Democrats vs. the Constitution

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, November 09, 2018

Having taken control of the House of Representatives, the Democrats face an enormous and perhaps insurmountable political barrier to achieving their agenda. It’s not the Republicans. It’s the Constitution.

“Kill the Constitution” would not be a winning campaign slogan for the Democrats, and you will rarely hear an American politician running against the Constitution as such. But it is the Constitution and the American constitutional order — not Senator McConnell — that currently vexes them.

At the time of this nation’s Founding, there were 13 distinct communities that had been colonies and had become states. Some of them were urban, industrial, and densely populated; some of them were rural, agricultural, and sparsely populated. They had religious differences (we sometimes forget that while the federal government is now forbidden from creating an established church, the states did have official, state-supported churches), economic differences, and what turned out to be an irreconcilable difference on slavery. The smaller states were hesitant to join the Union without protections and guarantees that they would not be subjected to a vulgar democracy in which their interests would be swamped by those of the more populous states.

The compromise that emerged from that situation is what is sometimes known as “dual sovereignty.” The federal government and the states each have their own sovereign powers, which sometimes overlap: That is why the terrorist Terry Nichols, for example, was tried both on federal charges and in Oklahoma on state murder charges. Each sovereign has the right to make its own laws and to enforce them. The principal role of the federal government was, under this understanding, to take responsibility for issues that cross state lines or that concern the union of states as a whole: interstate commerce, foreign relations, national security, etc. There have been more and less expansive interpretations of what constitutes a genuinely federal issue, with conservatives historically leaning toward a more restrictive view of the federal government and progressives looking to put the federal government into the service of national economic-planning programs, national infrastructure projects, and the like. These interpretations have never broken down neatly along party lines or political affiliations: The Republican party of President Lincoln’s time had a wing that was recognizably conservative in the contemporary sense of that word, but President Lincoln, like his fellow Republican President Eisenhower a century later, was very much interested in what he called “improvements,” meaning mostly what we now call “infrastructure,” canals and railroads in one century and the federal highway system in the next. These projects were thought of as being national in the sense that they would improve the economic productivity and public life of the nation as a whole by enabling the easy movement of goods and people — and, if necessary, soldiers: It’s the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

Projects that are national in scope in a country as large and complex as the United States inevitably require standardization and regimentation. In the early days of railroads, different railways used different gauges of track, a situation that was of relatively little practical consequence until the railroad network grew extensive enough that the discrete systems began to interconnect. Different parties had different political and economic interests in particular configurations of track — hence the so-called Erie Gauge War — but competition among the railroads and the economic power of the major industrial and agricultural concerns inconvenienced by incompatible tracks were sufficient to ensure almost universal standardization. The emerging Internet had standardization needs that were in many ways similar.

In our time, we think of progressives as being anti-business, or at least skeptical of the political and economic power of big corporations and business alliances. But the political thinking of the Progressive Era was profoundly influenced by the business philosophy of the time, which was not the libertarian-oriented business thinking we are used to hearing from Charles and David Koch or the Chamber of Commerce. The experience of building out the railroad network had left a profound mark on American business culture, as had the emergence of such techniques as the use of standardized and interchangeable parts in machine construction (one of Samuel Colt’s many contributions to American life), assembly lines (particularly in the automobile industry), and more systematic approaches to business management. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” philosophy was ascendant, and business and government alike were consumed with efficiency, rooting out waste and redundancy, and coordination. Many of the leading business thinkers of the time were frankly corporatist (the railroads had been a textbook example of corporatism in action), decrying “destructive competition,” duplication of effort, and the general messiness of free markets. You can still hear the echoes of that when Senator Sanders decries the many available brands of deodorant.

Academics, government officials, and business leaders alike came to believe in the inevitability of “scientific” management of the economy — not quite the “scientific socialism” of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Friedrich Engles, but something closer to the Italian corporatism that grew out of the same intellectual foundation. That thinking is still very much with us: For example, much of the case for the Affordable Care Act was based on the idea by that achieving a more unitary and standardized system of providing and paying for health care would enable government experts to wring efficiencies out of the system. (Much of that debate rested on the question-begging argument that profit and executive compensation are forms of waste, subtractions from the good of health-care consumers. That is pure superstition.) Similar arguments are made in favor of a “Medicare for All” national health-care system. The thinking behind No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized standardization and homogenization, as do most arguments for national plans regarding energy or economic development.

And we should not turn our noses up at standardization: It has revolutionized everything from intercontinental shipping to communication to pharmacology. Having more or less standardized shoe sizes is really useful if you are buying shoes online. (And the act of doing business online is made possible by a great many standardization efforts.) The problem is a familiar one: lack of intellectual humility. The political mind is fundamentally primitive, and it is captive to a kind of magical thinking, laboring under the superstition that the real world is governed by the words in the Federal Register rather than by physics, economics, and history. Observing the efficiency and effectiveness of a limited and manageable enterprise such as a well-organized assembly line or a scrupulously observed railroad schedule, the progressive imagines that the same principles can be put to work managing incomprehensibly complex organic phenomena such as health-care systems and energy markets. This is the dream of society as one big factory under the management of benevolent (not to say godlike) experts.

If this seems like a long way afield from where we started, it isn’t.

If you believe that what the world needs — what America needs — is efficient expert management, then you will pursue policy goals that emphasize size, scale, homogeneity, systematization, and regimentation. And your preferred instrument almost always will be the federal government; 50 states doing things 50 different ways is incompatible with your vision of intelligent expert administration. (Of course I am simplifying here, but I do not think that these characterizations are unfair or uncharitable.) And that is what we have seen from our modern Democrats for a generation: Their pursuit of national power, especially the centralized and centralizing power of the presidency, is an obsession followed often to the exclusion of other opportunities for political power. The Democrats won the White House twice under Barack Obama but were jackhammered at the state and local level, losing 900 seats in state legislatures, more than a dozen governorships, and more than a dozen state legislative houses. This did not seem to bother them very much. They also lost their congressional majorities, which stung more, but keeping control of the presidency — and hence the administrative state — was a great consolation. Their commitment to a Washington-based approach to political and economic life has not wavered.

Unfortunately for them, our Constitution is set up along other lines.

The interests and position of the states are fortified by institutions such as the Electoral College and the Senate, even as diminished as it is: Changing the nature of the Senate was one of the great political achievements of the Progressive Era.

Which of our institutions do progressives most detest? The Electoral College and the Senate. (The Bill of Rights gets no love, either.) On 16 October Jay Willis, who writes about politics for a fashion magazine, called for the abolition of the Senate on the grounds that it disadvantages progressives: “Since there now are a greater number of sparsely-populated, mostly-white, right-leaning states than there are heavily-populated, racially-diverse, left-leaning states, the Senate acts to preserve power for people and groups who would otherwise have failed to earn it.” Ken Dilanian of NBC News made the same argument. Philip Bump, writing in the Washington Post, complained that Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by senators representing less than half of the population, and described the functioning of the Electoral College and the Senate as an affront to the “precept that all men are created equal.” Ken Norton of Google has called for the abolition of the Senate. The Green party has called for its abolition, as has Slate’s “Chatterbox” column. Dylan Matthews bemoaned the Senate in Vox. And it’s not just far-left wackos: Michael Walsh praised the prospect of abolishing the Senate in National Review, and in the Washington Post John Bicknell advocated abolishing the Senate as the only means to render Congress functional enough to contain the imperial presidency. The many Democrats who have called for the abolition of the Electoral College have been sufficiently heard from and do not need revisiting here. The progressive (and occasional conservative) preference for more direct mass democracy is based either on a romantic overestimate of the intelligence of the mass electorate or (more likely, I think) overconfidence in their ability to manipulate that mass electorate.

It is unsurprising, then, that most of the foregoing Democratic arguments are mere demands for greater political power disguised as calls for “fairness,” an infinitely plastic concept. And we can be reasonably confident that if certain shoes had been on other feet — if Democrats enjoyed a commanding position in the states, or if Mrs. Clinton had won in the Electoral College with a couple million fewer votes than Donald Trump — that the intensity of their complaints would be diminished. But this is not only naked political calculation: The belief that the United States should be administered as a single unitary entity and that the 50 states are 50 impediments to national progress and efficient national administration is deep in their political thinking. In fact, it may even be the case that their political calculation is a lagging indicator driven in part by their policy vision: Being so focused on Washington, it is natural that the Democrats have allowed the atrophy of their political muscle in the states, leading to diminished power in them. At the same time, the people in the more rural states have not failed to appreciate that the Democrats’ Washington-first approach devalues them and their communities — precisely the problem that our constitutional order was designed to ameliorate.

Many Democrats argue that those dusty old 18th-century debates about how to organize the union are no longer relevant. The people of Wyoming obviously feel otherwise.

And therein lies an opportunity for conservatives of both the libertarian and Burkean tendencies, which may be summed up in a word that conservatives sometimes roll their eyes at: diversity. Russell Kirk wrote about the proper appreciation for genuine diversity in ways that may make the modern reader a little squeamish:

Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.

Kirk argued that good government meant “recognition of local liberties and interests and diversities and their safeguarding in the state.”

Conservatives sometimes are ridiculed for treating the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the words of the Founding Fathers as though they were delivered on stone tablets by Moses himself. (My own belief is that the conservative attitude regarding the Constitution and the Founders is a very healthy prejudice to have, even if its expressions can be sometimes a little silly, e.g., waving all those pocket Constitutions in people’s faces as though that were an argument.) Perhaps we conservatives are inclined to cleave to our Constitution simply because it is ours, but we should also appreciate that the order it creates makes for reasonably good governance and the chance of happy living. Conservatives should rejoice — loudly — in the facts that ours is a large, complex, messy republic, full of diversity of a much more meaningful sort than that contemplated by the self-flagellating partisans of intersectionality. We will argue our case, but we also are satisfied, if not quite content, to let California be California — and we would be much more content if our progressive friends were satisfied to let Texas be Texas.

What we sometimes describe as federalism is not a mere mechanism of political compromise, a way of allowing Republican candidates for federal office to dodge contentious issues by insistent that they be “left to the states,” though there is much to be said for leaving those to the states. It is, or should be, part of a broader conservative politics that insists that the states matter and that the communities within them matter — that Americans matter in the particular, not only in the aggregate. What is good and worth defending about Wyoming and North Dakota is good and worth defending irrespective of what 50 percent plus 1 of the American people at large think about it. (And who’s asking them, anyway?) The politics and the social dynamic are right there in front of our eyes: The progressive model of homogenizing and regimenting politics is very much of a piece with the hysterical demands for obedience on social media, the speech policing on the campuses, the excesses of the feminists and the other grievance professionals, the stultifying conformity that dominates the corporate cultures of Google, Facebook, Apple, and others. It is an attempt at the standardization of places and communities — and the standardization of souls. Their instrument is the politics of “My Gang Is Bigger Than Your Gang,” what stands between us and them is a frail little fence made of parchment and memory.

The Punk and the Princess

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 12, 2018

You wouldn’t think that pop princess Taylor Swift would have that much in common with punk-rock elder statesman Henry Rollins . . .

A few right-leaning Taylor Swift fans in my life expressed a little dismay — but no surprise — about the gifted singer and songwriter (and pretty good banjo-picker) and her decision to dunk herself in the muck of the upcoming election with a dopey and illiterate diatribe against Senator Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.). Swift had previously kept quiet about her political opinions, possibly in keeping with Michael Jordan’s advice (“Republicans buy sneakers, too,” he said) and possibly in the knowledge that there isn’t any particular reason anybody should give an especial damn about the political views of celebrities. She had been from time to time criticized for declining to use her celebrity as a pulpit for warm-mush chardonnay liberalism of the familiar variety offered up by American celebrities. The ego can only resist so much temptation.

I kept that in mind last night at the Kessler Theater in Dallas, where Henry Rollins — the punk-rock wild man who has in his fifties evolved into something somewhere between stand-up comedian and lecturer (I cannot write the words “spoken-word artist” without wincing) — was putting on a peculiar performance. Rollins has concluded his career as a musician: “I put up my fists and there was no longer anything there,” he wrote in LA Weekly, where he is a regular columnist. “It was heartbreaking, but it was clear. Music had moved on.” But it has been a long time since music was his primary outlet. He has been an actor in films of varying quality (from Heat to Johnny Mnemonic), a writer of bad verse and good prose, and a much-admired public conversationalist. At the moment, he is touring with a slide-show presentation about his extensive travels over the years, from crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express (he edited Johnny Ramone’s memoir, Commando, during those long stretches of monotonous tundra) to enduring a North Korean propaganda junket, and venturing into Afghanistan and Iraq as a USO performer.

It is difficult not to like Henry Rollins. He’d bristle at the wording, but he is an all-American success story, as good an example of the Protestant work ethic as you might ever hope to encounter. He is bracingly straightforward about what made the difference in his life: “I don’t have talent. I have tenacity.” And one bit of good fortune: When he was a young man scooping chocolate-chip cookie-dough ice cream into cones at a Häagen-Dazs shop in Georgetown, his favorite band, Black Flag, found itself with an opening for a singer, and invited him — an enthusiastic fan with little performing experience — to come up to New York to audition for the role. He ran through the set and had the job ten minutes later. He is probably the closest thing to a genuine rock star as the American punk scene ever produced. The most radical thing about him is that after spending his life marinating in a pop culture thick with jaded knowingness and ironic distancing, he remains entirely earnest.

The usual contradictions are there: Rollins is an anti-capitalist who has paid the bills with everything from Hollywood movies to modeling for the Gap, a creature of the underground who made it big on MTV, back when MTV was a thing. The son of an economist (Paul Garfield, the author of Public Utility Economics), Rollins grew up in Potomac, Md., attended a pretty fancy prep school (Bullis, current tuition $43,131/year), and enrolled briefly at American University before dropping out. That’s a pretty familiar curriculum vitae, that of the socially alienated youth with enough of an education and well-heeled background to enjoy his social alienation, and to make something of it. But there was real suffering, too: The long dark shadow over his life was a mugging outside of his California home in 1991, during which his best friend, Black Flag roadie Joe Cole, was shot to death.

“I survive America,” he says, “in spite of what it wants to do to people like me.” One cannot help but note that “people like me” in this case means beloved, widely admired, well-off celebrities. There’s a bit of a blind spot there for him, as there often is for similar celebrities. He took a moment to piss on Brett Kavanaugh and to heap praise on the performer he most admires: Iggy Pop. You’ll be familiar with the thin allegations against Justice Kavanaugh. Iggy Pop is indeed a gifted performer. He’s also a man who maintained a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl and then recorded a song, “Look Away,” mocking her family for their inability to do anything about it. Another of those blind spots, I suppose.

It is difficult to get outside ourselves, and to understand our own biases. Rollins, playing to the Dallas hipster crowd, praised Senate candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke — he goes by “Beto” for campaign purposes — who is running against Senator Ted Cruz. O’Rourke, like Rollins, is a prep-school kid with good family connections. His father was a politically important judge in Texas, which must have come in handy when he was arrested for drunk driving after careering into a truck and attempting to flee the scene. (O’Rourke still denies that he tried to run; witnesses told police otherwise.) O’Rourke, too, is a familiar type: The rowing-crew captain protected by daddy’s position from bearing the full consequences of his misbehavior. You think the sons of tomato pickers named Roberto Gonzalez or Perez or Guzman get sent into court–recommended misdemeanor programs after driving drunk into oncoming traffic and trying to flee the scene? Nope. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, is a bookish nerd, the son of an immigrant from Matanzas, Cuba, a guy who busted his ass at Princeton and who will talk your ear off about Hayek and history and constitutional theory. And yet he’s somehow the entitled jerk in the race? Another of those blind spots. O’Rourke may be a bass-player, but he’s about as punk-rock as my Brooks Brothers pajamas. The ties of tribe run deep, and they are not always obvious to us. I wonder what, if anything, Henry Rollins actually knows about Ted Cruz, or “Beto” O’Rourke.

On the same theme: Does anybody really think that Taylor Swift sat down and marked up a copy of Title IV, sec. 40001-40703 of Public Law 103–322, taking note of the ACLU’s historical objections to the law and the findings in United States v. Morrison, which ruled part of it unconstitutional? Do you think she carefully considered the provisions of the law that Republicans objected to, such as the process for extending temporary visas to illegal aliens who claimed to have been victimized by certain crimes? Or do you think she saw the words “Violence Against Women Act,” took a good hard look at Senator Blackburn, and let that be that?

It’s not that I don’t get it. I have spent a little bit of time with Senator Cruz, whom I like and admire, and I often have the same reaction to his campaign performances that I had to those of George W. Bush: “Who is this Howdy-Doody m———-r on my television? Because he sure as hell bears scant resemblance to the man I met.” I don’t know why Senator Cruz does that Elmer Gantry thing on the campaign trail, and I am a native Texan. I suppose it works. It must. Or, at least, it must have. As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, things change, even in Texas, where the increasingly urban population is going to make things complicated for Republicans such as Senator Cruz.

Republicans are not cool. Never have been. The hipsters in Brooklyn may be aping Abe Lincoln’s facial hair these days, but President Lincoln was not cool in his time. Neither were Dwight Eisenhower and Senator Taft. Hollywood thought that Ronald Reagan — one of their own — was the devil incarnate. Rollins’s pals the Ramones satirized him in “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” and Johnny Ramone was a Republican. Barry Goldwater? Those glasses are fashionable now (cf. Rollins, Henry) but Senator Goldwater was not cool — not in 1964, not thereafter. Cool is carefree. Cool doesn’t try too hard. Cool is not overly concerned about being responsible. Cool is just cool.

I don’t need Republicans to be cool. I need them to try to govern like adults.

(Alas.)

But the cult of cool is a faith without mercy — Ego, too, is a jealous god. Celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Henry Rollins swim in the sea of cool, which is invisible to them for the same reason that water is invisible to a tuna. It isn’t that they are stupid (some celebrities are genuinely stupid — looking at you, Sean Penn — but I do not think that there is any reason to believe that Swift or Rollins is among them), and it isn’t that they are incurious: Rollins is one of the most inquisitive people walking upright, one who consumes books and documentaries and experiences with real intellectual hunger. (You might call him “civilized.”) Like John Watson, they see, but they do not observe. And one of the reasons they do not observe is that they don’t have to. There isn’t any price for being intellectually irresponsible. Taylor Swift can make poorly informed and shallow political statements all day, and I can explain here why they are poorly informed and shallow, and, after I do that, she’ll still be Taylor Swift. Of course it is folly to think very much about the political opinions of pop singers and movie stars — except for the fact that they exert a good deal more influence over the political discourse than do the arguments and meditations of more responsible parties. This morning, one of the local right-wing talk-radio hosts was going on in something like rapture about Kanye West’s recent appearance in a MAGA hat. We conservatives are pretty cheap dates when it comes to celebrity.

A funny story from last night: Rollins has appeared as an interviewer in a bunch of documentaries, including one about New Orleans residents who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina. There was a woman he was scheduled to interview, and she clearly did not want to be interviewed. He told her that he understood, that he just wanted to hear her story, and that he’d try to get the whole thing done in ten minutes or less. I had the same experience about 20 years ago with a famous punk singer who had spoken often about how much he hated being interviewed, about how put-upon and probed the process made him feel. Henry, his name was.

The Return of Rent Control

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has long been an admirer of the Sandinistas, the revolutionary political movement that overthrew the government of Nicaragua and brought to that unhappy country its Marxist ideal of justice, which turned out to be rather heavy on mass executions. But Mayor de Blasio’s roving eye seems to have settled for the moment on Venezuela.

Mayor de Blasio proposes to expropriate the property of New York City’s commercial landlords. Of course, he wouldn’t put it quite like that, just as Senator Warren wouldn’t use the same blunt honest language to describe her daft proposal to put corporate boards under political discipline. (To be fair, Senator Warren is only 1/1024th a Leninist.) But that’s what his proposal amounts to: Commercial landlords would no longer have the power to set their own rents, to evict undesirable tenants, to determine deposit amounts, etc. The property would remain formally titled to them, but they would in effect lose control of it.

This is an example of what Robert Higgs calls “regime uncertainty,” which does not describe the rise and fall of governments but rather the security of property rights. Mayor de Blasio and other Democrats would argue that they are not depriving landlords of their property rights, only subjecting them to regulation in the public interest. But the changes proposed represent a fundamental shift in the nature of those property rights, away from property owners and toward political actors — the prior regime of property rights ceases to exist. A landlord who cannot set his own rent may still own his property on paper, as does a corporation that cannot determine for itself the composition of its board, but ownership no longer means what it did.

Regime uncertainty means that investors are unable to make long-term plans for their property, because the nature of rights to that property is not securely established. Often, this has the perverse effect of raising prices that regulation had been meant to lower or to stabilize: If an investment involves a higher degree of risk, then investors will demand higher returns to put their money behind it.

New York City, of all places, should understand this, given the catastrophic and categorical failure of its residential rent-control regime, which ended up subsidizing the housing of celebrities and politically connected multimillionaires. As a Vanity Fair contributor by the name of Donald Trump put it in a 1987 essay:

Consider one building on Central Park West at Seventy-third Street — magnificently designed, with huge apartments, wonderful detailing, a beautiful double-height marble lobby, and, of course, gorgeous views. Mia Farrow has ten rooms overlooking the park, paying about $2,000 a month for an apartment that could rent for upwards of $10,000 a month on the open market. Carly Simon lives in the same building and pays about $2,200 a month for her ten rooms with the same view. Across town, Alistair Cooke pays roughly $1,100 for his eight-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, and William Shawn, former editor of The New Yorker, lives in an eight-room apartment in the same building and pays about $1,000 a month. William vanden Heuvel, a very prominent attorney who served as ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, pays less than $650 a month for his six-room apartment in a terrific building on East Seventy-second Street.

(Ambassador vanden Heuvel is the father of Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, who seethes with revolutionary zeal in the Hamptons.)

Many of those celebrities eventually were shamed into giving up their subsidies — or they just moved on, as people do — but the underlying dynamic never changes. Oddly enough, neither does the progressive response: Every few years, some far-thinking politician will propose tax credits or some other form of subsidy to encourage manufacturing jobs, or alternative energy, or whatever it is the politicians think needs encouraging, and, then, a few years later, they will complain that these subsidies are going to actual businesses — businesses they hate — instead of the magical nice rainbow businesses of their mentally diminished imaginations. Manufacturing credits go to Starbucks and oil companies, green-energy incentives redound to the benefit of Tesla or General Electric, credit subsidies sold as guarantors of good blue-collar jobs go to Koch Industries. Think of Elon Musk as the Carly Simon of green-weenie schmundo.

(For the record, Musk is a vocal critic of the federal electric-vehicle incentive program.)

Mayor de Blasio and others of his ilk — Senators Warren and Sanders prominent among them — are simply hostile to the idea of property rights as classically understood. What they would prefer is a regime of pseudo-rights that is subject to constant political intervention. One of the benefits of strong property rights is that private property creates centers of power outside politics and outside the state. Mayor de Blasio and Senator Warren are étatists, who are hostile to all centers of power outside their control: corporations that conduct their business as they think best, holders of substantial private wealth who pursue their own political interests, private associations that raise money to participate in the political process and influence policy, etc. As the étatists would have it, power is a one-way street: Politicians have essentially unlimited power over the private economy (and over private life in general) but private actors are to have no power over the state other than that afforded to them — on the politicians’ own terms — at the voting booth. But there is more to liberty than having a vote.

Policies substantially similar to those proposed by Mayor de Blasio have been pursued to disaster elsewhere, most recently and notably in the case of Venezuela. The chavista regime thought that food prices were too high, so it set about controlling them; soon enough, there was simply no food for sale, and ordinary needful things such as toilet paper simply disappeared from the store shelves as producers declined to produce at the artificially low prices demanded by politicians. Mayor de Blasio has done the chavistas one better by pursuing this agenda at a particularly stupid time: Manhattan is experiencing a minor crisis of retail vacancies. Over the summer, retail vacancies in the West Village climbed above 11 percent — and they hit 20 percent in other parts of Manhattan. It’s a great time to be shopping for a storefront in New York City.

On the other side of the country, California voters are considering Proposition 10, which would give cities expansive new powers to control rents — not only on apartment buildings but also on private homes. Question: If you cannot decide to rent your house out for a price agreeable both to you and to your tenant — but instead are obliged to ask the permission of, say, the geniuses who govern San Bernardino — in what sense do you own your home? Much of California, especially the Bay Area, is suffering from a severe shortage in residential real estate, especially in affordable rental housing. Why would any sane investor put a few hundred million into a new development there if he cannot even determine for himself what rent he will accept?

Landlords do not have the power to unilaterally set rent. Neither do tenants. What both have — and this is the genius of the free market, and the beauty of it, and the justice of it — is the right of exit, which is to say, the right to say “No.” All parties come to the transaction with exactly the same power: the power to walk away. And if you think that the size and position of big corporations gives them extra special power in those relationships, ask yourself why it is that Walmart and McDonald’s cannot unilaterally raise prices without losing money. The seller wants x, and the buyer thinks x is too high; he proposes y instead. Maybe the seller likes y, maybe he doesn’t, but they negotiate something between them until they arrive at a price that both are willing to accept — or they don’t. The deal that doesn’t happen — the sale that isn’t made — is the little death that gives the free and cooperative institutions their evolutionary character. No politician had to put a price cap on New Coke or Clairol Touch of Yogurt Shampoo — consumers did that for them. Floyd Mayweather doesn’t make Floyd Mayweather money because some politician says that it must be so. New York City real estate is what it is, and it is worth what it is worth on the rental market — and no law can change that underlying economy reality. It can only get in the way of cooperative relationships between buyers and sellers, owners and renters.

There are many things that New York’s municipal and state powers could be doing to make life easier on commercial renters in the city. For instance, having one of the highest tax burdens in the nation surely is something felt more acutely by the little guy than it is by David Solomon’s gang, even if the latter pays a lot more in absolute taxes. (A functional subway system would be an excellent addition to the city as well.) Schools that are more functional and less corrupt might at least make them feel like those taxes are spent to good purpose. But putting the big ugly snout of politics between landlords and renters is going to end badly for everybody — as it has in the past.

Politicians are always and everywhere vulnerable to magical thinking. Somebody makes a complaint, “The rent’s too damn high!” And politicians respond by passing a law saying that the rent can’t be so damn high — as though this would magically change the nature of the market, the inventory of available real estate, the budgets and desire of other would-be renters, etc. — as though there would be no consequences.         

But there are consequences to this kind of totalitarian thinking. You can see them in Caracas.