By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, August 20, 2026
On America’s coasts, the zealots are in full flow.
“Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill,” reflects Macbeth after
killing Duncan and gaining the crown. And so, having chosen his path, he
persists inexorably in his folly. Nothing can stop him — not failure or
apparition or counsel or conscience. “I am in blood stepped in so far,” he
admits, “that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
In California, Representative Ro Khanna is determined to
tax the state’s billionaires, the consequences be damned. In New York City,
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is fixated upon the establishment of government-run
grocery stores, even as the absurdity of his plan becomes clearer by the week.
Both men are impervious to reason. Objections are dismissed, criticisms are
deliquesced, contemplation is a skill not yet learned.
Informed that a series of government-run grocery stores
would be a burden to the taxpayer, Mamdani merely pounded the Exchequer. Told
that this policy might have a deleterious effect on the city’s existing
outlets, an aide glibly proposed
a subsidy. That subsidy, in turn, will have consequences, and, when those
consequences are adumbrated, yet another mitigation will undoubtedly be
contrived on the fly. Rube Goldberg, please call your office.
Ro Khanna’s penchant for instantaneous patchwork is more
alarming still. Upon hearing that his coveted wealth tax does not
intersect with reality, Khanna spontaneously invented
an invasive new program: “Allow illiquid founders to pledge shares with a loan
from the government to pay tax,” he wrote on X. “The loan period is long but
not infinite (e.g. 10 years). The loan is non-resource: at the end of the
period, the loan is either paid back in cash, or the government assumes the
shares.” That, as it happens, is a preposterous idea. But the instinct is more
instructive than the detail. Khanna has his agenda, and he is trying to bend
the world around it. Welcome back, Mr. Caligula, we trust you will enjoy your
stay.
The correct response to the discovery that your ideas are
unworkable is to stop trying to work them. One cannot fault Napoleon for
wondering if the Continental System might help him to subdue the British
Empire, but, by the time that he was committing a million troops to the
invasions of Spain and Russia in a desperate attempt to plug the gaps, he
should clearly have realized that his theory was bunk. So it is with
California’s wealth tax, which has already failed badly, and with New York’s government-run grocery
stores, which were not necessary in the first instance and have caused nothing but trouble since their conception. I daresay that
Ro Khanna is sincerely invested in assuaging his guilt for being the most
useless multimillionaire in the Western world and that Zohran Mamdani is
genuinely excited to dress up and play Commissar of Supermarkets, but neither
of these idiosyncrasies is the fault of the people of California and New York.
Sometimes — often, in fact — plans don’t play out as one imagined they would.
We call learning to deal with such setbacks statesmanship.
In the course of a recent debate with Mark Cuban, Khanna
even suggested that it was odd for Cuban even to care about the many flaws in
his policies. “Of all the things in America,” Khanna asked, aren’t there “more
pressing issues than a onetime 5 percent tax on 250 billionaires”? This is too
clever by half. It is Khanna, not Cuban, who is trying to change the status
quo, and thus it is upon Khanna, not Cuban, that the obligations fall. It
cannot simultaneously be the case that Khanna’s preferred policies are
important enough to justify massive disruptions to the status quo — often
designed ad hoc, as each domino pushes the next — and that they are so
unimportant that to object is to render oneself frivolous. As ever, it is
incumbent upon those who would upend our society to consider the ramifications
of their plans — and, when they do, a little humility would go a long way.
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