“Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out”—David Horowitz

A reflection on the abuse of government authority.

February 9, 2023 by Richard L. Cravatts 4 Comments

3

George Santayana’s admonition that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” was apparently lost on progressive Democrats in Congress, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D–N.Y.), who appealed to President Biden to address what they recklessly described as “corporate price gouging in the real estate sector.” In a January 9 letter to the White House, 50 members of Congress urged the administration to use various agencies to impose a nationwide program of rent control, since, as the letter asserted, “the rent is too high and millions of people across this country are struggling to stay stably housed as a result.”

What the letter writers have conveniently forgotten, of course, is that the rental housing market is still reeling from the rent and eviction moratorium questionably implemented by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the midst of the Covid pandemic in the form of the CARES Act Section 4024(b). As a result of that moratorium, property owners—who themselves had to continue paying mortgages, property taxes, utilities and other operating expenses—found themselves with tenants who could decide whether or not they could afford their present rent, resulting in months of losses to property owners as tenants simply refused to pay rent—whether or not they could afford to. So the “corporate price gouging” cited in the Congressional letter may simply reflect the real estate industry’s effort to begin to recoup the significant losses experienced during the moratorium.

Rent control is not a rent moratorium, but it does reward tenants and punish rental property owners by a process euphemistically defined as “rent stabilization,” but which is actually a government attempt to control what rent a private property owner can receive from a tenant, with the assumption that private landlords can, and should, provide affordable housing to needy renters by absorbing losses forced on them in what should be an unencumbered marketplace.

Even if the Biden administration were successful in implementing a nation-wide program of rent control, the likelihood of which is questionably legal at best and well beyond federal authority and reach, rent regulations have historically resulted in the exact opposite effect intended by the municipalities that implemented them.

While policymakers have often looked to regulation in private marketplaces to induce desired social benefits, the lesson of rent control is simple: Not only has it consistently failed to serve those very individuals it was designed to help —namely, the poor and elderly —but it has a number of perverse effects, specifically, of actually creating a scarcity of affordable housing, speeding the deterioration of existing rental stock, polarizing owners and renters, and skewing the marketplace with artificially high and low rent levels.

Long positioned by its advocates as a government-sponsored housing program, rent control is, in fact, paid for exclusively by private owners of rental property. Its policies determine what rents may be charged, when and by how much rents can be raised, what actions an owner may take to evict or replace a tenant, whether and when an owner may occupy his own property and at what price, if at all, a property may be sold or transferred, or even if it can be demolished. Critics of rent control policies contend, in fact, that such regulations amount to an unconstitutional “taking” of private property without just compensation.

The fifty signers of the letter to the White House contend that something must be done about housing affordability. And if that something is a new rent control program, they and the other housing advocates looking at that option would do well to consider how rent control created far more problems than it solved in the housing markets that chose to use it:

• The onerous effects of rent control do not penalize the corporate “gougers” the Democrats fantasize about in their letter as much as they do the small property owner, often of limited means and with less income than some of their tenants. In fact, while housing activists and liberal policymakers like to envision landlords as greedy operators of vast real estate empires, exploiting tenants at their will, the reality is that, as a Brookings Institution study found, “40 percent of residential property units are owned by individual investor landlords.” Moreover, the study found, “among those owning residential investment property, roughly a third are from low- to moderate-income households; property income constitutes up to 20 percent of their total household income,” and that, while the Democrats seek to protect only tenants, rent control will adversely affect their other constituents—property owners— since “unstable rent payments are even more detrimental for individual investors—often referred to as ‘mom and pop’landlords—who carry greater financial vulnerabilities.”
• Cities with rent-regulated housing have a great disparity in the rent levels between rent-controlled units and market-rate units. The Cato Institute’s William Tucker revealed how price controls, including rent controls, typically create a ‘shadow market’ in which demand exceeds supply, creating a shortage —in this case of affordable rental units. Renters who cannot access controlled units, therefore, are faced with the option of having to choose from units elsewhere in the market with disproportionately high rent levels. “Although rent controls are widely believed to lower rents,” Tucker wrote, “data . . . collected from eighteen North American cities show that the advertised rents of available apartments in rent-regulated cities are dramatically higher than they are in cities without rent control.” Moreover, Tucker observed, “inhabitants in cities without rent control have a far easier time finding moderately priced rental units than do inhabitants in rent-controlled cities.”
• Rent control makes controlled units scarcer by encouraging renters never to give up their units. Without a means test, with a scarcity of other controlled units to move to, and with the minuscule vacancy rates characteristic of cities with rent regulations, tenants have many disincentives to move or even look for alternate housing. Couples renting controlled large units with multiple bedrooms will continue to rent that unit long after their children have moved out, creating an inefficiency of housing use and preventing a new family who needs extra bedrooms from moving into a unit suited for them. Faced with controlled rents, a landlord is also naturally inclined not to want low or moderate-income renters, choosing instead those more affluent and secure tenants who are less likely to default on their rent payments and more likely to enhance and upgrade their unit.
• There is no way—short of the creation of onerous and coercive new local bureaucracies—to efficiently, fairly, or accurately assess tenants who are elderly, disabled, or ‘low or moderate’ income, those individuals generally identified as being most in need of rent protection. Housing activists, and the rent control boards who have historically served as their aggressive advocates, have assiduously resisted any attempt at means testing, positioning it as invasive and in violation of tenant privacy. But while they are happy to let tenants self-assess their right to landlord-subsidized housing without any review of their actual ability to pay, they see no problem in evaluating every financial detail of a landlord’s ownership—up to and including determining the return he or she can enjoy on a property, how the property is maintained or improved, and at what profit it may be operated or even sold.
• Related to the decline in the market value of buildings put under rent control is the trend of owners to defer maintenance and repairs, since in the face of controlled rents, an adequate return on investment is difficult to realize. While tenants benefit from fixed rents, they often have to live in properties that are deteriorating and offering fewer amenities since owners cannot afford any extra expenses or investment in the face of limited rents.
• A decline in the market value of properties, of course, can also significantly impact the tax base of a municipality, meaning that taxpayers in rent-controlled cities may often end up with lower property tax revenues and reduced public services and facilities as a result. A study by the Duke Financial Economics Center found that in Saint Paul, for example, “the introduction of rent control caused an economically and statistically significant decline of 6-7% in the value of real estate . . ,” and that, more importantly to the city’s taxpayers, “rent control [could result in] an aggregated loss of $1.57 billion in property value and a 4% expected shortfall in property tax revenue.”
• Rent regulations serve to discourage homeownership opportunities and the creation of new housing. In regulated housing markets, investment capital also is not likely to flow in the direction of new construction. Investors are unlikely to put capital at risk when government interference limits their return, exposes their projects to uncertain approvals and permits, and offers no long-term guarantees for future rent levels and cash flows. A building permit analysis by HUD of the Saint Paul real estate market “shows an 84 percent decline in building permit activity in the six months since St. Paul passed rent control compared to the same period a year prior,” since, contrary to all rational real estate economics, even builders of new housing units faced the prospect of rent controls—a huge disincentive to build any new housing in the first place.

If policymakers decide they seek to provide more affordable rental housing for the country’s deserving tenants, it is clear that rent control is neither equitable nor efficient in providing that benefit. If property owners are called on to subsidize renters, then they need to be compensated fairly for the losses they experience in a regulated housing market. That compensation takes many forms but has included property tax abatements, building permit variances and tax incentives for creating new affordable housing, or rent vouchers (similar to HUD’s Section 8 program) to bring rents up to market levels when tenants could not otherwise afford to live in those units.

But it is an abuse of government authority to interfere with how landlords and tenants deal with each other in private markets and what rents are offered and accepted, especially since rent control, as has been shown, unfairly places the burden of providing affordable housing to the nation’s neediest tenants solely on the heads of private property owners instead of having all taxpayers provide that benefit through rational, productive, and efficient government actions that do not penalize landlords in inequitable, constitutionally-questionable ways.

Richard L. Cravatts

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of the forthcoming book, The Slow Death of the University: How Radicalism, Israel Hatred, and Race Obsession are Destroying Academia.

State of the Union speech? By Biden? Seriously?

Republicans — all of them — should have stayed home.

You don’t show unity with a dictatorship. You don’t honor the Constitution by dignifying this insanity; instead, you legitimize the Constitution’s destruction.

Having said that, the Republican response to the creepy puppet’s tirade was excellent:

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas:

The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left, Sanders said, “The choice is between normal or crazy, and it’s wrong”.

“Upon taking office just a few weeks ago I signed executive orrders to ban CRT, racism, and indoctrination in our schools, eliminate the use of the derogatory term ‘Latinx’ in our government, repealed COVID orders and said never again to authoritarian mandates and shutdowns,” she said.

“In the radical left’s America, Washington taxes you and lights your hard-earned money on fire, but you get crushed with high gas prices, empty grocery shelves, and our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race, but not to love one another or our great country,” she said.

“And while you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day,” Sanders said. “Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.”

“Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols … all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is — your freedom of speech,” she added. [source: NEWSMAX]

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Joe Biden misinforms, ignores, and attacks—and then calls for “unity,” as the country collectively slides into ruin.

By Victor Davis Hanson

After listening to the State of the Union address, Americans know why the latest Reuters poll has Joe Biden at 41 percent approval. 

Vice President Kamala Harris polls even lower—despite the obsequious efforts of the most biased media in history that has, in effect, merged with the Democratic Party. 

The nation was reminded again why only 37 percent of Biden’s own party want him to run again. 

Only a quarter of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction under his leadership.

Given all that, what could a president possibly tell a nation when he entered office inheriting a 1.4 percent inflation rate only to spike it to 7 percent? How did Americans’ 30-year mortgages of 2.7 percent soar to 6.5 percent in less than two years?  

How does a president explain that eggs climbed to $7 a dozen, or a thin steak hit $15 a pound, or a sheet of plywood reached $95?

How does a president explain to Americans that gas averaged $2.39 a gallon when he took office and, even after draining the strategic petroleum reserve, it is still  $3.50 a gallon—and recently spiked at $5 a gallon in many states. 

Can Joe Biden explain why once affordable, or even cheap natural gas more than tripled in price in less than a year? 

What can a president say when in his first two years, over 5 million foreign nationals poured into the United States—all illegally across a nonexistent border? 

How could Biden explain the humiliation in Afghanistan?  The draining of our arsenal of key weaponry? Or the inability to take down a communist Chinese spy balloon when it first brazenly floated above America—photographing military bases and missile sites as it crossed the entire United States with impunity?

We know the answers to all these questions. 

Joe Biden simply did on Tuesday in his state of the union address what he always does: misinform, ignore, and attack!

Misinform.  After sending inflation, energy, and interest rates to astronomical rates, and then seeing them momentarily taper off a bit, Biden declares that he “lowered” these indices that remain far higher than they were when he entered office. 

He brags about a low unemployment rate. But Biden never discloses the better indicator of the labor participation rate that has declined under his tenure—or the fact he inherited a growing economy naturally rebounding on autopilot from a disastrous two-year COVID lockdown.

Ignore. Consider what he will never mention. China just violated international law and U.S. airspace. How did Beijing assume rightly that they so easily could get away with it? 

There is no southern border. Joe Biden destroyed it. 

He greenlighted over 5 million illegal aliens to enter the United States without audit or legality—even as smuggled Mexican drugs kill 100,000 Americans each year.

He never will concede he stopped the building of the wall. He omits that he demonized innocent border patrol officers. He nullified the immigration laws he swore to uphold.

Biden ignores the $4 trillion he has borrowed in just two years to inflate the national debt, now on its way to over $32 trillion this year. The middle class has bled 20-30 percent of their 401k retirement plans representing years’ worth of lost hard-earned savings.

Yet Biden promised hundreds of billions of dollars more in borrowing with no idea of how to pay back the already crushing national debt that will incur $450 billion just to service this year alone.

He skipped over how he demolished U.S. deterrence abroad after the greatest humiliation in modern military history, with the flight from Kabul and the abandonment of billions of dollars in military equipment. 

He never mentions that Russia went into Ukraine because Vladimir Putin saw no downside after this debacle in Afghanistan, or that Biden’s own inept remarks about not worrying over a Russian invasion of Ukraine if it just proved to be “minor” probably played some role.

Attack! Remember, Biden comes to life only when he smears his enemies while calling for “unity” and “bipartisanship.”  

Only then his voice rises, his brow furrows, and his face reddens. He claims that  “the rich” avoid “paying their fair share,” even as he knows that just one percent of the country pays over 40 percent of all income taxes. 

Biden somehow demagogued the lethal violence of black police officers against a black victim in Memphis into evidence of America’s supposed racism. He smeared all law enforcement—even as inner-city violent and hate crimes soared as never before. 

He utterly lied about Republicans demanding a sunsetting of Social Security and Medicare. 

He beat the dead horse of January 6 (while insanely connecting it to the attack on Paul Pelosi!), despite the stacked congressional investigative committee and the suppression of critical video evidence and email communications involving security lapses.

In sum,  it was the same old, same old dishonest Joe Biden: misinform, ignore, and attack—and then call for “unity” as the country collectively slides into ruin.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.

 Archive Follow

People say the Republicans must move away from being “extreme”. B.S.! Extreme means consistent. There’s good consistency as well as bad. Hitler was bad consistency. So was Stalin. So are Iranian totalitarian mullahs. America’s founders were GOOD consistency. The Bill of Rights was a gloriously extreme document for its time. It still is.

By the way, what about the Democrats? They are now undiluted extremists. There are no moderate Democrats. Were it not for a few Trump appointees on federal courts, we would all have federal agents at our homes jabbing us with medical experiments. Emergency orders remain in permanent effect in blue states, meaning dictatorship at any time. They plan to take our gas stoves and gas cars, even if it means killing us. The FBI raids the homes of Republicans, not Democrats. People are forced to pay the huge tuition bills of strangers. Government is debasing our currency through hyperinflationary spending. The borders are completely open, and immigrants are made permanent wards of the state at the expense of Americans who are citizens, and immigrants who entered legally. The military is a shambles and the commander in chief is afraid to shoot down an enemy spy balloon. Why does nobody criticize the extremism of the people in power who control the culture, the entire agenda and virtually the entire government?

You won’t beat the ruthlessly consistent Communism and fascism of today’s “Democrats” without something at least as strong from the opposite, pro-freedom direction. Donald Trump did not fail because he was too extreme; he failed because he wasn’t extreme enough. In fighting the evil and occupying forces destroying America and civilization itself, it’s time to get ruthless and serious.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Why can’t criminal negligence apply to a President?

Of course, my question is rhetorical. There is ZERO chance of any leftist Democratic president being indicted, impeached or being held accountable in any way, unless he offends someone within the Party. But in our federal government, there is, from now on, only one Party. That’s why freedom loving states and localities simply have to secede from the negligent, dangerous monstrosity we permitted our federal government, over generations, to become.

The biggest problem, right now, are conservatives. They fantasize that Donald Trump will rise again, and sweep into office in a self-evidently rigged electoral college. Or that Ron DeSantis will do the same. We are past all that. There is no American republic. It’s over. It has been falling apart for a long time. Obama was able to kill it because it was so weak. And Joe Biden is simply the cashing in, the clown installed as a puppet as if to mock Americans for the negligence THEY and earlier generations have shown the legacy of freedom left to them.

There is no more American republic. Get used to it. It’s a nasty oligarchy with the potential to become the world’s most dangerous dictatorship. There’s a pretense of “rule of law”, which is supposed to be objective. But the truth is obvious: If you’re loyal to the Party, and if the Party likes you, then you can get away with absolutely anything; if you’re disloyal to the Party, you’re toast.

Forget the federal government of the U.S. as any meaningful source of justice, truth, rationality or credibility. There’s only your state (if your state government is not leftist), your locality (if you’re in a nonleftist city), and — most of all — yourself. In the challenging times ahead, it’s every man for himself. Deny that all you wish, until you can’t anymore.

I am saying all this not to depress anyone, but in hopes that the truth will set us free. Because pretending that reality is other than what it is — with the facts overwhelmingly staring you the face — is no path to freedom.

Self-delusion will not accomplish anything.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Biden claims inflation was already there when he came into office. It’s true–because of the massive spending by his own party in Congress, spending that still President Trump went along with.

Biden massively expanded the spending once selected as president, making the problem much worse.

The government is to blame for the mess. Biden’s party is the party of big government. In fact, they are really the only Party with power. So he and his kind ARE to blame.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Not only did Locke’s philosophy call for our 1776 revolution, it reaches out to us today . . . but with a twist. Where Locke gave little attention to the nuts and bolts of how a community goes about restoring free government after its dissolution, our Framers provided the solution in Article V of their Constitution.¹

Locke didn’t conceptualize free government as either a contract or compact. If governed and governors are equal and interchangeable, as they must be in a republic, trust in one another is essential.

He reasoned that “trust” was the best term to describe the relationship between the sovereign people and the government of their creation. It is simply in the nature of a personal assurance, a fiduciary trust of governors to keep within their enumerated limits to achieve the ends of any government, which is the good of the governed.² The people themselves decide if their governmental trustees violate their trust. To remain interchangeable, those who wield this power, fellow citizens all, must not develop an interest distinct from that of the community.³

The community grants powers for attaining certain ends and no more. If the ends are neglected, or power is put to other purposes, government is dissolved and the authority devolves back to the people/community. “Governments,” wrote Locke, “are dissolved . . . when the legislative, or the Prince (executive), either of them act contrary to their Trust.”⁴

Once trust is broken, that’s it. Who trusts anyone after they broke their word? Is the community to be a battered wife who keeps going back to her husband in the full knowledge that his promises are empty and his abuse will continue?

Locke’s dissolution due to violation of trust doesn’t mean the government folds up shop and everyone goes home. It means their subsequent actions are no longer legitimate or binding on the community. On closer reflection, we see every day what Locke had in mind. How many laws are outside the limits of our Constitution? Every violation of Natural Law or the supreme law of the land harms our respect for statutory law and especially non-legislative regulations that never deserved respect or obedience in the first place.

When trust is substituted in this way for either a contract or compact, Constitutional change is sanctioned. It secures the sovereignty of the people who have the perpetual power to cashier their governors and remodel their government.⁵

The great danger to free government occurs when the people recognize a breach of trust and do nothing about it. Rather than put our governors on notice of dissolution, that trust is at an end, people are more inclined to be patient and endure accumulated outrages. Locke wrote that if the governors resist reforms, then the people cease to be a community and a State of Nature is at hand, with all of its disadvantages. Should the State of Nature return, then there is no final judge here on earth, and the ultimate appeal can only be to God . . . in revolution. A real mess.⁶

But we needn’t accept as inevitable the bloody conclusions so common to republics IF we are willing to call out and correct violations on a regular basis through an Annual Article V Convention. Open Deep State criminality is less a disease and more a symptom of accelerating corruption that began long ago. One breach of trust followed another. The Deep State criminals are brazen; they flip off Congress and dare the nation to put them down. This is our sorry condition, in which a government of others not only recognizes no limits and acts contrary to its purposes, it functions under a separate set of unspoken standards that immunize them from the law.⁷

To Article V COS opponents, to those who believe a regular review of the people’s sovereignty at an Annual Article V Convention can only cause turmoil, John Locke wrote that when magistrates openly violate the trust put in them, the cynic may as well say that honest men may not oppose robbers because it may occasion bloodshed. If any mischief ensues, it is not the fault of he who defends his own right, but he who assaults his neighbors. If the innocent man must quietly quit all he has for the sake of peace, what kind of peace can there be which consists only in violence and rapine maintained for the benefit of the robbers and oppressors?

Rodney Dodsworth