Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Minneapolis is considering an ordinance requiring private landlords to accept Section 8 tenants. This is the housing analogue of health insurance. From the comments to the article, it appears there is much confusion about how private enterprise is affected by democratic socialism. Let me break it down for those who need detailed explanations but have short attention spans.
Sellers of nice things must charge enough to make a profit, else they go out of business and nobody can have nice things. But not everybody has the same amount of money, so pricing nice things to keep the seller in business means not all customers can afford to buy nice things. That results in unequal treatment: some get nice things and some do not.
Unequal results are unfair. To Liberals, this is a Law of Nature no less binding than gravity. Society cannot tolerate unfairness. Fairness must be imposed by making everyone equally able to afford nice things.
Society can achieve fairness by guaranteeing student loans, making income-adjusted forgivable loans for home ownership, subsidizing health insurance, giving away free cell phones with data plans to surf the web . . . all the nice things are then affordable by everyone, including the seller who still makes his profit. Everyone has nice things. Results are equal. Life is fair. Liberals are satisfied.
Until it turns out that some renters can afford nice places and others cannot. Unequal. Unfair. Intolerable. Impose. Solution: make every landlord accept Section 8.
But Section 8 is not like the other solutions. Section 8 is more like wage and price controls. If you tell the seller he must accept 60% of his cost as payment in full, he cannot afford to cover his mortgage, taxes, insurance, snow plowing, yard maintenance, repairs and still have enough left over to feed himself and his family . . . he goes out of the rental business. That’s what was happening to medical providers under Medicare, which was a big push to impose Obamacare (which is now seeing the same effect – insurance companies who can’t charge enough for their policies are dropping out of markets, which is the big push for Ryancare). Wage and Price Controls are why Venezuelans now are starving.
If Minneapolis adopts the proposed ordinance, some landlords will comply, some will convert their buildings to coops where members buy shares of ownership in the building to qualify for leases, and some will turn them into condos and sell the units instead of renting them. To the extent private landlords stop renting their units, Minneapolis residents will have even less affordable rental housing than before the solution was imposed. All renters will suffer. But they will suffer equally, so it’s still more fair than it was. Liberals will be satisfied.
Liberal policies destroy Liberal values.
Joe Doakes
Except for the whole “getting and holding power” thing.
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