Of Public Interest

Volume 4, Number 10
May, 2002

In their 1985 treatise Crime and Human Nature, James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein note that they are concerned only with "natural crimes." These are crimes that are universally acknowledged to be wrong, and include such things as murder, rape, robbery, assault, and theft. It is a universal quality of human nature to regard such acts as wrong and criminal. To be sure, there is a good deal of controversy about such things as whether a particular killing is also a murder, with self-defense, abortion, and war being three illustrations. Nonetheless, the principle of murder itself finds no defenders, but is universally abhorred.

There are many other acts that are not universally abhorred but which nonetheless are branded criminal through legislation. These other crimes may be labeled "political crimes," to indicate that their criminal quality arises through legislation and not through some universal abhorrence within the citizenry. Many of these other crimes are commonly described as white collar crimes.

Many white-collar crimes concern the enforcement of statutes and regulations to prevent ordinary, peaceful capitalist acts among consenting adults. Someone who carries people to work in the morning and home in the evening in his van for an agreeable fee would be judged a criminal even though all participants are happy with the arrangement. It would be the same for a wide variety of activities where legislation restricts contractual liberties for some people because such restrictions shelter some politically favored people from facing free and open competition.

Our Declaration of Independence asserts that governments are instituted to promote the security of our persons and property. Yet legislation often tramples upon these civil liberties. Such legislation also turns ordinary people into criminals, and offers strong support for the wisdom behind Mark Twain’s remark that "no man is safe when the legislature is in session."

A city council imposes an ordinance to set maximum prices for rental housing. A unit that might have rented for, say, $600 per month is controlled at $500. On the surface, this legislation is a simple and straightforward taking of property that would seem clearly to violate the plain text of our Fifth Amendment. The legislature might as well have taken one-sixth of the owner’s property and given it to the tenant. Such legislative atrocities, however, are always covered with some civilized veneer that speaks of something like providing affordable housing for the poor.

When the free-market price is $600, the willingness of owners to supply rental housing will roughly balance the desire of tenants to secure housing. This balance is destroyed when the ordinance forces the price down to $500. For one thing, owners are no longer willing to supply so much housing, because they now make a lower return on their investment than they can make elsewhere. Moreover, tenants will now want more and larger housing than before because their housing costs are now subsidized.

There are more tenants who want housing than there is housing available. What happens in the face of this imbalance? The same thing that happens when more people want to see a Super Bowl than there are tickets available: scalping, in one form or another. Only with rent control legislation, it is criminal to raise prices. Still, there are many ways that the equivalent of scalping can occur. A separate charge can be levied for what was formerly free parking. A swimming pool that had been provided free of charge and is converted into members only club, with the payment of dues required to use the pool.

All forms of scalping occur because there are more people who want something, whether it is stadium seats or rental housing, than what is currently available. This competition among customers necessarily drives price up to pare down the number of competitors for the spaces that are available. Rent control ordinances declare these activities to be illegal, so convert ordinary people into criminals. Even worse, politicians understand the human dynamics behind scalping, and send out agents to entrap people, thereby intensifying the transformation of ordinary people into criminals.

This transformation of ordinary citizens into criminals happens repeatedly through a wide variety of legislation that stands outside the narrow scope for legislation that is incorporated into our Constitution. Under that Constitution the powers of government were enumerated and strictly limited, and spoke to the use of government to preserve and protect people’s rights of person and property. Those powers most certainly did not extend to the use of government power to restrict the rights of some people because doing so would be beneficial to other people. It is a travesty of our finest constitutive principles, as expressed in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, to countenance legislation that turns ordinary commercial pursuits among peaceful adults into criminal acts.

A Publication of:
Public Interest Institute at Iowa Wesleyan College
600 North Jackson Street
Mt. Pleasant, Iowa 52641-1328
Phone: 319-385-3462 Fax: 319-385-3799
E-Mail: public.interest.institute@limitedgovernment.org Web Site: www.limitedgovernment.org