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Comment by bigmattystyles | Hacker News Reader

I feel the same way about rent control. It's not fair for society at large to make property owners eat the cost or the lost potential income alone. I am aggressively pro rent control and pro eviction moratorium during the pandemic, but I am for a (progressive) tax to fund these programs. It's just unfair to make yourself feel good by supporting these programs when you don't have any skin in the game. I'm not naïve though, I know that if you raise taxes to fund these programs as a society as opposed to a property owner having to fund it alone, those programs will lose their popularity. This is a case where most people's support for these programs is literally all talk. And yes, some property owners are scum and/or large corporations and people will game the system. But then you address that with oversight with teeth.

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I hope that eventually we will return to more predictable police power and broad taxation, as described by this quote: “The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that private property shall not be taken for a public use without just compensation was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole” (Armstrong v. United States https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/364/40/).

Another option would be a social housing program to buffer evictions and provide human rights (food and shelter are one, there's absolutely no discussion about this) to those in most difficulty.

Of course this approach will be met with howls of criticism about market distortion, having something to do with "social(ism)", and removing incentives to work hard.

Philosophically - there is a solid discussion to be had.

Where does the right to food or shelter originate?

I want to eat and I want shelter. But how and where am I going to get it? Do I have a right to compel someone else to feed and shelter me?

How does my desire for food and shelter turn into a right?

If food and shelter are a right - does it follow that it is now an obligation on someone else to provide me food and shelter? Society is just a group of individuals. Someone is going to have to build a house and someone is going to have to grow potatoes and apples. Do they have an obligation to share the product of their work with me?

I find framing things as "rights" is counterproductive. It creates all sorts of entitlement issues. I think it's better to say that society functions better - that is everyone, in total, is generally happier and healthier, if we all agree to work together to provide certain things for each other.

Forget about whether it's a right. Personally, I'd rather live in a society with free, happy people who aren't scared and desperate. I'd prefer it more than being extremely wealthy in a society where large numbers of people are barely able to scrape by. It's just overall a better experience to live in.

Agreed. Raising the floor for everyone by supporting each other is a great objective. It would be beneficial for all of us to greatly reduce food, shelter, income and healthcare insecurity.

But this isn't the way our current political discourse is going. Instead new rights are being created seemingly by the day. Voters are asked by politicians to demand their rights. If housing is a right, then some politician will eventually say that vacation homes are also a right. If employment is a right, then employment at the workplace of your choosing is a right.

> If housing is a right, then some politician will eventually say that vacation homes are also a right.

Oh come on, slippery slopes aren’t valid arguments.

If my 3 year old is about to pass away from starvation, and you walk by with a loaf of bread. I'll ask first, if you say no - I'll still be taking that bread.

Any parent would do the same. Who has a right to that bread? The person who bought it? Or the person who fought and "won" it from the other? Didn't I work just as hard to take it from you?

Is it right that a three year old die, if it could be avoided?

There was a time land was basically first come first serve claim any parcel you want and live off the toil of your labors. Lots of today's land owners I'm sure are predecessors of those first land-lords.

You feel you have a right to "peace" and that the police will protect you from crime.

If you're walking home with a bunch of junk food, and warm bread - you might see one family that salivates, maybe you can outrun them. What happens when 90% of society are those people?

Every year more people are getting pushed down into the dumps. Society is just one big social contract, I won't hurt you because I'm okay, things are good. I got food, water, heat, electric, I can't complain. I'm also too busy playing on my android phone to worry about what you have, or want to take it -- the incentive to commit a crime just isn't there...

Take away all my things, my home, my clothes, and make my kids starve and you'll see a very different version of me, probably a version I never knew existed. A lot of society is the same.

Society functions when everyone is at least "comfortable" and it degrades into anarchy and gotham city-like when everyone is relegated to squalor. If you don't believe me, consult the history books on the French Revolution and see how well it turned out for Marie Antoinette and her compadres.

Most buyers factor in Rent Control when buying the building, and so many end up using the Ellis Act (in CA) to get rid of the tenants.

We are not talking about naive buyers anymore who are blindsided by rent control.

Rent Control might be the only reason some middle class investors can afford to become landlords? Most rich guys don’t want the hassle of an Ellis Act eviction.

They just build luxury condos that only rich people can afford. (My world is San Francisco. In a more fair world, no one should tell a man what he can do with his property, but the world is not fair. Poor people don’t get many breaks.)

While I’m on my box—Sausalito is feverishly trying trying to rid Richardson Bay of Anchor-outs using underhanded tactics. They are targeting the poor people as usual. The only bright side is the victims moved to Dunphy Park because they didn’t know where to go. Sausalito tried to remove them, but someone filed a temporary restraining order with the courts.)

> It's just unfair to make yourself feel good by supporting these programs when you don't have any skin in the game.

The worst part about rent control is that there is zero accountability. Politicians pat themselves on the back for "lowering" prices without actually solving the underlying problem. The problem will only get worse over time until it becomes unbearable.

What is the moral basis of rent? Rent is by definition differentiated from service provision in that it is simply the use of a legal right to extract an income.

I don't see a moral basis, so I don't see how anything that impacts the interests of renters can be unfair. Bad on pragmatic level, perhaps, but not a moral one.

There would be a moral basis with a 100% land value tax or a property tax that approximates it.

Without it, though, rent is partially a stream of income derived from labor (upkeep, management, construction) and partially a stream of income derived from a state granted monopoly over a parcel of 4 billion year old land.

The moratorium is, in part, tacit recognition of this. Everybody knows that a large slice of rental income is completely unearned - even landlords.

Few would seriously believe that the sky high rental incomes derived from these is really earned, for instance - it's an entitlement: https://www.savingadvice.com/articles/2019/08/06/1067844_10-...

I am interested in constructing new housing and renting it out, comments like yours make me wonder why I should even bother and even if I did why would I have any reason to give an antagonistic tenant any favors if it will bite me in the ass?

No, it's quite simple. Being a landlord is being a business owner. You are providing a service and in exchange you get paid enough to make construction of housing worthwhile. Except, most landlords break even and only get paid in the form of building equity. It'll take decades to pay the mortgage off.

>The moratorium is, in part, tacit recognition of this. Everybody knows that a large slice of rental income is completely unearned - even landlords.

>Few would seriously believe that the sky high rental incomes derived from these is really earned, for instance

If nobody is paying for the house then there will be no house for you to live in. It's that simple.

If the landlord is literally just collecting rent and doing nothing to maintain the property and not taking on associated risks and responsibilities (liability for injury and catastrophic failures like electrical fires; having to pay, primarily, state and local taxes on the property), then sure, there's absolutely nothing good about rent.

But most rents are not executed in that manner. The owner of the property is still responsible for maintaining it, is responsible for repairs if the tenant breaks something and bails, is responsible to the government for the property taxes, is responsible to the bank (or other lender) for the mortgage, is responsible for the safety of the parties inside the house, and so on. It's not a "Hey, fuck you little guy you owe me $1000/month and I don't care that you have no running water and that the lights spark when you flip that switch." situation.

The moral basis comes from how the majority have agreed to structure society. A family isn't legally allowed to go to an unoccupied piece of land, start cutting down trees or making mud bricks into a shelter and stay there. We have divided up the land (a limited resource) into parcels of private ownership with government-enforced property rights.

With that comes a moral responsibility to make sure that everyone can obtain reasonable shelter. On the other side, for the person that owns the land, they provide access to what they own (as per the legal system that society has agreed upon -- private transfer of property, the banking system, etc). Not only do they provide access, they also provide the service of upkeep to the dwelling, upkeep of fixtures and security (locks, access control, etc). So it isn't like they are sitting back and collecting an income from the air that other people breath.

>We have divided up the land

If you dig just a little deeper into precisely how this was done, it gets extremely ugly very fast.

The only real argument for not resetting an inequitable distribution of land ownership is that the owners of unearned privilege have a habit of defending that privilege with extreme violence.

The US invasion of Cuba subsequent to their land redistribution was one example of this.

moral basis comes from how the majority have agreed to structure society

That’s more of a rationalization than a moral foundation. The land we’re talking about (in North America), in a lot of cases, was stolen by means of violent force from the indigenous people who lived here before the arrival of European settlers. If we’re going to call that a moral basis, then we’re back to arguing the account of Thrasymachus [1] and might makes right. It’s a cynical take on justice, to be sure, but also a difficult one to counter.

[1] https://iep.utm.edu/thrasymachus/

If nobody can own anything, why did the indigenous people have any more right to it than the European settlers?

The moral basis is the tenancy contract signed by the tenant and landlord-unless you believe contracts should not be enforceable.

I don't care about "enforcing contracts" as an abstract concept. If a contract is unjust, there is no reason it should be enforced. A contract that forces someone to pay $X a month or face homelessness during a huge economic crisis is not a just contract.

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