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Comment by snapplebobapple | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you understand what the word efficient means because what you said about it is certainly untrue. The private sector will almost always deliver a better result as long as you mitigate market power abuse. You are basically saying it is more efficient to deliver services through a public system because said public system failed at mitigating market power. In the rent example a lot of that market power is even self inflicted by said public sector via onerous zoning and permitting regulations that make development only plausible via large, oligopolistic systems.

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You assume a free market economy that does not exist. Rent is a good example because regulation is driving it small land lords in favor of a few large corporate land lords that collude on rent using common algorithmic models.

Similarly, you assume a public sector ability to identify, create, operate, and obsolete services that does not exist.

Mostly the issue with being a small landlord lies in how the landlord-tenant laws are written to treat you like a large corporate landlord. You have the same legal obligation to go through very lengthy eviction processes and to be very verbose about criteria but you can’t amortize the risk of a bad tenant over even tens of units like a corporation can. If you get one bad tenant they can cost you more than you get from them in rent, and they can destroy the rental house before you get to the eviction hearing.

I’ve had more than one conversation with my wife about just keeping the house empty instead while we’re gone, but I still think I have a moral obligation to rent to someone if I can.

I think short term rental lowers that risk by having more renters but none under contract. Air b&b is a terrible thing but also the local maximum for individuals

No, I assume the free market that does exist, i.e. the one where the outcome of competition is monopoly/oligopoly. On the way to oligopoly you get all these sweet, sweet benefits from competition, so one of the major goals of government has to be breaking up the ologipolists/monopolists or at least regulating them in such a way that they can't exercise market power (i.e. mitigating market power) so we can keep competition fierce and keep benefiting from said fierce competition. Doing the above has mostly been an utter failure in America and Canada since roughly the 1970's.

It's interesting that I said government self inflicted a lot of this in the rent space by over-regulating and you seem to think this is an example of the free market not working rather than the government breaking the market.

In my country there used to be a government-owned airline with a monopoly. Tickets were so expensive that only the wealthy could afford them (yet somehow the airline still lost money). Then the market was thankfully deregulated. Competition substantially lowered the prices, and gave people the freedom to choose which airline to fly on.

The bigger problem seems to be private homeowners colluding to increase their house prices by voting to prevent development in their neighborhoods.

> The private sector will almost always deliver a better result as you mitigate market power abuse.

Yeah, and feathers fall at the same speed as baseballs if you mitigate friction.

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