5 ms·

> Is rationing ... bad? Yes. When a good or service is always available to anyone who can pay the price, all one needs to do is find the money and one can get

by nanis 5y ago

> Is rationing ... bad? Yes. When a good or service is always available to anyone who can pay the price, all one needs to do is find the money and one can get it. When prices are set artificially low, both current and long term go down which results in perpetual shortages. Since getting the thing now depends not just on being able to come up with the cash, but relies on the pen of a bureaucrat, corruption seeps in and becomes endemic. This charity is able to get it done by requiring adherence to a specific religion which serves both as a selection and an enforcement mechanism. If one is tempted to think of generalizing this, I would recommend reading about both Western socialists waxing poetic about USSR's "solutions" to housing shortages and the reality of housing in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, city & urban planning programs as well as architecture schools tend to produce a lot of credentialed people who parrot the former.

jorvi 5y ago
> Yes. When a good or service is always available to anyone who can pay the price, all one needs to do is find the money and one can get it. This sounds nice but breaks down because shelter is a human need, it is not a new iPhone. I am aware that the solution to housing crises is build build build, and that the more profit is in developing housing the more there is being built, but pretending a place to live is like any other common good is cold and wrong.
- luckylion 5y ago
  > pretending a place to live is like any other common good is cold and wrong. Does it help if you pretend that it's not? Do you get more investments into housing, and in the end, more houses, if you consider housing different from other markets?
  - jorvi 5y ago
    I am not pretending anything, I am merely pointing out that shelter, like food an water, is a basic human right (although judging by HNs donwvotes, they'd be fine with starving and dehydrating people as long as someone is making a massive profit).
    - luckylion 5y ago
      I think many here disagree with you about it being a human right, because unlike the earlier human rights, it's not "leave people be" at its core, it's "you have to do X for people". If anything, it's a human entitlement, but that doesn't have the same ring to it, I suppose. And then there's the next part: how good and how much? What's the housing that everyone supposedly has a right to? 100sqft? 500? 1000? And of what quality, and where? Do they get to choose the location?
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        > If anything, it's a human entitlement, but that doesn't have the same ring to it, I suppose. This is nonsense you just made up. Positive and negative rights are both rights, as is common understood in English but especially as defined within political science and philosophy. [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
        luckylion 5y ago
        Yes, and positive rights in that context are entitlements. With a right to be housed, you're entitled to a house/apartment/shelter.
      - jorvi 5y ago
        The right to shelter is literally in the Universal Decleration of Human Rights. There is no disagreeing about it, it factually is a human right.
iSnow 5y ago
But housing doesn't work like this at all. "all one needs to do is find the money" is the mechanism that keeps some people out of the housing market, or at least makes their lives pretty hard. Middle-class families can find the money, but the poor do not and usually cannot (for whatever reasons) raise their value on the job market enough. A case can be made for rationed housing at extremely low prices. If you let anyone in, you would get a cash-flow problem and distort the market, but not if you limit it to the poor.
- nanis 5y ago
  > But housing doesn't work like this at all. The incentives and the price mechanism is independent of the desire of some people to think this or that good/service is "special".
eesmith 5y ago
You presume infinite resources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(Arizona) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(Arizona) has a rationing system. > Due to the fragile nature of the formation and the large number of people wishing to visit it, a daily lottery system is used to dispense only ten next-day permits in person at the Kanab visitor center. Additionally, ten online permits for each date are available four months in advance of a planned trip. There will be a perpetual shortage. This is not a bad thing ... unless you don't care about preserving things for the future. Do you still think rationing is bad? Or is my example not a case of rationing? Bavaria is majority Catholic. "Demonstrate financial need" is likely a much stronger selection mechanism. You didn't answer my question about why, if there's a wait list for this place, and since it's proven to be economically sustainable, other housing isn't built along these lines. > corruption seeps in and becomes endemic After 500 years, is the Fuggerei endowment fund corrupt? Corruption can seep in whenever the person making the decision isn't the person making the profit. Even in a free market.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  It’s not obvious to me that this is economically self-sustaining, that is to say it could be recreated starting from scratch today (without the initial grant from the Fuggers).
- gruez 5y ago
  >Bavaria is majority Catholic. "Demonstrate financial need" is likely a much stronger selection mechanism. According to wikipedia bavaria is only 49.6% catholic. I'm not sure how excluding more than half the population on the basis of religion can be justified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavaria#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavaria#Demographics
  - Moru 5y ago
    German Catholic is pretty strong still. Church runs a lot of hospitals and kid/youth things, daycare and so on. They require Catholic employees, they frown upon non married couples and so on.
  - 5y ago

by nanis 5y ago

jorvi 5y ago

> Yes. When a good or service is always available to anyone who can pay the price, all one needs to do is find the money and one can get it. This sounds nice but breaks down because shelter is a human need, it is not a new iPhone. I am aware that the solution to housing crises is build build build, and that the more profit is in developing housing the more there is being built, but pretending a place to live is like any other common good is cold and wrong.

luckylion 5y ago
> pretending a place to live is like any other common good is cold and wrong. Does it help if you pretend that it's not? Do you get more investments into housing, and in the end, more houses, if you consider housing different from other markets?
- jorvi 5y ago
  I am not pretending anything, I am merely pointing out that shelter, like food an water, is a basic human right (although judging by HNs donwvotes, they'd be fine with starving and dehydrating people as long as someone is making a massive profit).
  - luckylion 5y ago
    I think many here disagree with you about it being a human right, because unlike the earlier human rights, it's not "leave people be" at its core, it's "you have to do X for people". If anything, it's a human entitlement, but that doesn't have the same ring to it, I suppose. And then there's the next part: how good and how much? What's the housing that everyone supposedly has a right to? 100sqft? 500? 1000? And of what quality, and where? Do they get to choose the location?
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      > If anything, it's a human entitlement, but that doesn't have the same ring to it, I suppose. This is nonsense you just made up. Positive and negative rights are both rights, as is common understood in English but especially as defined within political science and philosophy. [1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
      - luckylion 5y ago
        Yes, and positive rights in that context are entitlements. With a right to be housed, you're entitled to a house/apartment/shelter.
    - jorvi 5y ago
      The right to shelter is literally in the Universal Decleration of Human Rights. There is no disagreeing about it, it factually is a human right.

iSnow 5y ago

But housing doesn't work like this at all. "all one needs to do is find the money" is the mechanism that keeps some people out of the housing market, or at least makes their lives pretty hard. Middle-class families can find the money, but the poor do not and usually cannot (for whatever reasons) raise their value on the job market enough. A case can be made for rationed housing at extremely low prices. If you let anyone in, you would get a cash-flow problem and distort the market, but not if you limit it to the poor.

nanis 5y ago
> But housing doesn't work like this at all. The incentives and the price mechanism is independent of the desire of some people to think this or that good/service is "special".

eesmith 5y ago

You presume infinite resources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(Arizona) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(Arizona) has a rationing system. > Due to the fragile nature of the formation and the large number of people wishing to visit it, a daily lottery system is used to dispense only ten next-day permits in person at the Kanab visitor center. Additionally, ten online permits for each date are available four months in advance of a planned trip. There will be a perpetual shortage. This is not a bad thing ... unless you don't care about preserving things for the future. Do you still think rationing is bad? Or is my example not a case of rationing? Bavaria is majority Catholic. "Demonstrate financial need" is likely a much stronger selection mechanism. You didn't answer my question about why, if there's a wait list for this place, and since it's proven to be economically sustainable, other housing isn't built along these lines. > corruption seeps in and becomes endemic After 500 years, is the Fuggerei endowment fund corrupt? Corruption can seep in whenever the person making the decision isn't the person making the profit. Even in a free market.

sokoloff 5y ago
It’s not obvious to me that this is economically self-sustaining, that is to say it could be recreated starting from scratch today (without the initial grant from the Fuggers).
gruez 5y ago
>Bavaria is majority Catholic. "Demonstrate financial need" is likely a much stronger selection mechanism. According to wikipedia bavaria is only 49.6% catholic. I'm not sure how excluding more than half the population on the basis of religion can be justified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavaria#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavaria#Demographics
- Moru 5y ago
  German Catholic is pretty strong still. Church runs a lot of hospitals and kid/youth things, daycare and so on. They require Catholic employees, they frown upon non married couples and so on.
- 5y ago