The Argentine president, known for his free-market stance, repealed a law that had imposed restrictions on landlords and significantly reduced rental availability.
www.newsweek.com
I am not sure why rent control keeps rearing its ugly head, but I hope we follow Argentina on this.
While the GOP certainly isn't friendly to rent control, many on the right seem to be as ignorant of the iron laws of economics as the dem-controlled places don't seem to understand what raising the minimum wage or controlling rent is going to do. My best friend Steve (he's going to Africa with the missus and me this Saturday), a solid republican, is as good of an example as any.
I give you Texas' "anti-gouging" law (every state-wide elective office has been held by the GOP since 1998, I think). Steve thinks anti-gouging laws are great, and thinks I'm FOS on this.
2 days before Hurricane Harvey made landfall, in my little Houston suburb of 120K people, there wasn't a gas station left with any gas, and all grocery stores were out of water. A lot of people were not in a position to buy a little early and stock up. I don't recall the exact gas price at the time, but if the gas stations had been permitted to double or treble their prices, it would have discouraged a lot of people from filling up all the automobiles and portable gas cans they owned. Water was roughly $5/case. The lucky ones got in early and bought up all the water they could. At $20 - 40/case - and people think nothing of paying $1 or $2 for a bottle of water at the gas station when they stop to fill up and are thirsty - there would have been plenty for everybody. Temporary high prices in response to catastrophic events tend to encourage frugality for everyone.
I mean, it's "nice" that the grocery stores were still showing water at $5/case, even if they didn't have any to sell. Kinda hard to drink "nice" when you're really thirsty. We got 40 - 50" of rain from Harvey. Much of I-10 between Houston and Beaumont (about 70 or 80 miles) was under about 8' of water. While I-10 was impassable, not all roads and highways were. While we couldn't have been resupplied during the 4 days of biblical rain we got, if water and gas prices could have been raised, the suppliers would have taken risks, truck drivers and grocery store workers would have been happy for the overtime, and we'd have started getting resupplied with both within a day or 2 of the end of the storm. It took weeks for the supply of both to stabilize.
Food and water shortages mean little to me, I've been a prepper for 10 years now. I'm utterly immune to this economic stupidity, at least in this context.
Higher prices of course are an incentive for the providers of such things to take greater risks in anticipation of windfalls; and additional players are attracted to the market as well, ensuring a steady (and eventual over- ) supply of those goods, bringing the prices back down to normal.
Not having learned our lesson from that, the same thing started happening during the scamdemic, particularly with toilet paper of all things.
When you see chronic shortages of any consumer good/service (including labor), you can always rest assured that there is some set of laws or regulations at the heart of it. It's as monotonously predictable as gravity.
Few enough on the right seem to understand these things. If you understand them, you're the only dem I know who does.
