Spoiler: Price controls.
For example, one of the first items mentioned in the article is how prices are regulated in France, which is really not traditional price controls:
> France has set up a food pricing system that will sound foreign to American ears: Consumer goods companies like PepsiCo must negotiate with the country’s grocery stores on prices in the stores during a set period. If they can’t come to a compromise, PepsiCo won’t be able to get its products on the grocer’s shelves. The negotiations provide French consumers with a small but valuable piece of power, and President Emmanuel Macron has been trying to use the system to his advantage as he aggressively pushes to get the country’s high food prices down, saying they should reflect the fact that the prices of many raw materials have recently declined.
That's not really how people think of traditional price controls, it's just saying that prices must be negotiated once per year. Of course, what the article leaves out, and which is mentioned in the link at https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/french-bill-moves-food-..., is that only negotiating once per year means that if prices are set high in the beginning of the year, there is not a chance to reset lower until the following year. So consumers get the benefit of higher-stakes negotiating power, but you've got to live with that outcome for a year.
I also despise the "blame inflation on corporations just taking more profits" line of thinking, because it's usually made from as a braindead assertion without any follow up. That is, basic economics 101 says that competition should keep corporations from taking undo profits. So if corporations are able to drastically increase their profits without new competition coming in, it means that either (a) there is something about the market that is fundamentally broken, e.g. monopoly pricing power or collusion, or (b) the price increases really are warranted, and companies are worried about price pressures in the future. That is, so often I see the argument being made of "companies are gouging us for profits, we need price controls!" as opposed to "companies are gouging us for profits, what is broken in the system that is allowing this to happen in the first place?"
This is absolutely price controls, complete with their inevitable result: The non-availability of the good.
If you don't like the price of your Pepsi, buy Coke. Or buy the store brand. Or do your health a favor and don't buy that garbage food in the first place.
Something does need to be done about that type of situation; in a properly working free market the competitor would gleefully accept having 100% of the market and waiting for the high price supplier to go bankrupt or lower their prices. Instead you're seeing what appears to be cartel-like 'we've got your back' from suppliers. This was most recently visible with eggs.
Incredible amounts of marginal farmland that comes in and out of production based on market prices.
(so, to be crystal clear, price caps are a horrible idea).
There's also farm regulation that manipulates farmland going in and out of production artificially. It already isn't driven solely by the free market.
A literally bankrupt company giving economic advice..
Relevant: https://cdn.mises.org/Forty%20Centuries%20of%20Wage%20and%20...
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mises.org
You can post articles from Vice, Oxfam or even Jacobin Mag. Just don't share the canonical sources debunking socialist canards. Articles from laissez-faire economists eloquently describing the problem of economic calculation aren't valued here. HN prefers the pop-culture journalists at Vice Magazine to rehash the virtues of price controls.