Homelessness in the E.U.: Rectifying a Right

In late 2025, the E.U. Commission presented its first European Affordable Housing Plan. The E.U.’s involvement in “social housing,” which translates into federal funds being used to provide housing beyond homeless shelters for people who cannot afford to house themselves, implies that the programs of the states had been insufficient. The U.S. could take a lesson from the Commission’s plan, which is cleverly multi-pronged in tackling the societal problem. Both in the E.U. and U.S., both federal and state funds were needed even in 2025 when neither economy was in recession. It is better to increase the supply of affordable housing when times are good than when unemployment is soaring. This is an exception in the E.U. to the usual pattern wherein the E.U. increases its competencies, or enumerated powers, in periods of one crisis or another. Russia’s multi-year invasion of Ukraine, which borders the E.U., and the Union’s foreign and defense activity demonstrate how European integration has typically been enhanced by crisis rather than when times are good.

The full essay is at "Homelessness in the E.U."

On the Supply and Demand in Housing Markets: Rent Control in California

In February, 2019, Oregon’s legislature passed rent-control legislation limiting rent increases to 7% annually plus inflation. New York’s legislature strengthened the existing local rent-control regulations in New York City. Roughly six months later, California’s legislature passed rent-control legislation limiting annual rent increases to 5% after inflation and strengthening other tenant protections.[1] Not even the largest landlord group and the California Business Roundtable had opposed the legislation in spite of the fact that rent-control even as a concept flies in the face of the free-market ideology that has been so popular in America. Indeed, economists “from both the left and the right have a well-established aversion to rent control, arguing that such policies ignore the message of rising prices, which is to build more housing.”[2] Accordingly, only four of the American states (and Washington, D.C.) had some kind of local rent-control. So what accounts for the rent-control fever that had taken hold in 2019? I want to point to the immediate context then in California, and then to a more theoretical explanation that calls for distinguishing shelter from real-estate investing.

The full essay is at "California Rent Control."

---

1. Conor Dougherty and Luis Ferré-Sadurni, “California Approves Statewide Rent Control to Ease Housing Crisis,” The New York Times, September 12, 2019.

Wall Street Snuffed Out President Clinton's Goal of Homeownership for the Poor

It is one thing for the head of a government (or a government’s executive arm) to set a praiseworthy goal that is in the public interest, and quite another thing to rely on the financial sector to implement it. Finance has its own means tied to its own goals, with plenty of greed in the mix. Governmental officials may tend to minimize the potential damage from ego-laden greed to the goals of public policy. Such policy ideally strives for the good of the whole, whereas the goals of a private sector of a part. This could account, at least in part, for the financial crisis of 2008 and the continuing bear market in housing in much of the U.S.

The full essay is at "How Wall Street Snuffed Out Clinton's Goal."

TARP Paid Off: But What about the Foreclosures?

TARP, the "bailout" for banks rather than mortgage borrowers, was the first big issue facing the Obama administration before the roughly $800 billion stimulus plan and the health insurance overhaul that stoked the rise of the Tea Party movement. After supporting TARP, several Republicans lost in the elections of 2010 largely because of their votes. For many Americans, TARP is a symbol of big government at its worst, intervening in private markets with taxpayers’ billions to save Wall Street plutocrats while average Americans continued to struggle to make mortgage payments or lost their houses outright.  “This is the best federal program of any real size to be despised by the public like this,” said Douglas J. Elliott, a former investment banker now associated with the Brookings Institution. “It was probably the only effective method available to us to keep from having a financial meltdown much worse than we actually had. Had that happened, unemployment would be substantially higher than it is now, the deficit would have gone up even more than it has,” Mr. Elliott added. “But it really cuts against the grain for a public that is so angry at banks to think that something that so plainly helped the banks could also be good for the public.” TARP was good for the public not in that the funds enabled Wall Street bonuses; rather, the good was solely on the macro level, as the frozen credit markets eventually thawed such that the financial system meltdown was averted.  However, this does not mean that it was "the only effective method available."

The full essay is at "TARP and Foreclosures."

Sustenance: A Human Right in America?

In the fall of 2010, the following was said on Fox News: “The government should spend more on the war in Afghanistan in order to fight terrorism. The problem is that the government has gotten into entitlements.”  The latter presumably includes food stamps, public housing, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  To say that government ought to be engaged in defense and not in supplying needy citizens with food, shelter and health-care is distinct from saying that the federal government should concentrate on foreign policy and defense, while entitlements are formulated and funded by the state governments as their domestic programs. In other words, advocacy for a certain priority in government and for less government is distinct from advocacy for restoring balanced federalism. Most Europeans in the E.U. undoubtedly view the redistributive right for sustenance resources as founded on human rights and thus as a legitimate part of government.  In contrast, Americans do not typically apply a human rights justification to entitlements for other Americans even as foreign aid may be justified in part on this basis.

The full essay is at "Sustenance: A Human Right in America?"

Uncovering the Root of Poverty: An Addictive Habit

Addictive pain-killers killed 64,000 residents in the U.S. in 2016, in part because physicians tended to rely on patients’ self-determined ratings of pain on a scale of 1 to 10.[1] Such subjective ratings were of course vulnerable to self-seeking motives willfully negligent or even reckless in terms of health. A habit or marked tendency in favor of choices at the expense of a person’s own long-term well-being stems, I submit, from weak impulse-control. This, plus the related lack of consideration for other people, either causes or is associated generally with poor people at least in the United States.

Poverty, it has been said, is the cruelest form of war, for such war can go on and on and wreck subtle though tremendous damage on the afflicted. Yet the mentality that can get a person into such a war and associated bad choices can be easily overlooked by elites that deign to study the problem of poverty.

The full essay is at "An Addictive Habit."

---

[1] Gregory Korte, “U.S. Waging Tech War against Opioid Epidemic,” USA Today, November 24-26, 2017.

Property Taxes: Property at Risk

Thirty years after Californians shrank their property taxes by passing Proposition 13, the same question faced the people of North Dakota as they voted on whether to eliminate their property taxes entirely. In an interesting twist, the debate on the tax incorporated a human-rights dimension that is rarely brought into debates in the American republics.

In addition to pointing to the budget surplus enjoyed by the Government of North Dakota at the time as well as to the unpredictableness of the tax and its inconsistencies, the proponents of a constitutional amendment to prohibit a property tax argued that it is contrary to the concept of property ownership. Beyond property rights, however, the advocates pointed to a human right to shelter irrespective of wealth or income. “I would like to be able to know that my home, no matter what happens to my income or my life, is not going to be taken away from me because I can’t pay a tax,” said Susan Beehler, a member of the group that was pushing for the amendment. The American republics are as it were joined at the hip, so it is no surprise that, Jim Cox, a representative in the Pennsylvania legislature’s lower chamber chimed in by declaring, “No tax should have the power to leave you homeless.” The implication is that having a home is a human right that even a government ought not be able to take away.

There is reason for concern as long as one’s house is subject to one’s wealth. For one thing, a large part of one’s net worth is in the equity-value of one’s house—such value being subject to the wax and wane of the market. According to the Federal Reserve, the medium amount of home equity dropped to $75,000 from $110,000 in 2007 (adjusted for inflation). More generally, the economic crisis of 2008 left the medium American family in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s. Medium family income fell to $45,800 in 2010 from $49,600 in 2007 (adjusted for inflation). With less of a cushion, should a homeowner lose his or her job, less home equity would translate into more difficulty in getting a loan (or being cut off from even being able to borrow to survive a brief period of unemployment). 

Therefore, housing viewed as not just a property-right, but moreover as a human right (i.e., not to be homeless), is incompatible with the precariousness that goes with treating one’s house as not only a commodity subject to market forces, but also a significant part of one’s wealth. A vicious circle can be engaged that leaves one as though drowning in a whirlpool without a life-preserver.  If nothing should have the power to leave one homeless, our concept of housing must go even beyond our concept of private property to be based in a doctrine of human rights—a concept rather foreign in North America. Paradoxically, a constitutional amendment that would remove one’s house from the government’s (as well as any private company’s or bank’s) grasp would proffer citizens more security (and thus happiness) than even a full-fledged notion of private property (rights), for the right of property—unlike a constitutional amendment—depends on government and is thus subject to eminent domain. To be sure, a competitive market is well-suited to distributing non-necessity commodities, but human rights trumps even economic efficiency (or its ideology). I find it odd that this notion is so foreign in the American states, while it is almost taken for granted in the European states.

Sources:

Monica Davey, “North Dakota Considers Eliminating Property Tax,” The New York Times, June 11, 2012. 

Binyamin Appelbaum, “Family Net Worth Drops to Level of Early ‘90s, Fed Says,” The New York Times, June 11, 2012. 

Wealth and Happiness American-Style

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released an up-dated version of its Better Life Index in May 2012. The U.S. ranked first in income, with average household wealth at $102,000, as well as in housing (Americans spending about 20% of their disposable income on it—the OECD average being 22%).[1] These figures for the U.S. could have been pushed upward by the fact that at the time, the very rich were richer than their counterparts in other countries, for the gap between rich and poor was relatively high in the U.S. For example, 30 million Americans were without health insurance and a record number of Americans were receiving a governmental subsidy for food. Rather than assume that the middle and lower economic segments in the U.S. were better off than their counterparts in other regions of the world, I suspect that the statistics reflect the higher relative pay of American executives and professionals (lawyers, physicians and CPAs). The typical CEO in the E.U., for example, made less than his or her counterpart in the U.S.  This caused trouble in the Chrysler-Daimler merger because the Chrysler executives enjoyed higher compensation even though Daimler was in charge.

The full essay is at "Wealth and Happiness."

1. “OECD LaunchesUpdated Version of Your Better Life Index,” OECD. 

Subsidiarity: Federalism Over Catholic Social Ethics?

In the E.U., the principle of subsidiarity functions in theory like the Tenth Amendment does in the U.S.—again in theory. In both cases, public authority on a given domain or policy-area is preferentially to be exercised at the state rather than federal level. The principle, while not federalism per se, can be an element of it. Taking subsidiarity to be “really federalism” turns the latter into an alliance—giving the states potentially so much power that the government of the federation or union itself cannot act as a check on the state governments.

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires.

Moral Hazard in Mortgages

“The cherished American ideal of self-reliance has a flip side”[1]  Before getting to the implications, or flip side, I want to fill out what informs this ideal. One could add to it the ideological stance that came into its own in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, who declared that government is the problem. This implies that government should be minimized, and otherwise corrected as much as possible. Government is hardly to be viewed as the solution. This is the legacy of the Kennedy assassinations of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and Watergate as well as Ford’s pathetic “WIN” buttons and Carter’s micromanagement and failure in regard to the hostages in Iran. I was not old enough for the Kennedys’ truncated optimism (and that of Martin Luther King) to resonate; I knew the political (and economic) pessimism of the 1970s and the energizing “fix it” mentality of the early 1980s. Of course, Reagan’s “new federalism” failed, as did his aim to balance the federal budget, and the jury is still out on whether “peace through strength” pushed the USSR off the cliff.

The full essay is at "Moral Hazard in Mortgages."

1. Shaila Dewan, “Moral Hazard: A Tempest-Tossed Idea,” The New York Times, February 26, 2012. 

Distinguishing Entitlements from the Safety Net

In 2012, Congress lost sight of the fundamental purpose of a safety net, extending it beyond the difference between life and death. By zeroing in on the purpose of a safety net, Congress can both save money and better provide for the survival of those who are not providing it for themselves. Of such people, where survival itself is at stake, questions of being deserving pale in comparison to society’s obligation to fend off starvation, sickness and homelessness. Ironically, by extending the safety net beyond survival, Congress has undercut its role in providing for its citizens’ survival.

The full essay is at "Distringuishing Entitlements."

Employing Smokers: Economic, Political and Social Aspects

Hospitals in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas (among others), stopped hiring smokers in 2010 and more countries were openly considering doing so. Paul Terpeluk, a director at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, said, “The trend line is getting pretty steep, and I’d guess that in the next few years you’d see a lot of major hospitals go this way.”[1] Indeed, this could come to be the case around the world. Various factors impact any comprehensive evaluation of a hospitals' policy against hiring smokers. The matter is therefore more complex than one might assume at first glance.
 

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

1. A. G. Sulzberger, “Hospitals Shift Smoking Bans to Smoker Ban,” The New York Times, February 10, 2011.