Comment by bigbadfeline

> there are plenty of ways that the government can interfere in an otherwise fair market

There's no such thing as "otherwise fair market" outside of government regulation. Ergo, any "interference" is for someone's benefit, and as a rule that's not the government. In other words, seeking economics explanations to political phenomena isn't going to lead to anything useful.

> Baumol is empirically good at predicting price movements.

Until something else explains the facts better - AnthonyMouse wrote about a better theory that can actually be expanded to a fairly precise descriptive model, despite the fact that the quantitative part of it would be politics dependent.