On Tuesday, the Senate briefly asserted its constitutional prerogative over war and peace. In a 50–48 vote, with four Republicans joining the majority, it passed a resolution directing President Donald Trump to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against Iran.

Politico called it a "surprise blow to Trump." The New York Times described it as "the most significant bipartisan rebuke yet of the conflict." 

But the moment didn't last. The next day, after Trump—"mad as a murder hornet"—berated the Republican defectors at lunch, he got a do-over. Late Wednesday night, Senate Republicans forced a vote on a parallel War Powers Resolution introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.). With Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.) switching sides and Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) voting "present," it failed 47–50–1.

The episode underscored Trump's continued dominance over the GOP caucus. More importantly, it was a reminder of how little practical power Congress retains over the most important decision the Constitution entrusts to it. 

It's been nearly four months since Trump launched Operation Epic Fury, demanding "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" from Iran while denying that the United States was at war. Along the way, Trump has admitted he was "shocked" Iran launched missiles at other Gulf states—"nobody expected that," he said—and seemed caught off guard by how easily the Strait of Hormuz could be closed, though that scenario has long been a staple of Pentagon war games. 

Now the administration is trying to preserve a face-saving settlement that leaves things worse than they were before the first Tomahawk flew. Whatever the multidimensional chess theory was supposed to be, the record looks more like improvisation followed by damage control. 

Despite the precarious "deal" the administration is struggling to preserve, there is every chance Trump will lose patience and the U.S. will stumble back into open war. Or maybe the president will prefer to hold his next foreign adventure closer to home. It's his choice, after all. 

In May, Trump's CIA director visited Havana to warn Cuban intelligence officials that they should "take a lesson" from January's regime-change strike in Venezuela. And in an interview last week, the president mused that Iran is "a very long trip," while "Cuba is a hopscotch." Plus, he noted, Cuba has "nice property" with a "nice shoreline."

For the Framers, the point of lodging the war power in Congress was to avoid leaving the body politic vulnerable to one man's supply of prudence and self-restraint. This was not part of the original plan. "This system will not hurry us into war," James Wilson assured delegates at Pennsylvania's ratifying convention in 1787. "It will not be in the power of a single man…to involve us in such distress."

After decades of drifting away from the original design, Congress tried to reclaim some ground in 1973. In the aftermath of Vietnam, over President Richard Nixon's veto, it passed the War Powers Resolution. The law's stated purpose was to "fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities."

It was a noble effort, but it did not work. That has been evident almost from the start of the law's five-decade history, but the War Powers Resolution's failure has never been more obvious than it is right now. 

One of the law's key provisions was designed to end unauthorized wars automatically, even if Congress could not bring itself to vote. Section 5(b) of the law orders the president to "terminate" military operations after 60 days absent congressional authorization or an attack on the United States that prevents Congress from convening. Over the decades, multiple presidents have treated that limit as a 60-day "free pass" for military adventures, but most tried to wrap things up before hitting the deadline. President Bill Clinton crossed the line during the 1999 Kosovo campaign. President Barack Obama blew past it during the 2011 Libya war, arguing that, technically, it was not "hostilities" if U.S. forces were bombing foreigners who could not hit back. On May 1 of this year, Trump also shrugged off that deadline without consequence. 

Another key provision assumed that a congressional majority should be enough to call a halt to unauthorized war making. Under Section 5(c), Congress could reassert its constitutional authority at any time: U.S. forces "shall be removed by the President if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution."

Then, a decade after the War Powers Resolution passed, the Supreme Court struck down the "legislative veto," effectively neutering that check. A mere congressional majority is no longer enough; reversing presidential action now requires presenting a law to the president for his signature or veto. 

The war powers measure that passed on Tuesday was a concurrent resolution under Section 5(c). But concurrent resolutions, as the Senate's own website notes, "do not have the force of law." So Trump had a point when he called the vote "meaningless" in a Truth Social rant on Tuesday; it had roughly the same legal effect as Congress declaring "National Nurses' Week." 

Even if Congress passed its rebuke in a form that could stick, Trump would veto it, just as he vetoed war powers measures on Iran and Yemen during his first term.

That's where we are now: with a legal regime for war making that turns the original design on its head. This system hurries us into war on one man's whim, then puts every constitutional barrier intended to prevent reckless action in the path of undoing the damage.  

And yet, this is a problem we know how to fix. Reformers have learned a lot from the War Powers Resolution's half-century of failure, and there's no shortage of serious legislative proposals for giving the statute teeth. In theory, at least, the goal of ending unauthorized wars automatically, without a vote, is achievable by tying funding to authorization. 

In practice, however, no reform is achievable without at least one hard vote at the outset. The Senate's inability to stick to its guns this week shows how far Congress still has to go.

The post The Senate's Failure To Rein in Trump on Iran Is Part of a Long History of Congress Abdicating Its War Powers appeared first on Reason.com.

Two days after three of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's endorsed congressional candidates won their elections in the New York primaries, the NYC Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) delivered another win for the mayor. 

On Thursday night, the board voted 7–1 to freeze the rent for 1 million apartments in the city. The rent freeze applies to both one- and two-year leases, and prevents rent increases for more than 40 percent of apartments in the city, reports The New York Times. Those apartments that are covered by the freeze include "high-rise luxury apartments, deeply affordable subsidized units and 150-year-old walk-ups," according to the Times.  

Freezing the rent was one of Mamdani's key campaign promises (remember this?), and one that depended on support from the RGB, which is now largely filled with Mamdani's appointees. 

New York University Stern School of Business professor Arpit Gupta was the lone dissenting vote. On Thursday, he outlined his opposition to the rental freeze in City Journal, warning that "freezing the price of a service indefinitely while its costs continue to rise does not produce cheap or abundant service. Instead, it produces deteriorating assets and, eventually, public bailouts and takeovers."

Although Mamdani claims rental freezes ensure affordability, Gupta argued these measures benefit New Yorkers based on luck, not need. 

"The protection offered by a stabilized lease is effectively a transferable property right, one that can be held for life and, in practice, is often passed down to other family members," he wrote. "A rent freeze increases the value of that right, turning the benefit into something closer to a lottery prize than targeted welfare assistance."

Mamdani's rent freeze is the first to apply to two-year leases, but the city has frozen rent for one-year leases before under Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015, 2016, and in 2020. During this time, however, Reason Foundation—the nonprofit that publishes this magazine—noted that the freeze "widened the gap between operating expenses (such as taxes, insurance, and fuel) and allowable rents," especially for small property owners of older buildings. 

"​​From an economic theory perspective, these freezes functioned as binding price ceilings, protecting existing tenants in the short run but discouraging investment in rental properties and reducing landlords' incentives to keep stabilized units in active use," wrote Reason policy analyst Jen Sidorova last year. "That left fewer homes available, so more people had to compete for the unregulated, 'market-rate' apartments, the ones not covered by rent limits, driving those rents even higher."

Mamdani's freeze is expected to face a legal challenge, reports the Associated Press, especially after the board member representing landlords, Christina Smyth, resigned the day of the vote. In her resignation letter, she wrote that the board, which is supposed to act independently, had "stopped being a fact-finding body" and that "this year's RGB order was decided last year on the campaign trail." 

New York's rent freezes have faced legal opposition before. In 2016, the Rent Stabilization Association, which represented landlords, sued over de Blasio's rent freeze, claiming the board was politically motivated. A Manhattan judge dismissed the lawsuit a year later.  A lawsuit challenging Mamdani's freeze could come from a group like the New York Apartment Association, which represents rent-stabilized landlords, reported The Real Deal. In May, the association's executive vice president, Jay Martin, told the outlet that the group is "exploring all legal options." 

Without a successful legal challenge, the freeze would take effect on October 1 of this year and continue until September 30, 2027. For those lucky to live in rent-stabilized apartments, the freeze may seem like a temporary win. But in a city that ultimately needs to increase the supply of housing to meet demand, the freeze will fail to make New York housing more affordable in the long run. 

The post Mamdani Got His Rent Freeze Wish. Don't Expect New York City Housing To Become More Affordable. appeared first on Reason.com.

Last week, nearly every elite men's tennis player skipped one of London's marquee tournaments. Only one of the world's top 10 showed up at Queen's Club, the traditional Wimbledon warmup; stars including Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev, Taylor Fritz, and Ben Shelton were playing 300 miles away in Halle, Germany. A culprit was likely Britain's tax code, which doesn't stop at taxing prize money earned on British soil.

It also taxes a slice of a player's global endorsement income, prorated by how many days of the year they happen to spend in the U.K. Fail to advance far enough in the tournament, and the tax bill on your sponsorship deals can exceed your payout. So, the players who get to choose where they compete are now choosing somewhere else.

"It's not about the money for playing," retired superstar Rafael Nadal once explained. "They take from the sponsors….This is very difficult. I am playing in the U.K. and losing money."

File this story under "how people dodge taxes by leaving." Evidence for the phenomenon was piling up long before California billionaires began their high-profile relocations to Nevada and Florida ahead of a proposed wealth tax on the ballot this November. And it's not the only reason these taxes disappoint.

When Norway raised its top wealth-tax rate by just one percentage point in 2022, economist Christine Blandhol documented a wave of business owners leaving for Switzerland, helped by a treaty between the two countries that precluded being double-taxed during the move. Norway lost tax revenue while the firms that business owners left behind, now run from a distance, saw their outputs decline.

Switzerland's own cantons—26 subdivisions that have taxed wealth since the 1800s at rates from about 0.1 percent to 0.9 percent—give researchers a natural experiment. The wealthy move steadily from high-rate Bern to low-rate Lucerne.

The people pushing California's wealth tax know this. Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley—a frequent coauthor with fellow French economist Emmanuel Saez, whose revenue estimates underpin the campaign—has spent the past couple of years engineering around it.

Zucman wants a coordinated global minimum tax on billionaire wealth, designed explicitly so that there's nowhere left for the superrich to move. He admits frankly that the whole point of his international coordination plan is to defeat the mobility problem. If wealth taxes are global, the thinking goes, they finally work as intended.

Not so fast. It's easy to count up lost tax revenue after taxpayers move away. There is also a less visible, but no less real, behavior change from people who stay home (by choice or because there's no better option).

The effect showed up in Denmark, where decades of tax records—covering people who by and large stayed put during its wealth-tax era—show dwindling levels of wealth accumulation when more of it is taxed away. Nobody had to leave the country for the effect to show up; the incentive to save and build wealth in the first place had simply shrunk.

Inside the businesses of the wealthy, there's an avoidance channel that requires no moving van. When a wealth-tax bill comes due, the owner of a closely held company will often pull out a larger dividend to cover it. Once that money has left the company, it doesn't go back into payroll or business expansion.

Make no mistake, the non-wealthy will suffer from this tax too. As wealth taxes diminish saving and reinvestment, the capital stock that workers depend on for tools, equipment, and business expansion stops growing as quickly as it should. Wages rise when there's more capital for each worker to use, so the slower buildup eventually means smaller paychecks for people who would never pay a wealth tax. This effect compounds for decades, so a modest annual drag turns into a substantial gap by the time anyone notices it in the data.

The same dynamic can show up even without a wealth tax. We saw it with another aggressive California levy. When the state raised its top income-tax rate by three points in 2012, Stanford economist Joshua Rauh went looking for the revenue. He found that the people who stayed and bore the tax increase deferred bonuses, retimed asset sales, and restructured how they got paid, shifting income away from the year the higher rate applied. Within two years, those reporting changes had erased most of the revenue gain the tax increase was supposed to deliver.

Income and wealth are taxed differently, but the lesson is the same: Raise the price of an activity and people do less of it, restructure how they report it, or, if they can, leave the jurisdiction entirely.

These are the responses that even a global wealth tax can't reach, because mobility was never the sole problem. The result is less tax revenue than pro-tax advocates project, and less economic activity too. Ultimately, everyone, not just the rich, will be poorer for it.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

The post Even a Global Wealth Tax Can't Solve This Problem appeared first on Reason.com.

Starting in July, Hawaii will begin earnestly enforcing some of the strictest hemp regulations in the country. One dispensary owner is suing to stop it.

Lance Alyas, a Hawaii resident who owns four hemp dispensaries, alleges that the state's hemp laws violate "federal constitutional and statutory law, including the Supremacy Clause, the Dormant Commerce Clause, and the Due Process Clause." Alyas tells Reason he's the victim of "selective regulation" by state officials who favor the medical marijuana industry over hemp. 

Under Hawaii's Act 269—passed in July 2025 and effective January 2026—all retailers and distributors of manufactured hemp products, including online and out-of-state sellers, must register their business with the state. The bill also tasks Hawaii's Health Department and its Office of Medical Cannabis Control and Regulation with enforcing existing regulations for hemp businesses, including registration and product compliance.

State officials gave business owners until July 1 to come into compliance with regulations, after which they would be subject to penalties, including fines of up to $10,000 for "each separate offense." The Health Department, the attorney general, and law enforcement will also be empowered to seize and destroy any prohibited product found. 

Hemp and marijuana are the same species of plant. The 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized hemp nationwide, drew the line for marijuana at 0.3 percent delta-9 THC—the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis—with anything below counting as legal hemp, including "all derivatives, extracts, [and] cannabinoids," containing less than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC. The bill also legalized hemp-derived products containing delta-8 THC, an isomer with similar effects to delta-9 THC.

Alyas argues that federal statutes preempt Hawaii's hemp laws. But the 2018 Farm Bill specifically states that nothing in its text "preempts or limits" state regulation of hemp production so long as the regulations are consistent with the law and do not interfere with interstate commerce.

Geraldo Scatena, an attorney who has practiced cannabis and marijuana law in Hawaii, tells Reason the state has the "right" to regulate hemp so long as it stays within the bounds of the Constitution. As to Alyas' claims of selective enforcement, Scatena says there's "no statute of limitations" on Hawaii's hemp laws, meaning the state is free to enforce them at its discretion.

Still, Alyas hopes to find favor with the Hawaii District Court, though it seems unlikely he'll prevail. Two federal courts, the 4th and 8th Circuit Courts, have already concluded that the Farm Bill did not preempt state laws restricting the sale of hemp products. The most favorable ruling has come from the 9th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Hawaii, in AK Futures LLC v. Boyd Street Distro (2022), when it found that hemp-derived delta-8 THC fit within the legal definition of hemp so long as it contained less than 0.3 percent of delta-9 THC. But even that appears to offer little hope; the 9th Circuit's ruling only dealt with the legal definition of hemp, not the products sold.

After the Farm Bill passed, Hawaii spent the next several years narrowing its definition of hemp, using the authority afforded it in the legislation.

In 2021, Hawaii's Department of Health implemented expansive new rules that prohibited the sale of any oral hemp products not in pill, powder, or liquid form—including gummies—and any cannabinoid-infused food and beverages, vapes, hemp flowers, and cigarettes. In 2022, the state banned the use of delta-8 and delta-10 THC as ingredients in hemp products.

In 2024, roughly a year before Sen. Mitch McConnell's (R–Ky.) amendment banning the sale of any "hemp-derived cannabinoid product" with more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC passed, Hawaii broadened its definition of total THC to include delta-8 THC as part of the equation, sweeping in many of the same hemp products McConnell hoped to ban. 

The stringent regulations on hemp are in part due to lobbying efforts from Hawaii's medical marijuana industry, which views businesses like Alyas' as illegitimate competitors. Hawaii was the first state to legalize medical marijuana through its state Legislature in 2000, but it caps the number of licensed dispensaries at eight. Alyas has tried to get a medical marijuana license, but he says the state's cap on dispensaries makes that "impossible." 

Alyas tells Reason he knows state law bans the majority of his products. Still, they are "so similar" to those of the medical marijuana retailers that he finds the difference negligible.

Despite the restrictions, Alyas has built his hemp business into the No. 1 cannabis dispensary in the state, based on Google reviews. However, it appears Hawaii's medical marijuana industry isn't eager to entertain the competition. In emails to the Health Department, Karlyn Laulusa, CEO of Noa Botanicals—one of the eight dispensaries licensed to operate in the state—asks state officials to intervene and enforce the law against "illegal dispensaries" that are "out of compliance."

So far, Alyas has been unable to substantiate his core claims in court. In December, he voluntarily filed a motion to dismiss his lawsuit, and Judge Jill Otake granted it without prejudice. She also noted that Alyas and his legal team had already "taken numerous bites at this apple" and wasted the court and defense counsel's time in the process, warning them that the court would take any prior mistakes in the case into account in future decisions. 

The state's attorney general's office has framed the dismissal as a win, telling Reason in an email that the department "prevailed in the prior case" and has now filed a motion to dismiss Alyas' follow-up suit for a preliminary injunction. The court will consider Alyas' suit for a preliminary injunction to stop enforcement of state laws against his businesses, as well as the state's motion to dismiss, on July 2.

The dismissal may be a win for the state's eight legal dispensaries, but not for its consumers, who overwhelmingly turn to the black market for more affordable products. Alyas' products may not be popular with his competitors or their defenders in the state government, but Hawaii's residents seem to have made their choice. The least regulators could do is respect it.

The post Lawsuit Argues Hawaii's Harsh New Hemp Regulations Will Stifle Competition appeared first on Reason.com.

Last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the indictment of 15 Minnesota activists. The charges included conspiracy to injure or impede a federal officer, which carries a penalty of up to six years in prison.

According to the indictment, the activists are members of "an organization dedicated and committed to direct action against federal law and immigration enforcement." It further alleges that they are part of the loose assemblage of antifascist activists known as antifa.

In a statement, the White House called the indictment a "crushing blow" to "the violent anarchist network." Instead, it seems like another example of the Trump administration taking a overly heavy hand against people the administration doesn't like.

Prosecutors say the defendants acted collectively to obstruct federal law enforcement officers moving in or out of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. (The Trump administration deployed federal immigration officers to the city last year, in what it called Operation Metro Surge. As CNN reported in January, the Whipple building "is home base for the immigration proceedings at the heart of the crackdown in the state.")

According to the indictment, protesters set up roadblocks in an attempt to obstruct federal immigration officers traveling in or out of the building.

While roadblocks may be illegal—not to mention annoying—they don't constitute violence, or a conspiracy to use violence, against a federal officer, like the indictment claims. "It's really hard for me to come up with anything they were talking about doing that would be actually using force against an officer," said Josh Esmay, deputy director of the Legal Rights Center. "Setting up a blockade is not using force."

The indictment also lists numerous instances of lawful conduct as "overt acts" taken "in furtherance of the conspiracy," such as warning people when immigration officers are nearby.

"In the indictment, the DOJ appears to argue that involvement in rapid-response networks is illegal because they 'identify and harass' federal agents to prevent them from 'performing their official duties,'" Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg writes at The Appeal. "Rapid-response networks alert community members to ICE's presence so volunteers can monitor, protest, and film officers' actions—all activities that are protected by the First Amendment, despite the administration's assertions to the contrary."

"I looked through the indictment at all the things that include my name, and I seem to be indicted for holding meetings," one defendant told the judge, according to The New York Times.

Indeed, while the indictment details acts of violence, it never alleges the defendants were directly involved. And while it goes to great lengths to establish that certain defendants were members or affiliated with antifa, group memberships are not illegal.

At a press conference announcing the indictment, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen struggled to justify the charges. When asked how he or the Department of Justice define antifa, Rosen spoke in circles, saying a strict definition was beyond the "scope" of the indictment, but "we have plenty of people who self-identify in that way, and you might want to ask them that question."

He also declined multiple times to say whether any officers were actually injured as a result of the defendants' actions.

"We have a group of people who quite deliberately got together, planned violence, used violence," Rosen said, then added that "whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime."

"We certainly want to prosecute people who are actively involved in a plot against the United States government to interfere with federal government functions," Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told Courthouse News. "But there's also such a thing as peaceful protest, [and] people have the right to assemble outside a federal building."

Rosen is likely desperate for a win: As MPR News reported, "In December and January, federal prosecutors charged 36 people, mostly protesters, with assaulting or impeding federal immigration agents." But Rosen's office "has dropped 18 of the 36 cases entirely, including three with prejudice meaning they can't file them again. Another 11 cases have been effectively dropped through non-prosecution agreements."

In one particular case, Rosen's office charged Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis with assaulting a law enforcement officer, saying he had used a shovel against a federal immigration officer who then had to shoot him. The charges were later dropped when the officer admitted he lied.

At Rosen's press conference, multiple reporters cited this sketchy history and asked how this case would fare any better. His answers were vague and unconvincing: "Read the indictment, and you'll understand the full magnitude of this case," he told one reporter. "You watch how this case plays out, you watch how the evidence plays out, and the evidence will prove it all out," he told another.

While it's certainly possible that the evidence will bear out the prosecution's case, it already resembles the Trump administration's established pattern of prosecuting people for disfavored but protected speech.

Last year, President Donald Trump issued an executive order "designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization," citing a "pattern of political violence designed to suppress lawful political activity and obstruct the rule of law."

As Reason's Matthew Petti wrote at the time, this made little practical difference: The U.S. has no formal designation for domestic terrorist organizations.

But Trump also issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), which said "common threads" among antifascist terrorists included "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity," and "hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality."

In December, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo on implementing NSPM-7. She directed "all federal law enforcement agencies" to "compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism," which she defined to include "organized rioting, looting, doxing" and "conspiracies to impede or assault law enforcement."

Rosen's office specifically cited NSPM-7 when announcing the indictments.

"While we do not yet have all of the information about these charges, the criminal prosecution of observers and protestors should be carefully scrutinized for retaliatory motives," the ACLU of Minnesota said in a statement. "Prosecution of a small number of people as punishment for exercising their First Amendment rights can chill people from exercising those same rights. Given this administration's history of misrepresenting the facts regarding their conduct toward observers and protestors during Operation Metro Surge, Minnesotans should demand transparency and reserve judgement until we fully understand the facts in this case."

"This indictment appears to be going way overboard, using a sledgehammer to address what might have been some infractions, some violations of the law by some individuals," Painter added.

The post DOJ Case Against Minneapolis Antifa Groups Has Concerning First Amendment Implications appeared first on Reason.com.

Of the trio of candidates who swept to victory in New York this week with the backing of Mayor Zohran Mamdani—all of whom are or have been associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—none has generated more attention than Darializa Avila Chevalier.

Chevalier, who has never held office before, is a 32-year-old community organizer who this week won a Democratic primary in New York against incumbent Adriano Espaillat. Like many DSA-affiliated up-and-comers, Chevalier has a long history of incendiary social media posts. As Reason's Liz Wolfe noted yesterday, she's called former President Joe Biden a "rapist" and a "war criminal." She once posted "fuck Kamala Harris." Remember, she just won a Democratic primary. 

She also described the United States as a "fucking disgrace," though it's apparently not quite so disgraceful that she doesn't want to take the title and salary of U.S. congressional representative. As center-left writer Jeff Maurer wrote, it will be extraordinarily easy for Republicans to portray her as a radical, anti-America lunatic "because she is a radical, anti-America lunatic." 

But Chevalier is not just an unusually unhinged, radically anti-American social media leftist; she's also a committed economic socialist who supports creating a four-day, 32-hour work week with no pay reduction, free government-sponsored childcare, free pre-kindergarten, Medicare for All, and a federal rent control system, presumably because rent regulations have worked so well in New York. Somewhat confusingly, she also supports both a universal basic income and a federal jobs guarantee, which raises the question: Why would you need a federally guaranteed job if you have a federally guaranteed income? 

In any case, after reading several academic studies, conversing with some economists and pollsters, and trying to assess her policy agenda neutrally, I have concluded that she is, in technical terms, cuckoo bananas. 

OK, OK, you got me. I didn't actually do all that. But her policy agenda is so wildly fanciful, so disconnected with economic reality, and so out of touch with American politics that I hardly needed to. It's self-evidently absurd. The same is true of many of the ideas of her fellow DSA-linked, Mamdani-backed candidates, like Claire Valdez, another one of this week's winners, who somehow still supports the Green New Deal and also wants the federal government to freeze electricity bills. 

Medicare for All is so expensive and so unwieldy that it failed, even in a small scale, in Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I–Vt.) home state of Vermont. The idea that it would pass at the national level is utterly fanciful. One estimate of the Green New Deal, a sort of everything bagel bundle of environmental-labor-big-government-quasi-socialism, put the cost at over $90 trillion, or about three times the country's total annual gross domestic product. Making the federal government America's electrical utility company would probably work about as well as making the federal government America's landlord did during COVID-19. 

And speaking of landlords, has anyone in the orbit of the DSA ever looked at one single solitary study of rent-control in New York? Or even just…the actual rent in New York, which is ground zero for American rent control? Rent control doesn't need studies to show it doesn't work. Every time someone rents an apartment in the Big Apple, it makes the case against itself. 

One might argue that Chevalier and the rest of the Mamdani-backed, DSA-friendly slate of candidates are extreme and not representative of the rest of the party. And that's true to some extent. But mainstream Democrats have been embracing fantasy economics for years, even and perhaps especially under a nominally moderate figure like Joe Biden. 

Biden wasn't a socialist. But he was a big-government Democrat who backed obviously ruinous spending policies from the day he entered office. His first major act as president was to pass the American Rescue Plan, a $2 trillion stimulus and spending bill billed as a COVID response, despite the fact that only a tiny percentage of the spending was actually dedicated to responding to the pandemic. Instead, the bill was a bloated package of handouts to Democratic interest groups and unnecessary checks to American voters. Critics warned that the package was too large and would cause inflation. In return, Biden said the bigger risk was going too small. But two years later, the economy suffered the worst inflation shock in 40 years. 

Meanwhile, Biden appointed a group of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) devotees to key regulatory posts. Often called neo-Brandeisians—or more colloquially, antitrust hipsters—they often gesture toward the technical and historical aspects of antitrust legislation. But in the main, their worldview is, as with most hipsters, aesthetic rather than technical. It can be summarized as: Big corporations are inherently suspect, and any merger or deal that makes them larger should require approval from the federal government, even if there is no obvious consumer harm. Indeed, this intellectual cohort sometimes explicitly argued that higher prices for consumers were an affirmative good that should be pursued by policymakers. You think an f-bomb directed at Kamala Harris is radical? Try telling American voters that the job of government is to make prices higher. 

And this is just the stuff that Biden, with Harris and the rest of the Democratic Party along for the ride, actually did. From spending to business regulation to labor issues, much of the Democratic Party, even beyond the fringes of Mamdani's Commie Corridor, has also gone cuckoo bananas, especially in bastions of blue governance like California and New York. 

Harris once championed Sanders' national single-payer healthcare plan. She backed off, but continued to push a large government expansion of healthcare that, while less expansive, was still substantial—and mostly just didn't make any sense. Democrats in both California and New York have proposed their own, state-based single-payer healthcare plans, both of which would have required politically implausible tax hikes and both of which were, to put it kindly, ludicrously expensive. 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), who looks to be readying a 2028 presidential run, proposed a Green New Deal for Public Housing Act that, while less expensive than national single-payer healthcare, would still have cost hundreds of billions a decade and would have substantially increased federal control of the nation's public housing stock. The city of Boston, meanwhile, pushed various forms of rent regulation, and the state of New York trumpeted eviction restrictions that, in some cases, allowed tenants to squat in apartments for years without paying rent.  

In New York City, the DSA's patron, Mamdani, has spent political capital pushing a series of utterly pointless, woefully expensive city-run grocery store boondoggles. Kamala Harris proposed a price-gouging law that was derided by Democratic-Party-friendly economists. Harris' proposal had some commonalities with a price gouging law proposed by Warren, Sanders, and Democratic lawmakers from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Illinois that might have given the federal government the ability to set grocery prices. 

Part of the problem is that many of the party's leading lights are not especially sharp when it comes to economics and policymaking. Another problem is that many simply don't care about the realities and practicalities of their proposals. But while that explains some of the party's economic nuttiness, that's not exactly an excuse. Careless, uninformed radicalism is still radicalism, and it's been gnawing its way closer to the party's center for years. Chevalier and the DSA-adjacent, Mamdani-backed cohort are just the most bananas of them all, the bleeding edge of creeping cuckoo-bananaism. 

I don't mean to say the Republican Party is much better. Over the last decade, the party has become a personality cult, and the personality it has organized around understands the economy through a simple-minded mercantilist worldview, in which America is essentially a business that needs to collect revenue through tariffs, like licensing fees for Trump-branded golf courses. Much of the party has sat idly by, or even cheered, as President Donald Trump unilaterally passed sweeping, constitutionally dubious tariffs that have cost jobs, raised prices, and generally failed to deliver on their own stated goals, like reducing the national debt and deficit. 

Speaking of which: Have you looked at the national debt recently? Our nation's political class certainly hasn't. All of these expansive spending proposals, from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal, are being talked about in an environment with dramatically less space for fiscal maneuvering. A major budget crunch is coming, yet the Democratic Party has largely decided to ignore the books and push for spending more, and more, and more.  

The all-around radicalism of the GOP during the Trump years has papered over and excused the radicalism of the Democratic Party, and even helped egg it on. After this week's radical sweep, youthful party strategist David Hogg posted, "If this isn't the Dem tea party I don't know what is."

Whether or not this is the Democrats' Tea Party, it's certainly a revolution. But like all revolutions, it didn't happen overnight. Democrats have been retreating into economic fantasyland for years, and this week's radical upsets are just the latest sign that the fantasy is taking over. 

The post The DSA and the Democrats' Retreat Into Economic Fantasyland appeared first on Reason.com.