A Paternalist’s Mistake: Rent Control

Arias Miguel, Christine Anderson and Walter Block ()
Additional contact information
Arias Miguel: Loyola University, New Orleans, USA.
Christine Anderson: Loyola University, New Orleans, USA.
Walter Block: Loyola University, New Orleans, USA.

Journal of Economics and Political Economy, 2016, vol. 3, issue 4, 627-637

Abstract: Rent control, to the economically uninitiated, sounds like a good idea. After all, given that poor people spend a disproportionate percentage of their incomes on housing, what policy could possibly be of more help to them than to lower their rents? Profit-seeking landlords can hardly be expected to do so on their own. Their inability to undertake so public-spirited a policy thus constitutes a “market failure,” and only government can ride to the rescue the suffering masses. This at least is the story widely told by journalists, clergy, teachers, etc. The present paper is an attempt to shed some light on the very opposite perspective: that rent controls lower the supply of residential rental housing, and thus hurt the poor, the very people supposedly helped by this unwarranted legislation.

Keywords: Price control; rent control; housing; profits; shortages. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.kspjournals.org/index.php/JEPE/article/download/1058/1101 (application/pdf)
http://www.kspjournals.org/index.php/JEPE/article/view/1058 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ksp:journ1:v:3:y:2016:i:4:p:627-637

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics and Political Economy is currently edited by Bilal KARGI

More articles in Journal of Economics and Political Economy from KSP Journals Istanbul, Turkey.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bilal KARGI ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).