In Venezuela, the Maduro regime has accused companies that refuse to sell things for less than they cost — the result of how high the government has pushed inflation and how low it has set price controls — of waging an “economic war” against the so-called Bolivarian revolution. The government has nationalized factories in response and then sold things at a loss itself, which, of course, has only added to its money-printing needs.
In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lashed out at what he calls the “interest-rate lobby” for trying to force the “mother and father of all evil”— higher interest rates — onto the country as a supposedly quack cure for Turkey's sagging currency and growing inflation. Erdogan, you see, believes against all evidence that lower rates actually cause lower inflation, rather than the other way around, and he has said central bankers would be guilty of “treason” if they didn't go along with that. [...]
But that's almost beside the point. The real story is that, like President Nicolás Maduro's inability to understand that price controls cause shortages or Erdogan's ignorance about the fact that lower interest rates actually lead to higher inflation, the Trump team seems actually shocked to find out that taxing imports so that they cost more makes things, yes, cost more.
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