Last week, I wrote about the pernicious nature of New York City’s rent control laws:

Forget about the contracts and other constitutional issues for the moment. Instead, just think about the phrase, “He’s a trespasser in his own brownstone.” Just imagine yourself owning a property and being told you are not allowed to move your grandchild into that property. Imagine yourself being told that you MUST lease your property out to someone, and that you can never—not even when the lease contract expires—opt not to renew.

New York is not North Korea, but this is a form of tyranny. Violation of people’s property rights is a violation of their inherent natural rights. Interfering in contracts between private parties (for any purpose beyond third-party adjudication of otherwise irreconcilable contract disputes)—and telling one party that he MUST give the other party a new contract every year, even if he does not want to—is a form of oppression. It’s not forcing people to cry when Mayor Laguardia died, but it is still a form of oppression.

And that is what I am talking about when I say that statism is statism, it’s just a matter of degree. You either wake up in the morning believing that more government is the answer, or you wake up in the morning believing that it is not.

Today, I ran across a video on the subject from Reason TV with Cato legal associate Trevor Burrus.

Description:

“If you wanted to destroy a city’s housing – short of bombing – the best way to do it is rent control,” says Cato legal associate Trevor Burrus.

While most cities in America long ago got rid of rent control, New York remains a bastion of government-mandated limits on what landlords can charge renters. About 50 percent of New York’s rental market is affected by rent control or rent stabilization, policies that keep rents artificially low and produce housing shortages, higher overall housing costs, and all sorts of corruption.

The court case Harmon v. Kimmel may finally bring an end to rent control laws that have been on the books in one form or another since the 1940s. James D. Harmon owns a building in Manhattan where the tenants are paying rents that are about 60 percent below the going market rate. After losing various legal battles at lower levels, Harmon has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his argument that rent stabilization is a form of takings that should be prohibited under the Constitution. The Court has not yet announced whether it will hear the case but has asked the state and city of New York to respond to Harmon’s argument.

Cato’s Burrus wrote a friend of the court brief on the case and explains why rent control and rent stabilization are bad at promoting affordable housing and abridgments of economic freedom.

It is true that rent control laws are not absolute despotism.

It is also true that road from legitimate use of government to absolute despotism is paved with stones of exactly this sort. Each step further down the road, you see increasing degrees of control and greater infringement of fundamental individual liberty. The paving stone of rent control is not at the end of the road, but it is on it.

And the road, history has shown, is very much shorter than we think.