A price ceiling is very command economy isn't it? Bit communist if you ask me.
Not at all. The US did price controls before. They don't call it 'communism' when they were the ones doing it. Here are some examples:
1) Franklin D. Roosevelt (Arguably America's favorite president)
.
The
Office of Price Administration (
OPA) was established within the
of the
by
8875 on August 28, 1941. The functions of the OPA were originally to control money (
) and rents after the outbreak of
.
2) Richard Nixon
Nixon issued
(pursuant to the
), imposing a 90-day freeze on wages and prices in order to counter inflation. This was the first time the U.S. government had enacted wage and price controls since World War II.
All democracies do price controls at some point in their history. The Indian government is quite famous for instituting price controls. Associating price controls to 'communism' is a capitalist Red Scare nonsense. The rich capitalists hate price controls for obvious reasons. It limits profiteering, and limits price speculation, so that only the wealthy can afford scarce commodities.
What the West is trying to do, is to impose imperialism on Russia. What they want is to dictate to Russia, the price that it can sell its energy. Their aim is to make Russia suffer a revenue hit, so that its economy can no longer sustain the Ukraine war like before. They hope that this might make Russia lose the Ukraine war. They even mentioned this whole agenda out loud. But the West has no actual leverage over Russian energy exports. So why the hell is Russia gonna agree to Western price cap diktat if their intention is to destroy the Russian nation in the long term?