> The price of taxis is held artificially high and really it is a loss for the consumer.
When does price fixing ever help the consumer? Honestly.
When does price fixing ever help the consumer? Honestly.
That is unless all of the landlords get together and price-fix, though I suspect that would correct itself rather quickly.
Only if you overvalue the benefits and ignore lots of costs.
Rent-control discourages turnover and maintenance. It also discourages building new capacity. The various tweaks to try to get around these things have other problems.
> the businesses hiring those people and by extension their customers.
How many biz want fewer potential customers and employees?
Whenever you hear a politician say "I remembered {group}", he's telling you that other people were "forgotten". (Actually, they weren't forgotten, they're paying the bills, and then some.)
It's not clear to me how/why rent stabilization (which merely limits how much rents can increase each year) would lead to less "building new capacity" -- an argument could be made that it forces new capacity to be created, because landlords can't make much more money off their existing units.
Rents are supposed to be set at fair market for new construction, but if you finish the unit in a downturn, or if there is oversupply, and you ever rent for less than you'd like, you'll never get out of the hole (without a tenant moving out) under rent stabilization.
There's also the risk of additional regulation -- part of why I won't buy in EPA is that it has rent control now (the only place on the peninsula), which is sort of tolerable as it exists now but which could easily get worse. Unincorporated San Mateo County is effectively never going to have rent control, so even for 5% more (on top of the "not being in the ghetto" premium), it's a better deal.
If they're not making "enough" off of a unit, why would they build more units?
Demand isn't the whole story. Demand that can be satisfied profitably will be satisfied. Demand that can't be satisfied profitably won't be satisfied.
For example, there's a huge demand for $1000 "supercars". Yet, the only supercars made cost far more.
I'd love to hear the argument for rent control, though.
I didn't say it made the market efficient, I said an argument could be made that it was a net positive. That's not the same thing.
Example: efficient markets sometimes produce monopolies, who then abuse their monopoly power. That's a net negative - but it isn't an example of an inefficient market.
Net positive? Sounds like some kind of value theory. Which "net positive" are you talking about? Can't argue something you don't understand..
In this instance it would mean that the sum total of the economic benefits to NYC that come from rent-controlled apartments outweigh the sum total of the negatives.
On your point, it could be argued that Google's overall platform dominance might not be attributed to barriers to entry, but rather barriers to exit. While Google offers some of your data back to you in a portable format it's still quite difficult to leave their services, and even when you do they will still be tracking you for advertising. To form their potential natural monopoly in your mind, you can imagine how difficult and inefficient it would be to have multiple different firms tracking you to the same extent that Google does (search, Google+, Gmail, calendar, Google Docs).
I am not an amateur economist.
I would go so far as to say: governments themselves are "free-market monopolies" in this sense. That is, there is no binding unilateral authority which solves intergovernmental disputes, and each government instead has to negotiate with other governments in an open and unregulated forum where even backstabbing and flagrant contract violations are permitted. If governments are monopolies on power, then the market of power is surely not a well-regulated one.
Pepsi and Coke are not a monopoly - as you explicitly acknowledge, there are at least two suppliers in this market.
Microsoft was never a monopoly, there were always other suppliers (Sun, Be, IBM, Apple, Linux, at different points in time).
Mission is another neighborhood which is pretty much a shit-hole, but IS a cool place. There are lots of great places to eat and drink and there are festivals, parties and parades most every night.
Usually when you hear about someone being shot, it's either in Oakland or the Mission.
It sounds like you're justifying rent control on the basis of aesthetics.
Same idea: You will lose the character without some sort of effort to not.