By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, July 01, 2026
Last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a
citywide freeze on rents.
The response from economists can be summarized as “oy.”
Economists are famous for arguing “on one hand” this and
“on the other hand” that. This is why President Truman famously wanted to hire
a one-handed economist. Nonetheless, there are few issues that enjoy a broader
consensus among economists than the conclusion that rent control is
counterproductive. Surveys of leading economists going back nearly four decades
confirm this. A 1990 poll of 464 economists found that 93 percent of
American respondents agreed that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and
quality of housing available”—95 percent of Canadian economists had a similar
opinion. And another survey in 2012 had a similar result.
As Jason Furman, who chaired President Obama’s Council of
Economic Advisers, put it, “Rent control has been about as disgraced as any
economic policy in the tool kit.” The Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck—a
socialist, mind you—was pithier: “In many cases rent control appears to be the
most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”
In response to the controversy over Mamdani’s rent
control scheme, which applies to roughly 1 million of the city’s rent
stabilized apartments, progressive writer Jill Filipovic posted on X, “Am I the
only person who has no strong feeling about the rent freeze other than ‘cool to
try out a policy like this on a short-term basis so we can test if it actually
works?’ My only hope is we all learn some important information from this
experiment and are honest about the results, whatever it brings.”
But I don’t really want to write about rent control, a
provably dumb policy that has been around for more than a century. The bigger
issue is this attitude, which is running wild within the Democratic Party and
on the increasingly confident hard left. Specifically, the idea that anything
the democratic socialist insurgency is proposing is new.
“Together, we will usher in a generation of change,”
Mamdani declared upon being elected last November as the new democratic
socialist mayor of New York City. He vowed to take a “brave new course” and
“chart a new path.” His rent freeze is seen as a fulfillment of his pledge.
That’s fair enough. But virtually everything on their
agenda was old before anyone reading this was born. Take price controls. Sens.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, along with numerous other progressive
politicians (and a few Republican ones), respond to every price hike and
inflation report by arguing for price controls of one kind or another.
Price controls are older than Christianity.
If you don’t believe me, pick up a copy of Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls by Robert
Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler. Hammurabi set prices 4,000 years ago.
Diocletian issued his Edict on Maximum Prices in A.D. 301. President Nixon did
it to disastrous effect in 1971.
Price controls are lies, fueling corruption and hiding
economic reality. Prices reveal where supply and demand are, even when we
cannot know all of the things that inform supply or demand. Prices, in the
words of economist Alex Tabarrok, are “a signal wrapped up in an incentive.”
Mask the signal and you remove the incentive. Controls on rent, food, gas,
pharmaceuticals, etc. don’t just conceal the real costs of a good or service,
they pass those costs elsewhere. Unable to recoup on the investment in housing,
crops, oil development, medicine, there is less—or no—investment.
Oil-rich Venezuela became an economic basket case because the government fixed the price
of fuel to a political benchmark. Its vast oil industry couldn’t afford to
maintain itself and collapsed.
Some progressives, like Sen. Sanders, at least admit
their ideas are old—how could he do otherwise, given that he hasn’t had a new
idea since the Pleistocene? But they point to Scandinavian countries that abandoned
command-and-control economic planning decades ago.
In other words, they point to “new ideas” from the old
world that are now considered old over there.
Speaking of old, the new hotness on the left is wealth
taxes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has endorsed the idea of a national wealth
tax to catch up with the cool kids. This, too, is a very old idea that began in
prehistory as mere plunder. It’s also a failed idea, which is why most of the
countries that adopt them end up repealing them.
Much has been written—including by me—about how Trump
appeals to low-information voters who don’t know the history or facts behind a
given policy (like, say, tariffs). That’s fine. But the most ardent opponents of
Trump, the ones promising a bold and fresh alternative agenda, are appealing to
the same kinds of voters—and journalists.
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