“The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics”

I think it was Thomas Sowell who said this and I think it rings true today in light of the failures of politicians to recognize how destructive that authoritarian control of the market has been and can be to the very people politicians think they are helping.

Free people making voluntary choices have been remarkably efficient at allocating limited resources.

Many politicians believe that costs are determined by something other than supply and demand, and can be controlled by authoritarian fiat. History is proof that these plans never work. Prices can be adjusted by fiat, but not costs. So when you lower the price by making it illegal to charge more, you immediately get is shortages and rationing.

When their plans to ‘solve’ this problem don’t work (and they never do), the reason identified is usually either insufficient political will, insufficient government funding, or insufficient power awarded to them to change things.

Free people react to incentives. The incentives for politicians under democracy aren’t to ‘solve’ things but to gain power through promising to solve them in the future, if they’re empowered to do so. Their true goal is more power, not solutions.

This is just as true with Trump’s tariffs as it is for Mamdani’s plan to freeze rent, raise the minimum wage to $30 per hour, or to seize the means of production. Yes, certainly there are major differences in the degree of insanity (“doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”), but government’s intervention in the market is not only an attack on liberty, it is a bad idea that ends up hurting the people it was designed to help.