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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

Why do you consider the 2 examples you gave “draconian”?

Not the OP, but I'll guess that it's because both of them strongly erode property rights. Another, more freedom-preserving, approach is to make it easier to build build build. Planet Money had a decent introduction a couple years ago.[0]

In the current NIMBY climate, my neighbor is struggling with the red tape to repave her driveway. Building a new home around here seems about as improbable as a hobbyist making the first human Mars landing.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/05/700432258/the-...

Are property rights freedom-preserving? One of the most infuriating bits of my visit to the US West coast was driving up from LA to SF and a lot of the really nice bits of coast not being accessible to the public. There's compromises like germanic Jedermansrecht [0], but overall I think limiting property rights is often a net gain of freedom.

I do agree on the problem of NYMBYism though. There's a funny-if-not-so-sad dispute here in Berlin at the moment, where the leftist state government is desperately trying to build public housing while the leftist local government in the district of Lichtenberg is blocking a major developing due to local concern. Sadly I can't find an article in English, but I am sure there are dozens if not hundreds of examples for that.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

All of the California coastline is public.

California coast is public up to mean high tide. This is appreciably different from, for example, Oregon where it is public further in (typically to the vegetation line, details are slightly complex). It makes it significantly easier for California property owners to de facto remove public access to beaches, which is very common in some areas. On top of this, CA courts have often been reluctant to enforce public rights to beaches.

Those coast lines are most likely either inaccessible due to environmental protection concerns, or just straight up not easily accessible — lots of cliffs on the West Coast.

Or just not very fun to be on. The beach cities of Southern California are blessed with having some of the most accessible beaches.

> Are property rights freedom-preserving?

You’ll find that historically speaking “freedom” and “property rights” are treated as synonymous for some political theorists, including the ones that founded the United States. This is one of the foundational aspects[0] of liberalism that has come to rule the western world; the idea that property rights are sacred and must have an exceptionally high bar for the collective to intercede on.

Whether or not that equivalence is true is a debatable matter. One of the unfortunate outcomes is the ability for the individual to withdraw their property from public use, often to the detriment of the whole (such as the beach example you provided).

Also, the fact that the founding thinkers of liberalism and America itself tended to own slaves or trade in them doesn’t necessarily disprove the basic argument, but it’s a pretty strong counter point at least.

0 - There are of course other tenants to liberalism that I’ve not included here, due to their irrelevance for the subject at hand.

How does public housing abridge property rights?

Sorry, I think I conflated "public" with "low-income" housing in reading the comment. They're clearly different, though often uttered together.

How does low income housing abridge property rights?

You're forced to rent or sell at certain prices for a certain number of units as a condition for your permit to build. So you're not building what you want to build, nor are you pricing it at market rates.

Rent control really doesn’t make sense. If we could make things cheaper by passing a law we’d do it for everything.

Rent control won’t work for the same reason a price control for food or cars won’t work.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/rent-control/

Some forms of rent stabilization make perfect sense. But most of the policies implemented in big cities are far too restrictive. There is a lot of policy to be explored between "your rent never goes up forever" and "you can't be immediately evicted for no reason". No one wants the latter, but there are better ways to address that, like much longer notices for rent increases, or requiring multi-year lease options.

Sounds feasible. I don’t normally think of that as rent control.

San Jose limits annual rent increases to 5%. That seems reasonable (unless inflation gets out of control). Tenants aren't immediately forced out of their homes if the market rate jumps 20% in one year. But landlords can still eventually raise rents to market rates spread out over several years. There's no absolute limit on maximum rent.

If it was inflation + 5%, I'd be fine with that - but a flat 5% limit only works so long as inflation stays low.

Technically, it only works if the (notional, I’m not sure this is an actual tracked category) PPI for rental housing is low, general (CPI) inflation may loosely correlate with that, but its not directly relevant.

Inflation may not be out of control yet, but certainly things like insurance, parts and labor for repairs and maintenance, and HOA dues are already increasing more than 5%/year. And property taxes alone are guaranteed to increase 2%/year in California. Not saying we should feel sorry for landlords, but when some parts of a market have price controls and other parts don't, distortions are inevitable.

> And property taxes alone are guaranteed to increase 2%/year in California

No, they aren't. Assuming no increase in property tax rate (which is a good assumption, since your local taxing jurisdiction almost certainly already charges the maximum nominal rate of 1% allowed under Prop. 13), your property taxes will increase only by the amount your assessed value for taxation increases, which is capped to the lower of 2% or the actual annual (trailing) rate of inflation.

For 2021/2022 the actual cap is 1.036%, based on the actual California CPI for October 2019 through October 2020.

> If we could make things cheaper by passing a law we’d do it for everything.

Price controls for medicine are proven to work, based on single payer European systems. They cost cheaper and provide better outcomes than the US system.

Yet here we are.

That’s a little different because we’re dealing with a monopoly which can raise prices above the market rate.

But you are correct that in those cases it can work well. Same with other monopolies like utilities.

That’s different. The drugs are invented and produced all over the world and can be imported to Europe. So low European drug prices will harm overall pharma innovation a bit without killing the entire market.

Housing, OTOH, is always local. Low rents will discourage development which will make the real, underlying problem worse.

That is an example of what economists call the free rider problem. European countries get cheap drugs only because they are effectively being subsidized by Americans.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/free_rider_problem.asp

Outcome differences are due more to public health and social factors like obesity. Expensive drugs or lack thereof have only a tiny impact at the population level.

US pharma spends an outsized amount on sales and marketing, expenses that could be eliminated if public funding was spent directly on R&D.

Europeans aren’t free riding; they’re paying a reasonable rate for these goods while Americans are shouldered with extraction of revenue for pharma profits and those inefficient (and arguably unnecessary) sales and marketing expenses.

Only two countries in the world permit marketing directly to consumers to promote pharmaceuticals: the United States and New Zealand.

There is already a lot of public funding for basic biomedical research. Actual drug development is another thing entirely. If this were publicly funded then funding would be allocated based on political priorities rather than realistic scientific and economic assessments. That misallocation of resources would overwhelm any savings from reducing sales and marketing expenses.

But in general the traditional drug development approach of finding small molecule drugs to treat specific diseases is running out of steam. Most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.

A ban on marketing prescription-only drugs directly to the public existed in the US until recent decades. The amount spent on marketing skyrocketed when that ban was removed.

Since there's no way to reinstate the marketing ban short of a Constitutional amendment (basically impossible) that point is moot.

An outright ban would be very difficult now that the genie is out of the bottle. The FDA can regulate what goes in the ads, like requiring disclosure of the expected benefit, how prevalent some of those side effect them mention are, how common the condition it's meant for actually is, and of the list price of the medication. Many of these drugs are for rare conditions and the drugs, though approved, help a smaller percentage of patients than the ads portray and to a lesser extent.

It's not like profit motive is a great allocation method either though. There are massive perverse incentives to favor expensive ongoing treatments over cures or prevention.

But, because healthcare is public in NZ you wouldn't bother with the brand names as you'll have to pay for them (generics are funded by the taxpayer through Pharmac, which is the crown entity that is responsible for buying all publicly funded medication for NZ).

It's like Private hospitals, we have them, but very few people use them as the public system is better equipped and paid for by the tax payer.

The way price controls affect supply is people build less of the thing who's price your controlling.

Since medicine is mostly a technological good, it lets the rest of the world freeride off America paying for much of medical R&D.

As described by Freakonomics and general economic education, this is more or less right.

However keep in mind there's two kinds of rent. You can rent a house, or you can rent money and buy a house.

Historically and across countries there's been some willingness to restrict mortgage LTVs and interest-to-income ratios. At least in some European countries the interest ratio depends on a fixed interest rate (eg 5%) rather than the current interest rate.

We can create and destroy money more easily than we can create and destroy homes, maybe that's a worthwhile lever to try.

Draconian is a strong word (but cool-sounding) and what I really mean is "antiquated". But they are also somewhat blunt instruments and have historically lead to unwanted consequence. We already have more modern, market-oriented solutions, like vouchers and tax-credit housing, but those have problems too. My bigger point was, Millennials tend to react big when specific issues rise to the forefront, and if there aren't better solution than what is already on the table, we risk people clinging to whatever ideas do exist, which in the realm of housing, are mostly shit ideas.

Its interesting how often on HN the main problem always ends up being how people will "feel" about the next crisis, and the danger of that feeling itself. It's a weird kind of proxy self-consciousness older generations have on behalf of the economy. Always and forever: "no no, it's not that bad, really!"

meanwhile people are very much homeless, whether they are millenials or not, whether they react strongly or not.

Econ 101 says that rent control (in effect a price ceiling) just results in scarcity (people are unable to get ANY housing), rather than actually reducing the cost of housing.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. This is the theoretical prediction based on simple microeconomics. By example, I believe NY rent controls were ineffective to the point where rents outside of controlled areas went higher than they otherwise would have and within rent control areas there was (and is) scarcity of housing.

It also exacerbates other problems that go hand in hand with urban areas, such as traffic. Most people would rather stay in their rent controlled apartment and drive an hour to work instead of having to move and pay the current market value

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