Price controls destroy supply. The EU proved it again in 2022 when Brussels capped wholesale electricity and gas prices after the Nord Stream sabotage sent spot prices past 700 euros per megawatt-hour in August. Generators across Germany, France, and Spain did exactly what any rational producer does when a price ceiling sits below their marginal cost: they cut output or pulled supply off the market entirely. French nuclear operators throttled dispatch. Spanish gas-fired plants ran below capacity. The supply Brussels wanted to guarantee, was chased away. You paid for this twice. Your electricity bill carried emergency government subsidies funded by debt, and your employer absorbed industrial rationing that cut production schedules through winter 2022-23. BASF curtailed ammonia output at Ludwigshafen. German steel producers ran blast furnaces at reduced rates. That destroyed real economic output, not just spreadsheet entries. The mechanism is always the same. Prices coordinate information that no committee possesses. When a price spike signals genuine scarcity, producers invest, consumers conserve, and the shortage resolves. Cap the price and you blind every actor in the market simultaneously, guaranteeing the shortage deepens exactly when it hurts most. Brussels decided that politicians allocating energy through administrative rationing beats producers and consumers responding to real signals. Germany's industrial output contracted 0.4 percent in Q4 2022. The price cap paralyzed the market. Ironically, government intervention to "solve" the crises did more damage than the crises itself, as always.