Shoppers are greeted with empty shelves in the meat department at a grocery store in Alexandria, Va., Jan. 14.

Photo: shawn thew/EPA/Shutterstock

On the 2020 campaign trail, Joe Biden declared, “ Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” Wrong! In March 2020 the money supply was $16 trillion, it’s now $21.8 trillion. Lo and behold, inflation is running at 7.9%, supply chains are tight, and many store shelves are empty. Friedman’s adage “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” has stood the test of time.

But what scares me most is the likely policy responses by the Biden administration that would pour salt into this self-inflicted wound. It feels as if price controls are coming. Don’t trust my Spidey senses? Joe Biden’s own words from March 16: “Oil and gas companies shouldn’t pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.” And in last month’s State of the Union address he said, “As Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up. That ends on my watch.”

And the worst offense: “Cut the cost of prescription drugs. We pay more for the same drug produced by the same company in America than any other country in the world. . . . let’s let Medicare negotiate the price of prescription drugs. They already set the price for VA drugs.” That sounds good on the surface, but don’t fall for it. As Tomas Philipson noted on these pages, companies would “face a tax as high as 95% on sales if they don’t concede to the government price.” These aren’t negotiations. They are price controls.

Prices set by producers are signals, and consumers whisper feedback billions of times a day by buying or not buying products. Mess with prices and the economy has no guide. The Soviets instituted price controls on everything from subsidized “red bread” to meat, often resulting in empty shelves. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Agency fixed prices, prolonging the Depression, all in the name of “fair competition.” Watch for the resurrection of that phrase to rationalize price controls.

In 1971 President Richard Nixon announced, “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States.” We got new government entities: a Pay Board and a Price Commission. Americans paid for this mistake for another decade. Farmers drowned chickens rather than send them to market. Store shelves emptied. Price controls contributed to long lines at gasoline stations in 1973 during the Arab oil embargo. It’s pretty simple: When you freeze prices too low, producers stop producing.

Price controls don’t work. Never have, never will. But we keep instituting them. Try finding a cheap apartment in rent-controlled New York City. Or look for many entry-level jobs eliminated because of $15 minimum wages. Or try to get gallbladder surgery in Britain or other nationalized healthcare systems that ration care.

Releasing strategic oil reserves is only a temporary fix. Increased supply, more pipelines and expanded drilling could easily counter soaring energy prices, but that would require policy makers to face the wrath of the climate clique that loves high fuel prices. So they find other alleged fixes.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a leader among our economic illiterate, noted in February that high prices are caused in part by “giant corporations who say, ‘Wow, a lot of talk about high prices and inflation. This is a chance to get in there and not only pass along costs, but to inflate prices beyond that and just engage in a little straightforward price gouging.’ ” She has co-sponsored, along with other economically challenged lawmakers such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna, a bill “to impose a windfall profits excise tax on crude oil.” In case that doesn’t pass, Mr. Sanders last week introduced the brusquely named Ending Corporate Greed Act with a 95% windfall-profits tax on “pandemic profiteers.” While not a price control per se, a windfall-profits tax has the same effect, lowering the return potential for oil exploration projects, so we get fewer of them, causing even higher prices.

These proposals are just dumb. The Biden administration also has a bizarre fixation on meat and chicken. Instead of saying that no one will pay more than $3.99 a pound for ground chuck, the executive branch could use fines and Justice Department inquiries on price gouging to skew prices. Once prices get frozen, expect less meat. This is the Alice-in-Wonderland world of economics we live in.

There are glimmers of hope: Modern Monetary Theory, the disingenuous idea that governments can create money without consequences, is as good as dead. Keynesian economic theory, especially the part about using government spending to jump-start the economy, should be on its last legs.

Want to whip inflation now? Forget all the Band-Aids and government controls. Instead, as Friedman suggests, stop printing money. Stop stimulus. Raise interest rates to above the prevailing inflation rate. Prices will adjust naturally. The market works best when it sets prices. Sadly, politicians can’t help themselves. They might disguise and sneak them in while everyone’s focus is on war, but price controls are coming.

Write to kessler@wsj.com.