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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how so many people refuse to accept that out-of-control housing prices are due to artificial scarcity, and that the solution is deregulation, rather than even more idiotic rent control and eviction regulations. David Campos is now trying to enact legislation to penalize Ellis Act evictions.

More than two decades after the USSR collapsed, and people are still clinging to socialist ideologies.

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I'm pretty sure the ordinances against housing construction in SF have very little to do with socialism or the USSR...

The zoning laws are good old NIMBYism. But the rent control? That's good ol' socialism.

Oh for god's sake, just because you don't understand what the word means doesn't mean you can use socialism for any government action in the economy. Rent control isn't stupid because it's redistributive or whatever you think "socialist" means, it's stupid because it arbitrarily redistributes from long-standing tenants (rich, middle-class or poor) to those who move more often (rich, middle-class, or poor), while introducing a massive amount of uncertainty and overhead for landlords and reducing the quality and quantity of housing stock. A little understanding of economics goes a long way; the fact that rent control is distorting the price mechanism per se is not the reason that it's retarded (by that logic, Pigovian taxes would be just as disastrous as rent control).

restricting supply to drive up prices is socialist????

When it's done through a coercive act of government, yes.

ok, yeah, I think I read that chapter in Das Capital about how to increase your capital by using government to restrict supply.

You can be as sarcastic as you like, but Marx isn't the only one who gets to define socialism. Coercive government action can rightly be lumped in with socialism. It does not mean that only socialist take coercive government action, but it does not disqualify socialism from this type of activity.

the things kids say....

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