Democrats led, at least so far as camera time allotted discerns a leader of a movement, by Alexandria Ocasio-Defarge, are protesting the twilight of the federal moratorium on evictions. It’s the usual theatrics: well paid and fawned over elitists such as Defarge and her crew LARP being poor for a night by sleeping safely outdoors protected by the glow of sympathetic media and the perks of their station – in this case multiple camera crews, the Capitol Park Police, and a militarized D.C. Their authenticity is not to be questioned. They spent a well-publicized evening understanding what it meant to be homeless. Whether from the comfort of their Georgetown Dacha’s or the tax-payer funded luxury of their Congressional offices they’ll dictate to their soundbite crafting lackies the travails they suffered is anybody’s guess. No word yet on who catered the roughing it evening.

Cori Bush (D – MO) can at least speak of the times she was evicted and slept in her car because of financial hardships but she seems to pretend to have no ability to conceive that financial hardships are being visited on others or what the long term consequences of this moratorium when I suspect the opposite is true. This is mendacious.   

The purpose is to unsettle the housing market and leave people clamoring for a savior which, surprise, is always an increase in government’s ability to regulate. At least that’s what I think. This moratorium seems to have dispensed with the idea that there is a limit on that ability to regulate the internal workings of those who took federally backed loans to purchase properties they later rented and are behaving within the confines of the rules under which they took those loans. “Prey we don’t alter them further.” Will the building of housing continue in the future as it did in the past, or will the dictates have a chilling effect on investment?

Among the primary purposes of having a government is the enforcement of contracts. If the government goes contrary to that purpose and acts as the dictator of terms after finalization we have turned this thing on it’s head. If you buy a car with a federally backed loan or even from a bank that is federally insured can the government come in and waive certain clauses that both parties agreed to? Can they dictate the price or payment schedule on lawnmowers purchase from a hardware store financed by a federally backed SBA loan?

I could go on. The misery created by capricious lockdowns had restaurants taking federal money to stay afloat. Can Congress or an Executive Order now force them to give free use of their capital and labor until the government decides they don’t have to? Federally mandated Steak au Poivre? That’s what they’ve done to landlords both compliant to the entered into terms and not, forcing them to give access to their capital and pay for labor to maintain their former tenants use of their properties in the form of repair, insurance, and upkeep. They are still required to pay property taxes despite loss or disappearance of needed income. Object and you hear about Blackrock or Wachovia or other huge real estate concerns and their billions enabling them to ease through this, never other property managers operating on the margins.  

It’s near time to evict these Congressional rent seekers. They create problems so they can purport to solve them with the only solution they are capable of conceiving: give them more power and the money to fulfill their demonstrably failed visions. This is their mess. Don’t embolden them to create another because it will get worse. As per usual.

Now all this is me complaining about Congress making things worse and is by no means an objection to the CDC telling people what to do to their property as is unassailable under CDC Regulation 2341-94 (c), subsection f, Paragraph 32: “We get to meddle in the housing market if we decide we want to.” This is their wheelhouse after all.