The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and hoping for a different result. Rent capping is an awful idea. It’s been tried and has never been successful. It simply reduces the amount of available housing as landlords get out of the game. But never mind, we have a new government that is keen to keep trying the same old bullshit and hoping that it will work.
Unions are calling on ministers to undo “years of damage to the housing sector” by the previous Conservative government and honour its pledge to tackle the housing emergency by introducing a form of rent cap.
Steve North, the president of Unison, the UK’s largest union; Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT), and Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, are among seven major union leaders and 19 signatories, including thinktanks, renters’ groups and an estate agency firm, to back the calls.
The ‘think’ in thinktank is doing some serious heavy lifting there. What we really have is the usual rag-tag of economic morons who have learned nothing from history and are blind to reality by their politics of envy and spite – landlords are bad, m’kay. Rent controls don’t work. They have been demonstrated not to work, yet these cretins think that reality doesn’t apply now that we have a far left government in charge who will doubtless defy reality with their bag of unicorn farts.
Despite a backlash from landlords, Stephen Cowan, who wrote the report, noted the “double-locked” rent caps would not have had an adverse impact on levels of supply or investment, with the backing of a number of economists and housing groups.
Mr Cowan has been overdosing on those unicorn farts.
That’s borrowed unicorn farts, and some people (good friends perhaps?) will get richer from ‘managing’ that borrowing.
First, try some wage caps on unionised workforces. Perhaps that’ll get some sense into their skulls.
Not surprisingly, the people at the top of Unions make out like bandits – high salaries (compared to the members), grace & favour housing and stealing donations for striking miners.
The only reason they continue is the stupidity of the members.
For those working in the public sector, I don’t see anything stupid about getting paid way more than your job is worth. I was a member of the Unite Union for maybe the last fifteen years or so of my working life. It was useful to know where I stood when it came to refusing to take part in team building activities. My only beefs with them were the automatic donations to the Labour Party and the fact that, when I retired and cancelled my membership the rep on the phone tried to persuade me not to.
Ruining the finances of the country by taking productive earnings and recycling them into useless public sector workers is not stupid?
Because that’s what “getting paid way more than your job is worth” means. Individually it makes sense, on the societal level it’s suicide. But then the Tragedy of the Commons isn’t new…
You people just don’t understand. These things didn’t work in the past because they weren’t done properly. This time we’ll do it properly.
Indeed. The cry of the socialist down the ages. This time it will work. Never mind the pile of dead bodies. Crows gotta eat.