Originally Posted by filtherton

Here's a story:

My landlords are self-proclaimed hardcore libertarians. They probably tell their home-schooled children scary stories about the jack-booted government bureaucrats who lay patiently under their beds just waiting for an excuse to seize their whole bedrooms and give them to the lazy poor people.

Now, I don't have a problem with that type of thing (the hardcore libertarianism). I don't agree, and think that it's kind of an overreaction, but whatever, to each their own.

Anyways, they are really bad at being landlords. Maybe they used to be good, but times are tough they own at least 4 properties, and it's really just two people. They can't handle the responsibility. That, and they insist on making all the repairs themselves, but don't seem competent enough to actually do the repairs properly.

At some point, we find lead in our windowsills, which is fairly normal. We call a local nonprofit who inspects lead problems, they come and find a mostly safe house, except for one windowsill, which contains 10x the amount of lead considered safe by the EPA. Obviously, that is a problem, because the only difference between the leady windowsill and the rest of them is a thin layer of cheap paint (the landlords repainted all the other windowsills when we told them about the lead).

The nonprofit would like to do more extensive testing, but, of course, must first get the permission of the landlords. Did I mention that the landlords don't actually believe in lead poisoning? At all. They seem to think it's some sort of conspiracy, like ZOG or some shit.

So we (my roommates, including two children under the age of 3) are in a position of wishing to accommodate our landlord's well founded sheepishness about city inspectors (they'd probably have a few costly repairs to do, but nothing life threatening that we've seen) and our collective desire as a household not to raise retarded children (no offense, it's a perfectly germane desire). If they don't allow the nonprofit to do more extensive testing, we have to call the city on their asses, which would for them violate the spirit of sacred agreement that is our lease and also result in us having to move.

Caveat emptor, I guess.

Capitalism is why people like my landlords are landlords. I can't really a fathom wanting to live in a society where we would need to rely on market forces to keep them in line, especially when getting out of a lease is very expensive if the landlord doesn't want you to get out.

I'm pretty solidly convinced that there are certain regulatory activities that are necessary for capitalism to function, and that anyone who disagrees with that notion is a zealot.

It's easy to go from there. Once you admit that some government oversight is necessary, then the extent of that oversight is a matter of preference. One person's smoking ban is another person's public health initiative.

I believe in capitalism like I believe in fire breathing dragons, which is to say that if I ever saw either in action I would brace myself for the worst. Regulated capitalism seems to do okay, though it could be better.