The Affordable Care Act - affordable for whom?

Never

We've got to find a quick way out of here, or we can stay here and rot.

We, living shadows in the smoke and beer, resenting all we never got.

We've got to claim the age and make it ours; put down our fears and just begin.

We'll make no deals, we'll take no captives, we'll play the game to win!  Yeah!

Somewhere back there someone is fooling you - you're skunked enough to think you're free.

Too duped to know this one is ruling you - you slave for what you cannot see.

The only one who knows what's good for you is you, within, it's yours to own.

Don't beg for handouts, don't play the victim, your soul is not on loan -

Your soul is not on loan.

Chorus

The architect of your intellect calls you but the urge to disconnect stalls you,

Do you cringe and genuflect to some insect who expects you to defer? 

Never!

You're caught up in the old, enticing view:  the law will honor what you own.

A potentate who'll just be nice to you - forbid the thought, you stand alone.

Remember what you call the Infinite - if infinite, then who are you?

Don't let the dreaming forget the dreamer or what you came to do -

Or what you came to do.

Chorus

The lyrics above are those for a song that I wrote back in 2006. It can be heard at http://hashtonealley.mymusicstream.com/track/never. What moved me to write the song was my concern over how unquestioningly America's newest generation of adults seemed to accept the status quo with respect to what government was or wasn't doing. Since it's modern inception back in 1776, democracy has always been as much an opportunity for the wicked as a refuge for the good and only the unflagging vigilance of those who are it's masters - that is, the People (the Greek words, 'demos' and 'kratos', meaning 'people' and 'rule', respectively) - has allowed it to gain credibility with the passage of time. Otherwise, it is remarkably susceptible to being manipulated for the selfish purposes of the powerful at the expense of the weak. Conveniently for them, the powerful can afford to have representatives probing 24/7 for opportunities to tweak the making of law in a way that favors them disproportionately and, even singly, in some cases. The poor, on the other hand, must go through an arduous process of forming organizations fueled by the collection of chump change to be able to match the forces arrayed against them.

Of the poor, the young poor are the least organized and the most vulnerable. They're at a stage of life when solipsistic immersion in one's own trivial affairs and all the challenges of developing a true and dependable self identity lay an all-consuming claim on one's time and energies. Additionally, the best and brightest of them are overwhelmed by the challenges tuition and hard-scrabble employment put on them. There just simply isn't much left over in terms of resources or attention for the average young adult to participate, in concert with others, in the protection of their collective interests. I've been heard to say on more than a few occasions that America eats it's young for breakfast. As if this bias were not enough, in the last twenty years, the young have had the developing front of information technology descend on them like a tsunami. While there are definitely opportunities for preservation and defense of social equity available through the internet, the overwhelming bulk of activity is clearly distractive and, unless one is intellectually and spiritually committed to not being negatively entrained in internet content, one can waste a lot of one's life in front of a computer screen, to no good long-term end.

All of the above was true back in 2006 and, ten years later, it is only more pertinent. The writing of the song, 'Never', was an attempt to use popular media to jolt consciousness among music lovers toward being more circumspect with respect to what government was up to.  

Right here, I must go on record as saying that I believe that the only system of health care that truly serves people on a socially equitable basis is a responsibly and honestly managed universal, single-payer health care system, in which physicians are guaranteed a good income, protection from unfair lawsuits and freedom from onerous paperwork obligations. Further, I do not believe that Americans should be subsidizing the rest of the world for drug development through the insurance rates they're paying. It's a burden that should be shared internationally under the aegis of a rigorous process of general accountability where governments are the first purchasers of large lots of drugs in a competitive in a free, international market. The last thing that individual needing health care should have to do is to have to prove eligibility before treatment. That's insane. And yet, that's the system we have today under the ACA. It is simply ridiculous to assume that America's most intellectually challenged - literally, tens of millions of people - should be able to arrange for themselves insurance contracts that suit the needs of a personal future they have no means of divining. It is that psychological factor that insurance milks. The most fear-prone give up everything they can spare to try and have that base covered. How often have you heard people say, if you think you can't afford insurance, you should ask yourself, how can you afford NOT to have insurance? What a trite piece of propaganda that is. It's a convenient play on words that selectively omits consideration of all the other financial priorities forced on one if one is to live a halfway fulfilling life in today's economy. From an objective point of view, that same argument turns a blind eye toward the huge diversion of cash it proposes, that would exit the consumer demand sector for the coffers of insurance corporations, their management and shareholders, none of which would be good for the American economy, as a whole. No one has yet been able to show how complete compliance, with all the demands of the ACA, could possibly occur without leading to an implosion of consumer demand and another deep recession, if not depression. Couldn't those architects of the ACA, with all the informational resources available to them, not see how burdened the consumer side already was with excessive rents, high housing costs and astronomical tuition fees? Where was the extra money supposed to come from, if not out of the consumer economy? Yes, we heard all kinds of justification how new market conditions imposed upon the health care industry would lead to lower costs, most of them remarkably tendentious, while those of us who said this couldn't be affordable were labeled as simpletons and kneejerk naysayers, as if these reservations were politically motivated. The fact is that some of the best and most analytical minds had already done the basic math - not much more than addition and subtraction - and found that the imposition of this Act would have negative economic consequences. But, the passage of the ACA was not driven by math. What it was driven by was a mishmash of conflicting, political stances that turned the original idea of the public option into a Frankenstinian compromise.  

As the 2016 deadline approaches, we can feel the panic that's out there at every level. Noncompliers are in a state of frantic denial, while legislators whose reputations are under the spotlight for the votes they cast, are in a state of disbelief that the Act has failed to force Americans to comply. In addition, insurance rates have not dropped for the American public, as a whole, but only risen as insurance companies seek to defend themselves, financially, against being obliged under law to accept all who apply, medical preconditions notwithstanding. Any fair-minded person in their right mind wishing to preserve the solvency of their business would do the same, and when the market is literally captive, the reasons against not raising prices simply evaporate. Basically, the ACA has put freedom-loving Americans in the position of coraled sheep waiting to be financially fleeced. From a constitutional point of view, it boils down to this: technocrats versus traditional American values of freedom of choice. One can be forced under the Constitution to pay a tax, where the process under which that tax is paid is equally burdensome to one and all. But the government is constitutionally barred from forcing individuals to buy services from private parties in a system of exchanges that has highly variable impacts on individuals based on their means, their intellect, their literacy level, their health condition, their geographic location or other factors. To imagine that somehow that would constitutionally equable is - forgive me from using the same word again - insane. We should either go back to the system we had before, in which individuals could at least hang on to some remnant of what they earned and apply that to what they felt best served their interests, given the very personal circumstances they each faced, or push through to the public health care system I've described above.  

What to take away from the song above, is that a universal health care system will only ever arise in this country when the 'demos' in the word, democracy, find their 'kratos' in the word democracy. Until then, all we will ever have is Frankenstinian accommodations that rumble Rube Goldberg-like, erratically into the future, leaving a trail of broken lives and unfulfilled promise behind them.

Replace the word "landlord" - a semantic relic - with less intimidating synonyms anywhere possible

Before I say anything, let me assure the reader,  I know the word "landlord" is not going to go away anytime soon.  People will use it in everyday conversation because it's what they've become accustomed to using.  The official use of words in government regulations, however, can - and often is - changed by decree, if the old usage is considered, somehow, retrograde.  Language evolves with usage and the meanings attached to words can shift with time.  The need for semantic upgrade in official documents is evident when one compares old versions of laws, specific to particular considerations, with the current form that has evolved over the years from those original forms.   Sometimes, the reason a law is upgraded is because the old language is not congruent with the way we speak about the subject involved in modern parlance.  In yet other cases, new aspects of constitutionality are brought to light by bright minds, requiring an upgrade in the way law concerning that subject is interpreted.  A more subtle form of outdatedness in legal semantics occurs when law fails to keep pace with evolution in social constructs or social norms.  This writing addresses itself to the question of whether the word, "landlord", suitably reflects our society's ongoing movement toward inclusiveness and the need to reconcile the strong and the weak under one flag, in accordance with the aspirations laid out in our national constitution.

Though we don't often use them - at least, as yet - there are a number of synonyms for "landlord" that we should start getting used to using in any documents that carry legal authority - city regulations, rental contracts, court judgments, et. al.   Consider the following:  "lessor", "housing provider", "property owner", even "rentor" (an archaic, but useful, word with neutral power connotations).

The origins of the word "landlord" go back to times preceding Europe's industrial revolution, when tenant farmers, routinely referred to as peasants, were all too often subjected to extremely onerous  extractions of the product of their toil, for the right to continue living on lands owned by wealthy families.  The person holding title to the land they lived and worked would demand to be addressed by their often illiterate tenants as either, "M'Lord" or "M'Lady", so that the requisite differential in status might be abundantly clear, right from the outset.  Failure to do so would be an expression of unforgivable effrontery. A very typical pictorial representation of a peasant petitioning consideration from a lord is that of a man clutching his cap anxiously with both hands in front of him, hunched over in a posture of supplication, as if his very life, and that of his family, depended on it as, indeed, it very often did.

Once the Industrial Revolution began to fuel the almost insatiable need for a vast array of products during the most active years of European empire growth across the globe, peasants were no longer chained to the land they grew up on.  Anyone of any useful age who could be employed in any entity, private or public, engaged in this unprecedented expansion of sovereignty over foreign lands.  No country could hope to be part of this rush to empire without being willing to field a large enough navy and army to spearhead and protect new fronts of expansion.  This required men, equipment, materials and equipment, the provision for which drew heavily on populations previously locked in land deals with those that lorded it over them.  Males of a previously inescapable lowly status now had a plethora of different options they could pursue, not just at home, but across the world.

Though their housing realities no longer approximated the primitive conditions from which most had extracted themselves, those they now rented from in cities were still called "landlords", since it was customary and no other word arose as a reasonable alternative.  Indeed, deferring to custom, the word insinuated itself into law, even though those it referred to bore little resemblance to the original lords of the land such former peasants had left behind.  Even those who were fortunate enough to rise to much higher relative status, still referred to those they paid rent to as their landlords.

Very conveniently for those who owned and rented out premises, the word "landlord" crossed the Atlantic with nary a dent in its hull.  Not even the War of Independence lent reason enough for lexicographers to float an alternative more in line with the egalitarian aspirations of the Founders.  I say "conveniently" because higher extractions of rent are possible when subtle inferences, inherent in the structure of the rental relationship, induce the tenant to feel inferior to the one who owns the property being rented out.  It is the rarest of tenants who in no way fears the person who holds the power to obliterate his/her tenuous grip on security (which, for most tenants, hardly qualifies as security).  For the so-called free market to work the way it's supposed to, buyer and seller have to be on a level psychological playing field with one another.  Price point resistance on the part of the buyer needs to match the profit incentive projected by the seller.

That felicitous condition would be noticeably advanced if the word "landlord" were to be replaced by a less inherently intimidating synonym, wherever possible, in whatever writing governs affairs in the business of renting - legislation, contracts, court documents, judgments, et al. In time, the new usage would start to be reflected in the press and in general speech.  I don't, for one moment, think that a change such as this would do much good on its own; it needs to be part of a much wider set of measures applied to the situation to make rent pricing more like Walmart pricing.

In the meantime, here we are today, with rents being charged that completely deflate the hopes and dreams of young adults.  As for seniors who are forced by circumstance to rent and facing increasing difficulty finding adequately-paying work in the job market, the results of being priced out of one's home can be very grim - homelessness, depression, illness and an untimely death are common stories.  When accused of extortion, property owners are quick to claim justification, on the basis that they are just doing business the American way, breaking no laws in the process.  Maybe so, but should we just let the matter rest there and offer nothing, in response?  Clearly, I, for one, don't think so.  In fact, I think it grossly irresponsible to limply capitulate to the current situation.

I'd like to be able to "read the tea leaves", as they say, but the number of bets I've made that have come true suggests I'm not very good at that.  So when I say that I sense a change in the air, with respect to the public attitude toward rent prices and rent conditions, better take it with a grain of salt.
On the other hand, when I was growing up in South Africa, I would insist to my conservatively-minded parents that the days of "apartheid" were numbered, to which assertion they would respond with unvarnished derision, calling it Pollyanna thinking.  Those who keep up with African affairs know how that turned out.  So here's hoping that what happened to the psychological differentials in South Africa - specifically, their wholesale implosion - might occur in the rental market in the USA, in the not-too-distant future.

Lateral assistance - very important, very under-rated

Individuals of conscience - those who cannot help but care about the condition of others, relative to the comfort they, themselves, are enjoying - are often moved to want to share what they have in excess of their own needs.  Simple enough, nevertheless, they're also often perplexed about how best to disburse what it is they want to give away.

 Deciding how to give away significant amounts of one thing or another that you have to others who might need that thing, in a way that leaves one satisfied that the highest good has been achieved by that action, can be surprisingly difficult.  Will the recipients be made more empowered by the giving, or will they have been made more dependent by the time the initial utility of the gift drops off?  Will intermediaries extract more than is fair?  Will vital peripheral structures and local exchange systems be undermined, to the eventual detriment of the surrounding community's sustainability?  Can I trust those with whom I will be obliged to interact to act honestly and honorably?  What conditions or expectations, if any, should attach to the giving?  These, and many others, are the questions that complicate the kind of giving that those who aspire to being thought of as philanthropists typically face.  For the purposes of this essay, I will refer to that kind of giving as vertical giving - from one much more wealthy to some multiple of others who are very much poorer.  Actually, if one were to get really technical about the number and relative wealth of the recipients, you'd probably call it vectoral giving whose degree could be graphically represented.  Giving with a relatively high degree of interpersonal connection and mild wealth differential would have a low vectoral gradient, while typical philanthropic giving by the ultra-wealthy to thousands of unknowns in another country, deemed less developed, through a large organization, would have a vectoral gradient pretty close to 90°.  Many high-profile organizations dominate the field of charitable giving .  A lot of what they take in goes toward highly compelling advertising, solicitation activities and sustained follow-up.  Their presence in the public eye is so compelling that the, arguably, greater social value and viability of other options for delivering help - particularly those occurring within a mild vectoral gradient - can easily be overlooked.

This observation is not meant to cast aspersions on the activities of well-established charities.  Far from it.   There are those that do indispensable work,  alleviating hunger, illness and homelessness, both here and abroad.  Nevertheless, the overall record of that sector of the social charity establishment is paternalistic, effectively undermining the very reasoning that would lead the recipients to become more self-reliant - the kind that arises when self-empowered people work productively with other self-empowered people to improve the communities they call "home".  Even the best of these organizations must, inevitably, run afoul of this, to some degree.  In the case of the worst offenders, the only kind of self-empowerment they promulgate is that enjoyed by career professionals looking for politically-correct, long-term financial security.    No small number of well-researched investigations have shown that negative social indicators, particularly with respect to relative poverty, remain stubbornly entrenched among population groups most often targeted for such giving.  Indeed, in the worst of cases, local self-reliance has been badly undermined by the well-meaning activities of large, top-down-managed, charitable organizations.

Before we rush to judgment on the activities of large charities, however, placing all the blame on them for the persistence of poverty among those they attempt to help, we should pause to consider whether their efforts might have been more fruitful had society not used their entrance into the picture to rationalize cutting back on investment in more traditional forms of social assistance, when these organizations entered the picture to help.  The most obvious forms of traditional support I'm referring to include not just those tax-sponsored activities and institutions initiated and run by government but, also, those initiated by ordinary folks, the kind I call lateral assistance - the kind of highly personal, low-vectoral-gradient assistance rendered by people, one-to-one, within the bubble of the private sector.  Perhaps it's a simplistic analogy to make but, for a stool to be useful, it needs a minimum of three legs and, in the case of overall giving by society, no leg should be considered as having failed if the other two legs hadn't performed close to as well.  When it comes to the sharing of resources, the legs I'm referring to are registered charities, government action and lateral sharing.

What kind of help, specifically, falls within what I consider to be lateral assistance?  Basically, any kind of giving where, 1.), the giver and the receiver fall under some kind of umbrella - a family, a friendship, a social club, an organization, a congregation, an ethic identity, a neighborhood or a general income bracket, for instance - that has the effect of conferring upon them the status of equality and, (2.), the giver and the receiver share a bond of reciprocal concern for one another.

Why is this form of help so important to society?  Let's go through a shortlist that clearly differentiates lateral assistance from the more vertical types of help offered by governments licensed charities.

*The relatively deeper perception, on the part of the giver, into the complex nature of the potential receiver's life situation, allowing the giver to better assess the needs of that person and then tailor the giving more precisely to the needs of the receiver and, by such means, conserve funds available for providing such assistance
*Such help can be delivered in a timely way
*The delivery of the help is not impeded by an application process that might either intimidate, discourage or disqualify the person needing such help, as might be the case with some organization or government agency
*The potential for reciprocity, at some later date, is inherent to such giving
*The back-and-forth nature of this form of giving creates strong interpersonal bonds, in turn, strengthening society
*There is no lower limit to this form of sharing, as there is with institutional giving and government assistance
*There is no past-record, exclusionary factor that might be attached to the recipient that would completely block him/her from receiving assistance from a benefactor, particularly within the cocoon of a blood- or love relationship
*Such giving constitutes the largest form of help to individuals needing assistance in the buying of a home or the starting of a small business, among other things of social importance

As invaluable as lateral assistance may be, it is not an easy thing for government to create programs designed to promote the existence of it.  The biggest tool in the box - that of being able to compel parties to do this or that, if they wish to do one thing or another - is useless.  You can't compel people to exhibit the kind of decency that leads one to identify with another's needs, to the point of actually acting to render such help.  Does that mean that people in government should just give up on the idea of promoting lateral assistance?  I don't think so.  There is much benefit that government stands to gain by helping to increase the incidence of lateral assistance within the society it serves.  Every person who doesn't need to turn to government for assistance because someone within his peer group came forward with the right amount of help when it was of best use, translates into an incremental benefit for government.  Millions and millions of such people helped each year constitute a huge diminution of the demand for public assistance, along with a massive investment in future prospect, across the board.

One idea that comes to mind is made possible by the enormous leap in registering ability afforded the government by huge advances in information technology.  The old excuse that charitable giving counts toward tax deductibility only if the source of income from which it springs is greater than some arbitrary cutoff point, simply because the paperwork involved would be too voluminous to extend the same gratitude toward lower earners is no longer valid.  If the government were to expect of itself the same kind of rigor, creativity and flexibility found throughout the private sector these days, owing to great advances in IT, it could make deductible any amount of qualifying and properly registered lateral assistance, given to another, unconditionally without ulterior financial designs.  Giver and receiver would have to know one another personally.  How could such a thing be vetted for honesty? By giving each giver wishing to participate, a monitorable digital account reserved solely for such purpose, from which the recipients, using passwords, could withdraw amounts, at leisure, up to a defined limit.  Giver and recipient would have to qualify as peers under whatever qualifying umbrella accords them status as peers.

Another thing government could do is air public service ads promoting the value of lateral giving to society - the sort of advertising of good personal behavior that the state of Utah engages in to such good effect.

Nothing should be done, however, without first undertaking a careful analysis of how much good is currently being delivered by lateral giving and what kind of additional social returns could be had by investing public moneys in expanding rates of such giving.

Why the rental market is not deserving of free market status

Normally, the free and open commercial market is the best controller of the price charged for ordinary goods. Presuming that this principle can be extended to all things that are sold, is a mistake. Anyone who has actually owned and run a business, as I have, will have a much more nuanced view of the issue of supply and demand.

If one is to understand why rents are continuing to climb, in spite of an apparent abundance of supply, the issue of competitor psychology has to be investigated. Imagine the scenario in which you, a business owner, become aware that a competitor of yours is selling a comparable product at a lower price. Do you, then, lower the price you are charging? Not necessarily. In fact, it would be foolish of you to do so, if you knew, full well, that your competitor was about to run out of the stock he was holding in that product and would have a hard time replenishing his inventory of that item. Every savvy business owner would simply wait for his competitor's stock to run out and then, either do nothing, or raise his own price. Thus, it is how one perceives the competition's supply line that has the greatest influence on price-setting. Seen from this perspective, it is hardly surprising, then, that prices never rose in the wake of the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing actions. The global race to the bottom, with respect to what suppliers were being paid, had another component to it, namely, apparent inexhaustibility. The general view was that competitors had uninterruptible access to an abundance in supply that was dirt cheap, which they could use to mount a discount price war, for as long as it took to freeze your product on the shelf at the price you were charging. As a result, retailers of food, clothing and just about anything else that could be produced at volume, kept prices in check.

A permanently inexhaustible supply of replacement inventory in housing cannot be produced dirt cheap and landlords know this. There may be a real score to be found, here and there, based on your luck, but that is, clearly, the exception and economic trends are not produced by exceptions. A rare steal is not going to depress the price of general housing, whether it's homes to own or homes to rent.

Another aspect of price competitiveness is the cost of dead inventory. A shelf of tee shirts or past-due food items has a really low recapture value on the salvage market. Not so with real estate. Getting back what you paid for something, plus some, is generally only a matter of waiting for the right swing in real estate values. If you don't manage to rent the house, so what? You're probably still making money off the long-term appreciation in its value. As long as the national population keeps growing, urban centers will continue to draw in an abundant supply of new renters and real estate prices will continue to rise. The apparent supply of housing, for the foreseeable future, will continue to fall short of the kind of supply that allows retailers to compete on price so effectively. It is simply naive to believe that market forces are adequate to keeping the cost of rental housing at a level where it does not place such a demand on incomes as to be a depressive force on the general economy. As things stand now, a very substantial slice of the general population must forego all kinds of other spending that prior generations, between 1950 and 1980, engaged in regularly. It is certainly not a good time to go into business in lines of retail enterprise that rely on casual and impulse buying.

The nut of the issue, with respect to price control, resides in how market sector principals regard their competitors' access to replacement inventory. If it seems inexhaustible, they will consider reducing their own prices, but, if not, they won't. It's as simple as that. And, in that respect, if for no other reason, the rental market resides in a category of its own, where customers can, and generally are, gouged for all they can afford to part with.

As a result of the above principle, the rental market should be regarded much more like the market for water or electricity. Housing, household water and household electricity are all essential to the prevention of discomfort. Without around a gallon of water a day, or so, you may well die, but beyond that, its consumption can only be construed to be preventing discomfort. Indeed, in the arid areas of the world, hundreds of millions of poor people survive without having access to water beyond that needed for potable purposes. It can easily be argued that the use of household water beyond a gallon a day is needed only for progressively indulgent purposes. Bathing, washing clothes, housecleaning, watering plants, washing vehicles - all activities Americans engage in without a second thought (except now, in California, with its terrible drought) - are only essential in the very smallest amounts to the preservation of either life or health under the auspices of disciplined action. Ask any ex-POW or homeless person. Nevertheless, the government does not balk at regulating the price suppliers can charge Americans for water used in those less than utterly essential ways. Why? Because having affordable water to do those things is absolutely essential to preserving the civilized character of our society out of which the demand for a huge range of goods and services is born. Civilized people, enjoying a high standard of living, buy more things to flesh out the inner vision they have of themselves. They also tend to buy from the higher end of the market, in search of better quality. The same kind of argument can be applied to the provision of electricity. People have learned that, without the tempering hand of state regulators on the market, prices for water and electricity might, in some areas, rise so high as to cause widespread suffering and socially couter-productive effects. It is not a scenario people are prepared to abide, so control of utility prices is accepted as necessary to the the long-term interests of society.

Somehow, left out of this debate the recognition that on-demand access to some sort of dignified housing is as essential as on-demand water or power. Forget the bells and whistles, what I'm talking about is the very bare essentials - a roof overhead that doesn't leak, a toilet, a shower, a wash basin, a stove, a refrigerator, a kitchen sink, winter heating, electricity, lights, a securable interior, a smoke alarm, windows that are whole in form and function. The housing occupied by the poorest third of renters qualifies as minimal housing, in my opinion, though most of it doesn't meet even these minimal standards. Nevertheless, even in its compromised state, it is comparable in its essentialness to the access to water and electricity consumed by Americans. So it somewhat astounding that, even in this day and age, those who make money from this sector have, by and large, succeeded in preventing states from regulating what they can charge for even the most abject of rental housing. Purchasers of rental housing in these states have almost no consumer power to use against prices running up and, typically, landlords set their prices according to what they see other landlords getting, with no regard to what prospective renters might feel about it because they are well aware that the overwhelming balance of landlords is doing exactly the same thing. It isn't a question of whether an upward spiral, against incomes, is occurring; it is simply a question of learning to hitch one's own rises in price to that background trend, so that one's pricing seems to be consistent with what is being charged in the general market.

On the demand side of the market, there is additional deviation from what free-marketers like to call customers. For free market price controls to work, the ability of the customer to switch to another provider needs to be effortless and as little belabored with process as possible. This is not a characteristic that applies to the average renter. The process of moving to another rental is not just a dicy bet, it's also very expensive and a logistical nightmare. Shopping for a new rental home isn't even slightly like shopping for food or clothing, or even for services. It's a totally different kettle of fish, only slightly less traumatizing than going on a combat mission.

Knowing this, landlords as not as concerned as, say, shopkeepers or contractors that a price hike is going to get their customer to switch to another provider, even when there is statistical proof that a surplus of rentable units exists.

These points have often been made before, but not so convincingly as to induce government to intervene - up to now, that is. The kicker, this time, is the gradual awakening of the political establishment that the public has begun to take a robust interest in this issue and that, if one continues to play dumb, one's time in office might well be cut short.

Finally, it seems, the worm has turned and renters in large cities are beginning to fight back. In particular, I'm thinking of current events in Washington state, where voters, under the leadership of Kshama Sawant and Nick Licata, have compelled the city council to petition state legislators to overturn the constitutionally provided ban against any form of rent control in the state.

Whether these efforts prove to be fruitful, or not, hereafter, the pricing habits of landlords will continue to come under increasing scrutiny for their effect on the general well-being of society. My hope is that the assertion of the business establishment that the rental market can control itself, without some sort of corrective action by government, will be soundly dismantled by arguments put forward in the heat of the current period of popular anger against exorbitant rents.

Why not use the Ebay model to sell/buy rental contracts?

If you are familiar with how Ebay works - some people aren't, I know - you will notice how the structure of that enormous marketplace helps the buyer by allowing him/her the opportunity to counterbid. This vital feature has had the effect of freeing up the demand/supply balance in the market that Ebay serves.

There is absolutely no reason this same dynamic model can't be applied to the sale of rents, more especially if government acts to help make it so. The challenge isn't intellectual; it's the age-old one of people needing to get out of the rut of outdated ways of thinking.

Let's do to renting what Uber has done to intra-urban commuting. Why, we may even be able to get Ebay, itself, on board. People tout Craigslist but, as anyone can see, Craigslist has not improved the situation for renters because it doesn't have a counterbid option.

In my previous writing, I have advocated for a system whereby rents are paid through a government register so that the accrual in rental payments can be applied toward some form of credit system that offers assistance in purchasing a home of one's own, after having helped others purchase equity over the years. It's simply a different spin on the old Social Security System. The option of being able to counterbid, online, if not picked up by some private sector entity, could be handled by the same government entity, without having to adopt the recourse of outright rent control.

Come on, people, let's get motivated. All too soon, you're going to see the dread product of millions of renting Babyboomers losing their jobs, years before they qualify for Social Security benefits. A fat slice of them is going to end up homeless, dependent on government largesse to just stay alive. We need to interdict this, as fast as we can, or live to regret having done nothing.

Welcome, Dear Readers, we've waited a long time for you to find us. You cannot imagine how grateful we are!

How people find their way to this collection of essays is a mystery to us. We don't advertise. Lately, however, there has been a really big uptick in visits that has us floored. We can't figure it out but we sure are happy about it. The river of this grand collective experience we call Life on Earth has so many moving parts that it is, most likely, unwise to push too hard on any given objective lest the fabric of inter-connectedness be ruptured. Even wisdom, itself, is only ever applicable when shared at the appropriate time, so that it can be applied to constructive action before it becomes too oft repeated and out of fashion. Better then, to commit what one has been working on to that great repository of ideas we call the Collective Unconscious, trusting that, when the time is right, it will work its way up through the subconscious minds of many to where enthusiasm first primes feelings of curiosity. The process of discovery that is lit in that manner has the force of personal agency that is free of the kind of demagoguery so many movements are bedeviled by. If an idea's time has come, it should have no need of a champion but, rather, flourish on its merits, alone.

Don't try to take in too much of what is written here in one sitting. Doing so will reduce its contents to verbiage. It was compiled over the course of countless bouts of writing, interspersed with backup discussions, the consulting of news articles and periods of contemplation. As a result, the argumentation is rather dense. You'll get mental indigestion if you read too much of it and your interest in issues of social equity may well suffer because of it.

If you glean a useful thing or two, rather than plodding on, leave off. The mind can't make much of more than a couple of good concepts at a time.

That said, we sincerely appreciate any smidgen of interest this work evokes. To be sure, how the national rental market affects the general economy - in particular, the spending power of younger and more financially vulnerable groups - is nothing to be sniffed at. Naturally, we think that a grievous financial arm-twisting is being perpetrated upon those Americans with the least ability to provide appropriate push-back and that local government, in too many places, plays an enabling role in the resultant shift of power, if only by willfully choosing to ignore the situation, on the old saw that it is just the so-called free market at work and that constitutional precepts preclude constructive action from being taken. Under that view, those who ultimately tire of the struggle to survive and fall by the wayside are nothing more than collateral damage, from whose demise we will not suffer, as a society.

Our essay not only takes issue with that point of view, but also goes on to suggest how government might act to make this particular engine of social inequity much less of a factor in the grander picture of inequality in America.

Once again, thank you for your interest. Happy reading!

Post-move status report

No doubt, the reader will be familiar with the statement, "I wouldn't go back there, even if you paid me!" Well, that about sums up our feelings toward where we lived in Seattle. Say, for some incredible reason, our erstwhile landlords were to offer to PAY US to return and resume looking after the house we were in, RENT FREE, we wouldn't waste a moment considering their offer.

Even when you take into account the fact that the restaurant we've been slowly restoring still has but one source of power - our outdated old wood stove - or that it's forty miles to the nearest supermarket, or that the cultural isolation out here is palpable, or that it snowed quite a lot on Easter Sunday, there is absolutely no comparison between living as owners out here and our former life on someone else's property in a city where all things seem to be piled on top of everything else. And that is quite aside from the added detraction of being squeezed like a financial orange every month so that people whom you know are no better than you are can have orange juice, while you must make do with water. Every screw hole I drill, every spadeful I dig, every blade of grass I mow, every square foot of floor I scrub, it all feels so much better to me now, and so much easier, because I never have to ask myself, "Who, exactly, am I doing this for?" You get a whole lot more satisfaction out of working on a place when you know that both its long-term utility and its resale value belong exclusively to you (singular or plural, as the case my be).  Those great big, double sided, super lightweight storm windows we built, completely from materials abandoned by the previous owners, have become an endless source of self-congratulation for us.  They're handsome and ever so efficient.  It's like being in a different building, altogether.   Compared with conditions we faced a year ago, it's like night and day.  Sometimes I just stand there, amazed at the serendipitous way these discards came together, holding my palms close to the plastic, trying unsuccessfully to detect a downdraft, as snow flakes drift past the window.  Only we could have done it this way, like it was meant to be.  You don't get that kind of satisfaction out of being a renter.

In the meantime, on the sad side of things, we hear from friends back in Seattle that the old house now looks forlorn. The owners cut down all but one of the trees we so carefully shaped for maximum appeal and best use by birds and squirrels. The yard, they say, is stripped bare and untended, the resident animal life gone. No one lives there yet and it's been 17 months since we left. Now, all, including our former landlords, can see what we brought to the property simply by being there. In reality, the house was no more than a patient that we were keeping alive. In what kind of crazy world are doctors expected to pay patients for the privilege of being able to use their skills on them? And yet, that's exactly what we were doing. It wouldn't have been so bad but for the fact that we knew we were being used, without acknowledgment of our services in the form of an appropriately-scaled rent offset, and that, regardless of how we attempted to put our case before them for consideration, the owners would steadfastly choose to see the situation from whatever perspective best suited their being able to get as much rent out of us as possible.

Well, now reality has come down on them with a thud and, no doubt, they're beginning to comprehend the total cost of no longer having us there to tend the property. Now, they're compelled to do both the oversight and the work themselves or, just as bad, having to pay someone else to do it for them.

This regrettable turn of events only serves to make me more convinced that, on balance, landlords under the current regulatory regime, take more money and services from the renting community than can be justified by what they offer, in return, and that government needs to do a better job of addressing that imbalance.