The Thin Line Between Meatballs and Mystery Meat

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, March 13, 2026

 

I’ve had a minor disagreement with some friends about whether or not the Strait of Hormuz is closed. My friends who are quite supportive of the war in Iran argue that it isn’t closed because Chinese and certain other ships can still use it. Even Iran has insisted that it hasn’t officially closed the Strait. This is all technically true. The problem is that shipping companies can’t get insurance to go through it. Also, some companies and crews just don’t want to go through it for the same reason insurance companies don’t want to insure them: They can get blown up.

 

I can understand Donald Trump’s frustration with this fact. But I don’t think yelling at the shipping companies to “show some guts” and make a run for it is great advice. Nor do I think it buttresses the administration’s case that it fully anticipated this threat to the Strait. Are we to believe that the plan was to respond to several attacks on oil tankers with a presidential exhortation to man up and deal with it?

 

Regardless, this strikes me as a perfect example of the difference between de jure and de facto. If a grizzly bear is hanging out in your local 7-Eleven, it’s not technically closed. But you’re probably not going to get your spicy Jamaican beef patty there until the bear is removed (not least because we all know that bears love spicy Jamaican beef patties even more than drunk college kids do).

 

In his press conference today, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “The only thing prohibiting transit in the Straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit, should Iran not do that.”

 

Well, yeah.

 

Hoping for success.

 

Speaking of the war, I want it to succeed. I don’t like the way we got into it. I don’t have a lot of faith in the administration’s strategic vision. But we’re in it. I agree with a lot of my friends that there’s a rush to pronounce this thing a disaster. It’s not one yet—and, God willing, may never be. I think the New York Times’ Bret Stephens is on solid footing when he says:
 

 

I’m flabbergasted by the relentless pessimism I’m seeing in much of the commentariat. We are less than two weeks into a war that will almost surely be over by the end of the month, and already there are predictions that it’s “another Iraq.” American casualties, heartbreaking as they are, have been minor for a conflict of this scale. Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors diminishes by the day: We’ve seen this in the sharp decline in its ballistic missile and drone attacks. I have to assume that before this war is over, we will find a way to remove Iran’s remaining stores of highly enriched uranium, which greatly enhances global security over the long term. And Iran’s leaders, for all their swagger, now know they are not immune from reprisal, which will make them think a lot more carefully as they plot their retaliation. We may not see regime change now, but this regime is likely to become a zombie state before the next, all-but-inevitable, popular uprising.

 

The only thing that I’m somewhat flabbergasted by is his flabbergastedness (flabbergastidity?). We’ve spent more than a decade hearing recriminations, remorse, regret, and historical revisionism about the war on terror, the Iraq war, forever wars, and the like. Is it really so shocking that a lot of people on the left and right are down on a war they were not really warned was coming? Bret’s a brilliant guy, and a fellow Trump critic, but surely he can understand that Trump has not done much to earn the benefit of the doubt from a lot of folks. Indeed, the MAGA types freaking out about the war were the last constituency in America willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and they feel betrayed.

 

(They’re also pissed because this war has exposed the fact that many of the self-proclaimed leaders of MAGA opposing the war have been revealed as paper tigers. There is simply no data indicating that actual MAGA voters agree with their supposed leaders.)

 

When a president explains what he’s doing and gets buy-in from Congress and the public before he goes to war, he gets some insulation against the pessimism Bret laments. When war with Iran is just the umpteenth thing the president has done unilaterally and, at least seemingly impulsively, that insulation doesn’t exist.

 

We’re in this war. I’d rather it continue for as long as it takes to be successful on some objective metrics. If it redounds to the benefit of Trump, so be it. My concern is that Trump’s metrics are always subjective.

 

That’s a spicy meatball.

 

The Senate passed, and I assume the House will too, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott’s bill called the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Needless to say, I hate the title. “ROAD” is an acronym for Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream. The wordplay says it’s a road leading to an abstract noun. “Housing” may look like a gerund, but it’s not, damn it. It’s got no verb-mojo to it. But I shouldn’t dwell on the obvious.

 

“Think of this bill like a meatball,” Sen. Warren explains. “It’s got a lot of different ingredients in it, but it’s the fact that it’s all there together is what makes it so delicious.”

 

Look, I get what she’s going for. Meatballs can be delicious if all the ingredients are good and work together. But meatballs can also be a form of mystery meat, like various institutional meat loaves, scrapple, various members of the head cheese family, and potted meat. Word to the wise: Potted meat can taste good but only if you don’t read the ingredients. The whole cliché about legislating being like sausage-making—widely, and probably falsely attributed to Otto von Bismarck—is a cliché for a reason. Big bills with a zillion provisions are a great way to include ingredients that don’t pass the sniff test. “We’ve got a ton of iffy chicken in the fridge. Grind it up and put it in the sausage—or meatballs.”

 

From what I’ve read, there’s some okay stuff in Warren’s meatball. But there’s also some meat product that smells a lot like Steve Bannon’s socks.

 

For some, the worst fare is the ban on big investors buying housing. Despite all the media and activist attention, the share of homes owned by large investment firms “account for less than 1% of the single-family housing stock,” according to the Wall Street Journal, “and the number of rental homes has declined on net by 900,000 since 2017. They manage fewer homes in pricy markets like Los Angeles (0.3%), Boston (0.02%) and Washington, D.C. (0.07%).”

 

If you like an apartment or house and it’s affordable, why would you care very much if a big corporation owned it? I can see plenty of benefits to the Ramjack Corporation being your landlord instead of some small owner. All things being equal, I’d prefer a big company with a dedicated maintenance staff over some dude who has to watch YouTube videos to figure out how to fix my toilet.

 

More importantly, a big corporation has the resources to make housing affordable. McDonald’s makes hamburgers at scale, so they tend to be more affordable than what you find even in a greasy spoon. I guess I don’t want to live in a country where only big corporations own all of the housing, but that isn’t a possibility.

 

Indeed, where else in your life do you make this sort of distinction? Do you buy your computers and phones from mom-and-pop outfits?

 

Don’t get me wrong, I like mom-and-pop businesses, but I like them when they’re good at what they do.

 

Still, the real rancid stuff in the bill isn’t the large investor ban, as stupid as that is. It’s all the grants and subsidies that give people money to buy houses. Let’s just stipulate for argument’s sake that they’re all well-intentioned and will probably help some people on an individual basis. The big problem is that subsidizing demand makes housing more expensive.

 

When I got into the punditry business, I was promised there would be no math, so I’m going to keep this simple. 

 

Let’s say you are the mayor of an island community with a hundred inhabitants. You have to import a lot of things you can’t produce on the island. But let’s focus on peaches, ripe summer peaches. The island gets one shipment every August, and—to keep the math simple—everyone wants one and they normally cost $5 each. But this year, the shipment only contained 50 peaches.

 

The sole grocer has a few options. She can raise the price to, say, $10 so the people who want the peaches the most will pay more for this scarce resource. The people who don’t care that much about peaches won’t care that much. But a few people will be pissed off that the peaches are just too expensive. One problem with this approach is that it’s entirely possible that one or two people who really love peaches might buy more than their “fair share” and snap all of them up, angering even more peach-lovers. The grocer can raise the prices more, or you, the heroic mayor, can step in and announce a rule to thwart the peach-hoarding scum: only one peach per customer.

 

Another way of addressing the problem: raid the rainy-day fund and give everybody a one-time gift of $20 to spend on peaches.

 

You see the problem? Neither approach will make peaches more “affordable” because the supply of peaches hasn’t increased. Give everyone more money to buy a thing and that thing will become more expensive.

 

The only reliable way to make peaches more affordable is to increase the supply of peaches. What is true of peaches is true of housing. Both are ripe, fuzzy, tree fruits. No, wait—that’s not right. But you get the point. If you give everybody, say, $50,000 to buy a house, the price of housing will go up because the price will adjust upward. The only reliable way to make housing more affordable is to make more housing. The bill has some features intended to increase housing, but the fundamental approach is to give federal regulators power over the housing market. The Trump administration likes the bill because it polls well and because it is in full “do-something” mode on housing and affordability. Bipartisanship on bad ideas is often much worse than a partisan defense of good ideas.

 

The 2007-08 financial crisis was fueled by politicians doing everything they could to goose homeownership, so we’ve been down this road before.