Townhall...
Is Government
Protecting Us or Limiting Us?
By Rich Tucker
Children learn a lot in school. Maybe more than we intend to teach
them. CNN recently reported: “One Chicago public school is telling
students they can either eat cafeteria food or ‘go hungry.’” No
homemade lunches will be allowed without a medical excuse.
The goal is to make certain children eat well. But that needs to be a
parent’s job, not a school bureaucrat’s job. This school is teaching
kids that they aren’t capable -- and that their parents aren’t capable
-- of making sensible decisions about something as fundamental as what
they eat.
Of course, there are plenty of other examples of government meddling in
our lives. Consider anti-smoking laws that prevent people from sampling
the wares in cigar stores.
Trans fat laws that limit the foods chefs may prepare.
And food labeling laws, which don’t even seem to work. “According to
Jennifer Andrews, director of marketing for Red Robin International in
Colorado, the introduction of labels in Montgomery County and elsewhere
has had ‘almost no impact to the menu mix that we’re aware of,’” the
Washington Post reports. Customers order the bacon cheeseburger even
though they’re told it has 1,000 calories.
Then there are building regulations, which influence where and how we
live.
Manhattan is an expensive place to live. You don’t have to be a Harvard
professor to understand that local government policies are driving
those costs up. Still, it’s nice to see one who’s eager to explain how
the law of supply and demand works.
“New York slowed its construction of skyscrapers after 1933, and its
regulations became ever more complex,” writes Edward Glaeser in The
Atlantic. “The resulting 420-page code replaced a simple classification
of space—business, residential, unrestricted—with a dizzying number of
different districts, each of which permitted only a narrow range of
activities. There were 13 types of residential district, 12 types of
manufacturing district, and no fewer than 41 types of commercial
district.”
These controls are aimed at building a better city, but what they
really lead to is a more expensive one. “Growth, not height
restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and
ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay and help
a thriving city remain successful and diverse,” Glaeser writes.
“Building enough homes eases the impact of rising demand and makes
cities more affordable.”
Another factor in affordability is rent control. Some cities and
localities (see New York and San Francisco) limit what certain owners
are allowed to charge in rent. This creates a false scarcity and drives
prices up. Way up.
“In uncontrolled markets the question of who gets an apartment is
settled quickly by the question of who is able and willing to pay the
most,” economist Paul Krugman (no conservative observer) wrote in the
New York Times in 2000. “Almost every freshman-level textbook contains
a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to
illustrate the principles of supply and demand.”
This explains why many cities are booming, while others are becoming
prohibitively expensive. “[L]ow cost explains why Atlanta and Dallas
and Houston are able to supply so much new housing at low prices, and
why so many Americans have ended up buying affordable homes in those
places,” Glaeser writes.
There’s an irony here. Governments, at all levels, like to tout the
value of “green” living. Yet it’s massive apartment buildings that tend
to be friendlier to the environment. “When you count the carbon
emissions associated with high-density living, it’s substantially lower
than living in exurban areas in the U.S. because people aren’t driving
as much, and they’re living in substantially smaller units,” Glaeser
says. “One of the problems is that if you don’t build up, you build
out.”
It won’t be easy to get government out of our lunchboxes, our smoke
shops and our very homes. “None of this says that ending rent control
is an easy decision,” Krugman wrote more than a decade ago. “Still,
surely it is worth knowing that the pathologies of San Francisco’s
housing market are right out of the textbook, that they are exactly
what supply-and-demand analysis predicts.”
People shouldn’t be forced to live in apartments, of course. However,
we should make it easier for landowners to build apartments, or any
type of structure they prefer, on their property. That means boiling
today’s building codes down to simple, sensible restrictions.
After that, let’s allow people to live where and how they choose to.
Read it with links at Townhall
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