The primary effect of the maximum price control is a shortage in the cows-for-hens market, but buyers, sellers, and government officials will attempt to alleviate this shortfall in various ways, giving rise to a number of secondary effects to be discussed below—e. g., sales of inferior goods, various rationing systems, and black markets. Such effects, of course, can be observed not only in the cows-for-hens market, but in any market in which a price ceiling below the free-market level is imposed.

Historically, the shortages and other effects have been especially crippling when price controls have been placed on a wide range of goods, as in ancient Rome, or more recently in the United States in 1971. In the latter case, President Nixon, illustrating the Republican propensity to sacrifice economic freedom to political expedience, imposed a draconian freeze on the prices and wages of most consumers' and producers' goods and services. In the succeeding three years, despite repeated adjustments in this program to deal with growing economic discrepancies, increasingly severe shortages developed for a vast array of goods. Best remembered are the long queues of customers at the gasoline pumps (imputed by politicians to Arabs and greedy oil companies), but shortages were especially acute in factors at the higher stages of production, for reasons that will become clear in our later analysis of inflation. In order to circumvent the wage freeze and compensate workers adequately, meanwhile, managers relied heavily on promotions, leading to especially top-heavy corporate structures. Later (in the 1980s) these corporations found it necessary to rectify these structures by pancaking and downsizing.