Georgia Legislature looks to move on from price controls
The very day that the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic, I told my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) to grab her cat and move in with me.
We didn’t know how bad the virus might be, and despite being incredibly allergic to her mostly deaf, one-toothed, geriatric cat who liked to howl into the night, we were determined to get through the pandemic together.
We did, and we thrived. However, we had to find a way to consolidate our household furnishings, which still makes my wife grimace. I have long had a motley collection of furniture, but bachelors aren’t exactly known for their fashion sense. I was no different. Nevertheless, to get her possessions to my house, she hired professional movers, and the results were disappointing and expose a patently backward and indefensible law.
As the movers arrived, they struggled with my wife’s large couch. They simply couldn’t figure out how to get it through a narrow doorway. So they kept banging it into the door—leaving it dented. Once they squeezed it through, they trashed the ceiling and scraped up the wall. If that wasn’t enough, they broke some of her dishes and kindly hid them behind her abused couch.
This wasn’t my only run-in with terrible movers. Another time, one broke an armoire and tried to conceal it. In a different move, movers bashed a hole in a wall and simply said “that’s easy to fix” before fleeing the scene. I probably sound like sour grapes, and you may be wondering why I don’t just pay more for quality professionals. Well, according to Georgia law, you can’t exactly do that.
Years ago, the Georgia General Assembly passed a measure empowering the Georgia Department of Public Safety Commissioner with regulating professional movers. By movers, I mean exactly what you think: a couple guys in a truck who transport your personal furniture across town. More specifically, the law states, “The commissioner shall prescribe just and reasonable rates, fares, and charges for transportation by motor carriers of household goods.”
Why the government felt compelled to get involved in the moving business is beyond me. There is no market failure requiring the government’s intervention, and no public safety issue to my knowledge demands price caps. It’s almost as if officials believed that they had solved every problem in Georgia and decided to then tackle professional moving, but the problems with this approach are obvious to just about anyone who has studied price controls. And that’s what the Public Safety Commissioner is tasked with doing—establishing price controls by setting the maximum permissible rate for movers—in the same manner that the Soviet Union used to regulate prices.
I don’t know what expertise the Public Safety Commissioner has in the moving industry, nor why the government believes it is in a good position to determine “just and reasonable” rates. What’s more, how is the commissioner able to account for inflation and fluctuations in gas prices on a real-time dynamic basis? He isn’t. How about accounting for scarcity and increased quality? He doesn’t. This is the kind of top-down one-size-fits-all approach that never works well.
“Typically, no entity is well informed enough to be able to exactly identify the imperfection, choose the correct price to rectify the situation, and then provide ongoing adjustment and enforcement,” writes the Cato Institute. Rather, market forces—like supply and demand and negotiations between consumers and movers—could settle on what is truly just and reasonable. That’s not the case in Georgia, and there are many other problems with price controls.
“Many researchers have found that price controls reduce entry and investment in the long run,” according to the Cato Institute. “The controls can also reduce quality, create black markets, and stimulate costly rationing.” In the case of movers, price controls may limit the ability to hire more seasoned and quality professionals, and it severely limits consumers’ options. After all of the terrible experiences I have endured, it would be wonderful to have the option to pay more for movers who don’t break your furniture or damage your house.
Nobody likes moving, and I am sure that there are many more moves in my future. Whether they are seamless moves led by quality professionals or incompetent individuals who destroy my property may be up to the Legislature. Lawmakers have been debating House Bill 204, which would make movers no longer subject to Soviet-styled price controls, and that is something I can get behind. We should let market forces—not bureaucrats—dictate prices and then enjoy the benefits.