“Affordability” has become one of the most potent political words of the moment, and both parties are scrambling to claim it. But in a new commentary for American Thinker, writer Robert Weissberg argues that the Democratic Party’s instinct to attack the problem through government intervention is both historically misguided and economically doomed—and that the real solution lies in the very billionaires that progressives love to denounce.
The piece, published October 13, is less a policy brief than a full-throated defense of free enterprise dressed up as a history lesson. Weissberg opens by noting that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has promised that a Democratic House majority would launch working groups aimed at lowering the cost of housing, gasoline and utilities, groceries, caregiving, and health care. To Weissberg, that agenda is not a genuine affordability plan but an excuse to grow state power. “Never let a crisis go to waste” is the governing motto, he writes, with affordability serving as the latest vehicle for expanding government’s reach into American life.
A Wartime Experiment Worth Remembering
To make his case, Weissberg reaches back more than eight decades to the Office of Price Administration, the federal agency Franklin D. Roosevelt created by executive order on August 28, 1941. The OPA fixed prices on automobiles, tires, shoes, fuel oil, meats, coffee, and processed foods, and once the war began it set rents as well. By the end of the program, according to Weissberg, roughly 90 percent of food prices were government-determined, restaurants were required to post government-set prices for every menu item, and nearly all consumer goods were strictly rationed.
The OPA did not survive long after the war. Opposition grew, and in 1947 the agency shut down, though some rules briefly continued under other agencies. When it ended, consumer prices rose—by about 6 percent, Weissberg notes. That aftermath is the point he wants readers to absorb: price controls kept a lid on costs only as long as they lasted, and when they lifted, the underlying pressures reasserted themselves.
His central warning is that the OPA could serve as a template for today’s affordability politics. Setting aside whether wartime-style draconian measures would even be tolerated now, Weissberg contends that reviving them would run into overwhelming practical obstacles. He asks readers to imagine the government setting the price of every pizza in every pizzeria in the country—dozens of rules governing size, toppings, takeout versus sit-down service, deep-dish versus thin crust, ingredient quality, plus penalties for violations and armies of inspectors to monitor compliance. And that, he argues, would be simple compared with setting rents for the more than 1.16 million current real estate listings in the United States, each reflecting local conditions and market forces and each subject to the judgment of government functionaries unfamiliar with the businesses they would be regulating.
Did the wartime regulations actually deliver affordability? Weissberg says hardly. People had money and were often happy to skirt the rules through the black market. Criminal gangs sold gasoline and oil illegally at a rate of some 2.5 million gallons a day, he writes, much as they had once marketed bootleg liquor. Entrepreneurs bought cattle, had them slaughtered—often under unsanitary conditions—and sold the meat illegally. He cites an estimate that 20 percent of all meat was purchased that way, frequently with local butchers cooperating, and that at the wholesale level 90 percent of all meat sold above the officially set prices. The New York Times, he notes, put the annual black market for food at roughly $1.2 billion in 1944 dollars—about $22.8 billion in 2026 dollars—with 70 percent of New Yorkers occasionally participating and one-third using it regularly. One in fifteen businesses ran afoul of the OPA, and many small mom-and-pop shops were never caught at all.
Weissberg also offers a personal anecdote, recalling accompanying his father to the local OPA office as a youngster. His father negotiated rent increases on his rental properties by explaining that he had added furniture and thus enhanced their value. The claims were genuine, Weissberg acknowledges, but who could say whether a cheap table or two justified a rent hike? Given the severe housing shortage, tenants simply ignored the minor skullduggery.
The Case Against Mandated Cheapness
The deeper flaw, in Weissberg’s telling, is that price controls misunderstand human nature. Many people will gladly pay more than the lowest possible price. Washington may decree that a pizza slice costs $2.00, he writes, but some customers will willingly pay triple—even if those expensive slices are technically illegal. That is not gouging; it is a transaction that satisfies a legitimate desire. Every businessperson knows price is only one factor in consumer choice, alongside convenience, selection, prestige, service, and personal relationships. Why would someone pay between $10,000 and $39,000 for a genuine Hermes Birkin handbag when Amazon sells realistic knockoffs for $30? Government-mandated affordability does not change human nature, he argues, and as long as people crave status symbols, they will find willing sellers regardless of restrictions.
Weissberg also detects something more troubling than mere inefficiency in the affordability agenda: a totalitarian impulse. Why should government limit consumer choice in the name of affordability rather than offer consumers the widest possible range of options? Nor, he adds, should it dictate what manufacturers can sell. The United States, he reminds readers, is not the old Soviet Union, where state-run construction companies built only “affordable” and depressingly ugly apartments.
Yes, Weissberg concedes, the OPA did hold prices down—but the arrangement was not sustainable as incomes rose. It functioned only during a limited wartime emergency, and even then cheating was rampant. It required vast bureaucracies enforcing often Byzantine rules, and when the experiment in government-run pricing ended, the American economy thrived. People had cash and could afford better housing, new cars, and better clothing, living more comfortably thanks to private enterprise.
The Henry Ford Principle
Weissberg’s alternative is straightforward: free enterprise, built on the principle that enormous fortunes can be made by supplying millions of customers with inexpensive goods of reasonable quality. Rather than city-run low-cost grocery stores of the sort proposed by New York City Mayor Mamdani, he suggests encouraging Walmart to open stores in the city—which, he notes, currently has none. According to one estimate he cites, Walmart’s presence would cut grocery prices for New Yorkers by 30 percent with zero city investment or administrative overhead.
The super-wealthy, he argues, have long been at the forefront of providing affordability. He calls it “the Henry Ford Principle”: making a fortune by helping Americans enjoy the good life. After World War II, the builder William J. Levitt helped resolve that era’s affordable housing crisis by quickly building some 17,000 private homes that initially sold for $7,900, turning 84,000 people into homeowners while earning millions himself. Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, was worth $600 million—nearly $2 billion in 2026 dollars—when he died in 1984. Weissberg points to the recent Forbes list of America’s wealthiest people, which he says is notable for how many billionaires made their money by satisfying popular tastes affordably. Jeff Bezos of Amazon ranks second, Michael Dell fourth, and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates also appear, all of them having earned billions selling reasonably priced goods and software to millions. Three of the top fifteen are Walton family members, owners of Walmart. If you want affordability, Weissberg concludes, capitalism far outshines government mandates.
What the Socialists Really Want
Weissberg closes with a pointed political claim: affordability itself is probably not what energizes Bernie Sanders and his followers. The deeper lure, he writes, is socialism’s government-run economy on the installment plan. When measures that would genuinely reduce prices are offered, they get rejected. He points to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s statement that “Walmart’s entry would be disastrous for New Yorkers,” and notes that she had previously helped stop Amazon from building a facility in her congressional district that would have provided as many as 40,000 jobs. In Weissberg’s reading, punishing billionaires outranks affordability—socialists despise oligarchs more than they love economically struggling Walmart shoppers, because prosperity shrinks the proletariat, and without a proletariat, socialist politicians cannot survive. If acquiring power is the goal, he argues, it is better to keep people poor and angry.
It is a sweeping indictment, and critics will note that it rests on a selective reading of history and a confident equation of Democratic price policies with wartime rationing. But as a window into how one strand of conservative opinion is framing the affordability debate—and into the deeper argument over whether markets or mandates should set prices—it captures a fight that is likely to define the next election cycle.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/billionaires-will-end-the-affordability-crisis/