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Seems like a non sequitur?

If you want people to be able to live in a place without paying rent, please just outright gift that to them and make that official policy. That may or may not be good policy, but at least it's honest.

But if the deal that people agreed to is to pay rent, then the courts should also enforce that.

You can get from one regime to the other, by eg buying out the landlords or outright expropriating them. But if you want to do that, please just advocate so outright.

Social housing may or may not be a good idea. But it's a completely separate issue from non-enforcement of existing rental contracts.



Not a non sequitur. I was responding to this specifically:

> In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.


Maybe. That narrower focus definitely makes your remark more defensible.

On a tangent: along with most economist, I generally prefer giving poor people money that they can spend on goods and services as they please; instead of having some pencil pusher decide what they need and giving that to them in-kind.




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