California Democrats are nothing if not shortsighted, and the knock-on consequences of every new tax or regulation they put in place always manage to catch them by surprise. Case in point: Los Angeles’s “mansion” tax.

Los Angeles’s supposed “mansion” tax was meant to take a cut of the sale price of any property sold for more than $5.4 million, with an even bigger cut if the price exceeded $10.9 million. At face value, this would seem reasonable to normal people, who will never see $5.4 million in their lives and cannot even fathom transactions involving that much money.