The idea behind limiting the landlord's profit is that many believe that it is more important for people to be able to afford housing than for others to make larger profits through, literally, rent-seeking. It's not just because, it's a social priority.
Kinda like the comment the other day on HN that was something along the lines of "I don't see why we need the gov't regulating water prices, why can't the free market just sort this out" ... "because water isn't like an iPhone, it's something that everyone needs and there's a huge butterfly effect to this, less crops, less food, etc. on a very large scale -- not to mention supply/demand doesn't work for something with fairly inelastic demand".
What's next, "I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force insurance companies to not take into consideration pre-existing health conditions"? "I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force politicians and political parties to reveal who gives them money"? "I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force people who are working to pay for the retirement of older people via Social Security"? "I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force companies to limit the amount they pollute"?
There are plenty of arguments against rent control. But I find it hard to accept "but this guy could be making more money if the government didn't get in the way!" as an argument against rent control (or most other things, for that matter).
How does this legitimize it? A group that votes to dictate what I can do with my property might be doing it by the letter of the law, but that doesn't make it morally right. If I've earned something (e.g., I've gotten it legitimately through trade, as opposed to theft or fraud), that means I've poured some part of my life into earning that thing. Apart from issues where criminality is involved (theft, fraud, etc.), no life should be subject to the arbitrary dictates of any group.
Each of us should be free to make the most of our lives, as best as each of us can. Some of us will achieve more, others less. And there's no getting around that, because no two people can ever be the same in every respect.
To be clear, I am pro-equality in one fundamental respect: we should strive to be equal before the law.
This is essentially a fundamentalist view of property rights. It seems like that for any X, you can find people to assert that X is obviously the most important thing in the world, so anything else doesn't matter. Fundamentalisms are mentally satisfying, because you always have clear answers. But they're practically dangerous, because the ignored concerns don't actually go away.
Land, of course, does not work like you imagine it does. See, e.g.,:
In addition to all that, you ignore that concepts like "trade" and "law" and even "earned" are all intrinsically social concepts. No man is an island. That doesn't mean that property rights aren't useful and important, but if you want everybody to agree on a particular set of rights, you'll have to make a case that is more compelling than, "my particular moral code says you must abide by my particular moral code".
my particular moral code says you must abide by my particular moral code
It's not merely an arbitrary moral code that I'm asserting. What other way is there to live than to use your mind as best you can to make the most of your limited time? What other way is there to live than to treat others neither as masters nor slaves, but as trading partners (in love, friendship, mentorship, business)?
Arbitrariness isn't the issue. Agreement between various moral codes -- often in harmony, often conflicting -- is what matters. And often that means compromising on some things. You don't appear willing to compromise on what seems like an advocation for absolute property ownership rights.
What other way is there to live than to treat others neither as masters nor slaves, but as trading partners (in love, friendship, mentorship, business)?
You're advocating the opposite of that. As a landlord -- assuming a world with absolute property rights -- you have a significant power advantage over your tenant. A 3x-4x rent increase is not treating your tenant as a "trading partner", it's using your status as landowner to your enrichment and their detriment.
Further up you suggest:
A group that votes to dictate what I can do with my property might be doing it by the letter of the law, but that doesn't make it morally right
Not inherently, no. That's only the case if you believe that the voting-majority group is immoral. That certainly can be the case, but I don't believe it's the case often enough to abandon the idea of democracy.
Personally, I'm definitely in favor of limiting property rights. Property is in general not a fungible "product", and its supply is limited. I consider land to be a public good. The state grants you some property rights, but reserves to place some restrictions on what you can do with the property in the name of the public good. I don't think we have the balance down perfectly yet, but I would absolutely not advocate giving property owners carte blanche to do whatever they want with that property.
It's a matter of drawing the line somewhere: I think you might agree that some restrictions are good. Disallowing renting decisions based on discrimination of protected classes is something we might agree is a good thing (sorry, I don't mean to state your position for you, but I don't know you, so I'm just stating a hope, a guess, as to somewhere we might find common ground). If we can take that as a given, then we can agree that the state restricting property owners to some extent does indeed make sense. And from there it's finding a list of things that it's ok to restrict, and it's not ok to restrict. From this discussion I'd guess that my list of things that it's ok to restrict is a bit longer than yours. And that's ok, but at least it's a starting point from which to find a compromise. The final list has more on it than you want, and less on it than I want.
Business deals and compromise are rarely about making one or the other party (or both) 100% happy. I believe there's "common wisdom" floating around that the best deal is one that both sides are slightly uncomfortable with, and I believe that to be pretty true.
If, on the other hand, you do truly believe in giving property owners absolute power and free reign to do whatever they want with it, then I don't know that we can actually have a productive discussion, because our viewpoints may just be too different. That's unfortunate, but that happens sometimes.
A 3x-4x rent increase is not treating your tenant as a "trading partner", it's using your status as landowner to your enrichment and their detriment.
In a romantic relationship, either party can decide to leave without retribution.
In a friendship, either party can prioritize something else they value more, and the friendship wanes.
Students can outgrow mentors, and vice versa. Businesses can fire clients, and clients can go to other busiensses.
It can definitely be detrimental for someone's romantic partner or spouse to leave them (and the same can be said for any of the other relationships in this list). Some people are so distraught when someone leaves them that they attempt suicide.
However, does the fact that this happens in any way justify imposing restrictions on couples? Should a person be forced to endure a romantic relationship that they wish to end because it would be to the detriment of the other person? You can say the same thing about any of the relationships I've listed. For example, should you be forced to buy a brand of soap you don't like because the grocer isn't doing well, and he needs you to buy his unsold inventory?
All relationships are a two-way street, and for a fair trade, both parties have to agree, voluntarily.
These are all just specific cases where one can reasonably make arguments to say "yes" or "no", but have a different opinion for other specific cases.
For your first 3 examples (romantic, friendship, student/mentor), I of course say sure, either party is free to leave whenever they want.
The difference here is an economic one. It's near impossible to make sensible legislation around feelings (though some lawmakers certainly seem to try). While the ending of a romantic relationship may have a huge negative psychological impact on me, it doesn't affect my ability to live on in economic terms. A landlord kicking me out of my apartment can directly affect my livelihood, and the government is trying to protect me there. I think it's also uncommon for that to hurt the landlord (especially in the non-rent-controlled case), so there's an imbalance of pain. In the relationship case, leaving causes me pain, but staying causes the other person pain. Legislating whose pain is worse or less justifiable is, I hope we'd agree, a mess.
The firing topic is interesting, though, because even the law disagrees in different parts of the world. In Europe, for example, many countries have laws that are very employee-centric, and make it very difficult for firms to fire people. I personally don't agree with the extent that they've gone over there, but I can at least appreciate that people in other areas value employee security over employer mobility and lack of overhead. Even different states in the US have different laws that make it easier or harder to fire people, and define different obligations on the employer when they want to fire someone.
All relationships are a two-way street, and for a fair trade, both parties have to agree, voluntarily.
I'd like to agree to that in principle, but that just isn't true. There are plenty of laws on the books that can give one side more rights to make, not make, continue, or terminate an agreement. For example, a landlord may wish to discriminate against people with certain physical disabilities, because otherwise he'll have to spend money to install accessibility features in his building, but the law says... nope, can't do that.
A landlord may also wish to discriminate against an existing tenant who isn't able to fulfill the landlord's newest vision of his property's profit-making abilities, but there are a bunch of laws that also say... nope, can't do that. I happen to agree with a lot of them, or at least the intent behind them.
Our entire legal system is based on the idea that, on an individual level, both parties don't have to agree... only some representatives pulled from the majority do... sorta. There are lots of laws on the books that I never agreed to, and yet I'm bound to follow them just the same.
But all that is fine, I think. Many laws -- renting-related laws in particular -- are designed to weaken inherent power imbalances. The landlord naturally has more power in society than the single mother who is holding down two jobs. The law tries -- often imperfectly -- to protect the mom from people who would ignore her interests and take advantage of her.
Property rights aren't "useful and important." Property rights are the fundamental basis for any other right. What right to life does anyone have if not because they "own" their own life? What right to free speech do they have if they do not "own" their own speech?
Thievery doesn't become acceptable because someone makes a compelling case or a pretty argument. Justice doesn't become "fundamentalism" because it won't compromise with injustice.
That you have found a way to construct all the rights you can think of based on a specific construction chattel property rights is interesting. But it doesn't it make it the only way to think about rights (or ethics or morals), or even a particularly good one.
Your fixation on one thing and your refusal to compromise or even to admit the validity of other views is exactly what fundamentalists do.
I was absolutely serious about that comment. Am I being downvoted because people disagree, or just because the Libertarians here don't like being told that treating lives as property ownership is the basis for slavery? Either way, I'm open to discussion on this point.
> A group that votes to dictate what I can do with my property might be doing it by the letter of the law
Why do you have property? Why does a police force and firefighters exist to protect that property? Why are there courts and contracts? The only reason is because a group of people have decided to set rules that protect your property - the only "natural property" you can have is that which you can fight for, and anything you have beyond that is by the grace and favour of the same society you are so quick to deride.
> To be clear, I am pro-equality in a fundamental way: we should strive to be equal before the law.
And the poor and rich alike have equal right to sleep under the bridges.
"Why does a police force and firefighters exist to protect that property?"
Because the landlord wants to protect their property and pays the property tax towards that goal unlike the renter? (yes it is built into the cost of rent but it's also built into the cost of every business transaction and people don't criticize that point)
It's not society that decided this. Most people in our society recognize the fact that the alternative would be to resolve disputes (including ones where no one intended to cause anyone any harm) through violence. We need courts, police and contracts so that we can live and create without fear of retaliation, without generations of Hatfields feuding with McCoys.
Most property, if you trace out the actual chain of transactions, originates in theft or fraud. Either a monarch or other military force took it from another group by force and parceled out pieces of it (theft) or literally just claimed it from afar (without occupation) and decided who to grant it to (fraud). Just because you are some steps removed from the beginning of the transaction chain, does not mean that you have 'earned something', or as you put it, 'gotten it legitimately'.
- What about the software I wrote in the past year and a half for the schools I work for?
- What about the designs my co-worker painstakingly worked on over the same period?
- What about the reams of reports my wife wrote at her company, which makes heart valves? She gets up at 4:30 in the morning, comes home at around 5 at night, works after dinner. When there's an important deadline coming up (which is almost all the time), she works weekends.
All of these things are property. Each of us poured ourselves into these things. We could have done other things, but we chose to do these things. In a way, we're not special - we're just three people, out of billions.
None of us are thieves. You can casually toss around your equivocations and guilt-tripping for being born, but that doesn't change the fact that many people are honest and have earned what they have.
I believe the person you were replying to was referring to land when he said property (which is a normal term to use, if someone asked me "are you interested in looking at a property?" it would pretty unambiguously mean land / physical building).
Not that it means his stance was correct, but your argument isn't addressing his point.
Property is more than just land. People have titles cars, boats, copyright over books they've written, stocks, bonds, savings accounts, furniture, clothing, timeshares, patents on things they've invented, etc.
At any rate, in all three of my examples, money changed hands for work creating property. That money could be used to buy property, physical or otherwise.
I don't think you understood my point. The word "property" just has two separate definitions in common English, one is the one you are using and the other is verbatim "land" (which happens to be a subset of the first definition).
At least in my dialect of English "a property" would always always refer to land (e.g. "steal a property" is nonsense).
None of that is real property. Attaching the word 'property' to those things is a legal fiction and completely different from what we were talking about.
> not to mention supply/demand doesn't work for something with fairly inelastic demand
lolwut?
The free market works pretty OK for gasoline and food (taken as a whole; obviously specific foods are elastic). When was the last time you heard people clamoring for price controls at the grocery store?
Even more to the point, the free market works just fine for housing in the vast majority of the US that does not have any form of rent control.
That so many units in SF are rent controlled is a huge part of the problem here. It reduces the incentives for landlords to maintain properties (the OP specifically cites these problems) and makes it difficult-to-impossible for people in rent-controlled units to move (again, cited by the OP). It also significantly reduces the supply of housing in SF, driving up market-rate rents. Eventually the market-rate rents are so much higher than the rent-controlled rents that landlords have a strong incentive to pull stunts like what's happening here.
The other big part of the problem is that so many people seem to think that the solution to all their economic problems is more regulation. What we're seeing in SF is not a failure of the free market, but rather the failure of an over- and ineptly-regulated market.
Neither gasoline nor food are "free markets", even approximately.
Government actively intervenes to influence the supply and price of gasoline, and actively intervenes in food, subsidizing both production and consumption.
So, if whatever is being done for gas and food works well, that's not an endorsement of the free market.
But now we've ended up where we always end up, where each side of a debate rejects any alleged historical evidence supporting their opponent's position on the grounds that their opponent's proposal has not been perfectly implemented.
I think the point was that no one is asking for price controls in those markets, despite the fact that we all need those goods to function - not that food/gas represent the text book cases of market equilibrium.
Indeed, just that it's ridiculous to say that supply and demand "don't work" for inelastic goods.
But I feel like people are focusing on the weaker argument, about gas and food, and ignoring the far stronger argument, that the vast majority of this country somehow gets by just fine without rent control.
But that's basically not true, or at least misleading; production subsidies for food are sold as a means of controlling retail prices, as are many policies related to gasoline. That's quite a lot of political pressure which manifests in actual policy for government to actively manage process in both domains, even if the actual policy isn't price controls in the sense of a de jure upper limit on retail prices.
A subsidy is fundamentally different from a price ceiling, both in terms of its economic consequences and its implementation. There's nothing misleading about that. Both have significant political pressures behind them, but price ceilings manifested as rent control are near universally derided among economists.
> When was the last time you heard people clamoring for price controls at the grocery store?
This is, in fact, extremely common, historically and currently. Just within the US in the past several years, look at the demand for price caps on bottled water in the wake of natural disasters.
I wouldn't make the "let the landlord make more money" argument, I would be making the "rent control is a significant distortion of the market which hurts both renters and tenants in the long run" argument. Housing absolutely is a social priority, and while rent control is definitely a well intentioned attempted and addressing the issue, a more effective approach would be to build more - not restrict the price signalling mechanism.
Vacancy decontrol = new construction can have whatever rent they want. So preventing a landlord from screwing over the current tenant does not prevent housing from meeting demand.
New construction does face many other issues, though. NIMBY's, parking regulations, zoning, etc.
I am in a rent controlled apartment. I have been in this apartment for 4.5 years.
I full-throatedly support new, dense residential construction sufficient to meet SF's current and future housing demands. This will continue to be my position for the forseeable future.
For those folks who are concerned about new construction destroying their rent-controlled units, Sangiacomo and his tenants worked out a really good plan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9209304
> The idea behind limiting the landlord's profit is that many believe that it is more important for people to be able to afford housing than for others to make larger profits through, literally, rent-seeking.
There is a fairly well-accepted economic system that advocates both profit-seeking and making desired goods affordable. Far from being mutually exclusive, they can be mutually reinforcing.
Kinda like the comment the other day on HN that was something along the lines of "I don't see why we need the gov't regulating water prices, why can't the free market just sort this out" ... "because water isn't like an iPhone, it's something that everyone needs and there's a huge butterfly effect to this, less crops, less food, etc. on a very large scale -- not to mention supply/demand doesn't work for something with fairly inelastic demand".
What's next, "I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force insurance companies to not take into consideration pre-existing health conditions"? "I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force politicians and political parties to reveal who gives them money"? "I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force people who are working to pay for the retirement of older people via Social Security"? "I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force companies to limit the amount they pollute"?
There are plenty of arguments against rent control. But I find it hard to accept "but this guy could be making more money if the government didn't get in the way!" as an argument against rent control (or most other things, for that matter).