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Posts Tagged ‘zoning laws’

The Cure for Homelessness | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on September 19, 2018

It obviously doesn’t occur to Sanders that builders cannot build low-cost housing for the poor in Seattle when zoning laws prohibit them from doing so.

https://mises.org/wire/cure-homelessness

One of most fascinating aspects of progressives (also known as “liberals”) is the blindness they display to the adverse consequences of their very own government programs. Instead of acknowledging what their statist programs do to people and then calling for their repeal, they inevitably call for new government programs to address the ills that their government programs are causing.

A good example of this phenomenon was an article entitled “The Homelessness Crisis Continues. Maybe Libertarians Have a Solution?” which was published last June by a newsweekly in Seattle called The Stranger.The author of the piece was an associate editor at The Stranger named Eli Sanders. Sanders is no dummy. In 2012 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in featured writing. His book, “While the City Slept,” was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Yet, Sanders’ article, which mocks and ridicules libertarians, including me, for their supposed solutions to homelessness is a pathetic display of moral, political, and economic obtuseness. That’s because Sanders, like other statists, simply cannot bring himself to acknowledge and address the two root causes of homelessness, especially in Seattle — zoning and minimum-wage laws, both of which are warmly and enthusiastically embraced by both the left and the right and ardently opposed by libertarians. Read the rest of this entry »

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