A moratorium on evictions from federally assisted housing expires today. In the first place, that's ridiculous, it should not expire. Millions of newly homeless people are not going to be at all helpful in trying to contain the pandemic and get the economy growing. But I also want to draw attention to the absurdity of landlords actually evicting people from low-income housing who are behind on their rent.
It's not as though they have more solvent families lined up to move into the apartments and start paying rent. They'd be much better off keeping their units occupied and collecting whatever rent the tenants can afford. The same goes for commercial landlords. Not to mention banks with mortgages. In the 2018 crisis, banks foreclosed on innumerable properties that they couldn't sell, that sat abandoned, got stripped of wiring and plumbing and eventually had to be razed.
If we're going to rebound at all quickly from this disaster once we have a vaccine, we need to freeze all of this evicting and foreclosing so that the tenants and homeowners and businesses are still there and ready to get going again. The banks and landlords will be much better off if they understand that and forebear, because tossing out the tenants and mortgagors is not going to suddenly cause money to start coming in from somewhere else. But they seem to view it as some sort of moral imperative. I'm not getting this.
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They really are this dumb. Homo Economicus is a myth and federal policy has enabled this stupidity every time they drop the ball. Those lenders got to write off massive losses with a federal cheque and they'll probably be able to do so again. The only incentive they have, supported by the history of rental policy, is never to let the price go down.
United States capitalism is, and always has been, insane and irrational. Advocates point to the possibilities that unbridled capitalism creates. But it also creates unbridled misery and abuse. Now, we have libertarian extremists in charge of policy. You know, Ayn Rand really was an asshole. She wasn't stupid, but she wasn't a genius either, and she was convinced that she knew more than she did. She was wrong about a lot of stuff, but her acolytes make her into a deity. The irony is that they claim to be atheists. Bullshit. They're illogical hypocrites who bullshit themselves into believing that the Earth's resources are infinite; otherwise, Rand's philosophical house of cards would come tumbling down. They really BS themselves into believing that the dollar is holy, that pollution doesn't exist, and that poor people just want to be that way.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing ... ba-by ...
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