You may print one copy for personal use. Rent control violates the rights of tenants and landlords alike. By means of such controls, the government infringes upon an individual's right to make voluntary contracts between himself and others and the right to control his own property. In this essay, four basic charges made by rent control advocates also are answered. Rent controls don't work, and everybody knows it.
Rent controls create shortages and decrease the quality of housing.
Yet the activists for rent control don't care that it doesn't work. What drives these activists are not issues of practicality but issues of morality. They are possessed by the same moral fervor that still leads leftists to claim that socialism is the best system, despite the collapse of the USSR and all the model socialist economies. In fact, there is nothing moral about rent controls. Rent controls violate your rights.