U.S. Supreme Court ends CDC's pandemic residential eviction moratorium

Yes, and I'm pointing out that the dissenting opinion is weighing in on the legality of it, you just choose a quote that's not about that part.

Probably. It gets into eminent domain law. It would also mean you could sue the government for what it seized from you.

Amusingly, if there's someone in the military who wasn't paying rent because of covid, the policy might have been a Third Amendment violation in that particular case.

> I said I'd like to see hard evidence.

... which we can't get without a live test. And then a localized test wouldn't be enough data. So we need to see massive suffering before we can follow common sense. Meanwhile, billions of dollars in rental assistance remain undispersed.

I agree with you that this should be a congress thing, but you gotta recognize that our government is currently structured to deflect as much decision making from congress as possible and place responsibility in the hands of opaque "process" and the imperial presidency. It's not gonna happen any other way.

The less democratic the system seems, the less people protest.

I 100% agree with you that this should be Congress's job.

Unfortunately, the people's branch has been acquiring job security by avoiding power and responsibility for a long time, leaving others to make decisions. Given that's the world as it is (and not the world as written), I think the Center for Disease Control is the least worst option for making edicts about public health.

I think it would be worse if another department did it. The only possibly better solution I can think of involves leaving it to states plenary power, but on the other hand a public health emergency crosses state lines and impacts interstate commerce.

> not all landlords are big evil corps... half of the rental stock is owned by small ones.

Which isn't much better, really. Large companies may have undue, negative influence on society at scale, but individually, it's the small businesses and individuals that screw you over the most. A large company can't afford to casually break the law or generate bad PR, the way a small business can.

Even if you assume that the money will come, you would have lost the opportunity cost of the money. Also in the meantime, if you had a mortgage on the property, you would have to make up that income on your own which is a double opportunity cost. In the meantime, inflation is running over 5%.

If you look at SF apartments, you will see many landlords who are selling at what seem to be low prices. Of course, SF and the surrounding Bay Area are affected by remote work as well. It doesn't seem to be a good time to be a landlord in this area?

I hear you, and I agree that there are definitely problems with wages in this country. But the thing to really understand is that the value of money is the collective value of the goods and services exchanged in the economy. It's really just that simple. You need to produce, personally, real value in order to get enough money to acquire the services of another (room and board of some kind). There are exceptions to this rule of course (stock market, currency market and commodities speculators, looking at you). Think about this long and hard and anyone can see the connections between value traded for value. This is why a free market is the best possible solution to a large economy. When government gets involved, their authoritarian solutions (take money from one person and give it to another, without the exchange of true value) will never have long term workability.

If someone wants to work a minimum wage job in America, they should not expect to be able to acquire luxury goods or anything of great value other than being able to subsist. It's nothing against them, it's just that the value being provided by the worker is not generally that valuable. This is in itself a UBI of sorts. Nobody inherently has the right to simply take from another (food, shelter, healthcare) simply for being alive and providing nothing in return. But showing up to a job and clocking in and clocking out every day, and doing one's job will bring in some return and you can then go out and exchange that for survival needs.

Now if you want to live a little better you're going to want to provide more value than is expected and you will get more return on that. A simple example is waiting tips. I have definitely tipped bigger for service people who put in extra value. And above all else, morale and general happiness of a culture goes up when people are producing and exchanging HIGH VALUE.

This is not the economy taught in schools. "Economics" as a subject has been mired down so thoroughly in complexity, trapdoors and dead ends nobody can agree on anything, and socialism and communism emerge as great concepts. It's just that "nobody has quite implemented socialism [which is communism] correctly" and thus resulted in untold suffering, misery and death throughout the ages. If communism is so great then why do so many people flee socialist and communist countries and try to make it to the USA? Because we have a FREE MARKET. Not total government appropriations and grants, yet.