Watch out Oregon! As authoritarianism in California worsens, so it will in Oregon

 What do you call people who are in a pit with their heads down and they keep on digging?  Maybe even digging faster? It’s gone beyond silliness and is no longer a laughing matter.  Madness has overtaken Democrats in California and has descended into authoritarianism.  Oregon, always trying to one-up their Southern and Northern neighbors for progressive ideas is vulnerable to the acceleration of tyrannical regulation. If our history of copying and outdoing California is a indication of what we have to look forward to, read this and weep.  

Weep not just for lost ketchup or napkins, but for every aspect of our lives the leadership class wants to control.  I can do without paper napkins - I carry paper towels, wipes and a plastic garbage bag in my car at all times.  It’s been a longtime since I have had children to clean up after, but what works for little ones works for me too.  I’ve also given up gas lawn mowers because electric ones are easier to start and I have a small lawn.  But the landscapers at my apartments would be lost without their riding mowers and gas blowers.  

Parents and grandparents - it is up to you to tell your children of the times before the Democratic takeover of our state (and country) of the individual freedoms we enjoyed and trust we had in one another.  It is up to all of us to fight the forces that want to upend our Constitutional “negative rights” that everyone is born with and supplant them with “positive rights” that only government can grant to the worthy.  

The Unhappy Customers of California

Another day, another government-imposed hassle in La La Land.Wall Street Journal. By James Freeman, Nov. 18, 2021 

Now they’re coming for your condiments, Californians, as new regulations are squirting all over the Golden State. Nathan Solis reports this week for the Los Angeles Times:

Restaurants in Los Angeles are now restricted from freely distributing the disposable items and may offer them only to customers who ask for them.

Under the ordinance, which took effect Monday for restaurants with more than 26 employees, all single-use disposable food-ware dispensers will be removed. Businesses also will stop including plastic utensils and napkins with takeout orders or for dine-in meals unless a customer specifically asks for them. All food and drink businesses will be required to follow the new rules starting April 22.

Backers of such rules are sending a climate virtue signal given the use of fossil fuels in the manufacture of plastic products. They also oppose plastic on the dubious premise that advanced economies like the United States have not yet figured out how to responsibly dispose of trash. Press an environmental activist on why plastic needs to be driven out of the lives of U.S. consumers and you’re likely to hear not about problems in U.S. waste management but about countries overseas where people dump mountains of shopping bags into the ocean.

“Why was making local gov’t the ‘ketchup packet police’ a priority?,” tweetedCalifornia Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk in September.

Don’t forget the toy police and the lawnmower police. Valerie Richardson wrotein October in the Washington Times that unleashing the ketchup cops was just one element of the state’s tough-on-non-crime agenda:

“As many of us predicted, Newsom’s defeat of the recall has only emboldened him to impose more freedom-killing measures,” said Los Angeles radio talk-show host Larry Elder, the leading Republican vote-getter in the Sept. 14 recall. Randy Economy, former senior adviser and spokesperson for the recall campaign, said the “only thing that has changed since the recall election is that Gavin Newsom has doubled down on lunacy.”

This column must admit wondering in 2019 whether California had hit peak liberalism and the answer is a resounding no. Mr. Newsom is still aggressively testing the consumer pain threshold.

A call to engage in “open bravery”

John McWhorter: Antiracism Is Not An Ideology, It’s A Religion

NOVEMBER 18, 2021 By The Federalist Staff

Linguist John McWhorter is the author of the new book, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” He joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky on The Federalist Radio Hour for a discussion on a new kind of leftist who clings to the new religion of race where the original sin is “white privilege,” and why they can’t be negotiated with.

“We are faced with a person that we either have to walk around or have the guts to stand up to because we can’t make them understand the virtue of compromise,” McWhorter said.

McWhorter explains how we need acts of “open bravery” and to normalize calling out “woke racism” for what it is.

“This book is something I wrote in order to ride what I think of as a healthy wave of resistance to these extremes,” he said.

Visit The Federalist website to listen to an interview with James McWhorter as he discusses his latest book on Wokeism and the religion of Antiracism .

Kneel. Repent. Pray for whatever the Woke demands.

 

 

 

 

Nothing learned, but much is lost

Following Marxist ideologues has consequences.

I don’t understand how rent control is even legal.  Owners retain possession of their property, but the restrictions on how much money they can make from their business is limited. No matter the quality of the product or service they provide, landlords are regarded suspiciously.  As a minority, landlords are beholden to mob rule.  Who wants to be a landlord under these conditions?  The more people are punished for being a landlord, the fewer people will choose to be one.  Rent control is the first step towards total government takeover of the housing market.  

Rent Control Backfires Again in St. Paul

Voters put on a 3% cap. You’ll never guess what developers did next.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, November 11, 2021

File this un­der lessons never learned: Vot­ers in St. Paul, Minn., last week ap­proved a bal­lot ini­tia­tive, 53% to 47%, to im­pose strict rent con­trol. The cap on in­creases will be 3% a year, “re­gard­less of change of oc­cu­pancy,” and with no ex­cep­tions for new con­struc­tion or mom-and-pop landlords.

What hap­pened next should be no mys­tery. One de­vel­oper has “al­ready pulled applications for three build­ings,” a rep­re­sen­tative told the St. Paul Pi­o­neer Press. An­other “lost a ma­jor investor” in “an apart­ment building he’s try­ing to get off the ground.” Who could have fore­seen it, other than ba­si­cally every economist with a pulse?

If a city’s hous­ing sup­ply can’t grow to meet de­mand, the nat­ural re­sult is that prices go up. Ar­ti­fi­cial caps then pro­duce short­ages and other dis­tor­tions, such as di­lap­i­dated prop­er­ties that land­lords don’t have an in­cen­tive to ren­o­vate. The St. Paul ini­tia­tive says the city will cre­ate an ap­peals process to let de­vel­opers break the 3% cap if it’s nec­es­sary to provide “a fair re­turn on in­vest­ment.” Got it? File forms in trip­li­cate, and maybe you’ll be al­lowed a “fair” profit, how­ever that’s de­fined.

A cul­prit here is Mayor Melvin Carter, who said be­fore the elec­tion that he’d vote yes on the ini­tia­tive and then work to “make it bet­ter.” His ad­min­is­tration wants the City Coun­cil to pass a “clar­ify­ing amend­ment” to ex­empt new con­struction from the 3% cap, on the the­ory that the bal­lot mea­sure “is silent” on that is­sue.

Is that le­gal? “We can’t make changes that are sub­stan­tive,” the City Coun­cil pres­i-dent told the Pi­o­neer Press, “and I think this would qual­ify as substan­tive.” Ex­pe­ri­ence is a harsh teacher, but at least other cities cu­rious about rent con­trol can learn from St. Paul’s self-destruc­tive ex­am­ple.    

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The consequences of rent control are entirely predictable, so only a poorly educated and naive population is surprised that things can go wrong, and when they inevitably do, the “corrections” will be a doubling-down of the same sorry policies.  

From Toronto: 

The Unexpected Consequences of Rent Control

Rent controls have created two markets. For Tenants who stay put, they'll pay below market rents. For new tenants, they can expect to pay even more because of a shortage of rental units. This shortage happens because more and more people are moving to Toronto each year. For those who do come, and for those who are already living here, they can't afford to buy, so they must rent.

Rent control explained in 5 min.

 PragerU clears away the cobwebs imbedded in socialist beliefs about how the economy and humans work.  Reality and facts trump ideology and propaganda, but only if one keeps an open mind and seeks the truth.  Politicians on the Left think they can change human nature by passing laws and tinkering with social constructs.  When humans don’t react to the Left’s agenda, they don’t question their beliefs-the double down on regulations as if they can force the human form to fit their programmatic straight jacket,  

What if people were taught economics as a science rather than theology?  What if facts were elevated.above fiction?  

Tap on images belo for short videos.

Marxist theory of housing:  

Private property should be abolished.  No one should make a profit (profiteering) from housing.  

Where is the incentive or even the means to create rental or for-sale housing in a Marxist economy?  

If rent is so high that housing is becoming unaffordable to renters, stop rents from rising. 

Price controls limit supply of a product.  What is the incentive for people to invest in a politically-controlled consumer product or business?  What products will be controlled next? If stores have empty shelves and high prices now, would price controls make things better?  Of course not!  Housing is no different.  

Regardless of what burdens government places on them, landlords can afford to do more but they are just being greedy.

Some landlords struggle with expenses and need every cent of rent to pay for rising costs. Rent controls inhibit construction of new rental units and degrades NOAH (Naturally Occuri g Affordable Housing). Investors have other places they can invest their money. 

If housing demand exceeds supply, government will subsidize building affordable housing units to meet demand.  Higher taxes will pay for more housing. 

Government cannot meet the need for housing everyone who needs a place to live. It’s been tried with miserable results.  Government-subsidized housing costs more to build and operate than private housing ($400,000-$700,000 per unit), and far more per family than the existing Section-8 Housing Voucher program.  

Market-based housing practices:  

If rent is so high that housing is becoming unaffordable to renters, it indicates there is not enough supply of housing units to meet demand.  Investors and builders will create more housing until equilibrium is achieved. Affordability depends upon the extent of government regulations that affect land and construction, and labor and materials costs.  

There will always be vulnerable people who need housing assistance.*. This is best achieved with housing vouchers to be spent on private-market housing that gives renters choice about where to live for less cost than public-supported housing. Support the person, not the buildings.

* There is a need for government or NGO-sponsored housing for unique populations who need a special environment or support; people with developmental disabilities, debilitating mental health problems, physical impairments, specialized medical needs, felons, people with addiction problems, etc.  The reason many people do not fare well in regular rental units is some type of behavioral or medical issue that causes them to be evicted.  The best solution is to offer vouchers and look to profit and non-profit entities to provide special-needs housing.  

A Badass Woman!

 

Winsome Sears, Lieutenant Governor-Elect of Virginia 

A new role model for women. Smart.  Not a victim. No excuses.  Cuts through the vitriol and propaganda about race and class.  Understands the limits and power of government to harm or help people. Committed to service and making the American Dream possible for anyone with the desire to work for it.  

Winsome Sears: "I Wish Joy Reid Would Invite Me On Her Show" For "A Real Discussion" About Race

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/11/03/winsome_sears_i_wish_joy_reid_would_invite_me_on_her_show_to_talk_about_white_supremacy.html

Virginia's newly elected Lt. Governor, Republican Winsome Sears, spoke to FOX News host Martha MacCallum on Wednesday about MSNBC host Joy Reid saying that the Republican Party is "dangerous to our national security" because they "stoke white supremacism."

"I am destroying all of the narratives about race. Look at me! Look at me!" Sears said. "I wish Joy Reid would invite me on her show. Let's see if she is woman enough to do that."

"I am a heartbeat away from the governorship, in case anything happens to the governor. How are you going to tell me I am a victim?" she said. "And I didn't do anything special to get here, except stay in school and study. I took advantage of the opportunities available here in America."

"We can do better. It's not 1963."

Blue and getting bluer. Or is change coming?

A single-party state is a depressing place to live.  Especially these days when the dominant Democrat Party is moving so quickly with radical left policies that seem very un-American to people like me - born a webfoot when Oregon was a “live and let live” kind of place.  A place that valued self-reliance, rugged individualism, patriotism, accountability and hard work. 

It happened in Colorado.  It happened in Oregon.  This isn’t the end.  

Colorado turned blue, but will it last?

Jakob Rodgers, The Gazette 

Nov 12, 2018

“Even so, blue waves of the past faltered quickly when Colorado voters recoiled at Democrats’ ambitious agendas. And longtime political observers say Democrats must avoid the same missteps if they are to stay in power.”

Will Oregon’s Democrats move too far left?  So far the outcry against the chaos in Portland has been weak.  The Marxist lawmakers in Salem have been working out of public view and have plans to go further with gun control, anti-landlord regulations, loosening safeguards on voting, and tax initiatives. What is the final straw that will bring balance to the state again so we can all breathe free?

No one will be safe from this storm

 Stupidity doesn’t just belong to Oregon.  Sadly, St. Paul residents are falling for the big lie also.  No doubt rent control measures will continue its spread to other parts of the country sooner rather than later.  Will any state be spared?  Economic education in the country is so poor that people have little understanding of what the unintended, but entirely predictable, consequences of anti-landlord and anti-property-rights regulations’ will be: fewer housing units will be built, demand for all housing will increase so that even existing homes, no matter how expensive they are now, will cost even more. 

Why should you worry? Unless the public gets smart - fast! - and realizes incentives work better than onerous restrictions on real estate investing, the outlook for private homeownership is dire.  After all, why should someone who owns a house prosper from rising home prices while others suffer from rising rents or non-existent housing options?  When will some addle-brained politician decide that taxing people on their home equity is a good idea?  It sounds fair and equitable doesn’t it?.  Tax proceeds will go to public or other “affordable” (aka subsidized) housing for those who can’t afford a home of their own. Wait, isn’t that what the new Metro housing tax is about?  

As the percentage of the population who are renters grows, the pressure on not just landlords whose numbers will stagnate or dwindle, but on homeowners to subsidize rental housing will grow. Too bad people don’t have faith in the free market market where entrepreneurs emerge to supply products (homes) in response to increased demand.  

National Multifamily Housing Council 

St. Paul Election: ‘Yes’ On Rent Control Currently Winning

Syndicated Local – WCCO | CBS Minnesota  

Like

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Missing girl found alive weeks after vanishing

 

Police say a woman stole $600,000 from her husband and tried to…

 

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — St. Paul residents look to have voted Tuesday to pass a rent control policy that would be one of the most stringent in the nation. 

The initiative, which as of 11 p.m. Tuesday had 53% approval with all but two precincts reporting, would cap annual rent increases in the city at 3%, with only certain exceptions for property tax increases and major improvements. 

Advocates say the policy will protect low-income renters from unfair profiteering, specifically for renters of color. Opponents, however, said that rent control will hurt housing development in the city, leading to only higher prices for renters. 

The millionaire next door may be you

 Is your home worth more than when you purchased it? Good for you.  Your net worth has probably risen over time and that is a good thing.  Hopefully you have more wealth in reserves for your retirement, your children’s or grandchildren’s education or doing whatever you want. You earned it.

But are you a millionaire?  What seemed like an impossible dream several decades ago is now reality for more and more people.  Politicians have taken note, and they want to t i to your wealth before you get around to needing it or enjoying it. Wealth Envy is a terrible and contagious disease. The cure is to not give the afflicted any power and to excise those who have power now.  

How rich are you? 

All homes below are priced at about $1 million.  

Which one is in Lake Oswego?  

Are you a millionaire?  

Photos are from Trulia (What a Million Dollar Home Looks Like Across America) and Zillow current listings.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

(Home #2 is in LO:  2,750 sf. at 6073 SW Carmen Dr.)

Millions and Millions of Millionaires

Don’t mistake them for billionaires, who are far richer and fewer.Wall Street Journal By Robert D. Hershey Jr. Nov. 2, 2021 

As Democratic lawmakers look for ways to tax billionaires, the ranks of millionaires are expanding by the million. The U.S. minted 1.73 million new millionaire households last year, lifting its total at year-end 2020 to 21.95 million, according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report. 

For the first time, 1% of adults world-wide are millionaires. Although the term can apply to any currency, the U.S. dollar is considered the standard gauge. (The British sometimes snarkily refer to upper-middle-class Americans as “dollar millionaires.”)

Credit Suisse, which unlike other researchers includes the value of residences in calculating net worth, projects another 6.1 million American millionaires by 2025. Does this trend mean an ever-growing target for politicians such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren—worth $12 million in 2019, according to Forbes—or might it inspire a larger number of wealth-tax opponents to dig in their heels against it?  

Ms. Warren proposes a 2% annual wealth levy starting at $50 million plus a 6% surcharge on billionaires. (Forbes now lists 724 billionaires, compared with a mere 13 when it first tallied in 1982.) Those fearing the threshold would come down can point to the alternative minimum tax. When Congress introduced it in 1969, the AMT was designed to snare 155 high-income earners who had paid little or no tax. By 2017 it reached far into the middle class, with 5.2 million affected, mainly because it hadn’t been indexed for inflation. (The Trump tax cuts sharply reduced the impact.)

The words “millionaires and billionaires” are as inseparable to politicians as “giant corporations” and “hard-working Americans.” Yet the rhyming words obscure the huge difference. A billion dollars, 1,000 million, invested at 1% returns around $10 million a year. A million dollars gives you a princely $200 a week, enough to treat the family to dinner or a baseball game.

The very rich, F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, are different from you and me. That’s no longer true of mere millionaires.

Not with my child!

If the cost of childcare is a necessity for parents to work, then the expense should be given a tax credit as any other business expense.  

When the government pre-school and childcare systems are in place, how long before They become compulsory for all?  

Why should childcare providers have college credentials?  In order to more adequately indoctrinate children in the way government believes is best. Parents and family are out, government is in. 

Mothers are now called “breeders.”  That is the future role for women in this Brave New America. Fathers have already been erased.  

NOT WITH MY CHILD YOU DON’T!   

MY CHILD, MY CHOICE! 

Get Ready for Government-Approved Child Care

Who wants to put bureaucracies in charge of kids even before they get to kindergarten?

Wall Street Journal By James Freeman 11/2/21

Given the multitrillion-dollar bundle of government interventions Mr. Biden is attempting to enact, it’s not surprising that even highly consequential items are getting lost in the legislative shuttle without serious debate.

Last week White House chief of staff Ron Klain retweeted a comment calling the emerging reconciliation bill a grab bag of “ill-designed” programs.

Mr. McManus (LA Times) notes with some understatement:

The provisions for universal prekindergarten education and federally subsidized child care are much bigger than anything the federal government has tried in those fields before. Implementing these programs, which depend on partnerships with willing state governments, may not be easy. 

No it will not. Economist Casey Mulligan describes in a Journal op-ed the financial incentives that will be highly destructive to families, taxpayers, and the economy. 

By adding new requirements for pre-K and child-care programs, the plan will also place extreme pressure on small, private providers of such services, including modest operations in church basements and community centers.

It should surprise no one that when government takes a larger role in child care, government providers enjoy an advantage over private ones, even when both have access to government funds. And those private providers who want to refuse government funds in order to avoid regulation will face an enormous disadvantage against well-funded government-approved competitors. 

Believe it or not, not all of the funding is going to be spent wisely. Politico told the story of Alma Garcia, executive director at the Puerto Rican Community Center, a private preschool provider in Trenton who joined with a lawyer to file requests for government documents. “What they found, Garcia said, was evidence of large sums of taxpayer money being misspent on administrator salaries,” notes the Politico report. 

Kudos to Ms. Garcia. Taxpayers can only wish lawmakers would show the same determination to investigate this huge costly idea before inflicting it on the whole country. 

Will all of this money even provide clear educational benefits? Advocates of government-funded childhood programs often appeal to the authority of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman of the University of Chicago. But in a 2020 interview with Gonzalo Schwarz of the Archbridge Institute, Prof. Heckman clarified:

I have never supported universal pre-school. The benefits of public preschool programs are the greatest for the most disadvantaged children. More advantaged children generally have encouraging early family lives. The “intervention” that a loving, resourceful family gives to its children has huge benefits that, unfortunately, have never been measured well. Public preschool programs can potentially compensate for the home environments of disadvantaged children. No public preschool program can provide the environments and the parental love and care of a functioning family and the lifetime benefits that ensue.

In sum, the model for the Biden policy isn’t working as advertised and a widely esteemed scholar on the topic has explained why it’s a bad idea. 

Are any politicians going to take a moment to study this disaster before enacting it?

How to be smarter than the average politician

 ..and the portion of the public who have allowed themselves to be brainwashed.

The best resource on the impacts of rent control is the book, now out of print, “Rent Control: Myths and Realities.”  

The paperback can still be purchased online for about $30.  The price has doubled and quadrupled since I purchased a couple of the books, but the entire book is available for free online as a pdf download.  This is a wonderful selection of writings from prominent economists about various aspects of rent control based on research that has only been verified by more recent research on the subject.  Contributors to the book are Milton Freeman and Frederick Hayek. 

Be smart.  Know when you are being told a warm, fuzzy lie.  Then be ready to educate others about the realities of how the world and human nature really works.  

RENT CONTROL: MYTHS & REALITIES

Another city considers self-destruction

 Why do otherwise smart-seeming people continue to be drawn like moths to the flame of the bad policies of rent control (aka rent stabilization)?  Stupidity. Willful Blindness.  Ignorance.  

Hatred for the Snively Whiplash class known as greedy, bloodsucking landlords.. The Marxist belief that no one should own property, especially housing. Stupidity.  

Yet here they go again - this time the voters of St. Paul are poised to vote on implementing an extreme rent control law that makes Oregon’s dastardly statewide regulations look mild.  Rent control in any form should be illegal as it creates the exact opposite effect on housing availability than it intends. There is also the question of how this squares with the property rights of the landlord, but that is another subject - the most basic of rights that seems to be forgotten by everyone but the minority who are being harmed - the landlords.  Although a very few people benefit at the expense of private business owners, the housing supply shrinks and all other housing becomes more expensive.  Did I say stupid? One-dimensional thinking.

Read previous posts on Rest Control by typing in “Rent Control” in the Search This Blog box at the bottom of this page.  Check out my favorite, “Quiz - Bombing or Rent Control?”

From The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

Rent Control

By Walter Block

Rent control, like all other government-mandated price controls, is a law placing a maximum price, or a "rent ceiling," on what landlords may charge tenants. If it is to have any effect, the rent level must be set at a rate below that which would otherwise have prevailed. (An enactment prohibiting apartment rents from exceeding, say, $100,000 per month, would have no effect since no one would pay that amount in any case.) But if rents are established at less than their equilibrium levels, demand will necessarily exceed supply, and rent control will lead to a shortage of dwelling spaces. Absent controls on prices, if the amount of a commodity or service demanded is larger than the amount supplied, prices rise to eliminate the shortage (by both bringing forth new supply and by reducing the amount demanded). But controls prevent rents from attaining market-clearing levels and shortages result.

Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”1 Similarly, another study reported that more than 95 percent of the Canadian economists polled agreed with the statement.2 The agreement cuts across the usual political spectrum, ranging all the way from Nobel Prize winners milton friedman and friedrich hayek on the “right” to their fellow Nobel laureate gunnar myrdal, an important architect of the Swedish Labor Party’s welfare state, on the “left.” Myrdal stated, “Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.”3 His fellow Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck asserted, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”4 That cities like New York have clearly not been destroyed by rent control is due to the fact that rent control has been relaxed over the years.5 Rent stabilization, for example, which took the place of rent control for newer buildings, is less restrictive than the old rent control. Also, the decades-long boom in the New York City housing market is not in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized units, but in condominiums and cooperative housing. But these two forms of housing ownership grew important as a way of getting around rent control.

Economists have shown that rent control diverts new investment, which would otherwise have gone to rental housing, toward greener pastures—greener in terms of consumer need. They have demonstrated that it leads to housing deterioration, fewer repairs, and less maintenance. For example, Paul Niebanck found that 29 percent of rent-controlled housing in the United States was deteriorated, but only 8 percent of the uncontrolled units were in such a state of disrepair. Joel Brenner and Herbert Franklin cited similar statistics for England and France.