Rent Freezes

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Are rent freezes unconstitutional? The question comes up in my pea brain by the moves of Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s move to freeze rents in New York City (though he’s merely expanding on prior city administrations’ rent freezes) and of Democratic Socialist and Progressive-Democrat candidate for Florida Senator Angie Nixon, whose campaign platform plank was a national rent freeze.

The Fifth Amendment says, in part, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. A rent freeze plainly caps a landlord’s income, blocking him from increasing it at will or even consistently with market values or imperatives.

Nah—that won’t work. Government can’t take what doesn’t exist, and those increases are purely speculative.

But those rent freezes lead to reductions in value of the landlord’s property through denial of the revenue increases required, not merely useful or even needed, to maintain his rental properties in the face of rising costs of maintenance through aging degradation, misuse or abuse of the property by the tenants, and inflation which drives the prices plumbers, electricians, etc must charge.

Surely that freeze-driven devaluation of the property constitutes a taking within the meaning of the Amendment.

Probably not here, either. For one thing, the government wouldn’t be taking for public use, it would be just taking. That’s a technicality. One the merits, it likely isn’t a taking at all. All government regulations in one form or another impact the value of the businesses in the industries being regulated. In some cases, those regulations actually increase the value of the regulated industry participants. If regulatory caps are takings, then regulatory-prompted gains would seem to be taxable capital gains.

But those gains aren’t transfers by government to the regulatees anymore than the regulation-driven losses are takings.

Rent freezes are bad for business, bad for tenants in the long run, and bad for government revenue, but they aren’t unconstitutional. Just monumentally stupid.

Responsibility

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A letter writer to The Moneyist wrote that

…political issues came up, and our daughter-in-law wanted to discuss and debate them with me. I calmly reminded them of our previous agreement [that there would be no political discussions among them].
Since January, our son and his wife have stopped communicating with my wife and me. They have refused to return our phone calls or respond to our texts. We have been told that our daughter-in-law does not wish to have contact with our family.

The letter writer added that we have also tried to respect the boundaries they have established.

First, it’s not just the daughter-in-law who has broken off contact. So has the son, who plainly has gone along with his wife, perhaps actively sides with her for the same reasons she has for refusing contact. It’s not inappropriate for a husband to support his wife over his parents, so there’s nothing to be read into that aspect. Both son and daughter-in-law are affirmatively not wanting further contact with the parent; that’s the boundary they’ve set.

Against that, the letter writer wonders if he and his wife should cut the two out of their will(s). A potential complication is that the letter writer has another son, only mentioned for his existence, so I assume (yes, yes) that this son is on good terms with the letter writer.

My position is this, because I tend to be a bit black and white on such things. The son and daughter-in-law have taken themselves out of the letter writer’s family. The only tie, such as it is, remaining is the accident of birth involving the son. Their removal of themselves—as the letter writer notes, they were not driven out—also took them out of any familial-related connections and obligations.

The parents would be well-served to acknowledge their son’s decision, not impose themselves on him—honor the boundaries they have established—and rewrite their wills (each parent should have his/her own will), and allocate their estate elsewhere. That’ll be hard to do, emotionally, but it’s necessary according to the son’s and his wife’s boundaries. That reallocation might also lead to friction between the son and daughter-in-law and the other son, but that’s among those three; it’s irrelevant to the fact of the two having decided to leave the family altogether.

Overly Optimistic

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Meghan Cox Gordon likes the idea of typos in finished products.

If there’s a goof, you know the author is human. Writers who compose using their own eyes and brains (and fingers) are going to err. Machines that collate and disgorge synthetic blocks of text, or that comb through human-generated text for usage mistakes, are not.

Not so. AI will learn to introduce typos and mistaken phrases entirely separately from its “ordinary” hallucinations. Dishonest writers and plagiarists will inject typos and mistaken phrases in attempts to disguise their own dishonesty.

Chilling Effects

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Who’s doing the chilling, though?

The FCC has opened an early review of the broadcast licenses of eight of ABC‘s broadcast stations, and ABC has sued to put a stop to it. The FCC says the review is over ABC‘s—in particular, Disney’s—use of DEI initiatives to determine whether they violated the agency’s prohibition on unlawful discrimination. ABC‘s executives claim the review is based on President Donald Trump’s (R) dislike of two program’s anti-Trump coverage.

There’s this, though, that exposes the underlying problem regardless of those competing motives.

In its filing, ABC said the FCC’s actions are already influencing editorial decisions and having a chilling effect on its news operations.

If the executives think the government’s move really is about suppressing ABC speech, any supposed speech chilling is not from anything the government is doing. These executives are preemptively chilling their own speech. If they had the courage of their convictions, they would press ahead with their editorial decisions unchanged. By chilling—altering—their decision making, they could be seen to be tacitly admitting that the FCC’s review is justified—especially since the review is only just getting started and no evidence has yet been collected.

SNAP Reforms

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The Senate’s Progressive-Democrats object to States having even minimal fiscal responsibility for managing Federal outlays to them for welfare programs. Their latest objections concern reforms to SNAP payments. Currently, the Federal government forks over 100% of the funding for a State’s SNAP program, and the State is solely responsible for disbursing those funds to eligible recipients. The current reforms, enacted last year, require those States with error rates—paying out to fraudulent recipients, for instance—above a low level (10%) to begin picking up a small part of the SNAP tab, with effect in 2028.

Progressive-Democrat Senators, en masse, object, and they’re blocking a farm bill unless they get that deadline extended. Their real goal is to functionally eliminate the deadline.

There is an alternative that would render this sort of Progressive-Democrat…foolishness…moot, and it’s one I’ve proposed before. Maybe its time has come, in response to Party’s studied intransigence to any reform that would reduce dependency on Party government.

Designate a nearby year as Year0, and add up all the Federal funds transfers for any purpose to each State in that year. Lump that sum into a single payment for the year. In each subsequent year, reduce that lump sum payment by 10% of the Year0 transfer, until the transfer is reduced, in about 10 years, to $0.00.

Federal transfers—taxpayer dollars—in general should not be getting made to any State except in exigent circumstances. The good citizens of Texas should not see their tax remittances pushed on over to New York or California. The good citizens of New York and California should not see their remittances relayed to Illinois or Iowa. Each State and territory in our union should keep its citizens’ tax remittances solely for the benefit of that State’s/territory’s citizens.

Exigent circumstances: when a State-wide or region-wide emergency arises that’s beyond the resources of that State or region, then Federal transfers (a going in allocation, to start the discussion, would be 50% grant and 50% loan at market interest rates) would be an appropriate means of assisting the State or region in dealing with the emergency.