Jon Stewart reprised his role as the media’s number one supporter of price controls on Wednesday as he welcomed author and former Elizabeth Warren economic advisor Lindsay Owens to Comedy Central’s The Weekly Show podcast. Stewart echoed Owens’s book’s thesis when he claimed that it is “bullshit” to warn about socialism and price controls because corporate greed is the reason why things are expensive.
Stewart lamented that:
What's really sort of difficult to wrap your head around with all of this is anytime the government is going to involve itself in trying to address these affordability issues across different commodities or different services or different things. We are always told that socialism — that's anti-capitalistic. It can never work. Price controls are the road to hell. We can't possibly stop this because what you're seeing in prices is merely the natural effects of supply and demand, and what you learn is that story is bullshit. It's utter nonsense. And yet what seems to be a very fixed point in that is that government trying to intervene is somehow socialism.
He then wondered, “Yet, corporate collusion is considered, ‘Oh, that's the price of free market.’ How do we address that narrative?”
Jon Stewart laments to former Elizabeth Warren economic advisor Lindsay Owens that "Yeah, what's really sort of difficult to wrap your head around with all of this is anytime the government is going to involve itself in trying to address these affordability issues across… pic.twitter.com/L7IGYo2yyA
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) September 17, 2026
Owens has previously argued that COVID-era corporate greed, not high government spending, was the primary drive of the inflation crisis. It was that outside-the-mainstream perspective that dominated the duo’s entire interview.
As for her response to Stewart’s concerns about messaging, Owens launched into a lament where she claimed that the type of bargain shopping where one goes from store to store and compares prices isn’t possible today, “When you can't comparison shop because you have no idea what the prices are or because the prices are changing before your very eyes or because companies have used personalized pricing to figure out who the comparison shoppers are and offer them a good enough deal to keep them at bay and then overcharge the rest of us. You know, pricing cannot be competitive in that environment.”
Owens’ old boss supported all that inflation-driving spending, and ever since then, she and other Democrats have been trying to pretend that their own policies had nothing to do with inflation. Democrats were warned that Biden-era spending would be inflationary, but they did it anyway. Stewart’s endorsement of the most economically illiterate policy position may be frustrating coming from a man who claims to produce the political commentary equivalent of “healthy food,” but for a man who has a fundamental misunderstanding of what economics is, it is not surprising.
Here is a transcript for the September 16 show:
Comedy Central The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
9/16/2026
JON STEWART: Yeah, what's really sort of difficult to wrap your head around with all of this is anytime the government is going to involve itself in trying to address these affordability issues across different commodities or different services or different things. We are always told that socialism — that's anti-capitalistic. It can never work. Price controls are the road to hell.
We can't possibly stop this because what you're seeing in prices is merely the natural effects of supply and demand, and what you learn is that story is bullshit. It's utter nonsense. And yet what seems to be a very fixed point in that is that government trying to intervene is somehow socialism.
Yet, corporate collusion is considered, “Oh, that's the price of free market.” How do we address that narrative?
LINDSAY OWENS: Yeah, look the idea that, you know, pricing is competitive, falling from the sky, you know, that really falls apart when faced with the data in my book, but also more broadly. The ways in which we know companies are gaming markets, are obscuring pricing in ways that would make it impossible for comparison shopping to function.
By the way, how do markets achieve competitive pricing? It is through the mechanism of the bargain shopper doing her comparison shopping, right?
STEWART: Right. Right
OWENS: Going to one store and saying, “Hmm, that price seems a little high to me I'm gonna hold and see if I can find a better deal.” Getting in her car going, you know, three miles to the next grocery store —
STEWART: Right.
OWENS: — seeing the better price. And then a bunch of people do that and the grocery store on the north side says, “Hmm, nobody's in the store today. I wonder what's going on. Oh, the grocery store on the south side is offering better deals. I've got a lower my prices.”
That is the mechanism through which pricing is disciplined in markets and pricing can be, you know, can be competitive. When you can't comparison shop because you have no idea what the prices are or because the prices are changing before your very eyes or because companies have used personalized pricing to figure out who the comparison shoppers are and offer them a good enough deal to keep them at bay—
STEWART: Oh dear god!
OWENS: —and then overcharge the rest of us. You know, pricing cannot be competitive in that environment.
