To see how contradictions in the Soviet Union – the world first communist state – killed Marx and Engel’s visions of a free and prosperous society, it is worth briefly recalling that the average Soviet consumer was squashed in cramped housing and enjoyed few consumer durables – no telephone and no car. Even basic staples such as flour, soap, bread, sugar, salt, and vodka, were rationed.
The unhappy facts about China’s Mao Zedong’s 1948 cultural revolution are added reasons a great number of Cambridge citizens are now trying to erase their image as disciples of Marx and Engels. These include the execution of 2 million landlords in the early 1950s, the anti-rightist movement of 1957 which threw a generation of intellectuals into the stocks, and the 35 million-plus deaths in the famine of the Great Leap Forward, let alone the countless lives ruined.
So, too, Cuba’s Fidel Castro piles of victims among its own people are the reasons for a great number of Cambridge citizens now speak of communism in the past tense. Tales of doctors dispirited by low pay and lack of medicines, or hospital staff moonlighting as taxi drivers are common coin.
However, to the surprise of the whole world, capitalist revolutions are now taking place in Russia, China, and Cuba, with the exception of the Pariah State of North Korea. It is evident that communism is dead. Still, a "de minimus" group of Cambridge extremist activists from the far left, wish to remember communism, at least, for its draconian price controls – more specifically, rent controls.
By the account of the small group of Cambridge extremist activists, the idea of affordable housing is best understood by the abolition of private property, concentration of political power in the hands of the proletariat and the replacement of the Cambridge government by an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Consequently, the small group of lunatic activists have not just declared war on economic rent but gathered some questionable 6,500 signatures on a petition, hoping to place a referendum question on the November 2 ballot and have voters declared it illegal.
This is odd because, Cambridge is not, for example, a North Korean City. Instead, it is a city of the United States with a free-market economy. Since it is so, economic rent is set by the forces of supply and demand. The quantity and quality people demand in the marketplace depend on income, tastes, price and availability of other goods, and expectations. Some people prefer to spend less on economic rent and more on clothes and cars. Others want more spacious living quarters but can’t afford it. All these diverse circumstances are reflected in the market demand curve.
The lack of housing in Cambridge for the poor should not be attributed to the demise of Rent Controls in 1994. Instead, it is the result of misguided, unsound housing regulations, which for years, unfortunately, have been part of the Cambridge political lexicon.
The failure of the city of Cambridge, as it continues to enjoy a budget surplus, to build more housing for its poor residents will only provide a small group of notorious troublemakers with the opportunity to attempt to inflict pains, mainly on the small property owners.
The pains- suicide, bankruptcy, divorce, homelessness, stroke and heart attacks – are remarkable not so much only for their telling but the long-term multiplying effect they will have on families who no longer have hope of lifting their incomes above the poverty line.
But what about the supply of rental units? Will more housing become available to satisfy the quantity demanded, as claimed the pro-rent controls extremists? Not according to the law of supply. Instead, the quantity of available rental units will actually shrink.
Another problem is that since rent controls will have such predictable effect – no return on investment – landlords will be forced to stop maintaining their buildings, letting the units deteriorate. The rate of new construction will slow, too, as builders decide that rent controls make new construction less profitable. So will the City of Cambridge be directly affected as housing prices plummet since it depends heavily on property taxes to pay for the cost of public goods? ¨
Yves A. Isidor is an economic faculty member at the University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth and spokesperson for "We Haitians United We Stand For Democracy," a Cambridge, Ma. -based non-partisan political pressure group.