xx To:
The once and future
Speaker
The Honorable Nancy
Pelosi
Minority Leader
U. S. House
of Representatives
233 Cannon House Office Building
Washington D. C., 20515
From:
Plinio Designori
New Ruskin College.com
[deletion]
San Francisco, Ca. 94110
Dear Nancy Pelosi;
Let me be the first
to congratulate you on your return to the Speaker’s chair after this coming election.
I hope you are not superstitious and consider
this bad luck.
I have full confidence the Republicans will pay for that pig[i] they have installed in the oval office of the White House. If you listen carefully to his Tweets you can actually hear him
snorting in the background as he rummages through the garbage looking for his next Tweet.
I would like to share with you some thoughts
on the issues where Republicans are vulnerable and how the Democrats can exploit these Republican weaknesses if the Democrats
will only make slight changes in how they address these issues.[ii]
So, let us get started.
First, I am a Republican. But I voted for Mrs. Billy Clinton to save the Republic the depredations
of the ogre.
But who better than a Republican to explain their weaknesses?[iii]
And if
you are thinking I cannot still be a Republican if I help you, you are mistaken. Consider the Club for
Growth which has been primarying Republicans they do not consider sufficiently Right-Wing morons. (Their candidates invariably
would lose in the general.) Yet the Club for Growth members are still invited to speak “for” the Republican Party
not withstanding their treachery.
Housing:
At the recent opening of a subsidized housing building in San Francisco you said, “We know how to build housing.”
This was in direct contradiction to the point I had just made in 2016 Lecture Notes. I had said that California
in general, that the Bay Area in particular, and that San Francisco especially has a housing problem. I
remind you that rents in San Francisco have risen 40% in the last 4 years.
It used to be agreed at the Federal level that Americans should only pay 25% of their income for housing.
Yet with no objection from the Democrats this has been changed to 33% without debate. That is a 32% increase.
Did income go up 32%? Has the quality or the square footage of the housing units risen 32%?
And in San Francisco,
a city of renters, some people pay even more!
What has happened here is that the American standard of living, at least as far as housing is concerned, has fallen
32%. And Democrats and Republicans have done nothing to help. Both parties have exacerbated
the problem with their prejudices.
Exclusionary zoning and building codes have been used to block market responses to the housing shortage; to keep the
“public” schools free from children of apartment dwellers, to “preserve” neighborhoods, to avoid “congestion,”
(that’s us: you know, people, we are called congestion by city planners).
As between the two parties the Republicans are more vulnerable because their interference with the housing market contradicts
their daily recital of obedience to free markets. Democrats argue in their own defense that the market
does not work in housing, passing over all the ways their actions have confounded market responses to the housing shortage.
The first
thing I want to do is disabuse you of the idea that intervention in the housing market must be socialism. The
subsidized housing you inaugurated the other day was not socialist housing. Rather all that can be said
of that transaction is that money was transferred from satisfying the more urgently felt wants of the consumers to the satisfaction
of less urgently felt wants of the consumers. (Mises[iv])
Capitalist surplus was redirected but this is hardly
socialism. If veteran’s barracks are built for homeless veterans to come in from the cold, or if
students at city or community colleges are supplied with dormitories, or if the mentally ill are offered a room, (instead
of being placed in a jail, (where over 70% of the population is mentally disabled)), and at lower cost to the tax payers,
all of this is simply transfers of money away from satisfying more urgently felt needs of consumers, (e.g. the provisioning
of housing for themselves), to the satisfaction of less urgently felt needs (the provisioning of housing for their above noted
fellow citizens).
There is no novel proposal for
the production and distribution of goods, certainly no nineteenth century idea of anything like “scientific” socialism.
When the Left engages in its rhetoric of socialism, or ‘the third
way,” it plays into the hands of the Republicans.
Then what rhetoric ought we to use? Affirmative Action.
Having admittedly used the powers of the state to interfere with the location of housing, the method of its
construction, its size, everything down to the materials used (including the color of the paint); having blocked housing for
the last 50 years with anti-growth policies, we now have a duty, the state has a duty, as we used to say: an affirmative duty
to take action.
Capitalism tends
towards surpluses. Mises says that if capitalists can be criticized for anything in their directing of
economic activity it cannot be for their unwillingness to try new approaches but rather on the contrary they can only be criticized
for their sometimes-laughable willingness to try for some unlikely proposed innovation. Capitalist noting
how many new jobs were being created in the Bay Area would have built enough hosing not only for the expected demand but for
the merely possible demand. Again, capitalism tends towards surplus.
The anti-growth coalition, managed by your party, in possession of the powers of the state to block housing, have ruined
countless lives. Their big lie is that free market capitalism does not work in housing. The
lie is all the more galling because they are the very ones who have blocked the market.
As wrongheaded as the Democrats are in blocking housing they at least can be persuaded
to take Affirmative Action to counteract their interference in the housing market (resorting to, for example, subsidies to
build housing). The Republicans offer no defense for their intrusions in the market to keep their suburbs
and “public” schools Lily White, free of the apartment people, and do not accept any responsibility to take on
an affirmative duty to correct what their interference in housing has wrought.
In The Triumph of the City, Doctor Professor Edward Glaeser,
of Harvard, cites San Francisco as one of the worst cities for renters. Chicago on the other hand is, he
says, one of the few cities with a pro-growth housing policy, encouraging new construction of housing units. This owes a lot
to the Democrat Mayor of Chicago, Ron Emanuel, whose service in Obama’s White House and now with his mayoral experience
is looking to be a serious contender for President in 2020.
Counselor: What happened to Joe Biden?
-It’s true he has been very kind . . . but . . .
Counselor: “German Model”![v] The Mayor of Chicago refers to the German Model and you sellout Joe----
-Madam Pelosi permit be to introduce Yvonne . . . Yvonne this is ----
Counselor: Yes of course I know; so what are you going to do with Joe Biden?
-Well he can speak up for himself, I’m open . . . if he makes references to what I’ve written
I would consider . . .
Counselor: Mercenary . . .
-It’s politics. You can understand this Madam Pelosi? If
Mayor Emanuel makes references in the media I have to go with him.
Counselor:
Joe Biden’s last letter to you was addressed to Plinio Designori.
Yes, and it was delivered! But time waits for no man.
Counselor:
Mercenary.
Affirmative
Duty to provide housing:
To
be continued . . .
[i] Whenever I refer to Trump as a pig, Chris Matthews finds a way of bringing
up “the ‘60s you know when they called the police pigs.” He might think of Animal Farm
where to politburo was populated by the pigs but he finds associating himself with the police comforting. He
lives and thinks about his own comfort, mainly. It is an ad hominem attack but I think Trump, the pig, is familiar with the
attack ad hominem.
[ii] What good does it do you if your heart is in the right place, your policies
will cure the patient but your bed side manner is so odious that the patient will not accept your counsel?
[iii] This is not treason. Politics is a consensual game.
It is played in public. This is the problem of using the rhetoric of war when discussing economics
or politics. War is pure coercion. Free market economics and democratic politics is purely consensual sport.
[iv] Mises, in his masterwork Human Action, took care to distinguish between
the transfers of capitalist surplus on the one hand and socialist management of the economy which are entirely different things.
[v] The Mayor in a briefing to reporters at the National Press Club on the
successes of Chicago’s education reforms said, “wait for it, the German Model,” just after my last letter
to President Obama where I recommended he follow the German Model in health care.
