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.

Musings on Health Care

The Pharmaceutical industry is often a target of populist scorn, but rarely is it mentioned in mainstream conversation that one of their main sources of power is a government created monopoly: a patent. With the elimination of the patent system the cost of all patented products would decrease dramatically as competition exploded. Medicine would become cheaper, health care costs would go down.

It sounds absurd (to some) to say it aloud, but our government has taken direct action, through regulation, to increase doctor's pay by creating an artificial shortage of providers. Largely done at the behest of the AMA, these regulations, if removed, would allow qualified professionals from other countries to practice in the US, as well as more people being able to become doctors. The number of providers would go up, the cost of health care would go down.

Under the current tax code, under an apparent attempt to stave off socialism (boo! hiss!), employers are given tax incentives to offer health care to the employees. This ties people to their employer for health insurance. Health insurance is then a commodity where the person who actually uses it is not involved in the choosing of the finer details. An agreement is reached between the employer and a health insurance carrier, and the employee is given some options, A B or C, for example. Removal of these incentives would give more consumer choice for health insurance, and the decreased cost of health care would decrease entry cost into health insurance, leading to more companies. All of this together would lead to a more de-centralized health care industry, as well as a more equitable one.

It goes without saying this is a very complex topic, and these are simply some brief thoughts on the matter.