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15 points

Capitalist/free market* economists.

Rent control works just fine in a more socialist model, especially when the government is a prime builder of housing without seeking profit, as almost every European country was during the 50s-70s. It’s only when government gets out of house building and everything gets privatisated and for-profit that rent control fails.

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1 point

Don’t know if you’ve noticed this yet, but the United States has a capitalist economy.

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4 points
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Semi. It’s got bits and pieces of all systems, which is a hint that the “-ism” powering any country’s economy doesn’t have as big an impact as its leaders.

Unfortunately, capitalism tends to reward corruption, it’s much easier and profitable to be corrupt than to do the right thing™.

Libraries are socialist. Otherwise every person in a fully capitalist system would be expected to buy their personal copy of a book.

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What you’re referring to is called a “mixed economy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy

And you’re right - there are scales with capitalism and socialism weighing against each other in basically every economy. Finland, Norway, France are examples where it’s tipped a bit more in favour of the “socialism” side. But the US has plenty of elements of socialism, from housing coops in the Bronx, to utility coops in the midwest (that helped pave the way for the electrification of rural America), to credit unions, to welfare policies, to the Alaska social wealth fund, and I could keep going.

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6 points

Libraries are not socialist. Socialism is not, in fact, when the government does things.

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7 points

And it’s failing

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8 points

The US has lots of socialized losses but privatized profits. To call it a capitalist economy is a gross oversimplification which glosses over the fact that no corporation is actually competing in a free market at this point.

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1 point

You may want to look at how rent control turned out there, and why Europe is broadly turning against rent control, and seeing it as a mistake https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-02/berlin-s-rent-controls-are-proving-to-be-the-disaster-we-feared?in_source=embedded-checkout-banner

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1 point
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I unfortunately can’t read that article as it’s paywalled, but looking at the link, it’s an Opinion piece, so not factual reporting. It’s also from Bloomberg, one of the most pro-capitalist publications out there, second only to The Economist in its championing of all things pro globalist and pro capitalist.

The main stream media which is all very pro capitalist (as they’re all owned by billionaire oligarchs) has been shitting on rent control for decades.

Here’s a more nuanced article on the matter which doesn’t come from such a pro-capitalist, classical economic outlook: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/23/berlin-rent-cap-defeated-landlords-empty

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1 point
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That article is literally about how rent shot up because of rent control policies.

Also it is an opinion article and written as if rent control is a good thing.

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4 points

Can you name some countries/policies where it’s a continuing success?

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4 points

Depends on your definition of “success.” Countries such as Holland, France, Canada, Germany, and China all have caps on the amount by which a landlord can increase rent in any given year, usually by law it’s less than 5%, or indexed to inflation (but with 5% as the max). These laws are incredibly popular with renters and have been around for decades.

Berlin implemented a hard rent freeze in 2020 which was extremely popular with renters, but not with landlords, naturally.

However, rent control isn’t just a hard price cap like back during the war, there are many nuanced aspects, see here for information: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/23/berlin-rent-cap-defeated-landlords-empty

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