>we've been particularly well served by the housing or health care markets. Healthcare is going to be special. We're OK with a person not getting a Lexus if th

>we've been particularly well served by the housing or health care markets. Healthcare is going to be special. We're OK with a person not getting a Lexus if they can't afford one, but we are deeply uncomfortable with treating, say, cancer surgery the same way. So healthcare will always have a social component. That's not the case for housing. Housing can be managed the markets just fine, you just need to make sure you don't constrain it a level where it cannot react to demand. Where housing fails, it's always the case of local regulations, from property owners who want to limit supply to keep their house prices up to activist and the local council who will restrict high-density housing development for the dumbest reasons (e.g. if the shadow of the new housing development falling on a playground - true story). You mentioned you're from Seattle - are you sure housing isn't constrained due to crazy progressive municipal policies? >I see rent control as one mechanism to attempt to decommodify housing (which I'm strongly in favor of) This is very perplexing to me. We know rent control hurts housing supply, and it hurts people that it purports to help because we have data on this from decades of studying this policy. There is no economist that supports it. I don't understand how it keeps coming back. >It's been demonstrated, again and again, that 'more supply will come in' just isn't working for housing. Where? Do you mean places like Seattle or San Francisco which make it almost impossible to build new development? Why wouldn't you look at regulatory policies of those areas before wanting to socialize an entire industry? >You have a lot more faith in markets than I do. It's not about faith in anything. Because markets are a messy, chaotic and complicated bottom-up structures where the individual transaction is impossible to predict, but where everything optimizes (at some minima) on a large scale - some people tend to be fundamentally uncomfortable with it. So the alternative is to fix the messiness of the markets by imposing a 'clean' top-down policy where the one true answer is dictated. The problem is that nobody at the top fully understands all the variables of the underlying messiness and hence they always get it wrong. If you take that to the extreme, you end up with a Communist disaster.