The Two Freedoms

What’s the message Democrats are trying to get across here? It seems a little subtle.

I have already covered some of the obvious problems with Kamala Harris’s proposed (and still somewhat vague) anti-price-gouging measures. Scott Lincicome is my go-to guy on this, so I was happy to see him do a thorough overview in The Atlantic of the actual factors driving grocery prices.

It’s not “greed” or corporate profits, which have always been and remain low in the grocery business. Instead, it’s a great example of the Law of Intended Consequences. The factors Scott highlights are government interventions like tariffs and ethanol subsidies whose whole purpose is to subsidize agriculture by driving up prices. And then we’re shocked that they go up, and we’re all trying to find the guy who did this.

The Atlantic also posted a cartoonish piece of left-wing populism titled, and I am not making this up, “Sometimes You Just Have to Ignore the Economists,” because “regular people seem to understand a few things that economists don’t.” That reminds us what we’re up against.

(Here’s where I have to include my usual Preamble about January 6 and Trump’s attempt to overturn the last election. To overstate the issue, proposals like Harris’s price control trial balloon put us in the position of having to choose between capitalism and democracy. That’s an overstatement because I don’t think the situation is quite that bad—and also because in the long run, I don’t think you can have one without the other.)

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The YIMBY Caucus

Just as to-hell-with-the-experts populism cuts across party lines, so do some better trends. The YIMBY movement that I’ve been following for years hit something of a high point at the Democratic convention, getting a clear call-out from Barack Obama, who said, “If we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that have made it harder to build homes for working people in this country.” Did Barack Obama just come out…in favor of deregulation? That’s the miracle of the YIMBY movement.

Alex Tabarrok traces the movement back to a National Bureau of Economic Research report in 2002, “The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability.” See a more popularized version from Cato.

See also a thread from a backer of the YIMBY movement who cautions that “we’re only barely starting to turn the tide on policy” and invokes a favorite Churchill quote: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Yet here’s how far we have gotten. This is now going to be a YIMBY Caucus in Congress.