If Putin is rational, he prefers Bernie to Trump

Trump vs. Bernie from Putin’s perspective.

• Trump’s (Bernie’s) policy of increasing (decreasing) US oil and gas production hurts (helps) the Russian economy, which is heavily dependent on oil and gas exports, and helps (hurts) the US economy, which make it harder (easier) for Putin to achieve his worldwide goals..

• Trump’s (Bernie’s) policy of providing (not providing) arms to Ukraine makes it harder (easier) for Putin to have his way in Ukraine and discourages (encourages) Putin’ aggression elsewhere.

• Trump’s (Bernie’s) reduction (increase) of corporate taxes and regulations strengthens (weakens) the US economy, which make it harder (easier) for Putin to achieve his worldwide goals.

• Trump’s (Bernie’s) reliance on capitalism (socialism) strengthens (weakens) the US economy, which make it harder (easier) for Putin to achieve his worldwide goals.

• Etc., etc., . . . . ., etc.

A rational and effective strategy for Putin to influence the US 2020 election in his favor.

• Encourage the belief that he is interfering in the 2020 election on the side of Trump to create a reaction among US voters against Trump in favor of Bernie.

A question to think about.

• Why are the Democrats so intent on “selling” the idea that Putin favors Trump and is interfering in the 2020 election in his favor?

Two hypotheses concerning the question.

• The Democrats have fallen for Putin’s strategy and believe that he favors Trump. In this case, Putin has hoodwinked them.

• The Democrats know that Putin favors Bernie and are using they are using the same strategy. In this case, is it fair to consider the Democrats as valuing power above patriotism?.

Neither of the above hypotheses favors the Democrats.

The right perspective on campaign financing

More regulations? More corruption

Here is the abstract of a paper by Amin and Soh at the World Bank.

No big surprise that regulatory burden and corruption go hand in hand.
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Regulation often creates opportunities for public officials to extract bribes. If this is true, deregulation offers a simple way to combat corruption. However, empirical evidence on the corruption and regulation nexus is limited. Further, the corruption indices used are based on experts' opinions, which may suffer from perception bias. The present paper attempts to address these shortcomings using firm-level survey data for 131 mostly developing countries on the experiences of the firms with bribery and regulatory burden. Exploiting within-country and industry-level variation in regulatory burden, the analysis finds a large, positive effect of regulatory burden on corruption. For the baseline results, the bribery rate is higher by about 0.03 percentage point for each percentage point increase in the regulatory burden. The finding is robust to several endogeneity checks.

More Sanders distortion of what went on in Cuba

Here is an article by John Lott at townhall.com.

Bernie Sanders is doing his best to misrepresent what went on in Cuba.
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With Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) becoming the odds on favorite to win the Democrat nomination, the media rehabilitation efforts have begun. First up on Sunday evening was CBS’s 60 Minutes, which moved to protect Sanders against attacks that he is a communist.

Host Anderson Cooper didn’t ask Sanders about his decision to honeymoon in the former Soviet Union or about past proposals for “public ownership of utilities, banks, and major industries,” proposals that Sanders has never disavowed. However, Cooper did ask Sanders about some positive statements that he has made about Communist Cuba.

In explaining why Cubans didn’t help the U.S. overthrow Fidel Castro, 60 Minutes first played an old interview of Sanders explaining it failed because people liked Castro. He “educated the kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.” No mention is made of the police state and Castro killing or throwing his political opponents in prison.

“You know it is unfair to simply say that everything is bad,” Sanders told Cooper. “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”

Sanders can’t acknowledge it, but the push in communist countries to make sure that everyone could read had a dark side -- the literacy programs were a massive indoctrination effort. The communist governments used the education system the same way that they take over at the same time and use television, radio, and newspapers. Controlling information is the reason that communist governments would regularly jam radio Voice of America’s broadcasts in their countries during the Cold War.

That is the same pattern that we have seen in other noncommunist totalitarian countries such as Nazi Germany. But undoubtedly Sanders wouldn’t be as effusive in his praise of the Nazi education system. In both the Nazi and communist systems, even simple math problems contained indoctrination lessons for students.

Education was just another part of the police state to control people. If you could teach people from a young age how wonderful the government is and how horrible the lives are for people in freer countries, you didn’t have to spend as much money on the secret police.

Cuba, other communist countries, and other totalitarian countries spent a lot more on education than freer countries with the same per capita income. Totalitarian countries also start public schooling at younger ages than freer countries, and they did so because they wanted to weaken the connection between children and their parents and replace the parent’s values with those of the government.

Sometimes these governments went much further than simply starting school at younger ages. For example, during the 1920s and 1950s, the Soviet Union experimented with raising children in communal children’s houses and dining halls that almost completely removed children from the influence of their parents. While fighting in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the Soviet government forcibly took tens of thousands of 3-and 4-year-old Afghanis to the USSR and raised them away from the influences of their families. The hope was that when later returned to Afghanistan, they would form the core of a loyal government administration.

In 1989, immediately before the fall of the Soviet Union, former President Ronald Reagan pointed out, “the biggest of Big Brothers is helpless against the technology of the Information Age.” Unlike Sanders, Reagan understood that part of winning the Cold War was breaking the control that communist governments had over the information that their citizens received.

Sanders is not alone in praising Cuba’s health care system. Of course, when Fidel Castro got very ill, he went to Spain for medical treatment. Their most significant bragging right was their improvements in infant mortality rates. But while infant mortality rates were improving dramatically between 1960 and 1971 in all the rest of North, Central, and South America, Cuba alone saw things get worse. Cuba’s big improvements occurred long after the attempted overthrow of Castro. To lower the infant mortality rate, the government forced abortions for high-risk babies. The government also took many pregnant women away from their families and ordered that they stay in special maternity homes. By 2000, the Cuban government was ordering 40 percent of mothers to stay in these homes for at least a portion of their pregnancy.

Cuba was able to eventually get an infant mortality rate slightly below that in the United States, but Anderson Cooper didn’t ask Sanders any follow-up questions about how the Cubans accomplished this “transformation.”

Communist countries from Cuba to Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union impoverished their citizens, though their leaders lived lives of luxury. The general citizens had miserable lives. Bernie Sanders might not want to acknowledge it, but their supposedly fabulous accomplishments had a real dark side.

Bernie Sanders’ and his ilk’s claims about how wonderful socialism works in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are lies. These countries are not socialist and rely on capitalism for their standard of living

Here is a link to an informative article at the Heartland Institute.

The authors present some facts about Denmark, Norway, and Sweden that show that Bernie Sanders and his ilk are lying about them.

Here are some excerpts concerning Denmark.  The same is true of Norway and Sweden.
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Denmark

Although democratic socialists argue Denmark’s economy is a prime example of how socialism should work, Danes have rejected many of the policies American democratic socialists regularly call for. For example, in Denmark, there is no federal minimum wage, no basic income program, and no federal jobs guarantee.

Although prominent American democratic socialists point to Denmark as one of their models for confiscating and redistributing wealth, in many respects, Denmark protects private property more than governments in the United States.

The Danish economy has a minimal regulatory burden and wide-open markets, which makes it attractive to global investors.

Over the past three years, budget deficits for the Danish national government have averaged 3 percent12 in the United States. Even more impressive, Denmark’s total public debt is 34.1 percent of GDP, while the U.S. total public debt is equivalent to a whopping 107.8 percent of GDP.13 (See Figure 2.) Denmark’s national debt of $127 billion means each Danish citizen currently foots about $22,000 of the country’s debt. On the other hand, the U.S. national debt of $22 trillion means each American is on the hook for about $68,000 of America’s unpaid bills.

In Denmark, the overall tax burden is 45.9 percent of total domestic income. In the United States, the overall tax burden is 26 percent of total domestic income.

According to the Tax Foundation, “The top marginal tax rate of 60 percent in Denmark applies to all income over 1.2 times the average income in Denmark. From the American perspective, this means that all income over $60,000 (1.2 times the average income of about $50,000 in the United States) would be taxed at 60 percent.”

“Compare this to The United States,” the Tax Foundation noted. “The top marginal tax rate of 46.8 percent (state average and federal combined rates) kicks in at 8.5 times the average U.S. income (around $400,000). Comparatively, few taxpayers in the United States face the top marginal rate.”

Furthermore, income taxes are only one ingredient of the tax burden pie. All Danes pay a value-added tax of 25 percent on goods and services, as well as excise taxes and government fees.

As these figures show, all Danes pay high taxes, not just the wealthy . . . the Danish tax system is far less redistributionist than the American tax code.

Denmark’s corporate tax rate is just 22 percent,24 only slightly higher than the U.S. rate of 21 percent.

The Australian fires are not indicative of climate change

Here is the truth about the Australian fires.  The source is Alan Longhurst at Judith Curry's blog.

The article exposes the data finagling being used to show an upward temperature trend that is unlikely to be true.
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Recipe for Australia’s climate ‘truth bomb’: dubious manipulations of the historical temperature record, ignorance of the climate dynamics of the Southern Hemisphere, and ignorance of Australia’s ecological and social history.

A correspondent of The Guardian newspaper writes that her personal ‘climate truth bomb’ hit her while she was picking ash from her glass at a wine tasting event – the Sydney Harbour bridge being dimly seen through the murk of bushfires. The truth came to her, she wrote, in the eloquent rage of Greta Thunberg and also in heat, smoke and fire.

Although anthropogenic climate change sells well, especially at The Guardian, their Sydney correspondent cannot be so ignorant about the climate of Australia or about bushfires as she pretends. Put briefly, bushfires in Australia and elsewhere have two main sources: from thunderstorms or from human activity, deliberate or otherwise – cigarette butts, sparks from brakes on railway trains, from incautious welding on farm machinery and from electric transmission lines. In California, where almost 2 million acres burned in 2018 and claimed many lives, the electricity supply company now closes down its transmission lines in windy conditions to prevent sparking and fires.

As she should have known, climate change or not, that ash in The Guardian correspondent’s wine was very probably caused by the direct action of an Australian citizen. In the current drought, 36% of fires have been judged to be accidental, 37% as suspicious, 13% as deliberate and only 6% as natural. And that pattern is not new: Australia has a serious arson problem. “In short, up to 85 bushfires begin every day because someone leaves their house and decides to start one,” said Dr. P. Reid of the Australian Center for Research in Bushfires and Arson

The geography of the Australian continent is a special case, fire-wise. It has very flat terrain without major mountain ranges, and no major gulfs to allow marine weather to penetrate inland. The pattern of rainfall is driven by the wind systems over the surrounding oceans: Pacific, Indian, Southern. The strength of the SE Trades across the breadth of the Pacific Ocean, and the moisture they transport, are paramount for rainfall in Queensland. But periodically the trades fail during Niño events and so rainfall is intermittent and decade-long dry periods are the rule rather than the exception, especially in the eastern part of the continent.

In New South Wales and Victoria, rainfall variability is also influenced by the dynamics of the Antarctic Ocean, with blocking highs developing over the ocean; in western Australia, the dynamics of the Indian Ocean are important in carrying moisture to the continent. But, overall, the ‘canonical driver of Australian rainfall’ is the alternating state of the SE Trades, according to Risbey and his colleagues. So periodic droughts, more frequent in the east, are the inevitable consequence of Australian geography. 

The indigenous vegetation and fauna was evolved to deal with these conditions and the pre-settlement human population had, likewise, evolved a lifestyle that placed sufficiently modest demands on the environment that their survival was assured. This included lighting seasonal ‘cool’ fires that prevented the build-up of dead vegetation and produced a mosaic of burned and unburned land: this technique has now been reintroduced in the Kimberly region and ‘right across the North’ [link]

But the wave of settlement during the 19th century by European pastoralists, who did not understand their new environment, changed all that very fundamentally: ‘sheep were cheap, water was available and graziers relied on saltbush and scrub to provide quality feed when overgrazing had destroyed the perennial grass [link] Rabbits, naively introduced in 1859, were in plague numbers over most of southeast Australia by the end of the century – busily digging out the roots of native vegetation, and ring-barking shrubs. After logging, the regenerating eucalypt woodlands lacked (and much still lacks) a closed canopy, a condition which encourages dry, shrubby ground cover and the propagation of fire. 

In short, settlement was disastrous for the original drought-adapted environment of the interior of Australia and it was not long before the inevitable occurred, even without the help of rabbits. Since reliable records began to be kept, a ‘severe’ drought has been recorded on average every 18 years, since that of 1803 which caused crop failures in New South Wales: each was accompanied by widespread bushfires.

The years 1871, 1895-1902, 1926, 1928, 1931, 1939, 1982 and 2009 each have their own Black day-of-the-week and notable high temperatures: the Black Friday fire of February 1931 burned 5 million ha. or 25% of the state of Victoria, claiming 12 lives, plus a million sheep and many cattle.

Images of dead stock and advancing dust-storms abound from those years, local newspapers headlined maximum temperatures and wrote of hardship and abandoned farms; trains were immobilised by dust storms having updrafts so strong that they emitted ball lightning. Conditions during the Federation drought of 1895-1903 were very severe indeed, and a land surveyor recorded that he feared the heat would cause the mercury bulb of his thermometer to burst.

Today, it is widely believed in Australia that the drought and fire-storms of 2019 were the consequence of CO2-driven anomalously high air temperature; long forgotten is the fact that very high temperatures were reliably recorded during earlier droughts. During the Millennium drought of south-eastern regions from 1996 to 2010, the highest temperature recorded at Melbourne was 46.4 deg C in February 2009 – but on Black Thursday of 1851 Melbourne recorded 117 deg F (47 deg C) and on Black Friday of 1939 the same place recorded 45 deg C. 

 These are conditions sufficiently similar to those of the recent drought as not to make a great deal of difference to those enduring them: that is a strong statement, but it is supported by the Australian network of meteorological observations, which has a spatial coverage second only to that of the USA – and includes stations having continuous data since the 1880s. Observations were established in the early years of the Federation along with the telegraph network, and Australia boasts one of the very longest continuous records globally: observations in Adelaide began in 1856, but you will find the early data have been expunged from the currently-used Australian archives.

Mass Public Shootings are much higher in the rest of the world and increasing much more quickly

Here is a link to a paper by John Lott, "Comparing the Global Rate of Mass Public Shootings to the U.S.'s Rate and Comparing their Changes Over Time."

JL's paper shows that the media and the anti-gunners have been lying to you.

Here are a few excerpts from the paper.  The graphics are particularly telling.
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Executive Summary

The U.S. is well below the world average in terms of the number of mass public shootings, and the global increase over time has been much bigger than for the United States. Over the 18 years from 1998 to 2015, our list contains 2,354 attacks and at least 4,880 shooters outside the United States and 53 attacks and 57 shooters within our country. By our count, the US makes up less than 1.15% of the mass public shooters, 1.49% of their murders, and 2.20% of their attacks. All these are much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the world population. Attacks in the US are not only less frequent than other countries, they are also much less deadly on average. Out of the 97 countries where we have identified mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranks 64th in the per capita frequency of these attacks and 65th in the murder rate. Not only have these attacks been much more common outside the US, the US’s share of these attacks have declined over time. There has been a much bigger increase over time in the number and severity of mass shootings in the rest of the world compared to the US.

Introduction.

President Obama and other politicians have frequently claimed that the United States is unique regarding mass public shootings.1 It is also a frequent claim by the media.

This belief is constantly used to push for more gun control. If we can only get rid of guns in the United States or have stricter gun control, we will get rid of these mass public shootings and be more like the rest of the world. Of course, it is understandable that the U.S. media doesn´t report about most of the mass public shootings in other countries. Americans are much more interested in news about their own country, but, as we will see, the US is a relatively safe place from these mass public shootings.

We use the FBI’s traditional definition of mass public shootings. America is unique regarding the detail of its crime data. For example, almost half the countries in the world don’t even report the number of firearm homicides, just the total number of homicides. Few countries provide murder rates as opposed to homicides. Other countries just don’t officially collect data on mass public killings, let alone on the category of shootings.

What this means is that we have had to do an extensive search of news stories to collect our cases. For less developed parts of the world such as Africa or Latin  America, it can be very difficult to obtain news stories from even a decade or so ago. It is downright impossible to obtain news stories on all of the cases of four or more people killed in the 1970s or 1980s. The problem is that if we have all the mass public shootings from the US but only a fraction of those from the rest of the world, it will make the US look worse than it is. So we examined the last 15 years of his period of study: 1998 to 2015. 

The following sections will explain the FBI’s definition of mass public shootings, how we collected the data, how the US compares to the rest of the world and how the rate and severity of these attacks has changed over time and comparing whether countries with the highest gun ownership rates tend to have higher rates of mass public shootings. We will also show how sensitive the results are to decisions on what to include in the count. But even the most generous assumptions produce results show that mass public shooters, shootings, and murders from these attacks are very rare in the US compared to the rest of the world.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders plan to hurt children of the poor

Here is George Will in the Washington Post.

GW is on target.

If you value education for the poor, encourage charter schools.
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ERIE, Pa. — Two women — one black and not affluent; one white, wealthy and famous — are contrasting faces of America’s debate about equal educational opportunity in grades K through 12. Porschia Anderson, a mother with daughters in kindergarten, fourth and 10th grades here, and parents like her have an enormous stake in Pennsylvania expanding charter schools and supporting other avenues to educational choices. The aim of such measures is for parents of modest, or negligible, means to have alternatives that affluent parents take for granted. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is ardent for equality as an abstraction but is even more ardent for the support of public school teachers unions. They are tenacious in defense of their semi-monopoly in primary and secondary education: Just 6 percent of the nation’s pupils are in charter schools, and only 218,000 (0.39 percent) of the 56.6 million pupils received vouchers.

In Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, there is a wearying constant, a simmering conflict. On one side are parents seeking charter schools — public schools granted more administrative and instruction discretion than enjoyed by unionized public schools. These parents also seek tax credits for privately funded scholarships that low-income families can use to pay tuition at private schools. On the other side are teachers unions characterizing such programs as “attacks” on public education funding.

Some attacks: Nationwide per-pupil public expenditure (in constant dollars) doubled between 1960 and 1980, and doubled again by 2016. Warren’s and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s jeremiads against “greed” exempt that of teachers unions.

The Commonwealth Foundation is a tireless advocate for more Pennsylvania charter schools and for tax credits for scholarships. This school year the foundation, prevailing against labor’s big battalions, expanded scholarship access to 15,000 more children. Unfortunately, Gov. Tom Wolf (D), who attended a prestigious and pricey prep school, the Hill School, has issued executive actions to restrict enrollments in charter schools. And to cut funding for charters. And to force charters to pay the government to perform its duty of compelling reluctant school districts to obey the law: Pandering to teachers unions, some districts refuse to provide charters with legally required per-pupil funding. Charter funds are distributed by school districts that often are running the underperforming schools that make parents desperate for the alternative of charter schools.

Last year, Philadelphia, where 34,000 students recently applied for 7,500 available charter spaces, refused all three applications for new charters. Demand does not elicit supply when monopolists use politics to restrict supply.

A 2019 Education Next poll showed African American majorities favoring public charters and private-school vouchers for low-income families. Nevertheless, Warren pledges to “end federal funding for the expansion of charter schools” and “ban for-profit charter schools.” She who preens about her granular mastery of policy details must know that her pledge would have a disparate impact on low-income and minority families. Sanders, too, vows to ban for-profit charters (about 12 percent of charters) and to freeze funding for new charters.

Before the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision, state and local governments could tell African Americans where they could not send their children. Sanders and Warren would have the federal government do that. George Wallace’s ghost is smirking.

Last November, Warren spoke in Atlanta with some African Americans who had interrupted her speech to protest her opposition to school choice, and who accused her of sending her children to private schools. Warren replied, as a clever lawyer would, “No, my children went to public schools.” This was technically true but (unless her son’s schooling slipped her mind) tendentious. She has tweeted “#PublicSchoolProud” and her daughter attended public schools. So did her son, until he didn’t. After fifth grade, he attended private schools in Austin and in Haverford, Pa. The public schools that Warren’s children did attend probably did not resemble those from which parents seek relief when residing in, as is delicately said, challenging urban environments.

The following is pretty much what Porschia Anderson believes: "The term 'voucher' has become a dirty word in many educational circles . . . The fear is that partial-subsidy vouchers provide a boost so that better-off parents can opt out of a failing public school system, while other children are left behind . . . [But] a taxpayer funded voucher that paid the entire cost of educating a child (not just a partial subsidy) would open a range of opportunities to all children."  Those are not, however, Porschia Anderson's words. They are from the 2003 iteration of Elizabeth Warren.  She also has celebrated the "extraordinary results" of Massachusetts charters, some of which started with the sort of federal aid she now vows to abolish.

Bernie Sanders doesn't understand that the US should be spending more on health care than other countries

Alex Tabarrok at marginalrevolution.com summarizes some facts and perspective from randomcriticalanalysis.com.

Health care spending is well predicted, indeed caused, by income.

Notice that the United States doesn’t look unusual when income is measured at the household level, i.e. Actual Individual Consumption, which measures the value of the bundle consumed by households whether the bundle items are bought in the market or provided by governments or non-profits. (AIC also avoids some issues with GDP per capita when a country has lots of intellectual property and exports, e.g. Ireland).

The price of health care increases with income but at a slower rate than income.

As a result of the above:

The price of health care relative to income is lower in rich countries, including the United States.

Let that sink in, health care prices are lower relative to income in richer countries. Health care in the United States is cheaper relative to income than in Greece, for example.

Since spending is going up faster than income but prices are not it must be the case that quantities are also increasing with income.

The density of health care workers (number of workers) and intensity (what the workers do) increases with income.

RCA: Rich countries consume much more cutting edge health care technology (innovations). For every 1% increase in real income, we find a 1-3% increase in organ transplant operations, a 1-2% increase in pacemaker and ICD implants, a 1-2% increase in the density of medical imaging/diagnostic technology, and likely similar patterns for all manner of other new technologies (e.g., insulin pumps, ADHD prescriptions, etc.). Obviously, these indicators are just the tip of the iceberg. Still, where data of this sort are available, they tend to be highly consistent with extreme income elasticity (particularly newer, more expensive forms of health care). In the main, costs rise because this technological change tends to requires a lot more people in hospitals and providers’ offices to deliver this increasingly complicated array of health care (surgical procedures, diagnostics, drugs, therapies, etc.).

A bottom line is that health care spending in the United States is not exceptional once we take US income into account.

RCA’s analysis is consistent with the Baumol effect and my analysis with Helland in Why Are the Prices So Damn High (we have some minor differences with RCA on physician incomes but neither of our analyses depend on that point). A big point is that RCA and Helland and I argue that the rising price sectors are not crowding out consumption of other goods. We can and are buying more of other goods even as we spend more on health care and education. Or, as RCA puts it:

…these trends indicate that the rising health share is robustly linked with a generally constant long-term increase in real consumption across essentially all other major consumption categories.

It is true that the United States has a convoluted payment system which results in absurd and enraging bills. Fixing the pricing system could generate more equity and efficiency but RCA’s analysis tells us that billions are at stake, not trillions. A corollary is that as other countries reach current US levels of income their health care spending will look more like the United States does today.

See RCA for much more.

Mayor Pete's spin on guns and his military experience with them

John Lott, at townhall.com, exposes Mayor Pete's misrepresentation about his military experience with guns and his spin on guns.  Lott is an expert on guns and gun laws - he knows what he is talking about.

Those who tell you that an AR15 rifle is an assault weapon are either misinformed or purposely trying to mislead you.  You can use such a statement as an indication that these persons cannot be trusted.
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One of the Democrats’ favorite talking points on gun control is that we don’t need military weapons of war on America’s streets. Former mayor Pete Buttigieg has been the most effective of the presidential candidates at making this claim, because of his military background. If anyone knows whether a gun is a military weapon, it is surely an Afghanistan War veteran who was trained on these weapons.

Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is the only other remaining candidate with military experience, having been a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard for 17 years, and she is the least outspoken about gun control.

“As someone who trained on weapons of war, I can tell you that there are weapons that have absolutely no place in American cities or neighborhoods in peacetime, ever,” Buttigieg declared at the Miami Democratic Presidential Debate in June last year.

“I think the weapons of war can do no good in American neighborhoods,” Buttigieg told CNN’s “New Day” last August. “I trained on weapons that are similar to these. And they have one purpose, which is to destroy as much as possible, as quickly as possible. They have tactical uses in war zones. Since when are American cities and neighborhoods supposed to be war zones?”

It is a theme that he has pushed endlessly.

But there are a few problems with Buttigieg’s claims. First, he never had military training, let alone weapons training. He never even received leadership training.

Naval officers typically go through four years at Annapolis or another military academy. Otherwise, they attend ROTC during college or complete Officer Candidate School as postgraduates. All of these programs involve extensive training. Instead, Buttigieg used a used little-known loophole — direct commission in the reserves — to skip all of the training that other officers receive.

Second, no self-respecting military in the world would use the “assault weapons” that we sometimes see in mass shootings. AR-15s fire the same sorts of bullets as small game-hunting rifles, and even do so with the same velocity and rapidity (one bullet per pull of the trigger). In fact, AR-15s aren’t allowed for deer hunting in most states because of the fear that they will wound rather than kill the animals. This may cause the deer to die slowly and painfully.

Buttigieg may be correct that weapons of war are designed to “destroy as much as possible, as quickly as possible.” But that’s not the story of civilian gun use. Guns can also be used to protect people and keep them from harm. About 95% of the time that people use guns defensively, they simply brandish the gun and cause the criminals to break off their attack.

Buttigieg supports virtually every other gun control law that is being pushed, from licensing requirements to mandatory gun locks.

There are few differences among the remaining Democrat presidential candidates. Even the supposedly “moderate” Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) supports mandatory gun buybacks, though she insists that this is “not gun confiscation because you give them the offer to buy back their gun.” This is still taking guns away from people, whether or not you stuff some cash in their pockets when you do it.

Another candidate who is selling himself as a moderate is former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. His opposition to private gun ownership is well known. He is willing to start with a “voluntary buyback and ban on purchasing assault weapons, before enforcing a mandatory buyback.”

Buttigieg, however, is almost too good to be true for gun control advocates. By appearing to know about guns, he gives their ill-informed claims legitimacy. But Buttigieg should do the right thing and try to really educate Americans about firearms. He should admit that the AR-15 and other “assault weapons” function nothing like true weapons of war.

Socialism vs. Capitalism

John Goodman at townhall.com gets it right on socialism.
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Since a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination has endorsed it, since most of his opponents have refused to denounce it, and since a majority of young people appear to approve of it, now is a good time to ask: what exactly is socialism?

In a free market, you can buy just about any product you can afford so long as you are willing to pay the market price. Since market prices tend to reflect the social cost of production, in order to consume a good, you must pay what it costs society to produce it. On the supply side, people often have many employment opportunities. But wherever you work, the wage you receive will tends to reflect the social value of your contribution to the economy’s output of goods and services.

Under socialism, government rather than the market sets prices and wages. What difference does that make?

If the government sets the price below the market price, people will buy goods and services that are worth less to them than the social cost of their production. For example, it might cost society $10 to produce a good that is worth only $5 to the person who obtains it. The result will be over-consumption, provided people can actually obtain the good. (Often they cannot.) If the government sets the price above the market price, people will refrain from buying and consuming things they otherwise would have purchased. For example, society might be capable of meeting a people’s needs with a good for a $10 price they are willing to pay. But because of a $20 mispricing, there will be under-consumption.

Similar distortions occur in the labor market. If government-set wages are above or below market wages, workers will respond by over-producing or underproducing various goods and services, relative to the value consumers place on them.

Under socialism, the government does much more than set prices. It determines what will be produced, how it will be produced, where it will be produced and under what circumstances people will be able to consume what is produced. Since prices are not allowed to clear markets, inevitably there is rationing by waiting for food, clothing, housing, medical care and other necessities. People spend enormous amounts of time and effort trying to circumvent the rationing bureaucracies.

To this point we have said nothing about why the government would do these things. Whatever the stated goals, socialist governments almost always have an economic plan. Whatever the plan, it’s in no one’s self interest to carry it out.

Let’s suppose the plan calls for you to have two bowls of rice every day, but you would like three. In a market economy you get the third bowl if you are willing to pay the market price. Let’s say that is $10. Under socialism, you are not allowed to have the third bowl at any price. So, your incentive is to spend up to $10 of effort to manipulate the rationing bureaucracy to get your third bowl.

Or let’s say the plan calls for you to work 8 hours a day, but you would prefer to work only 7. In a market economy, if you work one less hour you get one less hour’s pay. Let’s say that’s $15. Under the socialist plan you don’t have this option. So, your incentive is to spend up to $15 of effort to manipulate the bureaucracy in order to get an hour off.

Now, when everybody at the bottom has a self-interest in defeating a plan created by those at the top, guess who wins? Socialism, wherever it has been tried, has been an economic disaster.

Capitalism is sometimes described as institutionalized selfishness, while socialism is often described as institutionalized altruism. If anything, the reverse is true.

As Adam Smith pointed out, the only way to increase your income in a market economy is to meet other people’s needs. In a socialist system, the only way to increase your income is to undermine the plan. Doing so often means your increase in wellbeing is at someone else’s expense.

Even if socialist governments respected human rights – even if they didn’t imprison, torture and murder dissenters – socialism still imposes huge economic cruelties on ordinary people. That’s why northern European countries that have flirted with socialist ideas have subsequently abandoned them. In many ways, Scandinavian countries today are more capitalistic than we are.

There are several examples of economic freedom without political freedom, e.g. Hong Kong and Singapore. But we have no examples of a country that has abolished economic freedom while maintaining political and civil liberties.

It’s easy to understand why. If the government controls your job, your salary, your living choices and just about every other aspect of your economic life, how free will you be to challenge the rulers in the next election? All truly socialist regimes quickly became dictatorships – even if, like Nazi Germany and present-day Venezuela, they started out as democracies.

To this point, I have made no distinction between national socialism (fascism) and Marxist-type socialism (communism). The traditional political science literature tends to define the former as having private ownership with government control while the latter has both government ownership and control. The general rule is: the more government asserts its power in whatever way, the worse the economic deprivation and the worse the human rights atrocities.

In the 20th century, an estimated 169 million people were killed by their own governments. It was genocide on an unimaginable scale. The vast majority of these victims were murdered by socialist governments. The Russian communists were the worst (62 million) followed by the Chinese communists (35 million) and then the Nazis (20 million).

Although socialists claim that workers are exploited under capitalism, no greedy capitalist has ever begun to match what socialists have done.

Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez lived like kings and accumulated vast fortunes while their own people often faced starvation. Kim Jong-un and the current rulers in Cuba and Venezuela are following in their footsteps.

Socialism will destroy your freedom of choice and impoverish you

Here is an article by Richard Epstein at the Hoover Institution.

Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

RE is on target.--------------------------------------------
Changes in the language of self-identification give us enormous information about changes in political thought. Consider how the American left labels itself today compared to fifty years ago. Back then, American liberalism stood for the dominance of a mixed economy in which market institutions provided growth: deregulation of the airlines in the 1970s, for example, was no sin. At the same time, the liberal vision promoted political institutions that provided a safety net for Americans in the form of social security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. The term “progressive” came to the fore recently with the rise of Barack Obama, signaling a rising dissatisfaction with the status quo ante because of the liberal mainstream’s inability to reduce inequalities of wealth and income while empowering marginalized groups like women and minorities. Yet somehow the sought-after progressive utopia never quite emerged in the Obama years. Slow economic growth and rising inequality were combined with tense race relations, exemplified by the high profile 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates, and the fatal shootings of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and Michael Brown in 2014.

These events have put establishment Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton on the defensive. Spurred on by that old socialist warhorse, Senator Bernie Sanders, young socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are both rising political stars likely to join Congress next year. These new wave socialists will push the Democratic party further to the left with their constant calls for free and universal healthcare, free college tuition, and guaranteed jobs for all Americans—all paid for in ways yet to be determined.

The New Socialists try of course to distance themselves from the glaring failures of the Old Socialists, who suffered from two incurable vices. First, they ran the economies of such places as Cuba, Venezuela, the Soviet Union, and virtually all of Eastern Europe into the ground. Second, they turned these states into one-party dictatorships governed by police brutality, forced imprisonment for political offenses, and other human rights abuses. When viewing the proposals of the New Socialists, one looks for any kind of explanation for how their proposals for the radical expansion of government control over the economy aimed at mitigating income inequality will protect both personal liberty and economic well-being.

The New Socialists thankfully do not stress the old theme of abolition of private property through the collective ownership of the means of production. So what do they believe? One answer to this question is offered by Professor Corey Robin, a political theorist at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, who recently praised the “New Socialism” in the New York Times. He proudly boasts of a major uptick in support for socialist ideals among the young and then seeks to explain the forces that drive their newfound success. In a single sentence: “The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree.”

Robin reaches that conclusion not by looking at the increasing array of products and career options made available through the free market. Instead, he invokes the type of dramatic example that Bernie Sanders loves to put forward to explain the need for free public health care. Under the current system, we are told that everyone is beholden to the “boss” at work and to the faceless drones who have the arbitrary power to decide that a particular insurance policy purchased by a mother does not cover her child’s appendectomy. Thus, under capitalism, we all bow and scrape to the almighty boss, knowing, in Robin’s words, that when “my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination.”

This supposed equivalence of a market economy to organized serfdom reminds me of my time in both West and East Berlin as a young law student in the summer of 1965. You did not have to theorize about the difference between capitalism and socialism. You could see it in the bright lights of West Berlin and the drab exteriors and rumbling Soviet tanks of East Berlin. The explanation for the contrast came from a forlorn East German shopkeeper who sold me an ersatz chocolate bar that I purchased with my ersatz East German marks. The shopkeeper explained with this joke: “Question: What is the difference between capitalism and socialism? Answer: Under capitalism man exploits man, while under socialism the reverse is true.”

This quip is deeply insightful. The New Socialists in the United States live in a world of intellectual self-denial. They think that they can control the distribution of all the good things in life without undermining the economic and social institutions needed for the creation of that wealth in the first place. The words “competition,” “scarcity,” and “free entry” do not make it into Robin’s constricted lexicon, and their absence explains why he botches the analytical issues concerning “freedom” thoroughly. His first sin is to ignore the simple truth that scarcity means that all of us cannot have all that we want all the time. His second sin is that of cherry-picking. Sadly, some individuals must grovel before their bosses to keep their jobs. But in a competitive economy, free entry allows many more individuals to quit their jobs for better opportunities, or even to be recruited away by another employer.

Competition leaves people with choices. But under the New Socialism, people will really discover what it means to be unfree when they only have this choice: work for the state and spend your falling wages on government- supplied goods—or starve. And to whom does the unhappy citizen turn when there is only one healthcare provider, one landlord, and one education system? The state monopolies under socialism offer a kind of subjugation and submission far greater than that in competitive markets. The faceless corporate decision makers that trouble professor Robin are far less sinister than government bureaucrats who can block all exit options. Imagine how poorly the Post Office would function without competition from Federal Express and UPS.

Of course, today’s competitive markets do not work as well as we would like. But it is important to note that these difficulties often stem not from the unwillingness of prospective employers to strike a deal, but from the insistence of the state that all future contracts meet some requirements, such as the minimum wage, that can easily price workers, especially those workers at the bottom of the economic ladder, out of jobs. It doesn’t help that the federal government also taxes many workers heavily in order to help others more fortunate than themselves. Just that happens, for example, with the community rating system under the Affordable Care Act. The much-heralded program has the following consequence. It requires a major subsidy of older, sicker individuals from younger and healthier persons who often earn less and have less wealth than seniors. So if young people stay in the ACA’s insurance pools, the ACA mandates substantial wealth transfers from poor to rich. And as younger people flee that system, the ACA pools face the crisis in affordability and coverage that leads indeed to the adverse selection death spiral that is the inevitable result of any program of cross-subsidies.

It is easy to tell a similar tale with other grand social experiments that mandate transfers. Ocasio-Cortez readily attacks “real-estate developers” because, as Robin tells us, “in her district of strapped renters, landlords are the enemies.” And just how are we supposed to deal with these enemies? Put them under lock and key? If that sounds a bit extreme, we can put in place a system of rent control, only to discover that the primary beneficiaries of that system are, for instance in New York, the well-heeled and highly influential professionals on New York’s Upper West Side and Brooklyn’s Park Slope. Worse still, by sticking it to those mean-spirited developers, we prevent the creation of new housing stock that would allow market forces to drive down rental rates.

The New Socialists have yet to learn that rent control and affordable housing rules, whether for rentals or new construction, are a form of price controls. No, the New Socialists cannot defeat the laws of supply and demand. They might, however, take note of the disgraceful performance of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) as a public landlord. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “NYCHA officials had for years hidden broken elevators, rat infestations, leaking pipes and winter heat outages from federal inspectors” while doing nothing to eliminate peeling lead paint. After all, unlike landlords and developers, no public official suffers a dime of personal financial loss from mistreating those “free” public tenants who have nowhere else to go.

There is a deep intellectual confusion and moral emptiness in Robin’s New Socialism. On the one hand, it denies the major advances in longevity and human flourishing that have been made in recent years by the worldwide spread of market institutions, documented in exquisite detail by Johan Norberg in his great book Progress. And Robin makes the fatal mistake of attributing to market institutions the failures that fall squarely on the regulatory programs of traditional liberals—e.g. minimum wages, rent control—that hamper economic growth and personal freedom. The New Socialism has no more chance of success than the Old Socialism. You may as well try to cure diabetes by administering extra-large doses of government-subsidized sugar.

Don Boudreaux puts the danger of simplistic thinking in perspective

The kind of thinking illustrated by Illinois Representative Camillle Lilly is widespread.  It contributes to the appeal of those who want to change radically our economy and culture, e.g., Bernie Sanders and his ilk.  Simplistic, uninformed thinking is part of the reason why do-gooders so often make things worse.
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Rep. Camille Lilly (D – 78th District)
Illinois House of Representatives
Springfield, IL

Rep. Lilly:

You propose legislation that “Provides that no gas may be pumped at a gas station in this State unless it is pumped by a gas station attendant employed at the gas station.” It’s reported that your “office says the idea behind the bill is to create more jobs in the state.”

I here resist the temptation to insist on the necessity of making boring calculations such as of the number of non-gasoline-station jobs that would be destroyed as a result of motorists spending more money to fuel their cars and, hence, having less money to spend at local restaurants, theaters, and other retail establishments.

Instead, I embrace the spirit of your proposal. Yet when I do so I see that your proposal is far too modest! You should think much bigger!

For example, rather than prevent people merely from pumping their own gas, the government should also prevent people from washing and parking their own cars. Just as a prohibition on self-service gas pumping will create jobs for gas pumpers, a prohibition on self-service car-washing will create jobs for car washers, while a prohibition on self-service parking will create jobs for car parkers.

Indeed, even the above is too modest. How about a prohibition on self-service driving! That way, lots of jobs will be created for chauffeurs!

The possibilities are limitless. You should survey the full range of tasks that ordinary Illinoisans do for themselves and consider outlawing all such self-service in the name of creating jobs. Think of the number of jobs, and the attendant riches, that will bless the state of Illinois if you and your colleagues outlaw also the likes of, say, self-dressing and self-grooming (create jobs for ladies’ maids and men’s valets!), self-cooking (create jobs for household chefs!), and self-telephone-dialing (bring back all those jobs for switchboard operators!).

If your economic logic is sound, the possibilities for enriching Illinoisans with other such prohibitions are enormous!

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

How Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data is misused to fit Climate Alarmists’ agenda

From Joseph D'Aleo at ICECAP.

For some scientists, agenda and funding win over intellectual honesty.
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NOAA and NASA can be counted on virtually every month or year end to religiously and confidently proclaim that the latest global average surface temperature (GAST) is among the warmest on record. Back in the 1970s when an assessment of a global temperature was first attempted, the scientists recognized that even land-only surface temperature data was a significant challenge given that most of the reliable data was limited to populated areas of the U.S, Europe and eastern China with just spotty often intermittent data from vast land areas elsewhere.

Temperatures over oceans, which covered 71% of the globe, were measured along shipping routes mainly in the Northern Hemisphere erratically and with varying measurement methods. Despite these shortcomings and the fact that absolutely no credible grid level temperature data existed over the period from 1880 to 2000 in the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans (covering 80.9% of the Southern Hemisphere), global average surface temperature data estimation and publication by NOAA and NASA began in the early 1990s.

To illustrate the problem, on January 16, 2020, the WSJ published a lead article by Robert Lee Hotz stating: “NASA, NOAA ranked 2019 as the second-hottest year in tracking data to 1880. The world experienced near-record global temperatures in 2019, federal climate scientists said. ---.” This claim was made despite the fact that absolutely no credible temperature data exists over this period for more than 40% of the planet (0.5*0.809 =0.4+).

After 2000, there were diving buoys. But when the best technology designed specifically for the purpose, the ARGO buoys, disappointed by showing no upward trend, the data from the buoys was “adjusted.” John Bates, data quality officer with NOAA admitted “They had good data from buoys...and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did - so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer." He retired after that change was made.

That was just the latest example of data manipulation. Initially, this global data had a cyclical pattern similar to previously reported Northern Hemisphere data (high in the 1930s and 40s, low in the 70s). Then, as time progressed, the previous officially reported GAST data history was modified, removing the cycle and creating a more and more strongly upward sloping linear trend in each freshly reported historical data set.
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Peer reviewed, published and readily reproducible research has shown that: “The conclusive findings were that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality.”

“In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, which removed their cyclical temperature patterns are completely inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, despite current assertions of record-setting warming, it is impossible to conclude from the NOAA and NASA data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever.”

Current climate policies - based on these unreliable temperature records - threaten our economic and national security interests. As the proposed climate policies grow more extreme, the consequences of allowing this record to remain unchallenged gravely threatens an onslaught of litigation based on the greenhouse gas endangerment finding. Importantly, this litigation imposes significant impediments to the mineral land leasing and pipeline infrastructure build out necessary to maintain and enhance energy independence and economic prosperity.

Furthermore, the US financial sector has already dramatically curtailed its support of conventional energy source development in large part due to the continued calls for regulatory destruction of the fossil fuel industry based substantially on NOAA and NASA’s now invalidated global surface temperature records. This situation is putting our Nation’s energy security at grave risk ‘ which means our economic and national security are also in great peril.
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ADDENDUM to the Research Report entitled: On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding, Abridged Research Report, Dr. James P. Wallace III, Joseph S. D’Aleo ABD, Dr. Craig D. Idso, June 2017

The June 2017 Research Report provides ample evidence that the Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data was invalidated for use in climate modelling and for any other climate change policy analysis purpose. However, there was one very critical science argument that this report did not make, which is made here.

This critical point involves whether or not it was even possible to compute a mathematically proper GAST data set over the period 1900-2000 in the first place. Claims of record-setting GAST were made as one of the three Lines of Evidence of the 2009 GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding. Another Line of Evidence purported that climate models, tuned to fit this GAST data, were adequate for policy analysis purposes. The third Line of Evidence for validation required credible Surface Temperature data as well. However, as stated in the aforementioned GAST Research Report:

“The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever - despite current claims of record setting warming. Finally, since GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings” (1)

Thus, in this GAST report, ample evidence was provided that the current officially reported GAST data are simply not credible, therefore invalidating the 2009 Endangerment Finding. However, there is a proof that is far easier to understand. Over the period 1900-2000, there is virtually no credible surface temperature data available for at least 40% of the surface of the Earth. This follows from the fact that the Southern Hemisphere’s surface is over 80% ocean (.50*.80=40), and essentially no credible temperature data was captured for these vast oceans over this time period. (2)

Hence, it never made any sense to even attempt to compute a GAST data set over this time period unless the purpose was to construct a temperature data set that could be made to have virtually any pattern over that time period that the institutions involved desired to portray as reality. In truth, with literally no credible temperature data available for well over 40% of the Earth’s surface, these institutions were only limited by what was credible to the outside world. (3) Thus far, not knowing these facts, all relevant parties, e.g., regulators, environmentalists, and government officials, have been far too accepting of the GAST record as a valid global temperature database. Since GAST data has now been separately proven to not be a valid representation of reality, it also means that the 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding has been once again invalidated.

The Folly Of Bernie Sanders’ National Rent Control Proposal

Here is an article by Ryan Bourne at the Cato Institute.

RB is on target.

Anyone who has lived through New York City's rent control fiasco knows how awful are the consequences of rent control laws.  In NYC:

• Buildings with binding rental rates were allowed to deteriorate (the south Bronx looked like a bombed out zone).

• New buildings had exorbitant rental rates (beginning and near future rental rates were padded to offset further future capped rental rates so that estimated present values of all future rental incomes represented a reasonable return on capital.

• There was a huge black market in rental apartments.

• There was a huge shortage of "affordable" apartments.

If Bernie believes rent control is a good idea, he is either economically "disadvantaged" or disingenuous.  Either case implies he is not credible and dangerous.
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“Landlords cannot be allowed to raise rents to whatever they want, whenever they want,” Senator Bernie Sanders boomed on Twitter in November. “We need…a national rent control standard.” Now, his presidential campaign advocates one: under Sanders’ housing proposals, all landlords nationwide would only be able to increase rents annually by one and a half times the rate of inflation or 3 percent, whichever is higher. Assuming the current CPI for Urban Consumers is the inflation measure used, that would mean a rent increase cap today of just 3.4 percent.

Given the likely unconstitutionality of a truly national rent control law, one suspects Sanders should be taken seriously but not literally. What he is really doing here is endorsing a spate of new rent control laws across states, encouraging left‐​wing activists to push for more stringent restrictions elsewhere. California has already instituted a 5 percent plus inflation cap for older buildings. Oregon has passed a rent increase cap of seven percent per year above CPI. New York just expanded protections for existing rent stabilized tenants and is expected to follow the others with a proposal for a general rent cap.

But that Sanders’ national proposal probably won’t or can’t be implemented doesn’t mean his reasoning won’t damage housing policy across the country. His claim that landlords can charge “whatever they want” entrenches the idea that rents are set through greed or market power, not supply and demand. And if crude, low level rent increase caps are implemented even in individual cities, it could have disastrous consequences in “hot” markets – particularly given proposals like his are shorn of the exemptions one usually sees for small‐​time landlords, new properties or vacant units, that can provide a safety valve for the rental market.

To see the folly of a national rent policy, consider the differential state of major U.S. housing markets. According to a Demographia report last week, Rochester, New York has a median house price just two‐​and‐​a‐​half times the median income for the city. Similarly affordable housing can be found in Cleveland, Ohio and Oklahoma City (both 2.7 median multiples). On the other end of the spectrum, major Californian housing markets such as Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco all have mean multiples above 8, while Seattle (5.5), Miami (5.4), and New York (5.4) are still deemed “severely unaffordable.”

Given housing affordability varies so much, we shouldn’t be surprised that rents similarly differ by locality. And if we accept that rents differ across the country for similar housing because of different household sizes, incomes, land use and zoning laws, and more, it stands to reason that average rents will change at different rates year‐​to‐​year as these supply and demand factors vary.

Looking across the last 20 years shows this clearly (see Table 1). In the broad housing markets around San Francisco, Seattle, Miami and Denver, average rent increases have exceeded what Bernie Sanders’ proposal would allow in over one of every two years. In contrast, cities such as Milwaukee, Cleveland, and St Louis have rarely seen rent increases exceed Sanders’ arbitrary cap. Within cities, we’d expect differences by neighborhood too (though perhaps with lower variance).

Is there any reason to suspect that landlords have been greedier in Miami than Milwaukee, or Seattle than St Louis? Or is it more likely that supply and demand trends have been different across cities over that 20 years? This evidence, plus the fact that rents within individual cities’ neighborhoods tend to quickly converge for certain property types and size, suggests that landlords cannot raise rents to “whatever they, whenever they want.” In reality, they are constrained both by tenants’ ability to pay and the availability of substitute properties. Or, to put it another way, by supply and demand.

Once one accepts that rental prices are overwhelmingly the product of market forces, not landlord greed, you see why rent control, especially as Sanders’ envisages, is such a misguided idea. It effectively seeks to drown out the message that rising rents is submitting – of an increased relative scarcity of rentable accommodation that has led rents to rise to clear the market. Instead, capping rents forces on the market the comforting lie that property is abundant. That produces a whole range of well‐​documented consequences.

Consider neighborhoods where market rents are expected to rise in the coming year beyond Sanders’ current 3.4 percent cap. The rent control will therefore bind, and if market rents continue increasing rapidly (perhaps because of an unresponsive supply of new housing to demand) then rents paid will become lower and lower relative to the underlying market rent. For hot rental markets:

1. Once it becomes clear rent controls are likely to be implemented, some landlords may seek to raise rents today before the cap becomes law, second‐​guessing how market rents will evolve in the very near future. 

2. Once the rent control binds, there will be a shortage of property relative to the quantity demanded. Existing landlords will, on the margin, seek to find ways to convert rental accommodation into non‐​controlled forms of accommodation, such as condos, offices, use through AirBnB, owner‐​occupancy, and more. 

3. Since rents cannot adjust to the new market reality over time, and there are no exemptions for new properties, capital investment in new rentable accommodation will fall in neighborhoods affected. Existing buildings will likewise be knocked down and replaced with buildings for other uses. These effects will be exacerbated if landlords perceive rent control to be the precursor for other restrictions on how they use their buildings or choose their tenants. The overall supply of rentable accommodation in the market will therefore fall relative to where it would have been. 

4. Existing tenants who do not want to move will benefit significantly from the controls, with big rent savings. But over time that will mean many people being in accommodation that is the wrong size or location for them. Extensive wait lists for properties and black‐​market bribes will likely proliferate. 

5. Ordinarily, crude rent controls can lead to a deterioration of property quality. Landlords have incentives to either allow the property quality to deteriorate so that the market rent falls to the controlled rent or else to change the tenure type to non‐​controlled forms. In the case of Sanders’ proposal, however, landlords can apply for waivers from the controls if significant capital improvements are made. In very hot markets there are therefore big incentives for rapid gentrification – converting to very expensive, high‐​end properties and then fixing rents very high initially to reflect binding rent controls into the future.

In short, a Sanders national rent control proposal would bring a lot of economic damage. But even if implemented more locally, such a crude rent cap would bring significant downsides to local housing markets, and the economy more broadly. And all based on the misguided idea that landlords have vast market power to set rents.