Rent control hasn’t even taken effect in Boston, and already the consequences of rent control are being felt. Banker and Tradesman reports that building permits in Boston declined 94 percent between 2021 and 2022. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and others have claimed that rent control will not lead to less new housing construction, despite what has happened in every city with rent control. This is what happens when principles are absent.
Principles provide us with the ability to predict the future consequences of an action or policy. As Ayn Rand noted,
Concrete problems cannot even be grasped, let alone judged or solved, without reference to abstract principles.
Wu and her cronies argued that somehow Boston will be different. This is a refrain repeatedly used by advocates of statism. They will admit that rent control or some other coercive measure has created problems in New York or Seattle or some other city, but that is New York and Seattle. What happens in other cities isn’t relevant to our city.
A more colloquial way of stating this is Wu is unable to see the forest for the trees. She is so focused on the details of how Boston will implement rent control that she completely evades the principles underlying rent control and similar coercive measures.
When the government imposes arbitrary restrictions, such as rent control, on producers, those producers will produce less. In Boston, they have almost stopped producing housing. This could have easily been predicted because it is what happens every time government force is used against producers.
When principles are absent, no accurate predictions are possible. When faced with a problem, the unprincipled can only experiment and hope that they stumble upon the solution. In the case of Wu, she believes that Boston will somehow avoid the negative consequences of rent control.
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