IPFS Vin Suprynowicz

The Libertarian

Vin Suprynowicz

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IT'S TIME FOR 'RENT CONTROL' CONTROL

Nearly every time the Nevada Legislature has convened, for decades, some unrepentant fan of the hare-brained economic ideas of Marx and Engels has exhumed the festering and discredited corpse of “mobile home rent control.”

To date, it’s always been wisely defeated.

But clearly, the state’s remaining fans of socialism and confiscation (many of them double-dipping government employees or pensioners whose safe sinecures will never be challenged by any market realities) hope and figure that some day the attention of freedom-loving adults who know better will be distracted, and this abomination will become law.

In her Goldilocks attempt to adjust the real world to what she thinks would be “just right,” Assemblywoman Genie Ohrenschall, D-Las Vegas, whose interface with the real world has always been somewhat loosely wired, this year offers up Assembly Bill 216, which demands that the private owners of mobile home parks either close down entirely, evict people over 55 who are not rich, or else reduce the rents charged to mobile home residents over 55 who have lived in the park in question for at least five years, according to a schedule that would have pleased the heart of Comrade Trotsky.

Those who declare less than $20,000 per year in income could be charged no more than $300 per month in rent. Families who admit incomes of $20,000 to $30,000 per year would have their rents capped at $350, while those who declare incomes of $30,000 to $40,000 per year could be charged no more than $400 per month.

Former Brezhnev economic advisor Yuri Maltsev, who now teaches economics in this country, explains why -- for most of the Communist era -- many commodities were entirely absent from the markets of large Russian cities.

The state set a maximum price which could be charged for such things as chicken and eggs -- with harsh penalties for anyone who charged more. That price was often below the price at which shopkeepers could acquire those goods from producers. Ergo, the state could brag that “the price of chicken was affordable ... except that there was never any chicken,” Professor Maltsev quips.

(The exceptions, of course, were the illegal “black market,” and party members and favorites who could always get what they needed. Is that a system we want to emulate, here?)

Rent control in this country has led to the phenomenon of many city dwellers living in apartments registered in the names of former renters long since moved away or dead -- otherwise the rents could be raised. And, of course, landlords cannot afford to improve these crumbling slums ... since they’re not allowed to charge high enough rents to recover the costs of doing so.

(One solution has been to evict everyone and turn whole buildings into condos or co-ops. Where the poor go then, no one seems to care.)

Nevada mobile home park owners testified to similar economic realities in Carson City on May 17, vowing to convert their properties to other purposes and leave mobile home tenants homeless -- or else watch their parks degenerate into slums for lack of funds to keep them up -- should this bill become law.

Yet back in April, the enemies of investment, profit and property rights managed to ram AB 216 through the state Assembly, 25-15.

Seniors complain it’s hard to pay space rentals while living on $15,000 per year in Social Security checks. But Social Security was never intended to do more than supplement private retirement savings. Ms. Ohrenschall’s detailed formula ignores the fact that many retirees may have large piles of assets even if they report a slender “income.” Besides, mobile home owners knew they would have to pay space rents when they made their decision to buy this type of homes -- no one promised them those rents would never rise.

One letter-writer to the Review-Journal complained last week about space rents going up from $343 to $398 over five years -- a total of 16 percent, or less than 3 percent per year.

Oh, the horror! Priced gasoline, lately?

It’s not enough for the state Senate to merely defeat this proposal -- again. It’s time for the petition-passers to get busy and enact a constitutional amendment barring government-imposed rent control in Nevada, anywhere, ever.

Or are we looking forward to seeing our communities crumble into corrupt, decrepit, unaffordable chaos, like, oh ... New York City?