I’ve been thinking about this lately too in response to frequent interjections from the more libertarian side of the bbs commentariat with the theme of “any time the government tries to intervene, it ends up a corrupt, wasteful experiment full of regulatory capture and gaming of the system that makes things worse.” They cite examples like the housing bubble and the fact that the government “forced the banks to make bad loans to get as rich as they possibly could off the backs of poor people, I mean, what could they do? The government made them do it.” Their point is always that the government should therefore stop trying to do things. The response I’ve been formulating to this collective thesis is “Perhaps, instead, the problem is that the government uses markets as a tool to enact its social programs.”
We’ve been looking for apartments in NYC for the last few months, and are more risk-averse than we used to be so have been reading leases more carefully than we used to, and diving into the ugly world of rent stabilization loopholes and landlord games*. It’s a tangled, awful nightmare of government having to bribe, cajole, and police landlords into carving out a space for poor people, all the while landlords finding a way to avoid doing just that. And this is all a product of trying to enact social welfare policies through the conduit of a for-profit industry. Opposites may attract in relationships, but with philosophies so wholesale opposed to each other, this just seems like a match made in hell. I’m more convinced than ever that all housing should be a nonprofit venture.
This has made me a bit wary of basic minimum income as the end-all-be-all of social programs. As you say, without the coupling of other powerful regulations or a wholesale philosophical shift in the markets for necessary goods and services, it’s just shifting the bottom rung, and putting more blood into the rocks to be squeezed out.
*specifically the loopholes around “legal rent vs. temporary preferential rent” and “major capital investment”
