Whenever I listen to hardcore gun people and CCW zealots, I always imagine that they see the world as a post-apocalyptic movie. This is no longer the suburbs but Mad Max.

I agree that mobility is important and that the financial/mortgage crisis showed us how bad immobility can be but there is more than being attached to a house that is worth less than paid for with a bad mortgage. I would say that home ownership has more to do with immobility than rent control. Most people I know with rent control in NYC are artist types who got their apartments decades ago. These people are often true bohemians and never going to leave New York.

However this raises a lot more questions about home ownership than rent control. The idea that home ownership is bad is still very much a contrarian argument. Homeownership for better or for worse is still a corner of the American middle class/way of life. There was also questions about communities that are too residential/not economically diverse and too far from urban centers (hence preferences for urbanism by many policy and planning plates.)

In the end though, most people are not nomads and want to settle down sooner rather than later. I imagine even in these days of easy traveling, many people do not move far from home or eventually come back.

Some questions and I am not necessarily saying this in terms of being pro-rent control:

1. Is there any evidence (not theory, actual evidence) that markets without rent control would produce adequate and affordable housing for the working class/poor?

Matt Y wrote about San Francisco needing new housing quick a few months ago. This might be true but can anyone provide any evidence that landlords and developers would want to cater to anyone other than the upper-middle professional classes. All of the new housing in the Bay Area seems targeted towards educated types in the tech industry. Maybe there is a lot of demand here but some of the less-educated workers in my office have commutes of three to four hours a day because that is where they can afford to live.

What kind of housing policies will allow people with modest incomes to have shorter commutes? I know NYC tried to offer lucrative tax abatements to condo developers to create 80/20 buildings (20 percent for modest or law income residents) but the developers found it more profitable to just pay a fine or sum to the NYC Housing Department than actually create subsidized rents for a small portion of the building.

2. On the mobility issue, I think this is more tricky. A lot of people don't want to move because they don't want to move. They are close to their friends, families, and loved ones even if there might be jobs in North Dakota or whereever. Or other reasons. This is where people in life care more than economics. Why should people be forced to uproot themselves from their families?

Even for those of us who want to move, there are issues. I have strongly considered moving back to NYC. I've done some steps towards this like take and pass the NY Bar but I can't move back without a job but getting a job seems to require being in NYC. This is not a simple trick. Many landlords also want proof of employment like pay stubs. I have a good bit of untouchable savings but the simple fact is that moving back to NYC would require a job first.

TNC had a good quote about this recently.

He thought that people get caught plagiarizing when they want to be seen as oracles instead of just answering questions.

Well you can't say I did not level any criticism.

It is merely an ideological disagreement with neo-liberalism. I remain unconvinced that it will lead to what Matt Y says it will and I do think he is too technocratic.

He is certainly a polarizing writer/figure.

I have leveled my criticism's at him in other posts.

It is my general critique of neo-liberalism. I think, like Libertarians often, they are not good at dealing with realities. Ne0-Liberals are highly complicit in growing income inequality and not being too critical of stuff in the private sector. They focused too much on the privitization and not enough on protecting workers or equal growth for all socio-economic strata. Matt Y is typical of writers in the Brooks/Friedman set where it is more about coming up with a routine and counter-intuitive arguments than truth. He is the kind of policy wonk that seems to find electioneering and convincing people to be distasteful.

I am not arguing for income caps but you can't have all the growth in the one percent.

Speaking of aesthetic preferences.

I also really like urban living, public transportation, and walkable neighborhoods.

However, I don't want urban living to resemble something like Seoul in South Korea where everyone lives in really large and anonymous concrete buildings or the hell sprawl that is Los Angeles (though Venice Beach and other parts are very nice).

My preferred urbanism as always been low-rise urbanism. The kind you see in Brownstone Brooklyn, San Francisco, parts of Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Boston/Cambridge, Philadelphia, etc.

I often get the sense from Matt Y that he would rid this all down.

I don't think so. You can't deliver medicine or other physical items through the internet and in rural areas, the Post Office is the only option.

UPS and FedEx don't deliver to rural areas and often hand over post offices for delivery.

I live in San Francisco. Every now and then I order something on-line and have it sent to my office and the company decides to use UPS. UPS for reasons unknown to me decides to hand it over to the Post Office to deliver even though my office is in the height of downtown and not rural America.

As I understand the main problems for the post-office are that they are required to make huge future payments to their health and pension funds in ways that other organizations are not. If you got rid of these requirements, the Post Office would be healthy.

That depends on what we mean by West. California (especially in the cities), Portland, and Seattle are likely to be more favorable to gun control.

Montana and New Mexico probably not as much.

Again in the environment I grew up in, guns were associated with violence and crime. Not hunting.

As said above, I think this is largely geographic and cultural.

I grew up in Nassau County in a suburb where there is not much of a hunting culture because you would need to drive far before reaching any sort of hunting area. The general activities were more in the golf and tennis line for adults. I don't know of any classmate from my childhood who was taught how to use guns or anyone whose parents knew how to use guns.

I also only know a handful of people whose parents served in Vietnam.

So if you grow up in an area like mine, you are probably more amendable to gun control/regulation.

That being said, I am not opposed to hunting as an activity but don't see any reason for people to own assault rifles or automatic weapons.

There are ways to interpret the 2nd Amendment that go counter to yours and many people believe in those interpretations and many of those are more brilliant lawyers and constitutional scholars than either of us.

The Constitution is rather unclear and open to interpretation in many places and the Second Amendment is one of those places. Scalia's ideas not withstanding.

Yeah. I see gun control as more of an urban/some-suburbs issue vs. rural issue/other suburbs issue than a liberal/conservative one.

I think gun restrictions would ceases these types of shootings. There are many more gun deaths and mass shootings in the U.S. than in European countries and gun restrictions must play a role.

That being said, I realize that my position is probably a minority one right now and changes must be done in a way that goes for a long-game. This is going to be a decades-long battle.

As to your other question and in a completely unrelated tone, I thought it was really cute and sweet that the Czech delegation wore Wellies in tribute to their British hosts.

I agree that growth and sometimes very rapid growth can be good and that the trick is figuring out what is real growth vs. another bubble.

Humans seem to fall for a lot of bubbles or there is the real deal in growth (Goggle, Amazon, PayPal, Ebay) that can also be part of a bubble (a ton of other tech companies). Maybe a lot of us have trouble distinguishing between growth vs. the illusion of growth.

There are also non-economic considerations. There was another thread recently where someone mentioned that the meaning to life is more than economics. I think most people would agree. The problems seem to be that my version of "there is more to life than economics and growth" might be one where another person thinks that economics or growth are more important.

NIMBY v. Development seems to be the strongest area where this disagreement comes up. I agree that a lot of NIMBYism is very out of hand and can often go to far and there might be too many hoops for developers/builders/home owners to jump through before getting their permits. However, I also think that neighborhoods do have collective rights to retain the appearance of their neighborhoods. Maybe not in keeping single-family housing but certainly in preventing someone from just buying a lot, tearing down the existing structure(s) and building something that sticks out like a sore thumb.

There should be a middle ground option between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses that can make most people happy or at least give each side some of what they want but not everything.*

*I'm a firm believer that political compromise of this sort. The problem is a lot of people are not. Look at Jim DeMint and the Club for Growth as a good example.

MFarmer strikes me as a very clever performance artist or as a variant of Poe's law in action.

Yes I know Poe's law only deals with religious extremism but I use it as a more broad thing like when I can't tell whether something seems like it belongs in the Onion or not.

What do you think is the line between economic freedom and consumer protection?

As an example:

I am considering trying to find a new gym. Preferably one that is closer to work. My current gym is near my apartment but I would rather not get up at 5:20 so I can be at the gym at 6 in the morning (I hate working out after work).

So I began searching on the net for gyms near my office. The problem is that very few (only one) gave prices for membership on the website. The rest of them either provided information on their types of membership (without price) or required you to fill out a personal information form so they could have you talk to a membership services person.

I'd rather not do this. All I want is the price and this seems very simple to put on a webpage. I'm very cranky about businesses that make me hand over data before getting information on prices or go through with being signed up.

Would you say it is against economic freedom to compel companies to list their prices in clear and visible language? Why should my only option as a consumer be to jump through hoops in under to get the information I need to make an informed decision?

How do you feel about binding arbitration clauses in consumer contracts between parties of uneven bargaining power?

How do you feel about people who argue for sustainable growth instead of just growth, growth, growth?

While I still support capitalism, this does not necessarily mean I think the preferred policies of business need to always be followed. My impression of Matt Y is that he is still a bit too innocent on how the neo-liberal mantra of growth, growth, growth has not translated into growth for everyone. I think there is something to be said about wage stagnation and how the 1 percent is capturing way too much of the wealth.

This gets into pesky and hard issues. We should reward innovation but by how much? Yes successful CEOs deserve a lot of money but they also seem to have created a world where they get a lot of money whether they do well or do piss poorly. This is a luxury that very few people have.

Now I can see that you are not a libertarian

:)

My point on right-wingers still being hypocritical for calling liberals and people on the left utopians still stands.

Good points and sorry for calling you a libertarian incorrectly.

Several years ago on NPR's Planet Money podcast, they were interviewing various economists to give people a sense of the various schools: Marxist, Chicago, Austrian, Kensyian, etc. They interviewed one libertarian professor out of George Mason University who came very close to arguing that if you lift all government restrictions, we would all be happy shiny rainbows. His honest and sincere example was that he thought corporations would have come up with some miracle drug that allowed people to eat whatever they want without getting fat. It was only but for the pesky FDA that this has not happened yet.

I'd say that is a rather romantic view. And one I will call bullshit on or at least using very bad science and going to our basest desires to promote libertarianism.

The problem with terms like "romantic" and "utopian" is that like hypocrisy, it is very hard to see in your opponents or other people but extremely hard to see in yourself.

Libertarians and the Right always seem to like to accuse liberals of being nothing but dreamers with their heads in the clouds while painting themselves as the true realists on human nature. A quick look at the "non-fiction" best seller list of the NY Times reveals that there is quite a cottage industry in right-wing books making this exact message.

I call bullshit. There is just as much romanticism and utopian on the right especially in social politics. There is probably just as much utopianism and romanticism in libertarian politics.

I went to one of those colleges for undergrad. While I will never reach the upper-rungs of power, I have known more than my fair share of people to reach the wedding pages of the NYTimes. Also known as the merger and acquisitions page.

IIRC, meritocracy was not meant to be a good term. The original sociologist who coined the term imagined something like the present state happening. However, society ignored that.

So is there anything that can break a pseudo-meritocracy? Probably not completely. This is a wicked problem in that there are no full solutions. Only reforms that can make things better or worse.

As I said before, nepotism is a tricky issue. It is natural for people to want to help their off-spring in as many ways as possible. Though what counts as help differs wildly through culture or culture. A lot of cultures and people think you help your children by unceremoniously kicking them out at 18. When I lived in Japan, a lot of my UK housemates told me that they were required by their parents to pay "rent" while in high school. The sum was not high but it was not low either. I thought this was madness but I grew up in an area where parents could and did pay their children healthy allowances (again not too low or too high) because said parents wanted their children to concentrate on school and not be distracted by after-school jobs. This would continue until the grad school level for a sizable chunk of my classmates.

Both sides will go in circles about which helps children more and never reach a consensus.

Nepotism is also something that goes across socio-economic cultures in many ways. I know many people who would decry someone who went to work for their parent's law firm or financial firm as being a "little rich kid". They might even argue that if your dad was a lawyer, you should not become a lawyer and forge your own path. However, the same people would also be accepting of someone whose dad or mom got them a spot in the police or fire department because said kid "has been bred to be a policeman or a fireman"

I find it odd that it is acceptable to breed kids into some family professions but not others. As far as I can tell, the dividing line is on profitability. If the business needs to employ family members to survive, hiring your son and daughter is okay especially if it is a non-educated type of job like being a waitress or manning the front desk. If the job requires a degree or training, hiring your son and daughter is dirty, dirty nepotism. Same if it is a desirable career like art and media.

All of this adds to my belief that most human discourse is resentment and counter-resentment.

I would have much rather they saved the homeowners and innocent investors and let the banks fail personally.

That being said, I am not opposed to less regulation if it came hand in hand with a very robust welfare state and social safety nets. This was mentioned on a thread over the weekend. Sweden has a lot fewer economic regulations but they combine it with universal healthcare, good public transportation, and other aspects of the social contract.

This seems like a fair trade of to me. But there are many people in the US who find this trade-off unacceptable and want no or little regulation plus they think that the Government has no role in creating a welfare state with social safety nets. This to me is unacceptable and this is where political compromise should happen. The Libertarians get a bit of what they want and the liberals get a bit of what they want. No one gets everything.

We seemed to remember things for about two or three generations.

Then we promptly forget them and need to relearn the hard way.

Though there is always that group that likes to be bloody Bourbons who "remember everything and learn nothing."

Did you get the memo?

We are all secret Jacobins and Marxists to the right-wing and to libertarians. We don't want the New Deal, we really want the Reign of Terror and Stalinist Show Trials.

/sarcasm

I am not against rewarding success or innovation especially when it is good. I do not begrudge the Bill Gates, Warren Buffets, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. Same with loads of other inventors. Nor am I against highly-specialized professionals making significant salaries because of their skill or education. Highly-skilled lawyers and doctors probably do deserve salaries in the high six or low seven figures. I would like to be one of those highly-skilled lawyers one day.

When I talk about income inequality, I am not arguing that everyone should have their salaries capped at 100,000 USD a year. I once met a resident of the UK who moved to the United States. She was attending university later in life and explained that in the UK income discrimination is not allowed based on educational levels. I am not sure on the ins and outs of that particular law. At the least, I guess she means if two people have the same job, you cannot pay the one with more education a higher salary. She also seemed to imply that it covered promotions as well. She was angry at needing to go to university in the US.

I thought her stance was rather daft.

What am I against is the how the financial services industry has rigged itself with complex menchanisms which seem to be the equivalent of having your cake and eating it too. Or the general level of unaccountability from the so-called Masters of the Universe. Contrast what happened in the London Whale scandal v. The Barclays scandal. The CEO of Barclays was forced to step down, the CEO of Morgan Stanley was not. Did you see the e-mails from the LIBOR scandal which pretty much sounded like they were written by a 23-year old stoner? One that happens to have a very powerful job.

It is clear to me that something is rotten in the financial services industry and leaving them alone and to the magic of the market. As you said above, we punish murderers because we want less murder. I want bankers and investors to behave more like the fiduciaries they are. This means punishing the misbehaving ones.