A Stitch in Haste

...because we are dealing with Kindergartners:

If you've never been to an RGB meeting, it's a unique political spectacle. The board members take turns reading speeches -- when we arrived, one of the tenants' advocates was making an impassioned plea to freeze the rent increases. She was interrupted several times with shouts of support from the audience. After she finished, one of the landlords' advocates began to read his statement. He was drowned out every couple of minutes by shouts and organized chanting from the audience. Many members of the audience brought their own banners and signs, and waved them gleefully for the media assembled around the edges of the room. Most of the reporters had that glazed look they tend to get when there isn't much happening and they are watching something they've seen a thousand times before.

The "RGB" is the Rent Guidelines Board, a central planning bureaucracy that sets rates for about half the rental apartments in New York City. And while we have not seen this phenomenon "a thousand times before," we have in fact been seeing it since World War II, when the "temporary" and "emergency" rent stabilization program was first implemented. And we have, of course, suffered chronic housing shortages in New York City ever since. Go figure.

I won't pen yet another diatribe about the (rather elementary) economics of rent regulation -- been there, done that. What I want to note here is two other observations. First is the hopeless economic ignorance of these brats -- most of whom couldn't draw a supply-and-demand graph, let alone explain it.

Price ceilings create shortages. I can explain it to you in five minutes with one piece of scrap paper. And it's not a question of policy, but a question of fact -- economic laws are akin to the laws of physics. And no banners or speeches or protests or screeches can change that.

Second, what does it say about people who mark their calendars for the sole purpose of throwing temper tantrums? What precisely does it accomplish to drown out a landlord RGB representative -- who is trying to convey information -- with wailing shrieks and other manifestations of rude behavior? What cause are they serving by being jackasses? Whatever their purpose, alleviating the housing crisis certainly isn't one of them.

It's perfectly reasonable not to be an activist. It is not at all reasonable to become an activist and then dedicate your efforts to serving as mere background noise. That is not the activism of a reformer ... it's the activism of a pre-schooler.

More on the uncivil attendees from the New York Times.

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One sign at the RGB sandbox:

PRICES ARE NOT COSTS
Well no, actually prices are costs, since "profit" is not simply some residual to be found and looted like buried treasure, but rather a return to a factor of production no different than wages or interest. That factor of production is called entrepreneurship -- and it requires an extraordinary amount of entrepreneurship to own property as a business. Anyone who doubts that should ask whether simply owning one's own home is an effortless proposition. Then extrapolate to owning dozens or even hundreds of homes. Who could be so obnoxious as to suggest that landlords do not deserve profits or that "prices are not costs"?

The answer: only those who want something for nothing. And there's a word for people who want something for nothing, like these undisciplined housing "activists":

Greedy.