Punishing landlords and credit-card companies ends up hurting consumers, too.
Here’s an irresistible political formula: “We’re going to fix some big problem, but it won’t cost you, the ordinary citizen, a dime! We’ll just make those rich fat cats pay the bill.” We see this formula at work in New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to freeze city rents. We saw it during the Biden administration when the president blamed high prices, not on his own inflationary policies, but on greedy grocery stores “ripping people off.”
The populist right loves the fat-cat approach as well. Witness President Trump’s call to cap credit-card interest rates at 10%. “We will no longer allow the American Public to be ‘ripped off’ by Credit Card companies,” the president promised in a Truth Social post. In a vivid confirmation of the horseshoe theory, Sen. Bernie Sanders quickly introduced a bill to turn that suggestion into law.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor.
Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
