, but only for a couple of weeks, some of the effects won't have time to develop. I'm mostly considering settings where the price is kept well away from the free price for a substantial period of time.
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