The free market is just you and me deciding what we want to buy or not. What you want is the politicians to decide what we can and cannot do with our money because we are not smart enough to make free choices, which is the argument behind every single dictatorship.
Political regulation is just you and me delegating representation of interests. What you want is for corporations to decide what we can and cannot do with our money because we are not smart enough to make free choices, which is the argument behind every single corporation.
Companies do not exist for altruistic purposes. They exist to make a handy profit for the fee at the expensive of many sometimes. Regulation extends a more fair playing field in some cases. Sometimes it protects the public interest. It's why there's no Walmart in Seattle.
> Political regulation is just you and me delegating representation of interests.
Is there a way to opt out? Otherwise it sounds more like coercion than delegating.
Corporations are not made of martians, they are made of people making free choices. Should they get a special status with limited liability protected by the government? I don't think so but that's something to blame on the government, not corporations.
If your neighbor's airbnb ruins your nights you should be able to sue and the owner of the building should be free to ban airbnb. But the government deciding that airbnb should be illegal or regulated centrally is where I draw the line.
Suing someone is very inconvenient. Not only that, what are you going to sue for? Losing a couple nights sleep a week doesn't exactly have a monetary value.
Corporations are very nearly made of martians. The interests of the corporation (shareholder value, quarterly profit, market share, etc.) are not human values and frequently run totally contrary to the interests of their customers and the community they do business in.
The problem is, people still inexplicably think that they are delegating this representation to people who actually care or who are bound by some type of moral code which mandates acting in the person's best interests.
How has this basic falsehood persisted for so long and in the face of such damning evidence to the contrary?
What benefits you or me individually can easily be detrimental if we all start doing it, even if we take as a given your (in my opinion incorrect) assumption that in an unfettered free market there aren't some actors far more powerful than others.
Zoning laws are increasingly local however. At some point, its no longer "Politicians over in Washington" and your own darn neighbors who are attending HOA meetings, deciding to ban Airbnb locally.
A huge part of neighborhood local politics is the ability to push out "poor" people to certain corners. Single-family home dwellers don't like apartments or townhomes closeby. Not only are they "unsightly", they are filled with "lower class people" and "bring down home values". (often: codewords for browner and otherwise "less white" people)
But its important to realize that this phenomenon is NOT top-down, but instead bubbles up from the bottom up. The people who think this are your neighbors down the street.
I won't say those motivations are nonexistent, but having a bunch of unknown short-term people coming for a stay in a neighborhood makes it less like an actual neighborhood (who cares if I make a mess and do a half-assed job cleaning up?) and a temptation to turn housing into lucrative rentals squeezes housing stock in places where it's already constrained.
Fair point. That's also a local concern (and more legitimate). Although I need to remind people that in a democracy, its about the number of people who think a certain thought... not the legitimacy of those thoughts that count.
Which one of these things do you think is easier to enforce? Would you prefer to have to call the police with a noise complaint regularly or not have noise in the first place?
I think that the AirBnB host will be careful about what guests are permitted after the first noise complaint, risking being evicted. Perhaps just knowing the rules might avoid the issue. After all, that's how you expect any AirBnB regulation to take effect.
> I think that the AirBnB host will be careful about what guests are permitted after the first noise complaint, risking being evicted.
How about a simple law: don't violate zoning regulations.
Its no different than in the "good ol days" when you weren't allowed to run a Bed-and-Breakfast Inn out of your own home (unless you lived in a commercial district, or otherwise lived in a district with more lax Zoning laws)
Not everyone has the mobility to move around towns. People gotta plant themselves somewhere and start working with the local politics of the towns that they live in.
Which might be even encouraged by proper zoning laws. Long-term tenants may become more interested in local politics (the efficacy of local schools, security, and local decisions). Even those who are more economically mobile should be "good citizens" and participate in local decisions.
Carrying on with that: for those who have little-to-no economic mobility (and there's plenty of them), Zoning Regulations and how their local neighborhoods act and work are incredibly important.
Yes, but in practice zoning laws, however well-intentioned, have had the effect of suppressing affordable housing, public transit, and local businesses. Some of my favorite neighborhoods are the result of an area being re-zoned to allow mixed-use development. Over and over it's been a successful way to transform a blighted, abandoned area into a vibrant neighborhood. And no, that's not just gentrification.
I guess that demonstrates your point that the poor would benefit from being informed, active participants in local legislation. They aren't. Encouraging more local legislation isn't going to change who participates in the conversation.
Well it's not the "favorite" configuration of everyone, and many such people own homes in their communities and can't easily move. Why shouldn't they have a say?
Theoretically maybe it's possible but look at what happened to Boston neighborhoods where a lot of homes started being rented to college kids. Especially the way the landlords don't really give a damn because they make enough profit that any fines they incur are just the cost of doing business. Much easier to have a simple, no exceptions rule than a complex schedule of fines and enforcement for violations.
That's a good comparison. My take is that writing "simple, no exceptions" laws is very difficult. It's incredibly hard to draw what lawyers call a "bright line" between good neighborly behavior and bad behavior.
Further, I suspect the hotel lobby will try to sneak in some far overreaching wording as part of stopping some bad AirBnB hosts. I don't trust them to write something truly clear. For example, will their laws make renting your spare bedroom on Craigslist illegal? Quite likely they'll try to.
In contrast, a schedule of fines for things like noise violations already exists! It's just time to update the fines and start enforcing them. One major problem with misdemeanor laws is they tend to hardcode the dollar amounts and forget to update them with inflation.
I don't think it's really that hard to ban short-term rentals. If you want to still allow long-term rentals you can set a minimum length of any such agreement. Certainly it's less complicated than addressing every single undesirable thing that could result from having them.
Nobody wants politicians to decide what we can and cannot do with our money. What we want is a free market with a check on human greed. For example, do I think all people deserve cheap energy, personal transportation, and inexpensive plastic products? Yes. Do I think they deserve them at the expense of millions of peoples lives/livelihoods? No. Therefore, I believe there should be regulation in the "free market".
>For example, do I think all people deserve cheap energy, personal transportation, and inexpensive plastic products? Yes. Do I think they deserve them at the expense of millions of people's lives/livelihoods? No.
Sorry for being nitpicky, but wouldn't that second group of people also "profit" from cheap energy, ect. because they are also part of "all people"? Then what is so inherently wrong about that situation? If ALL of us can be living a little bit better by SOME of us sacrificing, then isn't that what we should be doing, at least in a somewhat "equal" measure? Guess I'm just channeling my inner Spock a tad bit too much ;)
> ... we are not smart enough to make free choices...
You say that like it's not true, but history has borne that out pretty well. Humans are great at ignoring externalities, impacts on minority groups, etc.
External political oversight* is one thing. Control is another.
There is a trend of legislature propping up broken industries to the detriment of the people. Take the dealer network argument for example.
Dealers argue that the existence of dealers creates inter- and intra-brand competition that drives prices lower and benefits the consumer. In the same breath, however, they say that it is impossible to compete with direct sales from Tesla. It is too competitive.
These are two contradictory statements. Dealers act as a middlemen that necessarily increase prices in order to generate profit that is allocated to said dealers. Dealers have historically enjoyed this now-oft-unnecessary place in the chain of automobile conveyance. But dealers view this profit source as a basic right which must be legislatively protected. And, thus far, they have been quite successful at lobbying for mandates which require these market inefficiencies.
Without legislating any particular example I agree that regulation can be used as a cudgel to stifle competitors too, but I don't agree that the answer is to throw out the concept.
And yes, I'd freely admit that I don't actually want to allow the free market to just do whatever it decides without any external political control.