Rent-Seeking and The Housing Crisis

Recently, a scandal has broken out that provides great insight into the housing crisis. Countrywide Mortgage brokers have been treating Congress to VIP lending rates. Accepting donations of $100 or more is illegal for these politicians, but scandals like this are not uncommon. The deeper question is why a profit-seeking business like Countrywide would want to offer discount rates to government officials in the first place. It is, of course, because they expect something in return.

If government could not offer these businesses any preferential legislation, exemptions from taxes or relief from anti-business regulations, there would be no incentive to buy them off.

Economists call this kind of activity rent-seeking. When firms spend money – or decrease their profit – in order to ensure favorable treatment by government it is not efficient. They produce no more output, and instead the resources are wasted. The favorable treatment gives them a monopoly position or an advantage over their competitors and the consumer suffers.

It also encourages government officials to pass more kinds of regulations that strangle business so that there are more chances to offer relief in exchange for pay-offs from the businesses. So, it creates a feedback loop leading to more regulations, more bribes and then even more regulation.

The only way to end the cycle is to limit the scope of government with a clear line preventing government from offering any kind of preferential treatment to firms.

But rather than moving toward a smaller scope of government, we are currently headed in the opposite direction. The new housing bill is set to bail out firms on a preferential basis – often by helping those, like Countrywide, who made the most risky sub-prime loans. In the future, these businesses will remember the compassion of Congress and will take these risks again.

Local governments will benefit too – with $3.9 billion in community development block grants. These grants are provided so that local governments can purchase, renovate and resell foreclosed homes. The proceeds can then be used to do this again next time that government subsidies followed by government bailouts lead to a new round of foreclosures. In this way, government can cause a crisis, solve it, and cause a new one, little by little expanding its scope in the process.

Have we not learned the lessons of the National Recovery Administration, when subsidies and bailouts, public works programs, and stringent regulations led us to a consolidation of government and big business that strangled private initiative and threatened the liberties we hold dear? Apparently we have not – a recent Time Magazine poll showed that 82% favor public works projects and 70% say more government programs are needed for those struggling.

The more that we allow government to solve our economic woes, the more that it expands its scope and creates new woes, just to have something more to solve. This is the rent-seeking power of government at its most frightening.

Cross-posted at the Heritage blog.

Note that the Center for American Progress was very enthusiastic about the community development block grants - HT Econlog for that.

Competition and Anarchy

Over at Distributed Republic, Micha Ghertner argues the competitive government position for libertarianism/anarchy:

I personally would much rather take the risk of letting isolated communities victimize their own members than the opposite risk of adopting a social rule whereby those with sufficient political power are free to "reproduce their ideologies and prejudices" upon all members of society, and not just a few sub-communities within it.

Many people tend to take a moral stance on anarchism: a democratic state should set the social rules, otherwise the strongest will brutalize - mobsters will take over and nobody will be safe. But, what if government currently is the mob boss? On the one hand, democracy is supposed to prevent that, but we all know that tyranny of the majority can oppress the minority (Hitler was democratically elected) so this argument is weak at best.

On the other hand, you have the idolization of the state as moral authority, which makes it dangerous. While the miniature states (or private security firms) can also take on this superior moral role, at least there would be more competition and free entry and exit from the states, so that minorities can easily escape persecution. Potentially they would also be less idolized if they were voluntary and competing.

Could this be a consequentialist morality argument for anarchy - that our values are more likely to be protected in a system with competition over moral authority?

Update: coincidentally, Arnold Kling just posted something on the same subject.