There are few more basic and important debates the form the foundation of public debates on policy than the one about rights. What is a right? Where does a right come from? How do we know what our rights are? What effect do government, policy, rules, and taxes have on rights? There’s no way to rehearse all that debate here. You can read one of my posts on Edmund Burke if you want to get a glimpse of my views. The short version, out of step with almost everyone, is that rights are social constructs evolved over time and both ensured and infringed by government. This last point is hard, because what follows is one of those, “you’re a libertarian moments.” I’m not. What I am is an advocate of working together to be responsible to each other and to do the thing that helps the most most of the time for the longest. That has nothing to do with rights but simply giving people what they need the most, in this case, more housing. 

Oddly this excerpt from a Forbes post called, “Efficiency Is Compassionate: Markets Don’t Solve Housing Problems, People Do” and accompanied by a picture of the latest socialist wonder, caused some people to think I am a socialist. I’m not. And if you are, you need to think this one through all the way. Even if God or the Great Spirit granted a right to housing or if it simply is a willful demand made by crowds in the street, we’d still have to build as many units as there are people who need and want them to create equilibrium. Someone has to build them and manage them and that means money and financing. Even if we grant that “housing is a right,” there is no escape from the reality that it will never be “free.” Here’s my little parable of the drink ticket. 

I attended an event recently at which everyone was given a “free” drink ticket. But the bar had one bar tender and one waitress. There were a couple hundred tickets handed out. Getting a ticket didn’t mean getting a drink since the lines were maddeningly long. People gave up waiting and gave their tickets to people in line hoping they could cash their tickets in for them. But the bartender was instructed to honor only one ticket per person. There was a perverse incentive to try different sides of the bar, and eventually people just decided to pay for drinks. Because of a lack of supply of labor, rationing resulted so while the drinks were free few people realized the benefit.

This is how “free” housing based on a natural rights argument would work without huge increases in the supply of housing.  Socialists can declare that housing is a right and hand out “tickets” to redeem housing, but if someone doesn’t build that housing, people will wind up right back where we started: needing to pay increasingly higher prices for housing that isn’t being provided by the state. Simply codifying a questionable right to a certain amount of living space won’t create that space; large scale housing creation happens when people can invest in it and make a return from it’s rental or sale. That isn’t ideology just fact. Of course the government could seize private property and force labor to work for free but that would be, truly, a road to serfdom.