Rent Control: Punching Bag

Rent control...what a terrible idea:

The trail led to the Badlands.

His name is Bill Golodner, private investigator. Along with partner Bruce Frankel he hunts down absentee tenants of rent-regulated New York City apartments. Golodner's subject was clearing a cool $1,500-plus every month by covertly subletting her digs in Manhattan while holing up in South Dakota. Her fatal mistake: Applying for a license to work in the gambling industry. That caused her true address to pop up in a search of public records.

Score one for the landlord. In New York, evicting a phony occupant makes it possible to increase the rent on an apartment. Almost everywhere else, nothing more is required than a rise in the unit's rental value on the open market.

Martin Fridson isn't breaking any new ground on the failures of rent control, but he's got a timely read up on TCS Daily. Concise and complete, he debunks rent control (for the umpteenth time), giving me a nice set of statistics to add to my arsenal when debating inane "advocates for the poor."

Anyone who has gone to college in a major American city can tell you that rent control is a complete scam. In my own experience, subletting was the least of landlords worries. While many students often secret subletting, it's usually just a room in the house. The larger problem had to be "continuous leasing."

Due to some arcane rule that I never entirely grasped, so long as one member of the apartment re-upped his lease at the end of the year, the landlord is forbidden from raising the rent. Not surprisingly, this fact quickly led to collusion across classes, as seniors recruit a junior to live with them and thus inherit the property for the same price. Most notably, there was a house that theater kids had been continuously leasing for the past seventeen years. Three bedrooms, with an in-house washer and dryer, water and electricity paid: around eight hundred bucks. Within walking distance of USC. The apartment I lived in, which was two thirds the size, with three smaller bedrooms, cost 1,500.

So, rent control, what a joke. My favorite new stat comes near the end of this article:

The ill effects have long since been a staple of introductory economics textbooks. In a nearly unparalleled demonstration of unanimity, 93% of economists surveyed on the matter in the early 1990s agreed with the statement that placing a ceiling on rents reduces both the quantity and the quality of available housing.

Bashing rent control is always worth a read.

It's Over

If you're hip or think you're hip...or have cultivated an image such that other people mistakenly believe you're hip...or even wish you were hip...or were born before 1978, you probably have heard that super-hip phrase, "jump the shark."

For those who don't get a Wired fix, aren't up to date on their smarmy cynical blogs, or are doing worthwhile things with their lives, I appeal to the allmighty Wikigod (what I have taken to calling that grand information dump in the sky, Wikipedia):

The phrase specifically arises from a scene in the hit TV comedy series Happy Days. In the early days of the series, Fonzie had performed a trademark jump on his motorcycle with a ramp over a number of cars - Evel Knievel style. Evel Knievel, at the time had established himself as a real-life motorcycle daredevil and was significant in pop-culture.

In later years of the show, after the high school plot had finished and the college years began, and in an attempt to resurrect the show's run, the writers were challenged to come up with new, fresh stories; they developed a story where Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli, wearing his trademark leather jacket despite the well-known negative effects of salt water on leather, literally jumps over a shark on water skis.

Many have noted the shark episode as the moment when they realized the show was no longer worth watching, considering the scene to be unrealistic and of poor quality, making it impossible to maintain suspension of disbelief. Even before "jumping the shark" was employed as a pop culture term, the episode in question was cited many times as an example of what can happen to otherwise high-quality shows when they stay on the air too long in the face of waning interest. Producer Garry Marshall later admitted that he knew the show had lost something as the crew prepared to shoot the scene. However, as he pointed out in the reunion special that aired on February 3, 2005, Happy Days went on to produce approximately 100 more episodes after the "jumping the shark" episode. During the same special, in response to an audience member's question, Marshall introduced the notorious clip and noted how the show had inspired the term.

Laughing your face off? I laughed, too, once upon a time, before I had heard three quarters of the world's population use this phrase, all trying to outsnark each other.

Think I'm being dramatic? Check out the litany of ways the phrase has been used, which conveniently provide empirical evidence to support my hysterical claim. I mean, hell, Maureen "I'm going to be saucy right up until they put into a nursing home alone and I weep because I never had a real friend, much less a husband" Dowd used the damn phrase.

But today, my friends (presuming its friendlies that are reading this, not mortal enemies), "jumped the shark" has...no, I'm not going to say that the phrase has "jumped the shark," because if I did, I'd have to go suck on an outlet. No, "jumped the shark" has reached a necrotic state that exceeds untreated gangrene. Why? John Fund:

When politicians break their pledges not to raise taxes, they come up with the darnedest evasions. Take Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wants to levy new charges on California doctors, hospitals and employers to help pay for his $12 billion health-care plan. "It is not a tax, just a loan, because it does not go for general [expenditures]," he told the Sacramento Bee last Thursday. "It goes back to health care."

A loan? The first reaction of many Californians was: What state office will I be able to go to and get my loan back--perhaps with interest? It's preposterous, for example, to characterize as a "loan" the 4% payroll levy the governor wants to impose on employers who don't offer health benefits. California's gas taxes are dedicated to transportation but no one would call them "gas loans." Property taxes go to local education. Are they not taxes?

Wait, that sounds reasonable...what's the deal? And where's the shark-jumping? And John Fund is a great writer over at the WSJ, right?

Okay, you're right. It's not the article or the author persay that causes the bile to boil, but the subheading: "Has Arnold Schwarzenegger jumped the shark?" The last line repeats the phrase, "Should he reach a point where his about-face on taxes becomes a serious issue, he may find the political floor he's standing on falling precipitously. Or, as they say in Hollywood, the health-care plan may prove to be the moment Mr. Schwarzenegger jumped the shark."

There it is. John Fund, God bless his soul, just used "jumped the shark," in the same way one's curmudgeonly grandfather might growl "rotten bebop music," or a spinster (perhaps Maureen Dowd in a few years) might coo, "Would you like to play some tunes on the Victro-, I mean, musical cassette tape?)

Proof, all you insufferably hip people, who are SOOOO bleeding edge when it comes to your phrasology, that you are about as sharp as a hatchet recently used to split rocks.

Oh, and yes, I think Schwarzenegger's "health-care loan" is Bologna...Bologna, Italy.

Goverment: Who doesn't hate it?

Hey, had your morning coffee yet? Good, be prepared for it to come back up, because Radley Balko's out to get your bile rising:

It is something of a clichéd tradition for a columnist to write a year-end or New Year column that makes exaggerated, sometimes humorous predictions for the next 12 months.

I wrote such a column at about this time last year, with "predictions" that reflected the continuing, creeping influence of government in our lives. Unfortunately, the state of civil liberties and both economic and personal freedom haven't improved much over the past year. So I figure it's time for another round of unlikely predictions as to what we might expect from our government in 2007.

Whoops, that doesn't sound so bad. What are the predictions, after all? Here's a choice sampling:

--In a scenario straight out of George Orwell's "1984," several local governments will begin to encourage children to turn in their parents when the parents fail to abide by building and property code violations, such as mowing the grass, properly sorting recyclables, and similar mundanities.
--Now that the federal government has made online gambling a crime, some state government will take things even further, and make writing about online gambling a crime.
--Not content with micromanaging parents when it comes to bicycle helmets, car seats and any number of laws and regulations, some state legislator will get the idea that we should make kids who play soccer wear helmets.

Ooo, that doesn't sound good. But those aren't even the heavy hitters Balko writes up.

But hey, what's the big deal? It's just some libertarian playing Chicken Little, right? Wrongodongo, Balko's actually listing events of 2006. Horrified yet? You ain't see nothin'. Get on over to Balko's article and be prepared to taste the morning java again.

Cripps(led)

After winning the award for worst title for a blog post, I read this line:

In Cripps—as in Lenin—we see ideological purity replace theological purity. Churchill's aphorism about Cripps has more than its humor to recommend it: "There, but for the grace of God, goes God."

Culled long ago from a page in Harry Jaffa's Statesmanship (Note: follow that link. Thank goodness the Claremont Institute is planning on republishing this work, because it costs a helluva lot to get it now. Thank goodness I stole the copy I was proofi-...er, I mean, heh heh), it was the best quote in an otherwise almost unbearable essay about British Socialists around WWI (what a miserable lot of politicos they were).

Anyway, it's a funny quote at least. And if you want to know more about Cripps, this mysterious fellow who prompted such snide remarks from Winnie, go here. Let's just say, full implementation of his economic views would have Cripps-led the British economy. Please excuse me, I think I just broke a rib laughing.