Rent control

Both Greg Mankiw and Megan McArdle both note that New York Democrats are trying to strengthen rent control laws. As McArdle says:

In times like this, it's easy to believe that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. But here's one of the things that basically everyone, left to right, agrees on: rent control is the surest way to destroy a city's housing stock short of aerial bombing, and one of the major culprits behind New York's painfully low vacancy rate.

This is absolutely correct, with an extreme amount of consensus in existence on the subject. My first semester in grad school my intermediate microeconomics professor gave a lecture about the counterproductive nature of rent control. Even left-wing economic talisman Paul Krugman has called rent control "a textbook case of economic stupidity."

You know, it's stuff like this that just makes you want to scream. It's almost as if the last 50 years never happened for some Democrats. We have all seen the failures of rent control laws -- and Democrats want to strengthen them. We have all seen the success of welfare reform -- and Democrats want to undo it.

What is wrong with these people? And they are the self-styled intelligentsia???