Stock

Travis Fisher and Joshua Loucks

The 1981 song Red Barchetta by the band Rush tells the story of a man who gleefully commits a weekly crime—driving a brilliant red Ferrari 166MM (barchetta being Italian for “little boat/​craft”) and ultimately outsmarting and outdriving the authorities. The story is a warning to people who love to drive because, in the dystopian future setting of the song’s plot, a “motor law” makes driving the car illegal.

The song itself is an exhilarating ride. If you haven’t listened to it recently, do your ears a favor and check it out here. And the political lesson is clear: a future in which the government tries to arrest you for driving a vintage Ferrari—or any car you like—would be awful and should be relegated to science fiction.

Not so fast, say the officious pencil pushers at the US Environmental Protection Agency, who issued a regulation earlier this year that would force a transition to electric vehicles (EVs). The EPA expects the tailpipe emissions standards to push two-thirds of new vehicles sold in 2032 to be EVs (today, EVs make up something like 7.6 percent of new vehicles sold in the United States).

Opponents of EV mandates typically cite things like range anxiety (which prevents the long drives that are “a hallmark of American car culture”), higher cost (EVs cost over $56,000 compared to $48,000 for gas-powered vehicles), and the lack of available charging infrastructure (despite the $7.5 billion in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to expand this infrastructure, the government had spurred the construction of just eight electric charging stations in over two years).

These are valid concerns, but what if you just like driving a car with an internal combustion engine? We have nothing against EVs. But if you love driving a gasoline-powered vehicle (for whatever reason), by God, this is America, and no one at the EPA should tell you what kind of car to love.

The formal name of the EPA rule is the “Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles.” Although the rule has a longwinded name, it would swiftly limit consumer choice for passenger vehicles. Under the guise of reducing “climate pollution,” the Biden-Harris administration’s EPA believes it has ample authority to reshape the American automotive industry.

How would an agency obtain such authority? Despite recent Supreme Court decisions to the contrary, the EPA has decided its sweeping new authority comes from existing statutes.

First, as summarized by Jonathan Adler in the Cato Supreme Court Review (an amazing resource), the 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA “rested on the longstanding and fundamental constitutional principle that agencies only have the regulatory authority Congress delegated to them” and found that “[e]xtraordinary assertions of regulatory authority… required a clear delegation from Congress.” Notably, WV v. EPA was the first case to invoke the “major questions doctrine” in a majority opinion by the Supreme Court. 

Second, the 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo limited the deference agency decisions will receive from courts and officially ended the era of so-called “Chevron deference.” Interestingly, the doctrine of Chevron deference was named for the 1984 case Chevron v. NRDC, which gave deference to—you guessed it—the EPA.

Taken together, these recent Supreme Court rulings illustrate how, thankfully, administrative law is beginning to side a little more with the freedom of the individual over the authority of the administrative state. They also show how untethered the EPA’s regulations have become from underlying statutes. Still, the EPA can’t help but shoot its shot—in fact, it has become effective at achieving its desired outcome even when it loses in court.

Defenders of the EPA’s rulemaking say it’s not a mandate, per se, but merely an emissions standard. My question back to them is: What’s the difference? If the result of an emissions standard is to limit choice and force an entire industry—and every American consumer—in a direction few of us want to go, can we at least call it a de facto mandate?

Further, what would stop the EPA from tightening its emissions standard even further and creating a real-deal EV mandate? The line is blurry. There’s even a separate EPA waiver program through which 17 states have now adopted California’s EV mandate.

Fortunately, Congress has a voice in this process. On the one hand, it could pass new legislation granting the EPA explicit authority to forcibly remove the internal combustion engine from American automobile markets. We don’t suspect that would be a popular policy. On the other hand, it could use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to disapprove and reject the EPA’s rulemaking.

The latter is precisely what the House of Representatives did last week, in a bipartisan vote of 215 to 191. Under the structure of the CRA, the Senate would also have to pass the resolution, and then it would head to President Biden’s desk for signature. Given the likely veto from President Biden, the CRA would require a veto-proof majority. The margin in the House was approximately 53 percent, which would fall short.

We have a better idea. What if the types of vehicles we drive weren’t dictated by Congress or the EPA? What if the government got out of the auto industry altogether? Note that many of the major car manufacturers in the US have “curbed their EV ambitions in recent months” as they have become aware of the lack of demand for EVs. Maybe the American people know more about what they want than federal bureaucrats.

Vehicle mandates—de facto or direct—push us closer to the dystopian future imagined in Red Barchetta, when people have lost liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As the song warns, these mandates force us to comply with burdensome rules rather than allowing us the freedom to chart our own course. The “better, vanished time” in Red Barchetta is right now, and we should fight to keep it. 

Romina Boccia

Today, September 25, the House Budget Committee will consider the Stop the Baseline Bloat Act (H.R. 8068), an important step toward addressing the budget distortion caused by including temporary emergency spending in the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) baseline. This flawed approach creates a distorted view of the budget, allowing “emergency” funds to quietly inflate future spending projections. It also makes maintaining current levels of discretionary spending seem like a deficit reduction.

Emergency spending provisions—meant to address unforeseen crises—are being treated as permanent expenditures, undermining the purpose of emergency appropriations and skewing fiscal decisions.

As bill sponsor Rep. Glenn Grothman (R‑WI) pointed out during a recent hearing with CBO Director Phillip Swagel, the practice of extending temporary emergency spending, like the $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, across a 10-year window artificially inflates future projections. This adds about $900 billion to the budget baseline, despite being billed as “one-time” money.

Dr. Swagel agreed that emergency spending should not be treated as permanent, noting that the CBO is bound by statute to extend it. This statute distorts the fiscal picture, leading to what Dominik Lett and I have called an “insidious ratcheting effect,” where spending is biased upwards as emergency funds inflate the baseline, making it easier for legislators to justify additional spending.

The Stop the Baseline Bloat Act, introduced on a bipartisan basis by Rep. Glenn Grothman (R‑WI) and Rep. Ed Case (D‑HI), would correct this by instructing the CBO to remove emergency spending from baseline projections, treating this spending as an exemption rather than as part of the regular budget.

This matters because the CBO budget baseline serves as the benchmark for evaluating fiscal policy. Whether something is scored as a spending increase or cut depends on the baseline. The current baseline approach, however, includes temporary emergency funds alongside regular discretionary appropriations and projects both to grow with inflation. The problem? By projecting temporary emergency expenditures as if they were permanent, the CBO’s current practice artificially inflates discretionary spending estimates.

According to Rep. Case (D‑HI):

“The path out of our growing budget crisis starts with accurate and transparent budgets. A budget that inflates prior year spending to conceal real growth year-to-year is neither accurate nor transparent. Our measure would eliminate these budgetary tricks that conceal our dangerous journey into fiscal irresponsibility.”

As Rep. Grothman (R‑WI) noted:

“The CBO cannot continue to create a budget baseline that justifies outrageous spending levels. Getting the country’s fiscal house in order starts with an unbiased CBO baseline.”

And as I’ve stated previously:

“The Stop the Baseline Bloat Act would [ensure that] when Congress decides to rely on emergency and supplemental funding to increase topline levels, a spending increase gets scored as such.”

To curb reckless spending, Congress should accurately account for emergencies in the budget. Honest budgeting is critical, and excluding emergency appropriations from the baseline is a key step in the right direction.

For a more comprehensive treatment of emergency spending and its fiscal impact, see “Curbing Federal Emergency Spending | Cato Institute”

Matthew Cavedon

Nicholas Anthony

The Human Rights Foundation’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Tracker shows that over 1.5 billion people are living in countries where CBDCs have been rolled out. However, not all central banks appear to be on board. The central banks in Canada, Australia, and Colombia recently came out in opposition to the idea of issuing CBDCs. 

In an update to its website, the Bank of Canada said it is “scaling down its work on a retail central bank digital currency and shifting its focus to broader payments system research and policy development.” Just before that, the Reserve Bank of Australia published a report that said, “There is no clear public interest case to issue retail CBDC in Australia as yet.” Finally, in July, the Banco de la República de Colombia published a report that said “there are not sufficient reasons for the issuance of [a CBDC] (retail or wholesale) in Colombia.”

It may be difficult to imagine government opposition given that the risks of CBDCs largely center on giving governments more power and that power is being rapidly pursued around the world. However, the news from these three countries shows that not everyone is on board.

To be clear, the statements made by the Canadian, Australian, and Colombian central banks are by no means binding, but these statements are a welcome change of pace, nonetheless. 

Matthew Cavedon

In 2020, petitioner Steven Duarte was charged with the federal offense of possessing a firearm while a convicted felon; he had no violent crimes on his record. He was convicted after a trial and sentenced to be imprisoned for 51 months.

On appeal, a panel of the Ninth Circuit reversed Duarte’s conviction under the Second Amendment, holding that the government failed to show that permanently depriving Duarte of his fundamental rights is consistent with our nation’s history. However, at the government’s request, the Ninth Circuit vacated the panel’s decision and agreed to rehear the case en banc.

Cato joined an amicus brief filed by federal public and community defender offices asking the en banc court to hold that universal, lifetime disarmament of all people convicted of felonies is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court’s history-based test allows for only narrow, concrete, historically grounded exceptions to the Second Amendment.

Additionally, disarming all felony probationers reflects a judgment that all felonies are dangerous. That premise is belied by an aggressive, decades-long trend in American politics: overcriminalization. 

Overcriminalization bears out a commonly held fear about the government’s bid for extreme deference: that instead of tethering the Second Amendment to the dangers motivating our regulatory traditions, the government would give legislatures unreviewable power to manipulate the Second Amendment by choosing a label.

Exceptions to individual rights do not move with the political winds. When it comes to individual rights, history—not legislatures—determines the existence and scope of exceptions. This means that courts may not simply assume that the Second Amendment will expand or contract to fit any crime labeled a felony. Rather, courts must confront the reality of what modern felonies look like, and compare that reality to the government’s proposed historical analogues. 

Applying history’s lessons to today’s sprawling criminal codes, the court should conclude that the government has not met its burden to square universal felon disarmament with our regulatory traditions.

Justin Logan

Without US military support, neither Ukraine nor Israel could sustain the wars they are fighting at present. From the first day Russia invaded, Ukraine has relied heavily on US arms, intelligence, and even targeting to defend itself. Similarly, Israel has relied on billions of dollars of American weapons to wage its massive campaign in Gaza. An Israeli war with Hezbollah would rely on even more extensive US assistance in defending Israel from rockets and other ordnance, as well as trying to deter Iran.

The United States has interests in Ukraine and Israel, but that interest is not identical with either country’s interest in itself. Still, the Biden administration has seemed incapable of speaking up for American interests where they differ from those of its partners. Washington seems like a passive spectator of escalation in both conflicts, despite the implications for Americans.

In Ukraine, early on in the war National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pronounced, “[O]ur job is to support the Ukrainians. They will set the military objectives. They will set the objectives at the bargaining table.” He added that “we are not going to define the outcome of this for the Ukrainians. That is up for them to define and us to support them in.”

Initially, the administration did not follow this principle. They declined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s repeated requests for the United States to enter the war via a no-fly zone. Similarly, when Zelensky blamed Russia for an errant missile that killed Polish citizens, the Biden administration publicly made clear that it was a Ukrainian air-defense missile that killed the Poles, again declining the opportunity to escalate the conflict. And when Ukrainians planned a massive attack in Moscow on the first anniversary of the war, the Americans told them not to.

More recently, Kyiv has decided to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. When Zelensky decided to strike Russian early warning radars that detect incoming nuclear strikes last spring, there is no indication they let the Americans know in advance, leaving an anonymous US official to worry to the Washington Post that the strikes could lead Russia to “think it has a diminished ability to detect early nuclear activity against it.” Similarly with Ukraine’s ground invasion of Russia. Apparently afraid the Americans would either say no or leak the plan, Kyiv did not notify Washington it was about to invade Russian territory.

A similar dynamic has taken place during Israel’s war in Gaza. The invasion of Rafah was the one instance where the administration did something material to try to constrain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it didn’t work. The administration delayed a shipment of bombs to convey its opposition to the campaign. Israel invaded anyway, and the Biden administration ultimately released part of the delayed shipment.

But Israel, too, has learned not to ask when you fear you may hear “no.” When it came to Israel’s exploding pager operation in Lebanon, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant only told his American counterpart beforehand “about an imminent operation without divulging details,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Similarly, Israel did not notify the Americans at all about their decision to begin bombing Beirut on September 20.

This is despite the escalatory potential, and despite the fact that the Biden administration made clear its opposition to expanding the war into Lebanon just a day before Israel launched the pager operation. As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff C.Q. Brown remarked this summer, such a conflict could well pull in both Iran and the United States, and even if it remained limited to Hezbollah, there were limits to the amount of protection the US military could provide Israel. The costs would be much higher for Israelis.

In both Ukraine and Israel, American partners are leading the United States toward outcomes it says it does not want, often doing so without notifying the US administration of escalatory decisions.

American policy should be working to extricate Americans from these conflicts. To the extent American aid matters to Ukraine and Israel, American advice—and American interests—must be made to count in equal measure. Whether the sleepwalk toward war in the Middle East and Ukraine is due primarily to the somnolent US president’s inattention, the hawkish prerogatives of the advisers who are running the government, or some other factor, American interests need someone to defend them in both countries. Present policies in both capitals risk entangling Americans in their wars.

Clark Neily

One of the US Supreme Court’s most significant Fourth Amendment cases was 1968’s Terry v. Ohio. In Terry, the court held that a police officer can frisk people based on reasonable suspicion that they are involved in a crime and have a weapon. Petitioner Nathan Cooper was subjected to a Terry frisk in January 2022 after reports that he was involved in a dispute at his Florida workplace. He is asking the Supreme Court to revisit the Terry decision. 

Cato filed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to grant the petition and end the practice of Terry frisks. Under the common law and at the time of the American Founding, a Terry frisk would have qualified as the seizure of a person. But a person could only lawfully be seized based on probable cause—a higher standard than reasonable suspicion.

Overruling Terry’s authorization of frisks would be a long-overdue course correction that would strengthen the legitimacy of the Supreme Court’s originalist approach to law.

The court should grant Cooper’s petition and restore a critical protection enacted by the people—a protection that Justice Antonin Scalia once referred to as enacted by the “fiercely proud men who adopted our Fourth Amendment.” 

Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett

The Biden administration’s unilateral executive actions could cost taxpayers $2 trillion over the next decade, according to an analysis by the House Budget Committee. Even if rising US debt wasn’t a big issue (which it is), executive spending—without congressional approval—is a serious concern. Unchecked executive authority undermines the constitutional balance of power and bypasses essential legislative oversight. Congress needs to step up and tighten controls on executive spending, starting with better transparency and stricter budget rules.

This week, the House Budget Committee will consider five bills to improve budget oversight. One of these bills, the Executive Action Cost Transparency Act (H.R.9751) by Rep. Ron Estes (KS), aims to shed light on the fiscal impact of major regulations and administrative actions.

More Transparency Needed

From student loan bailouts to expanding Medicaid eligibility and increasing food stamp benefits, the Biden administration’s rulemaking is responsible for an enormous fiscal gap, raising deficits over 10 years by $2 trillion, according to congressional estimates. Despite this magnitude, tracking new borrowing from costly regulations is challenging, making oversight difficult and enabling unchecked executive spending. The Executive Action Cost Transparency Act would require the CBO to regularly publish cost estimates, improving transparency and aiding in congressional oversight.

As we’ve previously written, improved reporting on executive spending during national emergencies is key to preventing abuse of emergency powers. The National Emergency Expenditure Reporting Transparency Act (H.R.4615 and S.2300) by Sen. Roger Marshall (R‑KS) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R‑AZ) would amend the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act to require reports on National Emergencies Act expenditures, increasing transparency by bringing executive emergency expenditures to light. The House Budget Committee should consider this proposal in addition to Estes’ Executive Action Cost Transparency Act.

Strengthening Administrative PAYGO

Congress should go beyond increasing transparency, by enforcing a regulatory budget. Administrative Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) aims to offset costly executive actions by requiring that the executive branch provide alternative spending reductions for administrative rules that impose new costs above a certain threshold. The Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) of 2023 made Administrative PAYGO a statutory requirement, but the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has not fully complied, issuing broad exemptions and claiming agencies aren’t legally required to implement offsets. This contradicts the original intent of PAYGO, which expected agencies to offset new spending.

While the administration’s excessive spending is concerning, Congress also failed to design PAYGO effectively. Statutory loopholes allow agencies to avoid offsets. By law, a rule is exempt from offsets if the direct spending increase is either:

Less than $1 billion over the 10-year period beginning with the current year.
Less than $100 million in any given year during such a 10-year period.

This allows agencies to strategically design or evaluate regulations in a way that would avoid triggering PAYGO requirements. For example, a rule costing $990 million over ten years with annual costs just under $100 million would be exempt, while a slightly more expensive rule would not. Likewise, a rule that might cost $5 billion or significantly more over 10 years could be automatically excluded from Administrative PAYGO if a single year costs less than $100 million. These spending exemptions are easily gamed. Additionally, the OMB can waive requirements for vague reasons, with no transparency or judicial oversight. Moreover, there is no proper scorekeeping, without which assessing the full budgetary impact of executive actions remains difficult.

Efforts to tighten Administrative PAYGO include the Strengthening Administrative PAYGO (SAP) Act. This bill seeks to codify Administrative PAYGO into law permanently, clarify exemption thresholds, and require OMB to submit any waiver determinations along with cost estimates of exempted actions to Congress. These reforms would increase transparency and help to curb the costs of executive actions.

Congress should consider going further by replacing the current thresholds test with a simpler approach, such as only automatically exempting rules that have a 10-year cost of less than $1 billion, to avoid gimmicky rule design. Limiting waivers only to emergency situations would better reflect the high hurdle that should be necessary to exempt new deficit spending from budget controls. Finally, adding a running tally of new costs, like a statutory PAYGO scorecard, would add additional transparency to the process, making it easier for budget analysts, Congress, and the public to understand how executive regulations impact the budget.

It’s on Congress to Rein in Executive Spending

Congress must reclaim its constitutional role as the guardian of taxpayer dollars. Executive spending, unchecked by legislative oversight, threatens both fiscal responsibility and the balance of power. It’s on Congress to restore accountability through tighter budget rules, transparent cost reporting, and stronger enforcement of spending controls. With trillions at stake, the need for action is urgent—Congress must step up and rein in executive overreach. The House Budget Committee’s efforts are an important start.

Marc Joffe

The California State Legislature continues to churn out reams of legislation to address the state’s homelessness crisis and housing shortage, with Governor Gavin Newsom signing over thirty relevant bills just last week. While many of the bills have good elements, e.g., lowering the barriers to new home construction, the whole exercise is underpinned by the notion that California can centrally plan its way to an “adequate” housing supply.

But central planning has been repeatedly tried and found to be wanting—most famously in the former Soviet Union where Josef Stalin implemented the first five-year plan in 1928. These detailed recipes for top-down economic management sometimes yielded apparent successes (for example, the rapid industrialization of the Soviet economy) but ultimately failed consumers and contributed to the economic weakness and unrest that ended the Soviet state.

As Nobel Laureate Friedrich A. von Hayek convincingly argued, central planning fails because the planners, even if well-intentioned, lack the knowledge necessary to efficiently allocate resources. That information lies within the heads of the millions of individuals participating in the economy and is best elicited through competition and the unfettered use of prices, which communicate consumer preferences.

But California’s political leaders have forgotten Hayek’s lesson. Just as socialist countries do with their five-year plans, California creates housing production goals at the state level and then pushes them down to regional and local governments. This top-down planning process often ignores local conditions and changes that occur during the planning cycle.

Consider the case of the San Francisco Bay Area. In June 2020, the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) made its latest Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) for the nine-county area, instructing the Association of Bay Area Governments to add 441,176 housing units by December 31, 2030.

But the requirements analysis was based on pre-COVID-19 population projections when it was thought that coastal California’s population would continue its slow but steady growth. Instead, many people fled to inland California and to other states in pursuit of more space and a lower cost of living. While the HCD’s RHNA projection was based on an expected Bay Area population of 8.3 million at the end of 2030, state demographers now forecast 650,000 fewer residents at that time.

The HCD’s RHNA assessment also includes assumptions about the proportion of the population living in institutional settings and the number of residents living in each housing unit. Without updates to those assumptions, it is impossible to precisely determine what the Bay Area’s RHNA would be given current population forecasts. Assuming an unchanged institutional housing ratio of about 2 percent and persons per household remaining at 2.68, the Bay Area’s RHNA would fall from 441,176 to just over 203,000, or more than half.

Yet the state government, ABAG, counties, and cities grind along using the now outdated estimate. State authorities are pushing these stale RHNA housing production goals onto the 101 municipalities of the Bay Area and their counterparts elsewhere in the state, sometimes penalizing them for failing to comply.

By contrast, Texas is able to produce housing for a growing population at lower prices and with less homelessness, all without a state-led central housing plan. In 2023, Texas authorized 232,373 new private housing units or more than double the 111,760 approved in California.

One reason that Texas is more successful than California is that it generally permits developers to create new subdivisions in the exurbs of large metropolitan areas. This is anathema to California’s housing planners who want everyone to live near transit. The preferences of these planners run against those of the many young parents who want more space for their kids (as well as themselves) and who are willing to drive to work and other destinations. In California, by contrast, most land is excluded from residential development because it is under government stewardship or zoned for agricultural purposes only.

California progressives should be applauded for adopting a “Yes In My Back Yard” mentality. But now they must be challenged to take the next step: rather than micromanage the housing production process, they should be getting out of the way and allowing home builders and home buyers the flexibility needed to alleviate the state’s housing shortage.

Nicholas Anthony

After former President Donald Trump announced his proposal to restrict credit card interest rates, I warned Americans that price controls are something to be wary of, no matter who is proposing them. I then posted a video on X showing how Trump criticized price controls and then proceeded to propose a price control ten minutes later. Needless to say, both supporters and critics flooded in to share their thoughts.

If I were to boil down the responses, there were really two main themes that came up in defense of Trump:

Interest rate caps are not price controls.
Usury laws already exist.

Let’s briefly walk through both of these themes to better understand where they go awry. As we will see, defenders of Trump may have more in common with supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris than they might think.

“Interest Rate Caps Are Not Price Controls”

For many people, the defense of Trump rested on the argument that interest rate caps are not price controls, but something else. But no matter how strongly they might believe otherwise, having the government control what rate of interest lenders can charge is to have the government control the price of loans. That is describing a price control.

When reading these responses, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu for these same arguments were made in defense of Harris’s proposed price controls just a month earlier. One notable example occurred during an interview when US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Harris “is not for price fixing—that’s a distortion [and] a Republican talking point.” CNBC’s Sara Eisen correctly responded, “It’s confusing [considering Harris] called for a federal ban on price gouging for food…. That’s a place where the government then controls what the fair price of a good is.” In other words, that’s a price control.

“Usury Laws Already Exist”

Other people countered that usury laws have been around for years. However, the fact that something is old does not mean it is right. History has unfortunately provided many examples of bad ideas that just won’t go away. For instance, the postal banking pilot program was supported by many people because the US Postal Service provided banking services during the 1900s. Yet, the Postal Service’s most recent attempt had just seven customers despite being available in four cities for the past two years. And usury laws have not been without criticism: evidence suggests they likely harm people more than they help as would-be borrowers are forced across state lines or into black markets. As I wrote in Ryan Bourne’s book, The War on Prices, this experience has been seen internationally as well.

Turning back to the interview with Commerce Secretary Raimondo, she also appealed to history in defense of Harris. She even cited usury laws as part of her defense. Raimondo argued, “Many states in this country… have anti-price gouging regulations [and] usury laws. For hundreds of years, we have had laws which provide guardrails for the economy.” Again, however, it doesn’t matter if a Republican or a Democrat is proposing it, the age or existence of an idea does not justify it by default.

Conclusion

Trump’s proposal may be less bad than Harris’s proposal by virtue of being one price control instead of many, but that’s no defense for the hypocrisy of his statements in New York. He was correct in calling out the flaws of price controls. He should have stopped there. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell warned Harris, “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls.” Trump should also heed this warning, but for him, perhaps the warning should be, “When you call your opponent communist, maybe don’t propose price controls.”

Are you interested in learning more about how price controls distort the market? Ryan Bourne’s latest book, The War on Prices, is available here and features 24 chapters that will walk you through price controls large and small.