The Orange County Register’s new site, Freedom Politics just posted an article I wrote for them on rent control.
Here’s a snippet:
In these days of economists constantly debating the right way to revive the economy, it seems like there is no way to find consensus among economists. Economists don’t spend much time debating the issues they agree on, and to them, rent control is about as dead an issue as the earth revolving around the sun. In 1992, 93% of American and Canadian economists surveyed agreed with the statement “A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” Opposition to rent control among economists spans the political spectrum from Milton Friedman and Walter Block to leftist Nobel Laureates Gunnar Myrdal and Paul Krugman. In fact, it was the socialist Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck who famously said, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing it."
The article is part of a series called “Undead Ideas” and I’m told the article is supposed to feature a humorously hideous illustration of a zombie Richard Nixon, which is the reason for the Nixon joke. I will share the illustration once it is public.
Could President Obama resurrect an undead Richard Nixon to implement nationwide rent control in the face of the impending stimflation? There’s a 93% chance his economic advisors wouldn’t let him do such a thing. However, Nixon’s undead corpse has been spotted mumbling "I am now a Keynesian" in places like California and New York City where bad ideas never seem to die.
I actually thought of the word “stimflation” on my own, but I checked and learned I wasn’t the first to think of it. The domain stimflation.com had just been reserved last week…
Here’s a composite, I found:
—–
Wendell Cox also made a contribution to the “Undead Ideas” series with a very good article about housing. I thought I might, but I don’t have any significant disagreements with Cox’s article. I was very glad not to see him singling out “Smart Growth” as a culprit, and appropriately blaming land use restrictions in general:
Demand for housing, driven by low interest rates and a growing economy, combined with supply restrictions—such as zoning laws, high permitting costs and “not in my backyard” regulations—to contribute to rapid price appreciation.
and he quoted a great point by Glaeser:
If some aid to expensive states is made conditional on permitting more construction, then pricey places will face incentives to permit more units and promote affordability. Those incentives will encourage restrictive cities and towns to look beyond their borders, and to make America more affordable by permitting more construction in the high-price housing markets that are undersupplied and unaffordable even to the middle class.
