Police force as a subsidy to Landlords

What happens in a traditional rental/land-lord relationship when the renter stops paying rent? The landlord will call the police, and eventually the police will come and evict you. The police do not charge for this service, they are, after all, benevolent enough to stop both poor men and rich men from sleeping under bridges.

If a landlord does not live up to his obligations, what choices does the renter have? He may move out, most commonly with the option of either breaking his lease, forfeiting the deposit, or wait for his lease to run out, paying for services that are not satisfactory. In other words, the landlord has no immediate incentive to fulfill his obligations satisfactorily, at worst he can receive bad word of mouth. If the renter does not fulfill his obligations, i.e. stops paying rent, the landlord can have him evicted for free by the police.

If the police were not here to fulfill this role, the landlord would have to pay a security force to play this function. This would increase the cost of doing business, and all landlords would have to charge higher rents. Cooperative housing would thus be more efficient, and be able to compete successfully against, traditional landlord/renter housing, not having this additional cost.

In other words, traditional landlord/renter relationships are a byproduct of The State.

Democracy is coming to the USA...

The Health Care debate is interesting to watch from the perspective of seeing so many interest groups collide against each other.

Radical Democrats rail against the Health Insurance companies, harnessing (justifiable) populist anger and channeling it into political support. Meanwhile Radical Republicans are violently opposing it, with murmurs of Hitler comparisons and violence bubbling up amongst their supporters.

Both of these positions aren't based on anything principled, merely attempts to harness populist anger into political support. My statement that these statements are not principled is that most of the Radical opposition is based on fanciful claims and that the Health Care reform that the Radical anti-health insurance industry Democrats supports is basically a bail-out for the insurance companies, excepting only the "Public option."

The Health insurance industry is enthusiastically for "health care reform", as long the public option is nixed. This extremely corporate friendly reform is billed by some as a blow against Big Business and by others as a Marxist take over. It is neither.

I think this article illustrates the true nature of Health care reform: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story