My understanding is that rent control backfired pretty spectacularly in the long term.
The better plan here would be to stop companies from buying residential properties, to incentivized the conversion of commercial properties into apartments, to penalize banks and individuals who are sitting on unused residential properties.
Oh, and wipe out all student loan debt so that younger generations have a prayer of buying a house someday.
Who told you rent control backfired? Cause that’s a lie. It was just never adopted as widely as it should have been, and rich owners always have the ear of lawmakers … the same can’t be said of poor/working poor people.
Capitalist/free market* economists.
Rent control works just fine in a more socialist model, especially when the government is a prime builder of housing without seeking profit, as almost every European country was during the 50s-70s. It’s only when government gets out of house building and everything gets privatisated and for-profit that rent control fails.
Don’t know if you’ve noticed this yet, but the United States has a capitalist economy.
Semi. It’s got bits and pieces of all systems, which is a hint that the “-ism” powering any country’s economy doesn’t have as big an impact as its leaders.
Unfortunately, capitalism tends to reward corruption, it’s much easier and profitable to be corrupt than to do the right thing™.
Libraries are socialist. Otherwise every person in a fully capitalist system would be expected to buy their personal copy of a book.
What you’re referring to is called a “mixed economy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy
And you’re right - there are scales with capitalism and socialism weighing against each other in basically every economy. Finland, Norway, France are examples where it’s tipped a bit more in favour of the “socialism” side. But the US has plenty of elements of socialism, from housing coops in the Bronx, to utility coops in the midwest (that helped pave the way for the electrification of rural America), to credit unions, to welfare policies, to the Alaska social wealth fund, and I could keep going.
