The Binary Circumstance

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

San Francisco and Boston found themselves among the cities losing the most people between April 2000 and July 2004. Boston, for example, shed more than 19,000 people, or 3.4 percent of its population. San Francisco lost 32,000, or 4.2 percent.

“People like to live in smaller places and a lot of it’s propelled by the sharp spike in housing costs in the inner and more attractive cities,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “People want to get as much housing as they can for their dollars.”

The median price for a single-family home in Gilbert is around $220,000, compared with more than $387,000 in Boston and $641,000 in San Francisco.

Peter Ragone, a spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, said the city recognizes the problem and has begun a number of affordable housing initiatives, such as redevelopment projects aimed at producing more moderately priced homes.

Four out of one hundred people left SF between 2000 and 2004.

San Francisco has tried all kinds of things to make housing cheaper including building “affordable housing” and more than 20 years of very tight rent control.

All they have done is make housing more expensive.

There are a huge number of people living in San Francisco who are playing far below market rates for rents. The city has strict laws against converting those units into condos.

If a huge percentage of your housing stock is locked up for decades at far below the market rate, any housing not covered by those restrictions will skyrocket in price. It’s basic supply and demand.

By taking so many units off the market by keeping them strictly rent controlled, San Francisco and other cities have limited the supply of housing where there is high demand. Their efforts to create affordable housing have produced the exact opposite.

Irrational premises create problems, they don’t solve them.

To solve problems it is necessary to stop believing in things that don’t exist, which is the basis for all irrational premises.

Logan Darrow Clements, who was the Objectivist candidate for Governor of California recently, has written to the Code Enforcement Officer of the Township of Weare, New Hampshire, about a plan to build a hotel on the land that is now occupied by Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s home.

I am proposing to build a hotel at 34 Cilley Hill Road in the Town of Weare. I would like to know the process your town has for allowing such a development.

Although this property is owned by an individual, David H. Souter, a recent Supreme Court decision, “Kelo vs. City of New London” clears the way for this land to be taken by the Government of Weare through eminent domain and given to my LLC for the purposes of building a hotel. The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare.

ROFL

While I’m on the subject of the Supreme Court, on Monday the Supremes gave a big boost to the record industry.

In their latest rendition of their mega hit, “Stop in the Name of Love,” they ordered that companies that make file-sharing software can be held liable for their users’ illegal activities — if encouraging illegal activities was their intent.

File-sharing services are responsible for illegal activity they encourage, Justice David Souter said.

“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties,” Souter wrote for the court.

[…]

“This is a very difficult roadmap to follow,” said Richard Taranto, a lawyer for Grokster. “The court has said to the Intels of the world, ‘We have a multifactor standard that you can’t in advance be terribly sure how it will apply to you.’ The immediate impact for the industry and technology innovation will … be a chilling one.”

At a press conference arranged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, experts called the decision Orwellian, saying that the courts have given the music industry the right to sue software makers based on private thoughts and conversations.

If Intel or some other computer company knows that their computers are being used by the government, particularly the IRS, to take money by force from the citizens of this country, can they be sued?

Just like computers, file-sharing software can have a lot of legitimate uses. If people start using it for the wrong reasons does that make the sellers of the software guilty of the crime?

Should the software maker ask the buyer first, “Are you going to use this to steal copyrighted material?” Of course, most would say “No.”

Does the software maker then launch a further investigation or give a lie-detector test to the prospective user?

Because the Supremes assist the government in the process of stealing freedom and property from private citizens, I find it rather ironic that they think that “intent” to help others steal is the basis for liability. There’s a double standard at work here.

The problem is that all mandatory, coercive governments, are built on the use of force and stealing. People who possess a willingness to engage in such activities are at a selective advantage genetically in that type of environment.

We should not be surprised that people are more willing to view the theft of another’s property as a good thing, something benefitial to all. The government has trained us well.

Sen. John Cornyn - (R) Texas, has already introduced a bill that would define eminent domain more narrowly than the Supreme Court just interpreted it.

Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, moved swiftly on Monday to narrow the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision last Thursday that upheld broad government power to seize private property to turn over for profit-making economic development. Cornyn’s new bill, S. 1313, would lay down a congressional definition of “public use,” far narrower than the Court’s constitutional interpretation in Kelo v. City of New London (04-108). The measure raises immediately the question of Congress’ power to write its own definition, and put it into effect.

Although Cornyn’s proposal, and his floor statement announcing it, do not spell out Congress’ constitutional authority to adopt the legislation, it appears that part of it is based upon the Necessary and Proper Clause, some notion of federal police power, and, to a degree, the Commerce Clause), and part of it is based upon the Spending Clause. (The bill’s findings say that “it is appropriate for Congress to take action, consistent with its limited powers under the Constitution, to restore the vital protections of the Fifth Amendment and to protect homes, small businesses, and other private property rights against unreasonable government use of the power of eminent domain.”)

This is from the SCOTUS blog.

I wrote about the recent Supreme Court decision regarding eminent domain here.