... I don't think that Nozick's argument is that rival defense agencies *necessarily would* use less reliable methods than the dominant agency. Rather, his

... Well, Jesse didn't say that Rand's views on government were *consistent* with the rest of the views that she is committed to. I agree with Childs, and for

Nathan Benedict:

Well, I can’t prove that this would be the case, but I have some evidence as to why it might be so. Look at air travel.

Well, what am I supposed to find out by looking at air travel? It’s certainly true that people will put up with a lot of temporary physical discomfort for up to a few hours at a time, in order to fly more cheaply. It’s also true that the longer they have to put up with it, the more price-inelastic their demand for comfort becomes. (E.G., as far as I know there is no regulatory reason why airlines couldn’t charge for meals on a trans-Atlantic flight, just as they charge for meals on domestic flights. But generally they don’t.) This may tell you something about what people are willing to put up with in a place where they expect to be living for the next several months at least; in any case, the issue of physical comfort or discomfort is also different from the issue of how likely you are to be dicked over by the terms of the contract. (Lots of people buy “non-refundable” tickets in order to save money; but as it happens most airlines are relatively willing to extend a fair amount of latitude even on such tickets if you end up having to change your travel plans. They could be a lot more hardassed about this than they actually are, but presumably what they’d save by doing so doesn’t compensate for the business they’d expect to lose. And there’d be pressure to be even more forgiving if the air travel market were more competitive than regulatory cartelization has made it.)

Nathan Benedict: But there seems to be enough people willing to do anything to save a buck that such onerous contracts would not have any difficulties finding takers.

Maybe, but again, what makes you think that the price savings to landlords would be great enough to make a significant difference when compared when the countervailing force of increased small-scale competition within the rental market? Just pointing to the existence of demand is not enough to show that something is actually going to be economically viable; you do need to show that the marginal costs faced by the supplier are such that there would actually be profit in it. In any case, the likely effect of increased competition in the market — in particular, increased competition from small-scale or informal-sector players — and the reduction of regulatory fixed costs for landlords, would tend to be lower rental prices, even at the same or better quality of service, no? Hence reducing the amount of advantage that a slumlord could extract by lowering prices below the already-lower rates.

... I think that it would be wonderful for _The Match!_ to be available online, but whoever might attempt to put it up should be aware that, given Fred

... Jock, Well, if it is Andrews, his heyday was quite a few years before Swarz's. His most famous book is "The Science of Society" (1851). Cheers, -C

Nathan:

But a landlord could still easily get tenants if he rented an apartment for $1000/month under such terms in an area where similar apartments go for $3000/month.

I agree that if you make up arbitrary numbers without any reference to actual supply schedules and demand schedules that landlords in a competitive rental market would be facing, you can easily come up with situations in which hardass contract terms would sell at the arbitrarily discounted rate. But I hope that Bryan’s argument is based on more than the observation that there are logically possible worlds in which this might happen. Certainly, if it’s supposed to tell us something about “How Inequality Shapes Our [Actual] Lives,” and what freed-market alternatives might look like, there needs to be some consideration about whether it actually is particularly likely for a landlord to be able to save $24,000 per year per tenant in marginal costs just by adopting such hardassed terms. If the disparity in rental costs is substantially less, then the question is going to be how wide the difference actually is, and how price-elastic consumer demand is for better contractual terms. Bryan seems to think it’s obvious that the price difference is likely to be quite wide, and consumer demand for better terms is going to be very price-elastic. But as far as I can see, he doesn’t give an argument for why this should be granted to be so.

Of course, he could point to the allegedly pro-tenant skew of existing housing regulations — perhaps claiming that this is like a subsidy, and hence (ceteris paribus) you’d expect to see less of what it subsidizes in a freed market. But if Bryan thinks that these regulations actually do succeed in protecting tenants from sharp dealing by landlords (even by themselves — let alone when considered in the context of the larger regulatory structure and oligopolistic political economy of which they are a part), without any other significant unintended side-effects that might overwhelm their supposedly protective functions, then I just think Bryan has a more optimistic view of the efficacy of government regulation than most left-libertarians do.

Roderick:

but Bryan wasn’t just asking about regulations that harm tenants; he was asking specifically about cases of ostensibly pro-tenant regulations that harm tenants.

Right; but my point was about the overlap of your type (a) and my type (2). If we have a regulation that does succeed in doing just what Bryan claims it will do — unilaterally drive up risk or fixed costs for the landlord, to the benefit of that individual tenant — then that regulation has an unseen effect, in addition to its seen effect: the ratcheted-up risks and fixed costs raise artificial barriers to entry against marginal competitors. In the nonce, the individual tenant who actively makes use of the regulation may be better off for it, but of course that doesn’t settle the question about whether tenants in general are better off for the existence of the regulation. That depends on (among other things) how accessible the “protections” really are for the average tenant, and how much the average tenant is harmed by an anticompetitive rental market. So even given a regulation that provides an ideal case for Bryan’s claim, the “pro-tenant” regulation’s effect on competition could perfectly well produce results much like putatively “pro-worker” minimum-wage or occupational-safety laws produce in the labor market, where the “benefit” to a limited subset of workers comes at the expense of (among other things) a harm to all other workers, who are shut out of opportunities by the increase in prices and reduction in employment.