Shared Article from semafor.com

Lina Khan’s populist plan for New York: Cheaper hot dogs (and …

Zohran Mamdani’s new aide will focus on “excavating the law” to lower prices, borrowing from her legal playbook at the Federal Trade Commission.

semafor.com

Lina Khan is a nearly inexhaustible fountain of terrible, profoundly economically destructive ideas, many of them focused around byzantine^[1] price controls. It is amazing how often these micromanaging interventions are justified by waving hands at the most niggling and trivial gripes imaginable about the consumer economy (How can you bear the price of beer at Yankee Stadium? Ever notice how many times you have to click to cancel your Amazon Prime subscription? There oughtta be a law!), and carried out without the least awareness of the stifling direct effects, perverse unintended consequences, and economy-wide chilling effect that the price control regime routinely causes. Her appointment and prominence in the incoming Mamdani administration is a bad sign that this mayoralty will be leaning heavily towards the worst-case scenarios for his populist economic agenda.

1. ^[1]Maybe I should say Late Antique↩