... 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.

Roderick:

… regulations that purport to help the weaker party generally fall into one of two categories: either a) they actually benefit the stronger party instead, or b) to the extent that they do benefit the weaker party they are outweighed in their effects by other regulations …When it comes to regulations purporting to protect tenants, I can think only of examples of (b); there may be examples of (a), but none comes to mind offhand. (Suggestions, comrades? Rent control is an example of a purportedly pro-tenant policy that actually hurts tenants, but it hurt landlords too as far as I can see.)

One point, which I’m a bit surprised you didn’t raise in this post, is that regulations may prop up the interests of actually-existing landlords, at the expense of tenants, in one of two ways: (1) by directly enabling landlords to screw tenants over; or (2) erecting regulatory barriers to entry that artificially suppress competition among landlords. (2) comes at the direct expense of the marginal would-be landlords who are shut out of the market, rather than at the expense of tenants. But of course it also indirectly harms the tenants, in that they are not able to form alternative exchanges that would have better met their needs than the actual exchange that they made under actually-existing rigged-market conditions.

Bob Nelson: “These people appear to be hardcore anti-American Communists …”

Let’s suppose — strictly for the sake of argument — that this is true. If it is true, what do you think follows from that about the FBI’s raids? Do you seriously mean to suggest that “hardcore anti-American Communists” should be raided, arrested and prosecuted for the government based solely on their political beliefs? If so, why? Shouldn’t people have a right to advocate any political beliefs they want, without fear of government intimidation or repression?

... Well, in addition to their libertarian philanthropy they also give a lot of money to more conventionally Right-wing and corporatist causes -- e.g. Heritage

... Well, sure, but the bit about nobody starving was in the present tense. ... Unemployment is a lagging indicator as usual, but there were noticeable losses

... Well, of course they didn't. I certainly had no intention of suggesting that they did. Stealing trillions of dollars from poor people to give away to rich

... Kevin, In terms of raw employment figures, I was referring to 1982-1983 (1982 had higher unemployment than 2009; whether 2010 or 1983 will have the worse

... Being jobless, and starving, are of course two different things, but I think that persistent nation-wide 9%-10% unemployment figures (or double-digit