Voice For Liberty

Tag: Economics

  • AirTran subsidy is harmful

    (This is a longer version of my opinion piece that appeared in The Wichita Eagle last week.)

    From the beginning, we in the Wichita area have been told each year that the AirTran subsidy was intended as a temporary measure, that soon AirTran would be able to stand on its own, and there will be no need to continue the subsidy. Mayor Mayans said as much last year, and so did City Manager Kolb this year.

    But State Senator Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, on a recent television program, may have made a revealing slip when she referred to the AirTran subsidy as a “pilot program.” Now that the subsidy appears to be a permanent requirement, funded locally and perhaps statewide, we should ask ourselves if this subsidy is in our best interests.

    The benefits of the subsidy are regularly overstated — and sometimes by huge amounts. In 2004, the Chairman of Fair Fares claimed that the Fair Fares program was worth $4.8 billion in economic benefit to the state. No reasonable analysis could make a conclusion that the benefit is as large as this.

    Last year, the present Chairman of Fair Fares spoke before the Wichita City Council and equated what Wichita is doing to pricing in the airline industry with the role that Kansas played in the years before the Civil War. It hardly seems worth noting that one struggle was against the immoral institution of slavery; the other is a taxpayer-funded effort to override the natural workings of free markets.

    Yes, it is undeniable. Low airfares are preferred over high airfares, and it is probably true that airfares are lower than what they would be without the subsidy. But the airline industry is changing. As an example, carriers tell us they have eliminated or reduced the very high fares for walkup ticket purchases. We simply do not know what airfares would be in Wichita if there had not been the subsidy, so any estimate of how much has been saved is merely a guess.

    The harm the subsidy causes reveals itself in several ways. We may have less air service in Wichita due to the subsidy. Last year Delta canceled seven important daily flights. Was this in retaliation for Wichita’s decision to not subsidize Delta, as some claim? Or was it the law of supply and demand expressing itself: that when the price of something is lowered (lowering prices is the desired effect of the subsidy), less is supplied. There are fewer daily flights supplied to and from Wichita, from 56 last year to 42 today. As the subsidy lowers the price that airlines may charge for tickets but doesn’t do anything to reduce the costs of providing service, we should not be surprised to see more reductions in service.

    Backers of the subsidy claim it is necessary to keep businesses from leaving and to attract new businesses to our area. We should consider the converse: have businesses considered Wichita, and seeing a meddlesome local government, one that picks and chooses winners and losers, decided not to locate here?

    Local lawmakers abandon their principles to back the subsidy. Last year a Sedgwick County Commissioner assured me that he was a “free market” thinker, but was backing the subsidy nonetheless. Local business leaders, some who consider themselves believers in free markets, back the subsidy and have even formed private fundraising efforts to augment the subsidy.

    Consider this: if a subsidy is good for economic development, why shouldn’t we try the subsidy approach with other businesses? If we feel that, say, advertising rates in Wichita are too high, why doesn’t the city select one local television station and subsidize its operations, thereby compelling other stations to match the subsidized price? Or to help people with something that really hits home, why not grant a subsidy to one chain of grocery stores so that other stores have to lower their prices? Or in the case of a monopoly such as a local daily newspaper, why doesn’t the city or county fund a startup to supply competition? I think most Wichitans would consider these measures extreme and contrary to fairness. I find it difficult, though, to differentiate these actions from the AirTran subsidy.

    Whether to continue funding the AirTran subsidy is a bright line that we can choose to cross or not. On one side we see low airfares, and those airfares are highly visible. What we may not see as easily is the cost of a permanent expansion of government, government that intrudes increasingly on our lives and liberties. We also may not notice the loss of valuable information that prices in a free market supply, and without those price cues, we will not recognize the misallocation of capital and resources that follows.

    On the other side of the line is the harsh realization that Wichita has factors such as low population that work against low airfares. On this side, however, we will find liberty and free markets. You will find me on this side, lonely though it is.

  • The Mystery of Capital

    The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
    Hernando De Soto
    Basic Books, 2000

    The problem with most third world countries, Mr. De Soto tells us, is not that there is no capital, it’s that the capital is dead. Dead in the sense that it can’t be used to its full economic potential. It can’t be mortgaged, it can’t be divided into shares, and it simply can’t be used in the same way we make productive use of our assets in the West.

    What is the difference between the West and the third world? The answer is formal property systems that allow the economic potential stored in property to be put to work. Until these poor countries develop the type of formal property systems that Western countries did, mostly during the 19th century, they are destined to remain poor.

    The obstacles in the way of development of formal property systems are many, including social, political, and legal issues. One interesting fact is that third world countries do have property systems, in the sense that it is possible to know who “owns” property, but that knowledge is extralegal and local. It isn’t as valuable as the knowledge contained in formal property systems, but it is there nonetheless.

    We see advocates for poor people in third world countries constantly calling for more aid or debt relief for these countries. It is sadly true that many people are hungry and in poor health, and formal property system that unlock capital won’t help these people tomorrow. But until poor countries start the process of developing formal property systems, they are unlikely to change and develop economies that can support themselves.

    Unfortunately, everyone does not hold capital and private property rights in high regard. In 1992 Libya burned all land titles. Former socialist states are reverting to their former ways. In America, not all people agree that capitalism is good.

    This book contains some interesting history of how private property systems developed in the United States.

  • Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity

    Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity
    James D. Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, and Dwight R. Lee
    St. Martin’s Press, 2005

    This is a wonderful book that can teach anyone what is important to know about economics. It teaches the insights that people can use to understand and evaluate the mechanism of our economy and government themselves. It is not a textbook with charts, graphs, and formulas. It requires no special prerequisite from the reader.

    The book contains four parts: The ten key elements of economics, seven major sources of economic progress, economic progress and the role of government, and twelve key elements of practical personal finance.

    This book promotes a restricted role for government. From page 80: “A government can promote social cooperation and enhance its citizens’ economic welfare primarily in two ways: (1) by providing people with protection for their lives, liberties, and properties (as long as the properties and liberties were acquired without force, fraud, or theft) and (2) by supplying a few select goods that have unusual characteristics that make them difficult to provide through markets.” Later, in the section titled “Government is not a corrective device” we read, “When thinking about government, it is important to recognize that there are fundamental differences between political democracy and markets. When a democratic government levies taxes, it does so through coercion. Dissenting minorities have to pay taxes regardless of whether they receive or value the goods that the taxes supply. … There is no such parallel coercive power in the private sector. Private firms can charge a high price, but they cannot force anyone to buy. Indeed private firms must provide customers with value or they will be unable to attract consumers’ dollars.”

    We also learn that when decisions are made through the political process, it is the majority that wins and sets policy, and the minority must yield to the majority. But when decisions are left to the market, each person can choose what they want. If they want something different from what the majority wants, they can get it without also having to pay for what the majority decided on.

    This part of the book also explains how special-interest groups are usually able to get the government to implement laws and policies that benefit the group at the expense of the rest of the country. An example is the sugar tariff, which is very valuable to a small group of people. They focus tremendous energy and money on getting politicians to keep the tariff in place. The average American may not be aware that the sugar tariff costs them an additional $20 per year in the form of higher prices for products containing sugar, and even if they are aware, well, what’s the use of getting worked up over $20? Even the employees of American candy makers who have moved out of America to somewhere where they can buy sugar at world market prices may not know who to blame for the loss of their job.

    This part of a book also contains a section titled “Unless Restrained by Constitutional Rules, Legislators Will Run Budget Deficits and Spend Excessively.” This is certainly the case with the recent Congress, and in the state of Kansas too, except that our state can’t deficit spend. The root of the problem is this: “Legislators like to spend money on programs to please their constituents. They do not like to tax, since taxes impose a visible cost on voters. Debt is an alternative to current taxes; it pushes the visible cost of government into the future.” The solution, we are told, is political modifications such as a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, or supermajority requirements for spending proposals.

    The book concludes with a good section on personal finance. The authors strongly recommend, as I do, that investors use low-cost stock index funds instead of actively managed funds or individual stocks.

    This book is very easy to read, and contains a great deal of valuable information. I strongly recommend it to people just starting to learn about economics, and to people like me who had some college training in economics, but didn’t really learn how economics and its relation to government affects our wealth, prosperity, and freedom. If you couple this book with Thomas Sowell’s two recent books Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded Edition and Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One you will have an excellent understanding of how our economy and government work.

  • Wal-Mart. More hypocrisy.

    Writing from Jackson, Mississippi

    Currently it is quite fashionable to criticize Wal-Mart as the starting point for everything evil about American business. Critics allege that Wal-Mart earns too much profit, pays its employees too little, doesn’t provide its employees health insurance so they have to rely on the government, it exploits low-paid workers in China, and might even be responsible for avian flu, for all I know.

    There is no doubt that Wal-Mart is a powerful force in the economy. The Wall Street Journal on December 3, 2005, wrote “Wal-Mart employs about 1.3 million people, about 1% of the American work force. Its sales, at around $300 billion a year, are equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.”

    But bigness doesn’t necessarily translate to profitable: “It is not, however, an especially profitable company. Its net profit margins, at about 3.5% of revenue, are broadly in line with the rest of the retail industry. In fiscal 2004, Microsoft made more money than Wal-Mart on just one-eighth of the sales.”

    Is Wal-Mart bad for poor people? Writing in The Washington Post on November 28, 2005, Sebastian Mallaby wrote: “Wal-Mart’s critics allege that the retailer is bad for poor Americans. This claim is backward: As Jason Furman of New York University puts it, Wal-Mart is ‘a progressive success story.’ Furman advised John ‘Benedict Arnold’ Kerry in the 2004 campaign and has never received any payment from Wal-Mart; he is no corporate apologist. But he points out that Wal-Mart’s discounting on food alone boosts the welfare of American shoppers by at least $50 billion a year. The savings are possibly five times that much if you count all of Wal-Mart’s products.”

    That’s a lot of money saved for consumers. Critics alledge, however, that Wal-Mart suppresses wages. It does, as it turns out. From The Washington Post article again: “Set against these savings for consumers, Wal-Mart’s alleged suppression of wages appears trivial. Arindrajit Dube of the University of California at Berkeley, a leading Wal-Mart critic, has calculated that the firm has caused a $4.7 billion annual loss of wages for workers in the retail sector.” Compare that with the amount that Wal-Mart has saved consumers. “Indeed, Furman points out that the wage suppression is so small that even its “victims” may be better off. Retail workers may take home less pay, but their purchasing power probably still grows thanks to Wal-Mart’s low prices.”

    As for health benefits, John Tierney in The New York Times on November 29, 2005 writes: “Wal-Mart is often denounced for getting ‘corporate welfare’ because some of its employees rely on Medicaid for health care and on other government aid. But so do some employees at other companies or at government institutions like public schools. Wal-Mart offers health benefits that are generally comparable to what other retailers offer.”

    For those who claim that Wal-Mart receives corporate welfare in any form, I think that readers of this website know my feelings on that. Corporate welfare is wrong.

    From The Wall Street Journal again: “But suppose Wal-Mart did look more like the company its detractors would like it to be, with overpaid workers, union work rules, and correspondingly higher prices on goods. It would not only be a less attractive place to shop, and hence a considerably smaller company. It would drive up the cost of living for the millions who shop there, thus hurting those in the bottom half of the income-distribution tables that Wal-Mart’s critics claim to be speaking for. One might expect this fact to trouble the anti-Wal-Mart forces, except that their agenda is very different from what they profess it to be.”

    John Tierney of The New York Times again: “It’s easy to understand the motives of some of Wal-Mart’s enemies. Local merchants don’t want to match its prices. Labor leaders know that they’ll lose members and dues if unionized stores suffer. But why would anyone who claims to be fighting for social justice be so determined to take money out of the pockets of the poor?”

    Whatever your feelings, Wal-Mart operates in the relatively free marketplace, so it must meet the needs of its customers, or it won’t last very long. From The Wall Street Journal again: “To the extent that mom-and-pop stores are threatened by Wal-Mart, it’s because the same people who supposedly so value their Main Street hardware store find that Wal-Mart’s selection, or prices, or parking lot — something about it — is preferable.”

    That’s the free market — people voting with dollars rather than professed feelings — at work.

  • Hypocrisy over oil profits abounds

    Writing from Orlando, Florida

    The recent swell of criticism over oil company “windfall” profits, some even coming from people who should know better, is truly remarkable in its hypocrisy.

    It seems that the critics feel that oil companies did nothing extraordinary to earn these profits. Therefore, they don’t deserve them.

    What’s wrong with this criticism? First, I don’t think we want to let the government get in the position of deciding who deserves to keep the profits they earn. It does enough of this already.

    Second, most people would be delighted to find themselves in the position of the oil companies: owning something that is scarce and in high demand. And, a lot of people are in that position, made huge profits, and did little to “deserve” the profits other than being in the right place at the right time. Who are these windfall profiteers that I speak of? They’re homeowners in hot real estate markets, who, by chance, happen to own property that other people are willing to pay high prices for, thereby generating huge windfall profits for those lucky homeowners. Has anyone proposed a windfall tax on these profits?

    (A further irony concerning profits from the sale of one’s own home is that the profit, which is a capital gain, is taxed at rates lower than most people pay on income. Homeowners don’t pay any tax on the first $250,000 (or $500,000 for married taxpayers) of profit, and the rest is taxed at the capital gains tax rate of 15%, and only 5% for those with low incomes. These rates were reduced in 2003. A cut in the capital gains tax rate is usually criticized as a tax cut only for the “wealthy,” but it turns out that many regular people will benefit. I suppose, though, that if your residence that you bought 25 years ago for maybe $50,000 is now worth over a million dollars, you have become “wealthy.”)

    Third, prices are the best way we have to allocate scarce resources. Every other way doesn’t work. But many people forget the lessons of history and think that somehow government can suspend the law of supply and demand.

    Finally, consider who owns these oil companies. If you own any mutual funds, especially index funds, you probably own a piece of these companies.

  • Employer-paid health insurance

    In the past I have written on how the system in America where almost everyone gets their health insurance through their job (Let’s Pay for Our Own Health Insurance) does not serve us well. Now I have become aware of even more evidence as to why we should all choose and pay for our own health insurance.

    A Harvard study (Illness And Injury As Contributors To Bankruptcy) concluded that of families that declared bankruptcy, about half cited medical bills as the reason. Of those, 76% had medical insurance at the time they became sick. Some of the problem is that when people become seriously ill, they can’t work. After they lose their job they have no income, and they can’t pay the premium to continue their existing coverage.

    Many types of insurance, and some health insurance policies, I have found, offer an option called “waiver of premium.” This option, if selected and paid for, pays the policy’s premiums when the insured can’t. This would help in the case where people are too sick to work and can’t afford their premiums. They would still be covered.

    If your employer, through whom you get your health insurance, doesn’t offer this waiver of premium option, you realistically have no way to obtain it. But if we all chose and paid for our own health insurance, those who wished to could have this option. This is just one more reason why the current system of employer-provided health insurance does not work well.

  • Prices ration scarce goods

    As the price for gasoline rises, politicians hear increased calls for regulation of gas prices. We hear news stories of hotels increasing prices for victims of hurricane Katrina, and prices for needed goods in the destructed area could rise, too.

    In Wichita, when gasoline prices rose rapidly, someone told me that this was price gouging, because the price the gas stations pay for gasoline hasn’t increased yet. I’m sure that’s true, their cost hasn’t increased yet, as they’re still selling gasoline they already bought some time ago. This analysis, however, doesn’t consider the most important role of prices: to strike a balance between supply and demand. That’s what prices do.

    Consider what the economist Walter E. Williams wrote about plywood prices:

    Windfall profits are indeed profits far beyond what’s necessary for an entrepreneur to stay in business, but windfall profits also play a vital role. Windfall profits signal that a human want is not being met. Resources emerge to meet that want. For example, when Hurricane Andrew devastated parts of South Florida, plywood prices skyrocketed. Florida’s attorney general threatened actions against companies for price-gouging.

    Those windfall profits conveyed messages to the rest of the economy. Let’s say that pre-hurricane plywood prices were $10 a sheet and afterward they were $20. That profit potential created a powerful signal. Instead of plywood manufacturers selling their plywood inventory to, say, Pennsylvania wholesalers for $8 a sheet, they were more than happy to ship them to Floridian wholesalers for higher prices. Wholesalers in other states were happy to sell their plywood to Floridians for higher prices. Since plywood supplies were moving to Florida, plywood prices elsewhere rose.

    From a social point of view, this is wonderful. Say I planned to spend a Saturday afternoon building a house for my dog. I go to my neighborhood lumberyard in Pennsylvania expecting to pay $10 for a plywood sheet, and get there and find out it’s $18. I say, “The heck with the dog; let him sleep in the rain!” I have voluntarily made a plywood sheet available for a more valuable use — rebuilding the house of a human.

    None of these and other voluntary actions making plywood available to Floridians would happen if price controls were slapped on plywood making the pre- and post-hurricane prices the same. Freely fluctuating prices, including the potential for windfall profits, encourage people to do voluntarily what’s in the social interest.

    In free and open markets, profits are to be praised — not scorned, as economic and political charlatans would have us do.

    We might consider the prices for hotel rooms. As families evacuated before (or after) Katrina struck, they needed hotel rooms. If the usual price for a hotel room was, say, $50, and hotel operators can’t increase their prices, there will be a shortage of hotel rooms. Why is this? Think of the Jones family with children. At a room price of $50, the Jones family might take two rooms, one for the parents, and another for the children. If the hotel operator is allowed to increase prices, the room price might rise to, say, $100. At that price, the Jones family might decide they could all stay in one room. That makes the second room, the room the Jones family children would have occupied at a price of $50, available for the Smith family. Otherwise, the Jones family children would be in the second room, and the Smith family is on the street, or has to drive farther to find a room.

    Yes, the Smith family had to pay $100 for a room when they would prefer to pay only $50, but if the price is $50, there is no hotel room available for them.

    Some people might object that the hotel operator is unjustly enriched by being able to sell hotel rooms for $100, when normally they fetch only $50. But what is the alternative? Is there anyone who has the power to say to the Jones family that they should all stay in one room, leaving a room free for the Smith family? Or, in the case of gasoline prices held artificially low through price controls, someone has to judge whose use of gasoline is more valued.

    But if the prices of hotel rooms, plywood, and gasoline are allowed to fluctuate, each person is free to make their own judgment as to how much they want to consume. If the Jones family really wants two hotel rooms, they can have them. If Dr. Williams really wants to build the doghouse, he can. But people acting as they do — demanding less of something as its price rises — there will be more hotel rooms or plywood available for others. If the price of plywood in Florida is controlled so that it can’t increase, the cost of plywood in Pennsylvania will likely be the same $10 as it always is. So plywood is used in Pennsylvania to make doghouses as people in Florida need plywood to patch the roofs of the homes so that they can stay dry.

    That’s what is important about prices. They represent people voluntarily — and that’s a very important word that Dr. Williams used — adjusting their behavior. The alternative is shortages, gas lines, rationing, government control, and commissions deciding who gets what at what price — all the signs of a planned economy. That does no one any good.

    In the case of my friend in Wichita, who was going to make a weekend trip that would require about 100 gallons of gasoline in a vehicle that gets 12 miles per gallon, I suggested renting a car that gets better fuel economy. That’s what he did. In the end, he’s saving about $100, even considering the cost of car rental, and he’s making about 50 gallons of gasoline available to someone else. That’s the power of prices in action.

  • What to do about gasoline prices

    Almost anything the government does in response to the recent high gasoline prices is bound to fail. The easy political solution is to place price controls on gasoline, as Hawaii has done. Basic economics tells us that when a price is held artificially low through price controls, demand will be higher than what it would otherwise be, and supply will be less than it would otherwise be. What does that spell? A shortage, as was the case the last time there were price controls on gasoline. The misery of dealing with lines at gas stations was much worse than slightly higher gasoline prices.

    As Thomas Sowell wrote in a recent column: “The last time we had price controls on gasoline, we had long lines of cars at filling stations, these lines sometimes stretching around the block, with motorists sitting in those lines for hours.

    That nonsense ended almost overnight when President Ronald Reagan, ignoring the cries of liberal politicians and the liberal media, got rid of price controls with a stroke of the pen.

    What happened is what usually happens when government restrictions are ended: There was more production of oil. In fact the 1980s became known as the era of an ‘oil glut’ and gasoline prices declined.”

    In an article titled “What’s the Answer for High Gasoline Prices? Absolutely Nothing” by Jerry Taylor & Peter VanDoren, published last October in National Review, we read:

    “… consumers have a right to make their own decisions about trade-offs between higher gasoline prices and conservation without the government whacking them over the head with higher taxes, constrained choices in the vehicle market, or extracting their earnings for the benefit of corporations engaged in making cars or fuels that consumers presently don’t want to buy. Simply put, individuals know better how to order their personal affairs than do politicians or bureaucrats no matter how well meaning they might be.

    At the end of the day, the best remedy for high gasoline prices is…high gasoline prices, which provide all the incentives necessary for motorists to conserve, for oil companies to put more product into the marketplace, and for investors to look into alternatives fuel technologies. Government has never demonstrated an ability to do better.”

    There are also unintended consequences of any action. When government requires higher fuel economy quickly (as many are calling for), automakers will find that the easiest way to comply is to decrease the weight of cars, since weight is the most important determinant of fuel economy. As Dr. Sowell wrote: “Many of the same people who cry ‘No blood for oil!’ also want higher gas mileage standards for cars. But higher mileage standards have meant lighter and more flimsy cars, leading to more injuries and deaths in accidents — in other words, trading blood for oil.”

    News stories tell us of SUV drivers considering trading for vehicles with more efficient usage of gasoline. Anyone who is considering such a move needs to do a little arithmetic first. Figure out the cost per mile, considering gasoline only, for the two vehicles. Then consider the costs of ownership of a new vehicle. Sales tax alone on a new $25,000 car (that’s about the average price now) in Wichita is $1,825. If you trade a 15 mpg vehicle for a 25 mpg vehicle, with gas at $2.60 per gallon, you’re saving about $.173 per mile in gasoline costs. That seems like a lot, but you’ll need to drive 10,549 miles just to “save” what you paid in sales tax. For many people, it might take a year to drive that many miles.

    Consider the other costs. Since cars depreciate at about 2% per month, a $25,000 vehicle depreciates about $500 its first month. The vehicle you already own that’s worth, say, $10,000 depreciates just $200 the same month. That difference of $300 requires 1,734 miles of driving to pay for (but will decrease each month as the new car rapidly loses its value). If you borrow money to buy the new car, you’re paying interest that needs to be allowed for. Add it all up, and you may not be saving as much as you thought you might. Then, if the price of gasoline drops, you may not save anything at all.

  • Book Review: Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy

    Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy
    Revised and Expanded Edition
    Thomas Sowell
    Basic Books, 2004

    This book is a general introduction to economics written in a non-technical way. It provides excellent coverage of many introductory topics in economics, and you don’t have to be a mathematical sophisticate to understand it. It is very readable by anyone who is interested in this topic.

    One of the best things the author does in this book is to distinguish between what politicians want to happen and say they are doing when they implement economic policies, and what incentives are actually created. Often there is a big difference between the two.

    One of the most important things to learn from this book is the importance of prices, and what goes wrong when governments interfere with prices. As the author says: “Prices play a crucial role in determining how much of each resource gets used where. Yet this role is seldom understood by the public and it is often disregarded entirely by politicians.” As an example: “The last premiere of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, is said to have asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: How do you see to it that people get food? The answer was that she didn’t. Prices did that. And the British people were better fed than those in the Soviet Union, even though the British have never grown enough food to feed themselves in more than a century. Prices bring them food from other countries.”

    The example of rent control illustrates how what politicians intend to do may not be what actually happens: “In short, a policy intended to make housing affordable for the poor has had the net effect of shifting resources towards housing affordable only by the affluent or rich, since luxury housing is often exempt from rent control.” What lower-priced housing that remains is in short supply (since less is supplied at a lower price), is in high demand (because more is demanded at a lower price), and is in poorer condition than it would be otherwise (since housing is in a shortage, landlords have an easy time finding tenants, and there is little incentive to maintain their housing stock). In fact, rent control often leads to rental housing being taken off the market, or, especially in New York City, entire buildings being abandoned when the (artificially low) rent that comes in isn’t sufficient to provide city-required services to the tenants.

    But because there are more tenants than landlords, Dr. Sowell explains, rent control is often a political success. It is easier for the average person to look at the situation superficially, to see that politicians are looking out for them by protecting them from landlords who would otherwise gouge them on rent.

    You can learn all this and more just by reading through page 40 of this nearly 400 page book. I highly recommend this book.