Lina Khan has reportedly readied more than a dozen executive orders and regulatory diktats for Mayor Zohran Mamdani to issue in his first days on the job in the name of lowering costs and protecting workers; too bad they’re likely to do the reverse.
Khan says she’s been “exploring ways to maximize executive authority” in implementing his anti-corporate socialist agenda, but her record as Biden-era Federal Trade Commission chief suggests many will fail: She was slapped down time and again by the courts for trying to usurp Congress’s lawmaking powers.
Even if New York courts prove friendlier, the inevitable litigation means months of uncertainty for businesses.
Most of the reported agenda also looks pretty small-ball, such as reviving a 1969 consumer-protection law that claims to let a mayoral appointee declare certain trade practices “unconscionable” to target sports/concert ticket pricing — a priority mostly for the entitled white lefties who formed Mamdani’s base.
The plan is to also use that law to target utility bills, but those are already strictly limited by other regulators — who’ve had to let them soar to cover the costs of the state’s insane green-energy mandates that Mamdani & Co. support.
And enforcing laws meant to protect food-delivery workers will likely drive up take-out and grocery prices — a direct assault on affordability that will also mean fewer food-delivery jobs.
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Another report speculated that Khan is looking to pursue private-equity firms that allegedly have gobbled up rent-stabilized residential apartment properties, harassed tenants and raised rents.
As popular as demonizing landlords may be, going after private-equity groups could prevent distressed properties from getting the capital needed for basic maintenance and upgrades.
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If New York’s left-leaning courts allow these moves, Mamdani, Khan and their minions will find themselves looking to pile more price controls and employment mandates on top of the first round, to “fix” things when initial results backfire.
Of course, a good socialist would want nothing less than government control of wages, prices, work hours and every other aspect of the local economy: It’s worked so well in Cuba and Venezuela!
Khan’s tilting at corporate windmills, in short, means nothing but woe for the city — with the working class inevitably suffering most.
In seeking to dictate “economic justice,” Mamdani will be slamming the very people he claims he wants to help.