As America approaches its 250th birthday, it's worth remembering why the colonies declared their independence from Britain. The Revolutionary War wasn't just about taxes; it was about resisting a government that increasingly believed it knew better than the people how to run their own affairs, where they could live, what they could build, and at what price. Early Americans understood a hard truth: government intervention was rarely the neutral hand it claimed to be. It picked winners, distorted markets, and made life more expensive for everyone in the name of helping society. Two hundred fifty years later, that same instinct remains.
California Republican Tom McClintock voted “no” on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a sweeping bipartisan bill aimed at tackling the nation’s housing affordability crisis. While the legislation includes provisions to curb corporate purchases of single-family homes and reduce regulatory barriers, it also leans heavily on familiar government tools, expanded grants, subsidies, and federal intervention, raising the same concerns about whether more government is truly the answer.
"Stop all of the subsidies," Rep. McClintock told Newsmax, Thursday. "That thing is chock full with subsidies and grants. All those do is force up the price of housing for everybody while hiding it for those that are lucky enough to qualify for the subsidies."
"This measure adds more folly to this government-created mess," the Congressman added in a statement on his website. "It adds an array of new grant and subsidy programs that expand bureaucracy and inflate prices – all at taxpayer expense. It prohibits commercial enterprises from acquiring homes for rentals, which may provide slight downward pressure on housing prices while proportionally increasing prices for rentals. As the Wall Street Journal opined, 'While cutting red tape on some existing grant programs, the bill creates many new programs with regulations that will make building more costly.'"
The high cost of housing is the product of bad public policy that has imposed expensive mandates on construction, limited the permits that can be issued, restricted the land available for housing, and flooded the market with subsidies that force up prices for all while hiding it… https://t.co/9gZ3GeW0Bo
— Tom McClintock (@RepMcClintock) June 29, 2026
To focus his criticism, McClintock zeroes in on the bill’s imbalance: it does plenty to stimulate demand, and far too little to expand supply. New housing takes years to build, in some places, even longer just to clear the bureaucratic hurdles. Cutting red tape is a step forward, but pretending that subsidizing demand will also contribute to solving the problem fails a basic economic test: it tightens the demand market instantly without expanding supply.
The United States once understood that private individuals, industry, and entrepreneurship were better equipped to solve our problems than any government bureaucrat, official, or policy. That philosophy undergirded the conservative movement for decades. Today, that is no longer the case.
The reason is simple: economics and our founding wisdom has taken a backseat in politics.
The Founders did not risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor so that, two hundred and fifty years later, their government would still be in the business complicating every problem of American life. They understood, in a way modern Washington has largely forgotten, that government's proper role is not to solve every problem handed to it, but to have the humility to know which problems it will only make worse.
On a vote that tested exactly that principle, only 32 of 535 members of Congress remembered it. Tom McClintock was one of them, a lonely stand, the kind that wins no headlines and cuts no ribbons, but the same kind of stand the Founders themselves once took when resistance was neither popular nor easy.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.
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