How government mismanages We, the People

A free market produces what people want in the quantity and quality they want to pay for. This is called supply and demand. No government is needed. (click here for more) Many people are not satisfied with choices people make. They want government to fix "free market failures" by decree. They want to force their choices on others. Stated more bluntly, they want to rig the rules against choice.

Take housing, for example.

A free market would never build 'free housing' because nothing of value is free. Builders expect to get paid. A house is not built unless the customer pays. That simple market truth can be overcome. That house can be built if someone other than the customer pays.

Enter government. The Constitution does not give the federal government the power to build housing for people. Yet politics has invented ways to do it anyway. Political forces circumvented the US Constitution to 'fix' the market in housing. One of those ways is the creation of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). One of the many ways to rig the system against We, the People is Section 8 of Housing and Community Development Act of 1974. This gives poor tenants money in the form of rent subsidies.

Typical of government market fixing legislation, the stated intent was to help (poor tenants in this case). The result was to hurt the larger community. It became a War on the Suburbs in the wider War on Poverty. Both wars were lost at great cost.

Section 8 has played a key role in transforming communities like Ferguson from close-knit suburbs into violent, atomized hellholes.

Former Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland stated that Section 8 vouchers replace "vertical ghettos with horizontal ones." (click here for more)

Before Section 8 government planners tried and failed to fix the problem of housing for low income people by constructing subsidized Public Housing Projects (verticle Gettos) more commonly known as “Projects.” Unsurpringly, this turned out badly. Projects became synonymous with inner-city blight and crime. (click here for more)

The cataclismic consequences of politics-as-usual to 'fix' the mortgage market to favor the poor nearly destoyed the mortgage market in 2008 and caused millions of investors to lose their savings. (click here for more)

All this fixing of 'free market failures' turned out to be counter-productive, expensive and socially destructive. 'The cure was worse than the disease.'

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