181–190 of 326 posts
Of course it is. It artificially limits supply due to long term rent squatters taking advantage of the system
Aka people who lived there before the insane hikes in cost with rent control being the only thing keeping them from being forced out of their home due to greed-driven economic practices
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>>unrestrained capitalism It sounds scary when put like that but it just means people free to interact, while secure from other social actors in their person and property. By the nature of voluntary configuration, interactions have a tendency toward being mutually beneficial, and there are corrective feedback loops that naturally exist in a voluntary society to reduce those that aren't (e.g. scammy operators increasi…
> so there is no fundamental deficiency in unrestrained capitalism Except a tendency toward consolidation and monopolies. And, inherent in the word "unrestrained", a tendency to use corporate money to unduly influence politics to benefit the corporation at the expense of the public interest. > it just means people free to interact, while secure from other social actors in their person and property It's kind of irrele…
That assumes no government provisioning of public goods that can counteract capture of natural monopolies, but there's nothing inherent to a free market to prevent such government intervention.
>>And, inherent in the word "unrestrained", a tendency to use corporate money to unduly influence politics to benefit the corporation at the expense of the public interest.
The term here is "unrestrained capitalism", meaning people in possession of their right to contract and secure in their person/property, not "unrestrained society". An absolute free market doesn't mean anarchy. It doesn't preclude checks within the electoral and political process itself to prevent corruption. It doesn't prevent laws from being passed to place restrictions on those in public office, like, to give an extreme example, a lifetime ban on receiving any compensation from the private sector.
>>It's kind of irrelevant anyway, all I really meant was UBI should be evaluated in comparison to "the status quo"
Fair enough. I just take issue with the connotations of "unrestrained capitalism", where it implies malevolent behavior is legalized. A less biased term would be "free market".
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There is a lot of stickiness and inelasticity when it comes to housing, especially when other factors such as kids and schools and spouse's commute and all come up.
Can a free-marketeer address this? I thought stuff like this were obvious rebuttals but look at the top posts in this comment section. It's starting to feel like articles and posts like this aren't driven by discussion or curiosity but just political fights.
It might help to think of it in a "top down" fashion. Imagine laying out housing for everyone in a metro area as an optimization problem, where you're trying to maximize a value function over things like amount of space, proximate to peoples' workplaces, quality of schools, affordability, etc.
Housing restrictions add additional constraints that make the solutions worse for everyone. E.g. say some group of people with kids are willing to live in a duplex on 1/8 of an acre rather than a detached home on 1/4 of an acre in order to reduce their commutes and see their kids more often. But they're not willing to live in a city apartment with their kids and pets. Housing restrictions basically eliminate that part of the solution space by making it illegal to construct such housing. That group of people get punted to their less-preferred alternatives, and the resulting solutions are worse for everyone.
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A start would be the pervasiveness of homelessness throughout the history of the United States as contrasted with its abolition in the USSR and its dramatic return with post-soviet privatization.
Why don't you start a communist commune? You can do that in a capitalist system. You can't set up a capitalist commune in a communist system because they'll put you in the gulag.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-timeline-of-cia-atrocities/5...
Another point which is usually not well-discussed, the houses/apts in SF are really bad in terms of quality, amenities and features. With new housing, this is starting to change a little bit. But, overall, rent control results in really bad maintenance. Landlords do the absolute bare minimum to not get sued/fined. For the rent people in SF pay, the value they derive is almost a joke.
When I moved to SF, I was shocked to find out most 3000+$/month apartments didn't have their own washing machine.
But then you look at what $1.5M gets you! It's bottom of the barrel housing most other cities. You need to move up to $3M to get something modern that has things like double-paned windows and a decent kitchen.
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A start would be the pervasiveness of homelessness throughout the history of the United States as contrasted with its abolition in the USSR and its dramatic return with post-soviet privatization.
Likely because being homeless in USSR was a crime and motive to send one to a Gulag?
Price controls always end up creating artificial scarcity. The solution to lower housing costs is more housing, not less.
Maybe we need something deeper than that, you have 3/4 of your country that are almost a wasteland and you insist on cram all the people in 4 or 5 cities. Maybe we need to start to incentive moving people to other more empty places...
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Personally I think that 1) is not attainable in a practical sense. It would require resources that are not available and would just add to the ridiculous overhead of running a government. I used to believe in an ideal state as the one you describe. More recently, I think about what a system - i.e economic, political, social - that is stable (in some sense) looks like. For example, liberatarians believe that markets s…
> I usually conclude that small societies are optimal for quality of living. I came to the same conclusion. Sadly many 'libertarians' often gets dismissed as disliking all forms of government and regulation, which is not the case, rather preferring a limited one. But I guess intentional/unintentional misrepresentation is a savvy and common political tactic because it's effective. My question to you is how do you achi…
The central problem isn't rent control, it's the fact that property is a very privileged asset class that allows owners to extract rent from those with less political and economic power.
Rent control is like pushing down on a balloon that's inflating. The inflation keeps happening whether you like it or not. The best you can do is minimise the effects in selected locations.
That doesn't mean rent control is causing the problems. The underlying problem is the inflation, and you can't make it go away with palliative measures.
In the US, you can't make it go away at all, because the economic system has been designed to privilege rent-seeking - at various levels of obviousness and abstraction - over other kinds of activity.
Rents in the Bay Area and the financial biases and traditions of VC and startup culture are both manifestations of the same underlying problem.
I really wish the submitter of this story did a better job than repeating the clickbait title at Curbed. Because this article is actually a fairly good summary of an interesting paper which has a lot to say about the mixed results of rent control as a long-term strategy. But no, instead we get this, "Rent Control Is Uniformly Bad" title which is designed to split the demo and bring in people who want to argue. Surely…
(We changed the URL back because it's not clear that that article has more information in it.)